Author Archives: Dan Wiencek

I’m Like, I Said

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Dan Wiencek

Or, In Defense of a Much-Loathed Linguistic Trend

So I was talking to my boss the other day and I was like, “Does anyone know what they’re doing on this project?” And he was like, “I wish.”

Now, what did I just say there?

People have been lamenting the decline of the verb to say for a surprisingly long time — at least as long as I’ve been around, which is enough. When I was growing up, the culprit was goes:

“So he goes, ‘What are you doing this weekend,’ and I go, ‘Going to a stupid family reunion’.”

I never liked goes very much. As a writerly type, I always felt an obligation to speak properly, whatever that meant, and to not give in to imprecision, trends, laziness or other bad linguistic habits. (That doesn’t mean I correct other people when they do it, but that’s for another post.) In college I took some linguistics courses — well, all of two, but it didn’t take much to change the way I think about language. The thing that struck me most was the distinction linguists make between being descriptive and prescriptive. As far as I had always known, as far as I had ever been taught, the only relevant issues concerning writing, speaking and language related to what you should do. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. (Actually, it’s OK to do that.) Avoid double negatives. Make positive statements rather than negative ones (“I forgot” versus “I didn’t remember”). It hadn’t really occurred to me that it was possible to take a different stance: that of the impartial observer, dissecting the ways in which people bend and shape the language to suit their needs, just as they’ve been doing ever since they started talking.

That’s the other thing that a few linguistics courses will do for you (well, that and some Old English courses): give you an appreciation for how old this language of ours is, how many competing influences it has absorbed and how its speakers have worried about and denounced what their fellow speakers have been doing to it since long before people started replacing said with like. I’m not suggesting that because linguistic standards are always in flux that there’s no reason to enforce them; I’m no anarchist. On the other hand, it’s difficult to get too worked up over a process that is not only inevitable but healthy: without people using English however they damn well pleased, we wouldn’t have the rich, endlessly adaptable tongue that has become the closest thing on the planet right now to a universal language. It’s a good thing that English is changing right under your feet, because that means it’s still alive, and it’s not going to wait for you to get on board as it grows and evolves.

If you start noticing a widespread trend, it usually indicates some aspect of the language that had become inadequate and needed shoring up. Here’s a simple example: the phrase “beg the question” refers to a logical fallacy in which the speaker assumes his own conclusion or uses a restatement of his conclusion as evidence. “We’ve always done it this way because that is our established procedure” is begging the question. Chances are good that you use it differently. “He went out every night this week without calling her, which begs the question of who he was out with.” It doesn’t beg the question — it prompts the question, or suggests the question or leads to the question. But those phrases lack a certain oomph, and “begs the question” was there, minted and ready to be picked up and adopted by those who needed it. To say that they’re using it incorrectly at this point is futile. If a great many people use a word or phrase in a way that makes sense and is mutually intelligible, how can it be wrong?

Which brings us back to like. Linguistically I’m still too much a of a tight-ass to use like very much. But I like like. I like it because to me it can fill a very specific function. Let’s consider two examples:

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I was like, “The feeling’s mutual.”

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I said, “The feeling’s mutual.”

You can see the distinction right away. To say that you were “like” something means “my initial reaction to this was.” To say that you said it means, obviously, that you spoke it aloud. Like encapsulates a spontaneous emotion or a thought that isn’t quite articulated — possibly the most memorable moment of an interaction. The word is also something of a double-edged sword, because you can be “like” something you never spoke aloud. To elaborate on our example above:

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I was like, “The feeling’s mutual,” but I just told him I’d try to do better.

Most people would find that a perfectly comprehensible sentence: you thought one thing, but spoke another.

My preferred way of using like, when I do, is a bit different. Convinced as I often am that I’m being boring, I tend to be concise when I talk, and if I’m reporting a conversation I usually try to impart the essence of it without getting into the nitty-gritty details, which in all likelihood I don’t remember anyway. So I might say something like this:

Bob came over to me and was like, “You agreed to pay me fifty bucks,” and I was like, “No I didn’t; I told you I can’t afford to pay you that.”

This conversation was probably longer, involving several supplementary exchanges as well as some profanity, which I might be eliding in deference to the sensibilities of my audience. By attributing the utterances with like, I am (at least in my own mind) saying, “This is the essence of what was said, but you should not quote me verbatim or think this sums up the entire exchange.” I do this because I am enough of a linguistic tight-ass (see above) that when I use the word said, I take it literally: if I don’t relate as precisely as possible the words that someone used, then it means I’m sort of lying. “OK, so first you said Bob called you a ‘festering wad of day-old horse offal,’ and now you’re saying he actually called you a ‘steaming pile of day-old horse offal’. Can you let me know when you get your story straight?”

Obviously not many people share my little tics when it comes to like and said. But it’s worth the effort to come to some sort of accommodation with this. Like may go away; people don’t say goes as much as they used to, and it’s possible that said will make a comeback. It’s even more likely that some new euphemism will take its place. What about straight-up to be? That one’s happening already: “So then she’s all, ‘Get out of my face!’” Whatever it proves to be, we have evidently decided as a culture that to say doesn’t get the job done. I’m pretty confident this clever language of ours will adapt to help us out.

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Welcome to the Hamster Hotel

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Dan Wiencek

Reading blurrpy.com earlier this week, I came upon a link to a most wondrous thing. Some design firm called O*GE Creative (the asterisk adds a lovely note of pretension, don’t you find?) created a giant, human-habitable bird nest:

The giant birds’ nest was created “as a prototype for new and inspiring socializing space, which can be seen as a morph of furniture and playground … Ready to to be used, to be played in, and be worked in.” I think it’s a marvelous idea, and one I am certain to have in my house, once I win the lottery and begin establishing my network of seasonal homes across the globe. But a work space? The thought of clambering into this thing with my colleagues to discuss our latest projects gives me the heebies. It would feel way too much like climbing into bed and I really want to stop thinking about it. Besides, I sometimes have a terrible time staying awake in meetings, and nestling into this, well, nest would be like mainlining an Ambien drip straight into my cerebellum, or whatever part of the brain gives me that happy tired feeling at the end of the day.

So I won’t be pushing to have the giant birds’ nest installed in our office anytime soon. But it did remind me of an idea I had a long time ago that I can’t seem to let go of. It concerns hamsters.

Hamsters, you may have observed, tend to live in little plastic or wire enclosures with everything they need: food, water bottle, exercise wheel, toilet paper tube (not sure what that’s about, I think they like to climb in it, and besides, it’s not like you don’t have a million of them lying around) and, on the floor, some kind of bedding or nesting material, usually wood shavings. I bet that the simplicity of the hamster existence — eat, drink, run around a bit, sleep and pee and crap in the shavings — can exert a primal, healing influence on stressed-out humans. My idea then was to adapt the hamster habitat into a unique retreat: the hamster hotel.

The hamster hotel room is large, about 500 square feet. It has no furniture. It has a ceiling-mounted flatscreen TV, which you watch while lying on your back. A slot in the wall dispenses your food and drink on demand, whatever you want whenever you want. There is no fancy table service. There is, for a modest upgrade charge and if you really feel you need it, a piece of exercise equipment such as a treadmill or stationary bike. You can have a giant cardboard roll if you want; it might be fun to climb in it. There are no toilets, no baths or showers. The temperature is a steady 85 degrees. And you’re naked. Did I forget to mention that? No clothes allowed in the hamster hotel. But you know what you do have?

Shavings. Atop the industrial-grade rubber floor is a comforting, aromatic bed of wood shavings a foot and a half thick. You can lie on it. Roll around on it. Burrow into it. Make shavings angels in it. Throw great handfuls of it into the air and watch it flutter back down. Turn onto your side and spin Curly-style. And when you’re done, breathe a contented sigh and lie back in the shavings … the soft, feathery embrace of the shavings.

Wait a minute, you’re saying — what about my bed? And I ask, do I have to draw you a diagram? You are living the hamster life. Do what hamsters do: build up a nice mound of shavings and nestle into it. The temperature is high enough to lull you into a state of warm, animal-like contentment. Have you ever stepped into a bath so perfectly aligned with your body temperature that you almost can’t feel the water at all? That is what it’s like to snuggle naked into the shavings for a night’s sleep. And if for some reason you feel the primal fear of being preyed upon or feel especially vulnerable sleeping nude, you can always crawl into the giant cardboard tube for a nap away from threatening eyes.

You noticed above that there is no toilet in the room. Well, you don’t see hamsters futzing around with toilets, do you? Just pick a corner and do whatever you need to do right on the spot, kicking over some fresh shavings to cover it. Our premium-quality shavings naturally absorb odor and moisture. Or better yet, just lie there, staring up at your big-screen ceiling TV, and let it come. That’s right. When you’re done, roll over to a new spot or stay there and let it dry. Seriously, you have no idea how liberating this is — it’s enough to make you question the entire premise of civilization itself.

Most clients find a single day’s accommodation at the Hamster Hotel sufficient, and they return to their lives with a renewed vigor and sense of purpose. A few hardy or needful souls stay for days, even weeks, gradually shedding the burdens of their humanity and embracing the hamster within. We like to think of it as “going native,” the act of leaving behind such confining constructs as career, parenthood, family, even speech and bipedal locomotion. Can living in a pile of wood refuse, nude and crawling and rooting like an animal really be worth those things? Wouldn’t you love to find out?

Well, sometimes the marketer in me takes over and I get a little carried away. This is my vision, such as it is. Perhaps it can come true once I’ve won the lottery, after I’m set up with a few giant birds’ nests.

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Did You Ever Have to Remake Up Your Mind?

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Dan Wiencek

Or, How to Convert an Atheist in Seven Extremely Difficult Steps

Faith, defined a little too simply, is a belief one holds without evidence. Perhaps that definition sounds somewhat derogatory or appears to contain an implied rebuke. But people of all stripes have beliefs they cling to for no intellectually defensible reason, whether they be common superstitions (“Crime is more prevalent during the full moon” — it isn’t), personal idiosyncrasies (“Something good always happens to me when I wear my lucky sweater”) and even moral or philosophical precepts (“If I make a point of being trusting and kind, others will be encouraged to follow my example”). Most beliefs of this sort are quite harmless, a few are beneficial and the rest are a small price to pay for the freedom to be occasionally irrational. I think it would be a terribly dull world if everyone had a solid empirical basis for everything they did. Besides, I’d probably have to stop buying lottery tickets, and I like having something to fuel my daydreams.

The snag is that a belief held without evidence is also extremely resistant to change. Christopher Hitchens once said that anything that is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That’s an intellectually justifiable position, but not a very satisfying one, at least not if you find yourself wrangling with someone whose judgement you otherwise respect about an issue you can’t agree on. Faith beliefs are felt in the gut; they accord with our sense of how the world operates and are the result of influences we are mostly unaware of, from our parents and families to the media messages we’re exposed to every day. Though I defend recreational irrationality, I don’t hold it as justification for never changing your mind. Resistance to evidence is usually rooted in fear: fear of admitting you may be wrong and feeling stupid, fear of having your worldview attacked, fear of having to start at square one in determining just what it is you believe. This kind of fear is unhealthy and ought to be stood up to, at least once in a while. So occasionally I undertake the mental exercise of determining what it would take to change my mind on an issue I care deeply about. Today’s issue: religion.

I am an atheist, and I am an atheist of a particular stripe: I do not believe in a god or gods. That is not the same as saying “there is no god.” The latter is a statement about the nature of reality, the former about one’s own knowledge and the limits thereof; another way of saying it might be “I have seen no evidence of a god.” This distinction is sometimes called “soft atheism” versus “hard atheism” (neither of which are to be confused with agnosticism, an oft-misused word that describes the belief that true knowledge of god’s existence or non-existence is unknowable by human standards). In practical terms, there is not much daylight between the two positions, and holders of either belief/nonbelief would be indistinguishable in how they lived their lives. The only difference is that one has come to a conclusion and the other hasn’t. In the spirit of jiggling a knife into that small chink in the armor of certainty, and in keeping with Carl Sagan’s dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” here are the conditions I would require to renounce my atheism and adopt a belief in god.

1. I would require access to a secure room, shielded against any outside transmissions or energy sources. All illumination and video equipment (see below) would be portable and powered by batteries. The room would have no windows and one door to which I would possess the key.

2. Inside this room should be a table and three chairs, along with a tripod-mounted portable HD video recorder, thermographic sensor and a copy of Snooki’s beach read A Shore Thing. All items would have been purchased by me personally and kept in my possession until the experiment begins. The first chair is for me.

3. Joining me in this room would be an impartial observer of a non-Judeo-Christian faith, a person previously unknown to me whose mental health has been certified by an independent expert. (I am approaching this experiment from the point of view of a Christian because that is the faith I was raised in. It is a simple enough matter to imagine the process conducted from a differing point of view.) This man or woman would take the second chair.

4. I would then lock the door, commence recording and take my seat. The video camera would be set up to take a wide shot of the entire table and anyone sitting at it.

5. At some point following step 4, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah whose coming was foretold in the Old Testament and reaffirmed in the New, must appear before me as he did in life (i.e., looking like a first-century Jew, not a pale-skinned hippie). When I say “appear,” I mean he must fully manifest himself as a corporeal being with weight and volume, capable of being perceived by all five human senses.  (I’m guessing a guy from the first century would not smell like a guy from the 21st.) I would employ the thermograph to make sure Jesus gave off an appropriate heat signature. His physical reality thus confirmed, Jesus and I would exchange pleasantries — I am assuming the language barrier represents no obstacle for the Son of Man, and would indeed be quite suspicious if he appeared in the flesh only to stare uncomprehendingly at me and babble in Aramaic — and he would take the third seat.

6. Jesus would then reveal three facts about myself that only I know. These would have to be of sufficient obscurity that they could not be discovered by any conventional means of research. It’s possible that Jesus and a team of investigators could find out, for example, that as a boy I was obsessed with the Sears Tower and once even had a small statue of it on my birthday cake. To demonstrate his divine nature, Jesus would have to reveal something on the order of, “You once had a nightmare in which you were exploring a construction site and a chimpanzee in a green Army shirt fired a laser pistol at you.” (That is true.) After three such revelations (that latter one no longer counts as it is now public), Jesus must then perform a small miracle: he must make the text disappear from the pages of A Shore Thing while leaving the book itself otherwise intact. As a final formality, I would ask Jesus to confirm that he is, in fact, the Son of God and that the stories of him in the New Testament are essentially true. These deeds accomplished, Jesus would then be free to depart by whatever manner suited him.

7. My impartial observer and I would then discuss what had just transpired while reviewing the video footage. If our recollections matched each other and were corroborated by the filmed record and if Jesus confirmed to me personally that he is the divine manifestation millions believe him to be, I would be forced to admit that my atheism was no longer justified and become (or, as it were, re-become) a Christian.

A religious reader — the laws of probability suggest I must have one or two — may find the above crass and bordering on offensive. “Why,” they might well ask, “should God go out of His way to prove Himself to a wiseass like you?” While it must require a truly cataclysmic circumstance to force a deity to “go out of his way,” I think it’s still a good question. I can’t think of a reason. If I had to have a god, I think I actually prefer one with better things to do than worry about whether someone somewhere doesn’t believe in him. But let me climb onto my anticlerical soapbox just long enough to say that this kind of exercise is never carried out the other way. That is, the devoutly religious, as far as I have ever observed, don’t bother pondering what it would take to break up, or at least shift, the bedrock of faith that has supported them their whole lives.

The reason, I suppose, is that nothing would. As we noted above, faith is largely impervious to facts and logic — otherwise it wouldn’t be faith so much as a passing fancy. We live in a world that has seen the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot, and the recent, terrible natural disasters in Haiti and Myanmar. We all know perfectly kind and decent people who have suffered senseless tragedy, and others who never got a chance to enjoy the gifts that life offered them. So if you can wrap all that up into a belief that there is still a benevolent someone up there who loves you and is looking out for you, just what would it take for you to question that belief? And if you’re reluctant to confront the question, why?

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