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PHNEH
There’s been some comment lately about Blogistan about some bit of political correctness in which the terms “Master” and “Slave” should no longer be used in tech contexts, because they’re racially-charged terms or something. Most commenters, such as Kevin Drum and Jeff Kahane, think this is taking linguistic sensitivity too far, and I agree.
(BTW, is Jeff Kahane a new commenter over at Highered Intelligence? What’s up with that? Not that it’s a problem. I think. Hmmmm…)
Anyway, in one of the comments to his own post, Kevin says this: “It just encourages people to look for things to be offended by, a behavior that is distressingly common among all groups these days (including white males, I might add).” This reminds me of a weird tale from my college years, which still befuddles me whenever I think about it.
In my senior year I took a class in Analytic Philosophy, which very heavily involves matters of language and how language works and what metaphysical relation, if any, exists between words and objects. In particular, we spent some time on the work of Saul Kripke, a philosopher who held that “Names” actually pick out the same object in all possible worlds. If memory serves, a thought-experiment we delved into in this class went like this: “If a meteor had demolished life on Earth such that humans had never evolved, and thus the English language had never existed, would the word cat still refer to cats?”
(You begin to see just why I’m currently unemployed.)
So, one day after spending this class debating whether or not words had “absolute” meanings, a friend and I decided that it would be neat if there was a word that had literally no meaning whatsoever. It was a word devoid of meaning: it would not even have meaning if you used it in any particular context. And the word we cooked up to serve this position was this:
Phneh.
(You begin to detect now the roots of my sense of humor, I hope.)
So we kept this joke around, mainly as a bit of philosophical goofiness: a word with no meaning! None at all! What could be more harmless than this? Well, I was about to find out, because during the subsequent semester, I was spreading the joke of Phneh to some of the cooler folks in the music department, where I liked to hang out. And then I scrawled Phneh on a piece of paper and stuck it on the bulletin board in the student lounge of the music building, and then I pretty much forgot about it.
Until a week or so later, when some other guy was sitting in the lounge and suddenly announced, “I’m taking that sign down. It’s bothering me.”
I, of course, was completely baffled: This guy was claiming to be offended by a sign bearing a single word that he could not possibly have ever seen before, since the word hadn’t even existed until my philosophy buddy and I had coined it in the first place. I thought nothing of it, although I did get a bit nonplused when he in fact did remove the sign. So I, striking a blow for All Good Things, made another such sign and stuck it right back up. Which he tore down as soon as he saw it. And so on and so forth, except this guy actually decided to make some kind of personal crusade over this. Inevitably, this character used some connection he had with the Administration by serving in the Student Government to “take over” the bulletin board in question. He typed up an Official Notice on a fake college letterhead (and I remember him making a big deal of bringing in his girlfriend’s laptop just so everybody would see him doing this, and this was back when students with laptops were pretty rare) that Bulletin Boards were for Official Use Only, et cetera.
This, of course, annoyed a lot more folks than myself, people who took this to mean they couldn’t put up signs advertising their used textbooks or parties they were hosting that weekend or various things. Another person actually went to the Dean of Student Affairs or whatever on whose authority Mr. Bulletin Board had claimed to be acting, and was informed that no such policy existed. And ultimately, I ended up receiving a stern lecture from the music building secretary, a woman named Ruth, if memory serves (who was the real authority in the building). She basically told me that she shouldn’t have to take time out of her busy day to adjudicate a dispute “over a nonsense word!”, and she was less than amused when I asked why she was getting involved in something that everybody concerned already knew was nonsense.
This stern lecture did afford me one bit of amusement later on, because after she’d finished with me, Ruth tore down Mr. Bulletin Board’s “Official Notice” (which other people had covered with caustic bits of graffiti) and stormed out. Then, later on, Mr. Bulletin Board himself came in and got huffy when he noticed that his “Official Notice” was no longer there. He demanded that I tell him who took it down, because it was, you know, “Official College Business”, which allowed me to tell him: “Ruth took it down, and I suspect she is a better arbiter of what is and is not ‘official’ than you are.”
A few friends told me that I should print up a ton of flyers with Phneh on them and just start putting them up on every campus bulletin board I could find, but by this time I was bored of the whole business and had moved on in my head to other things. There was a coda, though, that I think of anytime some weird PC controversy erupts. When it had all just about died down, someone actually asked Mr. Bulletin Board why he decided to make such a crusade over a word that had no meaning. I have never forgotten his response:
“If it really has no meaning, then I’m free to interpret it as offensive.”
A month or two later, I was relating this whole tale to my philosophy buddy, who had missed it all because he had left our college after the first semester that year. He found the whole thing completely hilarious, and when I told him Mr. Bulletin Board’s idea that he was free to interpret Phneh as “offensive”, my friend rubbed his chin and said, “I don’t get it. Why would you voluntarily offend yourself?”
Well, I’ve been wondering that myself, ever since. Maybe the folks who think that “Master” and “Slave” should be stricken from the OED can answer it. Or the poor guy who once nearly lost his job because he used the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence.
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Now THAT’S Crap-tacular!
Via TBOGG I learn the answer to a longtime question of mine: If Bob Pinciatti on That 70s Show hosted a party, what kind of music would he play? I mean, check out the track listing. Lord, if I ever find myself at such a party, please shoot me!
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Untitled Post
Like everyone else on Thanksgiving, I didn’t learn about President Bush’s trip to Baghdad until late in the day. Comment seems to be centering either on that trip being a nice thing to do, or a bald political maneuver. It seems to me that it was both. Somebody probably decided that some new photo-op stuff was needed since that whole aircraft-carrier thing just doesn’t look as good now as it did way back when. And of course, a visit from the Commander-in-Chief is nice and all but it really doesn’t do anything to change the fact that the whole policy-thing is going south in a hurry. So basically I don’t think the trip was the great stroke of political genius the President’s supporters seem to think it is, and I don’t think it was the mistake that the President’s critics seem to think it is. I’m with Atrios: obviously a photo-op, but a pretty good one – and that’s it. And it does kind of speak volumes that the President spent two hours in the country he insisted on “liberating” and yet didn’t speak to a single one of the people he’d “liberated”.
I’ve also seen some weird theories floating around that this was hastily cobbled together when the White House learned that Senator Hillary Clinton was also traveling to Iraq, but that just seems bizarre to me. Ditto the folks Glenn Reynolds is linking to, the ones who are spouting the “They love Bush and hate Hillary!” crap. Of course they’re going to be more excited about the actual Commander-in-Chief visiting than some Senator, even if that Senator is fairly high-profile. It’s amazing how anything Bush does can reduce so many people on both sides into acting like sputtering doofuses.
(The only news coverage I caught of the President’s Iraq visit was on The Today Show, which seemed to go out of its way to emphasize the staggering bravery of this whole thing, which I’m really not sure I buy. I mean, yeah, it was mildly risky, but NBC had a computer animation of Air Force One touching down in complete darkness, and then they showed a bit of the news footage some French reporters had of some insurgents shooting a rocket at a cargo plane, as if to say, “These insurgents could have brought down the President’s plane, had he attempted his landing in daylight and had it not been totally secret!” Which, quite frankly, I very much doubt. I know that the President’s plane isn’t quite the piece of military hardware that the Harrison Ford movie depicted, but there is no way a couple of guys with a rocket-launcher could bring it down.)
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How I Spent My November Vacation
“Well, I’m back!”
Spending nine days away from the blog was actually a lot easier than I had expected. In fact, for a very brief moment, the thought of simply not returning until I really felt like it flashed across my mind. Luckily, I was able to beat that impulse back down with a very large hammer.
So, what did I do? Well, the usual stuff. First, I read some books:
:: The Sword of Rhainnon, by Leigh Brackett. I’d never read any Brackett before this. Her work is pretty hard to find — I had to get this one from the library, since I’m not sure there is anything by Brackett even in print right now. Brackett is one of those names you’ll see lauded on SF discussion boards which are frequented by people who have read the genre for a long time. Her biggest claim to fame is that she wrote the first draft of the screenplay to The Empire Strikes Back, before her untimely death in 1978 required George Lucas to turn the project over to Lawrence Kasdan.
This particular book is set, as apparently a lot of Brackett books are, on Mars — but it’s not the Mars we know now, not by a longshot. Since the book was written two decades before the Viking landers, this was still in the era when people thought there might be canals up there and that a great civilization might have once prospered on the Red Planet. So basically the book reads like one of those 1950s sci-fi adventure movies. As I read it, I could just see the burly white hero besting a planet-full of Technicolor baddies. The book never quite rose above the anachronisms, but it was still pretty fun.
:: Carrie, Stephen King. I liked this one. Not as much as ‘Salem’s Lot or The Stand, but this one was pretty good. Not all that scary, really, but that could be because I already knew how it ended. What made it compelling for me was that I well remember the equivalent of Carrie in my own school, the kid who was still getting his books knocked out of his hands on the stairs even when he was a senior. Anyone who ever says that “High school is the best four years of your life!” should be kneed in the groin and forced to read Carrie while being force-fed overcooked asparagus.
:: The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain. This is one of the cornerstones of the noir crime genre, and it’s a good one. Tough and lean prose, a tight focus on a mere handful of characters, a crime that is almost gotten-away with, and it’s short. I read this one in a day, and I think that noir novels might become my genre of choice whenever I’m tired of longer, more florid works.
:: Bushwhacked, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. A fascinating, if depressing, look into the policies of the Bush Administration.
:: And I’m still truckin’ along on The Iliad. Hector just killed Patroclus. Lots of stuff about the Argives trying to recover the corpse. I have a feeling Achilles is not going to take kindly to this development. (Yeah, I already know how it all plays out. In college we had to read the portion of the poem where Achilles and Hector finally duke it out.)
As for writing, I didn’t get as much work done as I had hoped, but I still got a bit of work done. The novel now stands just shy of 83,000 words, which is in turn just shy of the halfway point. Now I’m in the middle of a couple of chapters which set up the conflicts that play out over the last act of the thing.
In real-life stuff, Thanksgiving was lovely — much food consumed and not a single down of football watched. (A good thing, too — the cognitive dissonance I would have suffered as I tried to figure out which team I wanted to win in the Dallas-Miami game would have been too much.) We caught From Russia With Love on some satellite-network that was doing a Bond marathon (they followed that one up with The Man With the Golden Gun — talk about going from good to, well, not-so-good). And we largely sat around and did nothing.
Friday I did a very small amount of Christmas shopping. I went to Wal-Mart — but in the mid-afternoon, well after all those psychotic people who line up at five in the morning (and who, apparently, will trample anyone in their way) are gone. That’s also a good time to visit stand-alone stores like Media Play and whatnot, because it’s my experience that later in the day is when people descend on the malls. Then I went home. (BTW, hey, Wal-Mart! You’re going to “hold” a DVD player for the woman for when she gets out of the hospital? You can’t give the damn thing to her? Ye Gods….)
And that’s about it. All in all, not a lot went on. Just the way I like it.
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Friday Cat Blogging
No, I’m not officially back from hiatus yet, but I wanted to stick something here just so there isn’t a gaping, week-long hole in my archives.
So, go look at some kitties. Awwwwwwww!
(via MeFi)
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I want to see Mountains and Elves again….
OK folks, this is the Final Post. This is IT. No more.
Well, at least for nine days. I’ll be back on the 30th, one week from Sunday. I hope all of my American readers have a lovely, safe, and filling Thanksgiving; I hope all of my non-American readers have a nice regular week. Feel free to check in here a bit, just to keep the traffic from totally nosediving; I have almost two years’ worth of good stuff in the Archives, you know. Newer readers can check out the posts listed under “Notable Dispatches”, as well as the ones I listed here, which was the last time I took a break from posting.
(BTW, Blogger’s permalinks work, but they are thrown off by graphics. I’ve noticed that when I load a permalinked post of mine from the archives, it will go to the right spot at first, but then as the various images and whatnot in other posts from that same week load, the thing gets thrown off. So you’ll have to scroll around a bit. But that’s not a problem to you, is it? Nope, I thought not!)
Also make sure to check out any of the blogs under “Other Journeys” you might not have checked out before. There is a ton of great stuff being produced in Blogistan. I’m not going away or anything, so I’ll be checking in here to do my own daily blog-reading and I’ll be answering e-mails, if anyone needs to contact me. I should also have a few new reviews showing up on GMR this Sunday (but I’m not sure, it depends on when the editors choose to run them).
Finally, I leave you for now with this item from rock critic Lester Bangs’s book Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Writing in 1981, Bangs is talking about Jim Morrison (in response to the book No One Here Gets Out Alive, which I really must read), and there’s good food for thought for all artists in this passage.
In a way, Jim Morrison’s life and death could be written off as simply one of the more pathetic episodes in the history of the star system, or that offensive myth we all persist in believing which holds that artists are somehow a race apart and thus entitled to piss on my wife, throw you out the window, smash up the joint, and generally do whatever they want. I’ve seen a lot of this over the years, and what’s most ironic is that it always goes under the assumption that to deny them these outbursts would somehow be curbing their creativity, when the reality, as far as I can see, is that it’s exactly such insane tolerance of another insanity that also contributes to them drying up as artists. Because how can you finally create anything real or beautiful when you have absolutely zero input from the real world, because everyone around you is catering to and sheltering you? You can’t, and this system is I’d submit why we’ve seen almost all our rock ‘n’ roll heroes who, unlike Morrison, did manage to survive the Sixties, end up having nothing to say.
Art is about the world. So is blogging. So get out and, you know, see the world once in a while. Your art and blogging will be better for it.
Happy Thanksgiving (or Thursday), and see you in nine days!
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It’s Caption Time!
Longtime readers will know that I love photos that capture American Presidents in decidedly un-Presidential moments. (It doesn’t matter who the President is, either. Clinton was great for stuff like this.)
Anyhoo, go ahead and leave a caption in the Comments for this one:
(via Bara)
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Friday Burst of Weirdness
OK, it’s a two-fer this week, because I won’t be around next Friday to offer up any weirdness.
This first one is something I just saw on TBOGG about an hour ago: a time-lapse Flash presentation of Michael Jackson’s changing face through the years. As one might expect, it ain’t pretty.
And the other bit is something I saw six days ago. I’ve waffled on whether or not to post it, because it pretty much violates my own self-imposed “PG-13” rating here: this is straight “R” territory, if not slightly worse (maybe that “A” rating for which Roger Ebert is always pining). Anyhow, this is perhaps the strangest (and grossest) fetish I’ve ever seen. NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
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I wear the required uniform!
Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias are getting annoyed with Glenn Reynolds’s whole “Let’s snoop around the news from 1946 and compare the situation then to the situation in Iraq right now” schtick. I’ve never been a regular reader of Reynolds, primarily because when I do read him I’m generally reminded of that scene in The Breakfast Club when Bender (Judd Nelson’s degenerate) tells Andrew (Emilio Estevez’s wrestler): “When I grow up I wanna be just like you. I figure all I need is a lobotomy and some tights.”
(Yeah, that’s not fair. Reynolds does link a lot of interesting stuff. But his own logic is invariably half-baked. Probably comes from updating eight blogs fifty times a day.)