[Glimpse.sup.winter 2001-2002].

"Facts as we see them are little more than quick glimpses of a ceaseless transformation ..." -- Wendell Johnson, 'People in Quandaries'

Find more at http://glimpse.blogspot.com

Symbols and their Meanings

As a nation, we seem to have settled on the shorthand "9-11" to stand for the mind-numbing events in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. Now that metaphor has generated a further metaphor (a metametaphor?): "9-10," as in "life as it was before the world changed."

According to an article by Monica Collins of the Downtown Journal, the phrase So 9-10 "refers to words and deeds -- excessive, egotistic or otherwise unsavory -- that are unacceptable in today's new world order. We all understand that our lives were indelibly altered after the terrorist attacks. So 9-10 sets the boundaries. We carry around the images of death and destruction in our heads. The scalding pictures, the bad dreams, the persistent depression are the burdens many of us bear more than a month later as we attempt to get back to routines. But we see things very differently .... The social and political order exploded on Sept. 11. Afterward, we were advised to get back to normal. In the new normal, time has not stood still. To think otherwise is so 9-10."

They Have a Word for It

While visiting in Spain, Oregonian Dale Sloat entered a small store with the sign "Snack Bar" outside. Hoping to find out more about the various items in the display case, he pointed to one and asked, in his best tourist Spanish, "What is the name of that?" The reply from behind the counter: "Sandwich."

Fact or Inference?

This November 15 CNN web poll asked readers, "Is Osama bin Laden still in Afghanistan?" The table below summarizes the results.

Is Osama bin Laden still in Afghanistan?

Yes  67%         200,216 votes
No   33%          97,159 votes
          Total: 297,375 votes

This QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole. The QuickVote sponsor is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.

I asked myself "How would those voting know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden?" In the fine print below the results, the poll organizers do acknowledge that these represent opinions and might not generalize to the real world.

Perhaps they would better have asked "Do you HOPE Osama bin Laden is still in Afghanistan?" At least then people might more readily see it as a measure of opinion (and very likely an intensional evaluation and thus possibly groundless) versus some kind of estimate of knowledge or intelligence.

What prompts a person to respond to such a poll? What does such a communication hope to convey? Especially, what does it convey to readers who do NOT respond?

Quotes

Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.

Dale Spender, writer (1943-)

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question.

How We Use (and Grow) Language

We know how readily our language acquires new words and new meanings for old words. Ken Ringle of the Washington Post has enumerated a fresh batch of coinages spawned by the current "war" in which we find ourselves.

Among these we find ramped up, locked down, weaponized, aerosolized, nasal swabbed, laser-painted and finely milled.

In the article, Ringle quotes Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society concerning this phenomenon: "No term has yet been coined to convey even the scope of what happened on Sept. 11, much less the horror. So, in effect, we're all talking about this one subject, but it's a subject for which we have no name."

As I read this, I recalled dealing as a parent with a youngster who had just discovered the pain of losing a friend to a sudden fatal illness. On the one hand, I wanted to acknowledge the distress this loss has caused him. On the other hand, I knew I had to help him put the loss into perspective, to place it accurately in the full range of possible losses.

The author of this article quotes a language authority as saying "No term has yet been coined to convey even the scope of what happened on Sept. 11, much less the horror." I wonder if people in Nagasaki or Bhopal or Rwanda would agree with that. Or do we as a nation need a loving parent or leader to remind us that, while our hearts will hurt for a long time over this loss, we have not suffered something outside the imaginable range of losses, that others in the world have suffered similar or even much greater tragedies.

In my view, perspective doesn't diminish the personal, it ratifies and normalizes it. A childish person may want to hear a justification for anger and revenge. An adult wants the information that makes it possible to replace such emotions with an improved sense of humanity.

The Word is not the Thing

From Alexander Bryan Johnson's prescient work A Treatise on Language, published in 1832:

As bank notes are the artificial representatives of specie, so words are the artificial representatives of natural phenomena.

We employ words as though they possess, like specie, an intrinsick and natural value; rather than as though they possess, like bank notes, a merely conventional, artificial, and representative value. We must convert our words into the natural realities which the words represent, if we would understand accurately their value. Some banks, when you present their notes for redemption, will pay you in other bank notes; but we must not confound such a payment with an actual liquidation in specie. We shall still possess, in the new notes, nothing but the representatives of specie. In like manner, when you seek the meaning of a word, you may obtain its conversion into other words, or into some verbal thoughts; but you must not confound such a meaning with the phenomena of nature. You will still possess in the new words, nothing but the representatives of natural existences.

Revealing the "Real Mechanism of Thought"?

The Third Annual National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) convened November 1, 2001, with hundreds of writers and would-be writers participating. The objective -- to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, regardless of quality. In an article on NaNoWriMo in the Village Voice, Ed La Farge reviewed the history of a similar movement called "automatic writing" and the fascination it held for writers in the 19th century and in the surrealist movement of the 1920s. One proponent, Andre Breton, posited that automatic writing "revealed the real mechanism of thought" and that if all writers embraced the habit, "all distinctions, as between perception and representation, subject and object, waking and sleep, sanity and madness, would collapse, and the subject would be freed from what the bourgeoisie, for their own nefarious ends, called 'reality."'

In 1823 Karl Ludwig Borne published this advice in an essay called "How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days": "Take a ream of paper, and write everything that goes through your head for three days, without stopping or correcting yourself. Write what you think of your wife, of the war against the Turk, of Goethe and the trial of Fonk -- and after three days you will be astonished at how many new and unheard-of thoughts you have come up with."

Early in the 20th century, Gertrude Stein conducted experiments on "normal motor automatism," the ability of the nervous system to operate without conscious control, including the act of writing. Stein put her arm in a sling and hid it from her view with a screen; a colleague distracted her while her writing hand went about its business. The results sound like ... well, like Stein: "Hence there is no possible way of avoiding what I have spoken of, and if this is not believed by the people of whom you have spoken, then it is not possible to prevent the people of whom you have spoken of so glibly."

In the 1920s, Andre Breton, who wrote the manifestoes to which the other Surrealists affixed their names, concluded that automatic writing revealed the "real mechanism of thought" by uniting the conscious and unconscious minds. Breton hoped that if everyone liberated their minds by means of automatism, the result might be political change, the collapse of the State, the institution of some real and meaningful communication between minds.

However, it appears to me that the much of the "revolution" takes place in the reader's mind. The works that Breton and his collaborators Philippe Soupault and Paul Eluard produced automatically include sentences like "That's what they call the uncovered place where the water is made up of all those peasants' movements" and "The grass at night gulps down a great number of white pebbles and talks more loudly than the echoing caves." Reading such statements, the mind wants so hard to make sense of things that one ends up seeing patterns and connections. By breaking the world up and jumbling it together, you have seen things in a new way.

Confusing Fact with Inference!

A woman and a baby were in the doctor's examining room, waiting for the doctor to come in. The doctor arrived, examined the baby, checked his weight and asked if the baby was breast-fed or bottle-fed.

"Breast-fed," she replied.

"Okay. I want you to strip down to your waist," the doctor ordered. She did as asked. He pressed, kneaded, and pinched both breasts for quite a while in a detailed examination. Motioning to her to get dressed he said, "No wonder this baby is hungry. You don't have any milk."

"I know," she said, "I'm his Grandma, but I'm glad you checked."