The Fascination of Everyday Things: Margert Visser's The Way We Are

     Margaret Visser. The Way We Are (1994). A wonderful potato chip book, but more nourishing. Margaret Visser wrote a column for Saturday Night, Canada’s defunct general interest and arts magazine. Her editor, John Fraser, persuaded her to collect them into a book. Here it is, and if you can find a copy, buy or borrow it. You won’t be disappointed.
     Visser has a knack for giving you both the essence of some topic and some off-the-wall riff on it. These essays often prompt further reflection. My favourite: she ends In Flagrante Delicto (an essay about blushing) thus:
     We blush above all when we think that other people think that we are different from what we want them to think we are.
     Which reminds me of my tentative definition of “honour” as our mutual acceptance of the public images we’ve created of ourselves as being better than we know ourselves to be. “Dishonour” is the revelation that we are not what we pretend to be. Hence the widespread misconception that some bad behaviour reveals “what a person really is”. What a person really is all the behaviours they are capable of. Most of us never discover all that we are capable of, but few, I think, understand how lucky they are. ****

Language How She Is Spoke

     The Power of Babel (2001) McWhorter (at U of C Berkeley) surveys a slew of languages. He establishes what should be a common-sense conclusion: Languages change without ceasing. The book explores some implications of this fundamental fact.

     Standard languages are recently standardised dialects spoken by the politically and economically most powerful groups. When the King’s power unified disparate regions into a country, the dialect of his region spread beyond its borders. The dialect of the powerful became the language of law and business. Hence, standard languages. Printing accelerated this process, and had the secondary effect of recording language changes. Before printing, people spelled as they spoke. Standardised spelling prompted the wide-spread misconception that language is unchanging, and that dialects are bastardised, defective versions of the “real” language.
     And that I think, is why language mavens make a living. They claim that they know what the language should be, and never tire of correcting other people’s mistakes. They do, eventually, accept change, but they do so reluctantly. I’ve never read a language column that welcomed some change.
     McWhorter’s central thesis is that a language is a collection of related (but not always mutually intelligible) dialects whose speakers see themselves as all using some version the common language. He shows that in pre-literate societies, languages change within a person’s lifetime, and that sometimes these changes are major reconstructions of grammar and vocabulary. Some changes are so drastic that we need a written record to recognise them.
     These drastic changes illustrate an important fact: languages change in illogical ways. There is no logical reason why English speakers should distinguish between the apple they’ve just spoken about, and an apple they haven’t referred to. Yet that’s what we do. Around the world, “articles” are unusual. Sino-Tibetan languages, even Indo-European Russian, don’t have them. In most contexts we know what we are talking about, and if we aren’t sure, we make sure with words like "this" and “that”. Thus, articles (aka “determiners”) aren’t necessary. So why do we have them?
     Look at similar oddities in every language, and there’s a clue. McWhorter focusses on gender. We think of gender as being about sex: male, female, or neither. That’s why we find German genders odd: why is a woman female, but a girl not? But in many languages, gender goes well beyond these concepts, into animate/inanimate, for example. How and why?
     McWhorter argues that “drift” accounts for these unnecessary and often illogical elaborations of language. He uses the analogy of water-cooler talk. The group develops in-jokes and allusions to their common history. Their conversation may be utterly opaque to the outsider. Linguistic drift, McWhorter claims, is like this. Speakers add information to their speech by extending word meanings, or adding in bits and pieces. I also think of tag-lines and buzzwords, and slang as sources of language drift. A deliberate in-joke mistake may become standard if it spreads fashionably enough.
     The book is rich in examples. It amounts to a survey of language as she is spoke, with a side-glance at how she is wrote. It consolidated my understanding, and gave me lots of new data and insights. McWhorter is a bit wobbly on semantic change, I think. For example, in his discussion of the English article, he fails to note that the absence of the article changes the reference of a noun from object to class. Abstract nouns normally don’t take articles in English. When someone uses the article, they signal that they see varieties of the abstract entity (eg, C S Lewis’s The Four Loves).
     McWhorter believes that pidgins and creoles show us the most basic aspects of reality that we want or need to express. I think he makes the case. Pidgins and creoles are stripped down. As such, they are a clue to the ur-language, the one that our remote ancestors must have used before they migrated out of Africa. McWhorter notes that as a creole develops and changes over time, its speakers add those wonderful curlicues and frills. We believe those add-ons are essential, simply because we use them in our own language. We’re flummoxed when we discover other languages don’t have them. And we’re even more flummoxed when we find that they have different ones. These are often so different that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp their intended meanings. I think that’s why we feel that every language expresses a different way of experiencing the world.
     An excellent introduction to linguistics in general, and especially the wonderful variety of languages. One thing this book confirms: languages differ mostly in what must be said in each of them, even if it doesn’t matter. Pinker has some interesting discussions of experiments teasing out how these differences affect the way we feel about reality. ****
     20190527: Another factor that standardises language, and also fossilises them, is religion. Sacred texts tend to be preserved verbatim by memorisation or precise copying. Thus "dead" languages like Latin and Sanskrit. Hebrew is an instructive exception: Israel made it the official language, and it has become a living language again.
     20190812: The Guardian reviews a book with the same stance. See Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language.
     Thanks to CMKG for this link. 

    Update 2022-03-06: McWhorter writes a column for the New York Times. His latest discusses the effect of capitalisation on our perception of meanings. There may be a paywall, however.

"I Am My Brain"

   Richard Restak, M.D.. The Brain has A Mind of its Own (1991) A collection of essays originally written for Newsday and other public forums. As such, they are short, often lack nuance, and too often express far more certainty than the evidence warranted. Overall, a good refresher on neuro-biology, documentation on the state of neurology in the 1980s and ‘90s, and an interesting reminder of a time when experts weren’t afraid of saying things that these days would be heard as triggers or worse.
     Restak’s stance is that we are our brains, which implies that our Western and especially American insistence that we are somehow exempt from biology. His sometimes testy remarks about the interplay between nature and nurture should correct the widespread notion that we can be anything we want to be. Restak was also a psychiatrist, and his anecdotes about his patients and his helplessness show that there are limits to the best-intentioned attempts to help.
     I learned a few things. His comments on the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) appear at first reading to miss the point, since he wrote before neural networks so spectacularly demonstrated the power of computing. But recent equally spectacular failures of neural-net AI support his contention: human (and animal) brains are self-modifying in response to new experiences that don’t compute. AI can’t do that. Once trained, AI stubbornly resists further training. Eg, offered a mildly altered image of an orange, the AI asserts it’s a power drill. AI cannot do what biological brains do: recognise objects in a context. They can only recognise statistical patterns, so that a handful of differences in one region of the pattern prompts an incorrect recognition.
     It may be possible to build some self-modification into AI, but that won’t eliminate the fundamental limitation: it’s domain-specific. AI can deal only with the data that it’s trained on. Brains can somehow apply what’s been learned in one domain to another domain. Humans are especially good at this: mathematics is the abstraction of patterns that apply to multiple domains, which may explain the “unreasonable efficacy of mathematics”, as Wigner called it.
     Worth reading. ** to ***

Gratitude

   Oliver Sacks.  Gratitude (2015) Four essays written towards the end of Sacks’ life, lovely and loving meditations on life and death. This book was given me, and it is a gift in all senses of the word. The second essay, My Own Life, ends, “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been and enormous privilege and pleasure.” Amen

****

Guide to gentlemanliness

     Douglas Sutherland. The English Gentleman (1978) An anatomy of the English gentleman, written with a mildly Wodehousian wit, and generally agreeing with Edmund Burke’s “A King may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.” Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, Bart, supplies a foreword, which suggests a serious purpose beneath the mild mockery.
     Sutherland’s stereotypical English gentleman is a version of Chaucer’s very parfitt gentil knight, warts, prejudices, and all. Briefly, he minds his own business and expects you to mind yours. He strives for courtesy, decency, and kindness, as he understands these virtues; and avoids petty strife, again as he understands it. He has a strong sense of duty, is not given to self-reflection, or any reflection for that matter, and detests change for change’s sake. He spends as little as possible, but can be generous. He sees himself as upholding standards, though he may have  a vague idea that these standards may be mere shibboleths. He’s not a snob, though his shyness may give the opposite impression.
     The last chapter provides some advice on how to be a gentleman. But if you’ve understood Sutherland’s discussion up that point, you’ll realise that no gentleman strives to be one. ***

Incentives and Disincentives; Superfreakonomics (2009)

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.  Superfreakonomics (2009) Another excursion into the obvious but oddly unappreciated fact that humans, like other animals, respond to incentives. But it’s not aways obvious what the incentives are, in part because a policy proposer by definition doesn’t think like most people, and when most people propose or back a policy, they usually misunderstand both the problem and the solution. The former is shown in campaigns to eliminate prostitution (most prostitutes are in the business because it’s the best-paying work they can get); and the latter in the design of child safety seats for cars (for 3-year-olds an up, the adult seatbelt does as good a job as the safety seat).

     Nevertheless, the implicit thesis is worth placing front of mind: If you want to know whether a proposed policy will work, ask both what the incentives and disincentives are. Thus, Ford installed seatbelts as a safety feature, but buyers balked: they didn’t want to be reminded that driving a car is dangerous. But after several decades of ubiquitous seatbelts, buckling up has become second nature. The incentive is conformity to a social norm.
     The last chapter deals with global warming, which 10 years ago could still be considered not well enough understood for making sound policy. The doomsayers of the time have turned out to be correct: it’s real, and we should have begun mitigation and adaptation decades ago.
     A fun read, which gently teaches you to check the numbers and think hard about what people actually want. We humans rarely have simple wants: we generally want to have it all, which is impossible. So we need to compromise. Understanding the problem comes first, and that almost always requires knowing the numbers and doing the math. ***

Another 1950s picture book about Austria

    Langewiescher Verlag, compiler not named. Österreich (1957) Franz Nabl, a prizewinning author, supplies a text summarising the landscape of the country. He writes a dense and convoluted prose, intended to be archly amusing. The pictures cover the same ground as Breidenstein’s book, but with more emphasis on architecture.
     The book is one in the series of Blaue Bücher, picture books that originated in 1902, and were intended to provide a concentrated summary of some topic, via a short but authoritative text and masses of pictures. The printing was excellent, since the books began as advertising for Langewiesche’s printing and publishing business. Their dark blue wrapper became their trademark. But the format was much imitated, and evolved into the standard tourist souvenir book that we love to bring home with us.
     A good overview of Austrian landscape and architectural monuments. Nabl laments the reduction of the empire into the small (but still world-class!) country illustrated in the photos. He’s a believer in the mystical connection between landscape and psyche. **