I had a strange thought the other day, as I occasionally do, and it led me through an odd chain of conclusions. That germinative thought was “why do we call someone who rapes a rapist and not a raper¹?”

There are many ists out there, and the four definitions of the suffix at wiktionary seem to cover all the typical cases, but it seems a stretch to consider rapist as any of them.

The first definition says it signifies a system of belief. Perhaps to some rape is a way of life, but is the act itself an expression of a belief system?

The second possibility is that it describes a profession or field of interest. I can’t imagine many making a living through their rape, nor it being a field of interest for anyone.

The third is that it’s something a person uses. This is a pretty vague definition so it seems the most likely candidate for the origin of ‘rapist’ as a term. Rape is often said to be an exertion of power and dominance over people. In prison, and elsewhere, rape is a weapon used to control people. Still, this seems like a fairly substantial allegorical stretch.

Finally, it could mean it’s a biased view of some sort. Admittedly, raping someone probably means your preferences are biased in your favour but is committing the act of rape equivalent to the personal belief that a specific subset of humanity is less than another? I don’t deny that rapists might frequently be sexist, but does that make rape itself an ist?

So while, none of these really fit ‘rapist’ as well as I’d like, a common thread in these definitions is that all these ists are what a person is. It is something that defines them. Put simply, ers are what you do, ists are who you are. There might be a few exceptions to this, but rules always have exceptions.

But let’s overthink the implications of this linguistic hint briefly. Is it a coincidence that Ist sounds like His and Er sounds like Her? Is there a subtly sexist/chauvinist theme carried through the implied nature of ist? That things that are described by an ist are more robust, more steadfast, than the fickle actions of an er? Are we tacitly endorsing an ist every time we use an ist? No, probably not, but thinking about and subsequently overthinking these sorts of things is just what I do.

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Footnotes

1. Shortly after I had this thought, I came to a place in George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows where someone is called a “raper” and wondered what that implied about the act of rape in that world. [↩]

There was a great video getting sent around the blogosphere earlier today — which has since lamentably been made private by its uploader — with a young kid learning about homosexuals and just sort of going ‘oh, ok’ and reacting the way children do to any new fact they encounter. It’s a wonderful example of the ease with which children can ‘get’ homosexuality.

But it’s also a lesson, I think, that the sorts of awkward things we try to avoid talking about with our kids, things like sexuality and homosexuality and racism, are exactly the sorts of things they need to learn when they’re young. Whether we like it or not, it’s very hard to break the prejudices of our youth. Growing up in a family that eschews acknowledgment of homosexuals will betray an implicit otherness to children. But talking about these things in a straight-forward manner, invariably works.

A few years ago, at the dinner table with my dad, my sister, and her daughter we were having a conversation and homosexuals came up. My niece asked what that was and I explained it very matter-of-factly as my sister and father looked on with shock. After I finished my explanation, she got a look on her face that meant she thought it was weird that some men like men the way most men like women, but once she knew it wasn’t a soul shattering experience.

It’s not that the new generations are inherently more accepting, the conversations are just happening earlier.

To me — maybe not to anyone else, but to me — there are two distinct kinds of memories, only one of which I really think of as a memory. When someone asks me if I remember something I generally reply in the negative unless I remember it in that one particular way. These two ways are: Plain Old Memories and Remembered Facts.

Plain Old Memories are things you can re-experience in your mind, maybe even evoke the scents and sensations of the moment. The tentative hold before you approach for your first kiss, the first time a girl you like smiles back at you, that night you started at a basement party and wound up dancing naked in the fountain. These memories are much less reliable than Remembered Facts, they’re so rooted in emotion and passion that over time they become little more than the emotions of the moment with a few sprinkled images and a healthy imagination to fill in the rest, but they’re so much more human than that second form of memory.

Remembered Facts are things you know happened to you, but they feel distant, like facts from a table you had to memorize at some point. As an example, at my fourth birthday party I had pizza. Something didn’t sit well and I got sick from it. I didn’t eat pizza again until I was in grade 6. I’m sure there was a point when that event felt real to me, but at this point I simply know that it happened. I know that it happened in exactly the same way that I know that World War 2 happened. I can attach emotion to it, but the emotion will never come from it. There’s an immutable distance to it. Do you remember it? No. You know it happened, but you don’t really remember it.

I always tell people I have a terrible memory and this is what I mean. So much of my youth is obscured by veil of abstraction, a dehumanizing wall that lets me know things happened but never re-experience the urgency of them. I know that many things have happened to me. But I don’t remember them in the way I think most people remember their personal histories.

So here’s a fun thought that happens to run counter to all the laws of nature and has absolutely no way of being true, but is still kinda neat. We all talk about the Big Bang Theory (the scientific theory not the CBS sitcom) and it’s generally accepted that it is the way the universe came about. Its cause remains mysterious because, well the catalysing event occurred before time itself so its hard to verify in any way whatsoever. But the theory itself is widely accepted.

Because we started small and grew big, there are basically two ways the universe can end; it can either fall back in on itself creating a Big Crunch (which could potentially instigate a subsequent Big Bang), or the universe will continue to expand faster and faster ultimately spreading itself so thin that all the energy will be too spread out to be of any use to life, often called the Heat Death or, for symmetry, The Big Freeze.

At its surface, the Big Freeze seems to be a less than optimal way to go. At least with the Crunch there’s the possibility that life could start over in the new universe the Crunch might create. But what if that weren’t the case? What if, at some point in the very distant future, the universe has spread so far out, the spaces between space so remote, that space-time itself ruptures? The universe would shatter across an infinite number of vertices with each atom, each quark, each gluon being torn apart by the universe’s expansion. And each particle ripped apart becomes a brand new Big Bang. A trillion new universes. Neat idea, right?

I’ve always been fond of footnotes and endnotes, but two things have happened recently that have led to me grossly abusing endnotes: first, I installed a wordpress plugin that makes including endnotes much easier, though it unfortunately lacks support for referential endnotes and nested endnotes but I’m working on solving that in my spare time, and second, and almost certainly more importantly, I’ve started reading Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose that footnotes become addicting, a fact to which I can attest. Sometimes, they ease the construction of a sentence, allowing me to include all the information I find pertinent without building a sentence as complex as might otherwise be needed. Other times the information I want to include has no purpose in the context of the post, though it is still worth noting, information that I think is important but would be unacceptably extraneous in the article proper. And then there are other times that endnotes are just fucking fun.

But even I’ve found the inundation of endnotes in my more recent posts a tad tiring. I can’t promise I’ll try to stop or at the very least reduce my endnote output. But I’ll try to try.

In this increasingly connected world, I’m obviously not the first to discuss this on their puny insignificant blog and I certainly won’t be the last, but Michael Jackson is dead at 50. My eyes welled up when the initial shock washed over me. He went beyond all superlatives. And, despite his troubled life, he will be missed. Though, I suspect, never forgotten.

In the 60′s and 70′s there was lots of hope and high expectations (never good things, FYI). Artificial Intelligence (AI) was going to be conquered with relative ease and by the turn of the millennium we’d have self-aware machines helping out humanity wherever they could out of the kindness of their heart, or they’d have taken over society and enslaved us all. Either way, everyone was certain it was going to happen Any Day Now.

That didn’t happen. Autonomous robots are still a fanciful thought with the closest approximations of thinking and feeling robots merely mimicking emotions they’ve been taught to mimic and parsing the expressions on our faces through complex analysis which ultimately comes down to further training of what emotions a certain kind of face means.

There are some efforts out there that rely on emergent properties popping up in simple loops of code which are initially taught a few base commands some of which would allow the code to modify itself. These are slow going but I think they are the best bet right now.

A few years ago I was considering a minor in cognitive neuropsychology, primarily because I was interested in AI and I wanted to try it from a different angle. Rather than come at it from a mathematical deterministic manner, I began to think about AI development from an evolutionary standpoint.

Intelligence didn’t come from nowhere; it took thousands of generations of incremental improvements, both physical and mental, to get to the level of humans, or even the level of dogs. Which is why self-modifying programs seem like the best bet of the available options, but I think there is one thing that self-modifying programs lack that could be crucial in developing truly independent and self-aware intelligent machines: childhood.

I’m sure that my stance has either been attempted enough times to be proven useless or is actively being researched by people in the field who know much much more about all this stuff, but I think that the AI researchers out there need to start looking at creating families. Instill in the base code of the first generation of programs a need for procreation and a few other basic operations and let life flourish or crumble.

I’m not saying that this is easy, but I think it will be the method by which substantial artificially intelligent machines will be created. Rather than create something in our own image, we must generate an environment conducive to development and allow it to persist.

Recently, I saw a large chuck of Sin City on television. I hadn’t seen it since its theatrical release, which I really enjoyed, so some of my reactions to the movie surprised me. Specifically, I was incredibly offended by its sexist and misogynist slant.

I did enjoy the movie — I simply accepted the sexism as a part of the universe in which the story’s told — but my reaction to the sexism was visceral. And I most certainly didn’t have that reaction when I saw it in the theatre. If anything, I’ve become more aware of sexism. That said, I’m a little bit sexist.

I’ve noticed as my volume of blog reading has increased, I will often find myself reading a blog post and having an assumption challenged. Very deliberately and scholarly written posts I tend to attribute to men unless I know who the author is or there is a reference to the author’s sex in the content of the post. Similarly, light and airy posts are assumed to come from women. Neither of these prejudices are particularly appealing to me. They’re not harmful, I don’t think; when the evidence tells me that my assumption was wrong I make a note of it and move on reading the content just as I did before. But it’s not something I like about me.

Are these quiet assumptions harmful? I’m not really sure. My intuition is that they’re not, so long as you are aware of them and their flaws. Our brains have evolved in a very specific manner, but that sometimes makes them screw up. When we see something in water we know it’s not in the line of sight because of refraction and we adjust accordingly; I see these ongoing corrections I make as a similar adjustment we all must make to override any prejudices we may have, however they come about.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published recently what some might consider a screed against Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style — or Strunk and White as it is often referred — in honour of the semicentennial of the original 1959 release. I’m a great lover of English, and Strunk and White was incredibly influential in codifying my initial sense of good taste when writing, so I had to see what could be so bad about it.

One of the “rules” of Strunk and White the author of this article, Geoffrey K Pullum, notes chidingly is “write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs,” except it’s not a rule; it’s what the book calls an approach.

The book is separated to five segments: Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style. That last section has some questionable advice, some which I consider outdated and therefore ignore, or rather I put less weight on them when I make my decisions.

On the other hand, I, to this day, agree with all the Rules of Usage and following them does indeed generate more pleasing sentences. In the rare cases when those rules can be broken, they should be broken knowingly and by someone well versed in their proper usage. For example, splitting up a sentence into briefer, less grammatically correct, sentences can affect the reading of a line of a novel, giving greater urgency to the words. Overall, those elementary rules are truly elemental to good writing. Pullum criticises little of this section, and I’ll save my response to that for later in the post.

Following the Rules of Usage, there are the Elementary Principles of Composition. The one rule in this section Pullum derides in particular is “use the active voice.”

We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

Pullum failed to notice the subsequent paragraph which discusses that very point:

If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”

My first visit will always be remembered,

it becomes indefinite: is it the writer or some undisclosed person or the world at large that will always remember this visit?

Which is absolutely correct. And completely unaccounted for by Pullum. He then criticises the book for three of its four example passive sentences in its “Passive vs Active” sentence pairs not actually being passive sentences. At least not grammatically speaking. Of course, that’s not really what that section is about. What is specifically stated at the start of the section is “the active voice is usually much more direct and vigorous than the passive.” While some loose grammatical terminology is discussed, the crux of the argument centred on the passivity of the sentence. And no one can deny that “there were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” is considerably more passive than “dead leaves covered the ground.” It was the indirect way in which these sentences got their point across that chafed Strunk and White. Perhaps they could’ve done better in their description of the difference between their examples, but the advice is no less valid; nitpicking the difference between grammatical passivity and semantic passivity seems childish.

Immediately following this minutiae-obsessed drone about passive voice comes an attack of another rule of composition: put statements in the positive form. The critique of this is once again a case of nitpicking. Because Strunk and White wrote the sentence “the adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place,” which includes a dreaded negation, Pullum calls them out as hypocrites and purveyors of inaccurate advice. Naturally, while doing so, he completely ignores the actual content of the section.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, not as a means of evasion.

So, because Strunk and White wrote a sentence which definitively asserted that adjectives cannot replace well chosen nouns — that is, as a means of denial — they are hypocrites.

And when Pullum isn’t misrepresenting Strunk and White’s advice, he cherry-picks from the collected vocabulary of English to refute their supposed arguments.

For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive “should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb.” The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk’s original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split.”) But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.

Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like “The dean’s statements tend to completely polarize the faculty” places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, “The dean’s statements tend to polarize the faculty completely.”

I am an avid supporter of the split infinitive, primarily because the arguments against it are rooted in the limitations of English’s progenitors. And “to polarize completely” does place more emphasis on the completeness of the polarization than “to completely polarize.” But the example which Strunk and White use — “to diligently inquire” versus “to inquire diligently” — is the exact opposite. (And really, is it placing more emphasis on the boldness of it to say “to go boldy” than “to boldly go?”) Strunk and White note the difficulty of split infinitives later on when they write that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split,” and describe the decision the author must take as “a matter of ear.”

Beyond these childish criticisms, none of which carry any real persuasive power, though, is the deeper problem: Pullum is a linguist, and an idiotic one. Following these “scathing” criticisms, he moves on to a different tact: the appeal to popularity.

An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.

Consider the explicit instruction: “With none, use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘not one.’” Is this a rule to be trusted? Let’s investigate.

• Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for “none of us.” There is one example of it as a subject: “None of us are perfect” (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.
• Download and search Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of “none of us” with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural (“I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset”).
• Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural (“None of us ever do”).

It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.

The naïvete here is a little baffling, to be honest. How a linguist can claim a style guide published in 1959 should not only mirror the style of how text was written fifty years hence but also remain completely valid fifty years later is beyond me. Language is constantly changing. Maybe it was considered archaic to write in the manner of Oscar Wilde or Bram Stoker in the wake of the scores of literature-changing novels that emerged in the intervening fifty years. We don’t suggest using the term “help meet” to refer to women anymore, either.

Despite this utter lack of understanding of how languages change — from a linguist, no less — Strunk and White once again have preempted this false criticism:

A plural verb is commonly used when none suggests more than one person or thing.

None are so fallible as those who are sure they’re right.

And yes, the appeal to popularity should carry some weight when writing a book like The Elements of Style, but I’m sure that there are just as many examples of “none of you is perfect” that Pullum either ignored because they weren’t written by authors as famous as Stoker and Wilde or simply to prove his point.

But, for the moment, let’s ignore the appeals to popularity, and the straw men arguments he attempts to construct, and the cherry-picked sentences; there’s one sentence that, in my opinion, discredits any analysis Pullum may proffer.

There are many other cases of Strunk and White’s being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English.

The Elements of Style is not a formal description of the language and its syntax. It is not there to describe what is possible in English. It describes one way to write well, not what can be written.

Many sentences can be written which meet the grammar of English and make no sense at all. Even further, only a limited subset of the infinite permutations of possible sentences that can be written will read well.

To talk of the “facts about English” in this way, when the subject matter is explicitly discussing the style of English, is absurd. It borders on dishonesty. It’s true that some of Strunk and White’s advice isn’t universal, but to claim that they considered it such is farcical. Strunk and White offer up intelligent guidelines while admitting that “the shape of our language is not rigid; in questions of usage we have no lawgiver whose word is final.” Pullum seems content to throw the baby out with the bathwater, choosing to ignore all of Strunk and White’s inestimable advice because of a few outliers in our complex and beautiful language.

Here’s a screenshot of my system tray on my computer from about an hour ago.

The red “FF” icon is video decoding using ffdshow. The blue “FF” icon is audio decoding using ffdshow. And the white Omega-ish icon is Haali’s media splitter, a tool to split a movie file into its video and audio parts for decoding purposes. I guess what I’m trying to say here is, my computer’s pretty busy right now. It’s also sort of mind-blowing how utterly normal it is to be able to do all this video and audio rendering simultaneously while still watching a movie, browsing the web, and myriad other tasks which only a few years ago would’ve had to be pre-empted by any video rendering, let alone multiple renderings of different videos.

The first computers were used to calculate polynomial equations, and ballistic trajectories. Now we use them to create Kyle XY videos and Lolcats. At first glance, that’s a bad thing, a sign of the dumbing down of society. But in reality, it’s a sign of the democratization of power. Computing power, that is. Those other tasks are still performed by computers, but now computers can do more than that. Beyond that, computers are more readily available. More people have more access to more computers. And we’re not all mathematicians tired of calculating polynomial tables. We have varying interests, some meaningful, others less so. Some of the things which interest modern society may disgust me greatly, but they are not signs of the devolving of society. They are side-effects of the ease with which anybody can express their true interests.

We’re not getting dumber, merely more aware of how dumb we all are.

I know that most of my blog content of late has been almost exclusively focused on television, but I do think about other things from time to time. But generally speaking, I only write about things that others aren’t saying. That is, things I don’t hear others talking about. And I’ve been reading a lot more recently. And the more blogs I read regularly, the fewer things I find myself needing to write about.

That said, most of what I read is still wrong. I just rant about it elsewhere, at the moment. I’ll try to redirect some of said ranting to here. After all, I wouldn’t want my blog to be targeted at a specific audience thus resulting in higher traffic. Cause that’d be foolish.

Up until now, Dollhouse has been a good show. Even a great show at times. But it wasn’t a Joss Whedon show. The first five episodes were hindered by network interference, but with this episode Whedon finally got out from under the thrall of Fox’s “creative consultancy” and Dollhouse finally became a Joss Whedon show. Before now, you could see inklings of Whedonism in the show — Lubov’s “Sweet Home Georgia” line from a couple weeks ago, in particular — but this episode brought it all together; there was intrigue, philosophical pondering, humour, and plot twists galore. More (a lot more) after the break.

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The Smoking Gun published a new mug shot of Charles Manson earlier and I have trouble looking at it. Not because it reminds me of his barbarous acts, but because it reminds me of the humanity within even the monsters of our world. Even with that swastika permanently etched into his forehead, I have trouble looking at this picture and not feeling sorrow and pity.

The worst part is that I know this is a man completely undeserving of pity or sorrow, yet his cracked skin, his broken expression, his aging face all call to me to have those feelings. Photography has the power to imbue its subject with more than it deserves.

Those natives had the wrong idea. Photography doesn’t steal your soul, it preserves it. It puts it out there for everyone to see, even if they don’t want to.

Yesterday, I sat down and watched a spectacular lecture about primate sexuality I found through Boing Boing. One thing I learned, among the many many fascinating things I learned over the course of the lecture, was that men produce more testosterone when near women. I also learned that testosterone spurs the growth of facial hair. And that’s why I have virtually no facial hair…

The Dollhouse review/recaps I’ve been writing thus far have varied wildly. This is because I have two conflicting desires when it comes to reviewing a specific episode of television. Most blogs out there give brief glib reviews of any given episode. They will on occasion focus on the little details that make an episode especially good, but overall they gloss over these details and what they do focus on, they interpret incorrectly. Outside of this world, there’s Television Without Pity. Television Without Pity focuses on detailed recaps of episodes with nearly shot by shot descriptions written with humour in mind. These recaps tend to focus more on the facts of an episode with mythology and character development often being left unexplored.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.