I’ve noticed that people routinely pronounce “accreditation” as if the first ‘t’ were a ‘d’: accredidation. I’ve been wondering why, and I have a theory.

First, consider that ‘t’ often becomes a ‘d’ sound before ‘ed’. “faded” and “fated” can sound very similar. “imitated” is pronounced more like “imitaded”.

Now, it’s also true that while “imitated” sounds like “imitaded”, no one says “imiDation” instead of “imitation”. Nor does anyone say “visiDation”, “mediDation”, or “cogiDation”. So why “accrediDation”?

The reason, I believe, lies in the past tense form of the word: accredited. In that word, the ‘t’ after the ‘d’ sounds like a ‘d’ (like “imitaDed” and so on). I surmise, therefore, that something along the following lines happens when people pronounce “accreditation”: The brain gets to that first ‘t’ after the ‘d’ and, out of habit born of d-ifying the ‘t’ in “accredited”, pronounces it as a ‘d’.

What the brain doesn’t quite take into account is that there’s a syllable “missing”. If the past tense were “accreditated” instead of “accredited”, then no one’s brain would ever have thought that there were two ‘d’ sounds in a row, and no one would say “accredidation”.

It’s the only theory I can think of that explains why this word alone, among all the -itation words in the language, gets pronounced this way.

I am very pleased and excited to announce that I have accepted a Senior Developer position with Cyrus Innovation, Inc. Cyrus is based in New York City. I will be, at least for the foreseeable future, assigned to a team working on-site at a New Jersey client. It’s a work-place I’ve been in before (I’ve done training for them), and I know some of the other members of the Cyrus team who work there. So while it’s definitely a big change for me and a new adventure, it’s also a familiar and collegial environment that I already know I like working in.

And it really is a big change! The last full-time job I had was my professorship at Seton Hall University (1992-2005).

The question is (drumroll…) why now?

Throughout the years that I’ve been doing freelance and independent consulting and training, I’ve regarded the prospect of a fulltime job with ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s less independent. And much of the brainstorming I’ve done this year about whether or not to seek a fulltime job has been kind of depressing, because it’s been motivated largely by the fact that my freelance business has dropped off a great deal (and I have no marketing skills, which means that when the market gets tight, I tend not to remain competitive). I’ve also been conflicted about fulltime jobs because I am very settled where I live and do not want to move.

On the other hand, I’ve always understood that a fulltime job would provide a measure of continuity and security that I’m increasingly feeling the lack of in my independent work. And, even more importantly, there’s the sense of belonging to a team of colleagues. I’ve always looked with a pang of envy at friends who are part of a development team, and whenever I’ve spent even a couple of weeks on a team helping out, it’s been incredibly stimulating. I always go through a big learning spurt when I work directly with other developers, and I don’t do nearly enough of it.

So I’d reached the point where I was interested in a full-time job but, fussy customer that I am, it had to be one that didn’t require me to sell my house and move, and that I had very, very good reason to believe would provide me with the kind of collegial environment that had been, for four years, the thing I had pined for the most as an independent. (I also didn’t want to telecommute, because sitting alone in my house literally all the time is not the right formula for me.)

Well, fast forward a bit and here I am, having found what I was hoping to find! That’s the story. I start December 7. (And all the “date that will live in infamy” jokes have already been made :-) Wish me luck!

I’ve watched no more of the Sotomayor hearings than has happened to be on while I’ve waited for the guy behind the counter to toast my bagel, and things like that. I don’t see much point in watching them, since it’s pretty easy to predict what her critics are going to ask her and say about her, and not terribly interesting to hear her answers.

But I do want to say something about this “wise Latina” thing, if I can do so without boring myself as well as you to death.

With very few exceptions, all Supreme Court justices, ever, have been white men. So have most other judges in the U.S. That means that someone, somewhere along the line, felt that white men make wiser decisions than people who are not white men. Maybe closer to “everyone” than “someone”, in fact.

White male jurists never have to say anything public to the effect that white males as wiser, as jurists, than people who aren’t white males, because it’s been said for them. It’s been said by virtually every President who has made judicial appointments and nominations, every Senator on whom the strangely homogenous pattern has not weighed heavily, and every citizen who never considered withholding a vote from the perpetrators of this centuries-long exercise in exclusion.

In short, the entire history of the Supreme Court and much of the rest of the judiciary amounts to a sustained assertion that white men make wiser decisions than anyone else.

So along came Sotomayor, and expressed a different opinion. She expressed an opinion that was not the opinion on which the entire history of the Supreme Court has been predicated. She espoused the belief that white men do not, in every imaginable case, make wiser judges.

Well!

How dare she?!

Doesn’t she realize that The Universal Opinion on this subject has already been established?

Of course it’s the same old thing. The belief that white males are wiser is so widespread, so ingrained, so taken for granted, that it seems natural. You don’t have to think about it; your thinking has been done for you. And you don’t have to be so gauche as to say that you believe it, because as long as you don’t saying anything, it will be assumed that that’s what you think.

All Sotomayor did was to respond. She was responding to history. History was saying—loudly, repeatedly, in chorus echoing down the centuries—that white men make wiser jurists. Sotomayor said: maybe not, under some circumstances.

That’s all.

Think of it this way. Sotomayor walks down the street every day, her whole life, and every couple of blocks, somebody says to her: White male jurists make wiser decisions than anyone else. Senators say it; Supreme Court justices say it. Citizens say it; Presidents say it.

After a lifetime of that, Sotomayor says: well, not necessarily.

And everyone gets mad at her.

The every-couple-of-blocks thing represents about one millionth of one percent of what Sotomayor, and the rest of us, have actually had communicated to us over our lifetimes. So why the hell shouldn’t she respond? And why are people treating her like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel?

Here’s a passage from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart, published in 1906. I’ve included some context but the main thing I’m interested in is the appearance of the word “cool” in the second paragraph.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Bring yourself. The lady that keeps my boarding-house is calling to me to insist. You remember Dorothy, don’t you, Dorothy Browne? She says unless you have lost your figure you can wear my clothes all right. All you need here is a bathing suit for daytime and a dinner coat for evening.”

“It sounds cool,” I temporized. “If you are sure I won’t put you out—very well, Sam, since you and your wife are good enough. I have a couple of days free. Give my love to Dorothy until I can do it myself.”

I can’t see what “cool” means in the second paragraph, other than “cool” in the slang sense that we use it. My understanding is that “cool” in that sense started, or at least came into common usage, during or after World War II. In any case, 1906 seems insanely early for it.

But what else could it mean in the quotation above? The wardrobe described in the first paragraph doesn’t suggest a particularly cool climate. Is there some other nuance of the word I’m not getting?

I shall leave comments open on this one, at least until the spam gets intolerable.

I hate it when athletes thank God when they win. My reasons for hating it have nothing to do with my own atheism. I hate it because it’s narcissistic and because it’s theologically infantile.

If you win a game and then thank God, and do not thank God when you lose, you are going on record as believing that God wanted you to win, and that a victory by your opponent would have represented a thwarting of God’s plan.

But how do you know? Isn’t it possible that losing is what God has planned for you, and that it will do you good? Maybe losing will strengthen your character. Maybe your opponent needs the win (or the prize money) more than you do, and God somehow managed to figure that out in spite of being dazzled by your greatness. Maybe you should be thanking God for protecting you from the sin of pride by not letting you win a spiritually meaningless, entirely earthly contest.

But I’ve never seen an athlete drop to his or her knees and thank God after a loss. Why not? Because the ones who thank God when they win have a dinky, anthropomorphic conception of God. Their God is “the man upstairs,” the Santa Claus figure, the parent who may or may not give them the birthday present they want. And to hell with the other kids. Me, Me, Me.

So what gives? Where does this all come from? Whose big idea was it to thank God only for bringing about what they themselves wanted to happen anyway?

Let’s go back to ancient times. Things were different with respect to thanking gods, because there were lots of gods and the gods took sides in the contest. It made sense for the Greeks to thank Athena for the victory over the Trojans because Athena was, at some Olympian level, duking it out with Ares and Aphrodite. The Greeks’ powerful friends prevailed over the Trojans’ powerful friends. And the Greeks understood that someone had actually made an effort on their behalf, faced uncertainty, and prevailed. So they thanked her.

Dear athlete: Do you think that God faces uncertainty when you play a tennis match?

Do you think that God has to make an effort on your behalf to make sure you win?

Do you think that God’s enemy is rooting for your opponent?

And if you don’t think all that, what exactly are you thanking God for when you win? I mean exactly. Not just vaguely that you’re happy, and happiness feels good, so it must come from God. That’s theological babytalk.

The best thing that can be said about thanking God for an athletic victory and not for a loss is that it’s an ignorant corruption of what was a perfectly reasonable pagan practice. If you’re a monotheist and thank God for a win, you’re making a statement about your own inherent worth, and what you believe is God’s opinion of that worth, in comparison to the inherent worth of your opponent. You’re asserting that your victory is of the Lord to an extent that a victory by your opponent would not have been. And you’re implying unmistakeably that your opponent is in league with God’s enemy.

In other words, thanking God for an athletic victory is stupid, uninformed, thoughtless, self-absorbed, and about as far from anything religious or spiritual as you can get. I understand the whole thing about religion not being the same as rational thought. But this isn’t even the same as religious thought. It’s just vanity.

Announcing the opening of WishSight!

WishSight is for managing wishlists and gift-giving. It lets you see who’s given (or promised) what to whom, and it lets gift-givers for particular people communicate with each other, via a comment-board, so that they don’t duplicate gifts.

It’s based on a Christmas-list application I wrote in 2005 that my family and friends have been using every year since then. It’s completely merchant-unaffiliated. You can post links for the gifts you want, and they can be links to any merchant.

WishSight helps you cut down on gift duplication, and increases the chances that people will get things they actually want, without the gift-givers having to do a round-robin of email or phone calls to pin down who’s buying what. And chances are they don’t all know each other anyway—which doesn’t matter on WishSight, because you all communicate by leaving comments directly on your mutual friend’s wishlist.

All you have to do is:

• sign up
• list the email addresses of people who you want to be able to see your wishlist
• get those people to sign up and “whitelist” your email address
• list your wishes
• stake “claims” on other people’s wishes

There’s no stealth: the email addresses are only used internally to determine who’s allowed to see whose wishlist. Also, you can list email addresses even if the people haven’t signed up yet. Once they do sign up, they will automatically have permission to see your wishlist and claim your wishes. No two-sided “handshakes” required; you just whitelist people.

Have fun, and let me know if any questions or problems!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that other forms of hate and prejudice are extinct, or even on the wane. But it feels like the stars anti-Muslim sentiment and homophobia are in the ascendancy.

It’s very much about statements that don’t sound aggressive or hateful, on the surface, but that would never be made if hate didn’t lurk just below. I’m thinking, for example, of a report I heard on the radio of some attack or other, involving “three Muslims of middle-eastern descent.” I might have the phrasing of the “middle-eastern descent” part wrong (though it was that or close to it). In any case, the salient bit, for me, was “three Muslims.”

When was the last time you heard a crime described as having been committed by “three Christians”? How about “A Jew broke into a convenience store…”? So what’s up with “three Muslims”?

What’s up, of course, is hate. I don’t think the radio announcer or the newswriter hates Muslims. But they do operate under a compulsion to mention explicitly that Muslims are Muslims, and ultimately that’s so that the listenership can be put on alert to hate them. Does the phrase “three Muslims” have explanatory power? Did these people do whatever they did because they are Muslims? No. There’s no reason to mention their religion except out of habit of mentioning the fact that Muslims are Muslims.

Back when I was a university professor (1992-2005; in this case somewhere around 2003, I think), the school newspaper had a kind of “person-in-the-street” feature, where they’d ask a few people around campus a question and print selected answers. One week, the question was something about Iraq. One of the people quoted in the feature said something along the lines of, “Bomb them all off the face of the earth.” Or “Blow them all up”—words to that effect.

My response was to call the editor-in-chief of the newspaper into my office and have a little chat with him. I was under no institutional imperative to do so—I was not involved with the paper directly—but it seemed to me that I had an opportunity to teach him perhaps the most important lesson of his college career. “If the question of the week had been about how to improve the cafeteria food,” I asked him, “and someone had said, ‘Line the whole cafeteria staff against the wall and shoot them dead,’ would you have printed it?”

Of course he would not have, and said that he would not have. “The fact that what we would not say about the cafeteria workers, we would say about the entire population of a Muslim country,” I explained, “is the dehumanization process at work.” I do believe he understood and took my point on board.

So we mention that people are Muslims, and we lower the bar when it comes to suggesting (or, if you like, joking about) their violent deaths. And it’s all very dangerous and should be sending up serious alarms.

Labeling the gay as gay is an even more popular pastime. The world has settled for a breathtakingly stunted view of what homosexuality entails, and how it manifests itself. It manifests itself, by the way, as itself, not as an obsession with the song “YMCA” or an expertise in designer footware. Hey, more power to you if you have that expertise. But the set of all men who do intersects in a miniscule subset with the set of all men whose primary sexual orientation is toward men. Ditto for all the stereotypes.

Of course, the world can’t deal with the idea that homosexuality manifests itself only as itself, because if that’s true, it means you can’t tell who’s gay; and that, like being unable to tell who’s Jewish, is unacceptable. The workaround is to pretend that you can tell who’s gay, resorting to babytalk about your “gaydar” when the stereotypes, as they must, fail you.

And then, following a fairly tight train of thought, there’s hatred of gays.

First of all, let me explain that I include, as hatred, the “love the sinner, hate the sin” horseshit espoused by the Catholic church. It is, to be sure, a kinder, gentler hatred than the burning-at-the-stake kind. The idea is that you’re enlightened enough to acknowledge that some people just are gay. But you also understand that, as gays, they must never indulge in the kinds of sexual activities they feel interested in. So you, as the compassionate believer, offer to contribute to their happiness by giving them support and encouragement as they fight to maintain their chastity.

How noble.

The church, of course, has two thousand years of experience disguising hate as love. But this one is particularly devious and malign. Let’s cut to the chase: the only reason that one adult human being would try to stop another adult human being, on a lifelong basis, from attaining romantic and/or erotic satisfaction is that he or she (human one) hates him or her (human two). No amount of theological stroking can change that. It’s hate.

Not news, of course, that the Pope and friends hate gays. But interesting to see how slimy and prurient they can get, in the process. Anyway, let’s move on.

Actually we can borrow a concept from the church: “invincible ignorance.” When I read the stuff about homosexuality being a choice (note that it’s not that sexual preference is a choice, just homosexuality—which makes it kind of weird to describe it as a choice), my reaction is that if you put twenty articulate, knowledgeable people in a room for twenty years with the person who’s taking the “choice” position, that person would emerge still saying that homosexuality is a choice. There’s no point of entry for explanation, and no point of contact with reality.

It’s pathetic, but I still count it as hate. At least it leads to hate. Or from hate, perhaps. Or maybe these people are actually choosing to be vicious, and could stop themselves if they really wanted to. It’s hard to know. They’re not saying.

With gay marriage on the news radar these days, more and more of this kind of discourse is showing up: the choice thing, but also the “gays recruit people” thing (which is actually backwards; have these people ever watched television commercials?) and, most disturbingly of all, the “gays prey on children” thing. And each of these things embodies two problems: first, that people believe it; and second, that it’s acceptable to say it publicly.

Which hateful statements are acceptable and which aren’t is a kind of lump under the carpet that moves around but never goes away. Unfortunately, the underlying hate never goes away either—and ultimately, no matter which targeted people or groups we’re talking about, it’s the underlying hate that matters. But who gets to say what, and when, and with what consequences (or lack thereof) is, in itself, something that I think it’s worth keeping fairly close tabs on.

The bailout bill has just passed. I know very little about economics, little enough that I don’t feel entitled to a strong opinion one way or the other on whether the bill should have passed. But I am suspicious of it.

I’m suspicious of it, for one thing, because of the fear-mongering that has surrounded it; it’s very reminiscent of the ongoing “Terrorists will come and kill your family if the executive branch doesn’t get a blank check for waging undeclared war” campaign, and things in that vein.

But I’m even more suspicious of the bill because of all the rhetoric about how it will help “Main Street” as well as “Wall Street”. I don’t know whether it will or not, but what troubles me is the fact that this kind of rhetoric makes it sound like Congress and the Bush administration are desperate to help Main Street. The fact is that, in general, they’re not.

Every microsecond of every day in the history of this country there have been uncountable opportunities for the government to help citizens with financial problems, difficulty paying for a home, lack of job opportunities, inability to get credit, and all the rest of it. The thrust of the behavior of the government for most of the history of the country has been not to bother helping such people to any significant degree.

Now, all of a sudden, helping Main Street leaps to the front of the congressional and executive agenda. I’m disinclined to buy it. If the common weal were really a government priority, we would have known by now. I find it immensely suspicious that the greatest outpouring of social concern, at least as measured in money, comes tethered to a Wall Street bailout.

If Main Street is going to benefit from the delivery of a de facto blank check to Wall Street, surely it would not benefit any less from having money delivered to it directly. But you don’t hear any talk of, say, the government purchasing houses for the victims of fiscal mismanagement. I suppose it would have taken too long to draft a bill that did that; and as we know, the earth would have left its axis if the bill had not been passed this week….

During the week of July 6-12, I invite and encourage everybody who includes links in their email, blog posts, online chats, and other documents, to link to something other than Wikipedia.

I’m not trying to be a Wikipedia slayer. It wouldn’t matter if I were; that’s not going to happen.

I just want to remind everyone that there are thousands and thousands of interesting, well-informed, thought-provoking, educational websites out there, written by professors, researchers, doctors, artists, scientists, practitioners of every craft and industry—and however you slice it, these websites are getting a raw deal when it comes to links.

It’s not about whether Wikipedia articles are accurate or not. Some are, some aren’t. But that’s true of the whole Web. Let’s stop acting as if Wikipedia has some special status.

The best thing about the Web is that it isn’t an encyclopedia. And Wikipedia is evidence that when Web culture meets encyclopedia culture, encyclopedia culture wins. Sure, Wikipedia is collaborative. Most encyclopedias are. They still give off an aura of total, centralized, complete knowledge and authority. And that’s not very Web-like, is it?

So:

• If you’ve got a point to make about grammar, look for an English (or whatever language it is!) professor’s site. There are some great ones. Point the person you’re arguing with to a couple of those.

• Countries have their own informational websites, some official and some written by people who live there. Many of them are multi-lingual. Are they “balanced”? Probably not, at least not in the network news way. So much the better! Balance on the Web emerges from the quantity and interplay of sites. It’s not supposed to be embodied in every document. How boring!

• Wikipedia is great for technology-related topics. But so are lots of other sites. Are you sure that Wikipedia’s description of the algorithm you’re discussing on that mailing list is really the best? the clearest? the most engaging?

• You get the idea! Strike a blow for the richness of the Web, and for the beauty of discourse that doesn’t try to be poker-faced and non-committal, even about important issues. Rediscover the expertise of the many Web contributors who write about their own specialties and have taken the time to share their thoughts.

There’s a lot to learn at Wikipedia, but it’s time to spread the linkage!

A guy I was chatting with in the men’s lounge of the spa at Harrah’s in Atlantic City was telling me about “slide words.” I can’t find anything about them (and I’ve tried “slider words” and a few other variants) anywhere. I don’t think he made the term up, and he certainly didn’t think he had.

Anyway, even though I can’t find any background information or previous discussion, I am going to talk about “slide words” (or whatever they’re called).

A slide word, I gather, is a word or phrase that has come to serve as shorthand for an entire argument—except that the argument isn’t really there. We’re all just supposed to think it is. The slide word acts as a black hole, drawing further discussion and thoughtful debate into itself and killing it.

Slide words are bad because they take the place of actual analysis of situations and events. Every slide word has a kind of implicit, “Sigh. Here we go again” attached to it, even though the “again” part is asserted through the use of the slide word itself and not actually demonstrated.

I have something to say here about three slide words: conspiracy theory, Chinese menu, and bikeshed.

“Conspiracy theory”

“Conspiracy theory” is perhaps the best example of a slide word. Consider the following exchange, which is made up but is actually very similar to several I have had:

With the invocation of the term “conspiracy theory,” all further discussion of what might have actually happened is discredited. The events surrounding the death of John Kipalani’s son need not be examined in any detail; nor need the press coverage (or lack thereof). “Conspiracy theory” plays the role of a rebuttal of the statements about the Challenger disaster, even though it has no actual connection to them.

Again, the slide word (or slide phrase) gets played as if it were a trump card, when in fact it has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of Bush’s culpability in the 9/11 attacks, and neither refutes the logic that’s on offer nor adds information that might bring about a reconsideration of that logic.

“Chinese menu”

Another slide word I’ve come across, in a somewhat narrower setting, is “Chinese menu.”

When I was teaching at a university, I was involved in lots of discussions, formal and otherwise, about core curricula: what they should include, how they should be administered, and so on. I remember that in one series of such discussions, any time anyone suggested anything along the lines of having students choose one or more courses from each of several course groupings, someone else would say, “That’s like a Chinese menu.” Eventually it became just “Chinese menu.”

I have no memory of any discussion of why it was considered a bad idea to adminster a core curriculum this way. All that was required to rebut the idea was “Chinese menu.” Actual argumentation did not enter into it.

“Bikeshed”

Another slide word, a rather obnoxious one that seems to be enjoying considerable popularity these days, is “bikeshed.” If someone says “bikeshed,” they’ve said all they need to say (or at least all they think they need to say, and certainly all they’re planning to say) to establish that what you have been talking about is trivial and not worth discussing.

Saying “bikeshed” to someone, instead of telling that person outright that you find his or her statements trivial and worthless, is not only needlessly indirect but, in most cases I’ve seen, wrong.

The original bikeshed concept, as I understand it (which is from second-hand accounts, so I could be wrong), had to do with the phenomenon of committees spending more time arguing over what color to paint the company bikeshed, than over the allocation of funds to build a nuclear power plant.

The problem with the typical usage of “bikeshed” today is that there’s no nuclear power plant in the picture. It’s more likely to be a bunch of people on an email list discussing the best name for a proposed new method in Ruby, or something like that. Then someone who feels superior to the discussion (which would exclude the creator of Ruby, as well as many of his colleagues, associates, and friends) comes along and says “Bikeshed.”

But if we weren’t talking about method names, we’d be talking about literal constructors for runtime objects. And if not that, then perhaps the question of whether parentheses around parameter lists in method definitions should be mandatory. All of these things are important to people interested in the Ruby programming language; but, with respect, I will state unequivocally that none of them is as important an issue as nuclear power.

Furthermore, saying “bikeshed” implies that you think the group you’re addressing not only is wasting its time on the current topic, but has a history of spending too little time on important things. Even scaling it down so that the important things aren’t really important things in the nuclear power sense, no one ever says what those things are. That’s probably because “bikeshed” is just a snide way to say, “What you’re saying is stupid,” and not a unit of cogent or well-sustained argumentation of any kind.

Thus slide words. I’m glad there’s a name for them, even though it’s puzzling that the only person who seems to have heard the name is that guy at Harrah’s.

I love reading Wikipedia, and I’ve learned a lot from doing so. I’m not, in other words, rabidly anti-Wikipedia. But I do have a few serious concerns about it.

It seems to me that Wikipedia is, in effect whether or not in intent, pushing the Web in exactly the direction it isn’t best suited for: namely, centralization of information. Mailing list posts and IRC channels are full of links to Wikipedia articles, on everything from… well, on lots of things. It seems that the standard way of saying, “If you’re not familiar with the term I just used, here’s how to learn about it” is to provide a Wikipedia link.

I strongly suspect that this is automatic on the part of the people doing it—automatic, that is, rather than based on a thorough search of all the resources available on a given topic and a reasoned decision about which is best-written and/or most informative. That’s the thing: Wikipedia provides something close to one-stop shopping. You’ll find something on almost anything.

Furthermore, Wikipedia itself seems to buy into and cultivate the image of itself as a centralized, objective source of information about everything. One symptom of this is the fact that links within Wikipedia articles are always, or very nearly always, links to other Wikipedia articles. In spite of how open it is, in terms of contributions, it’s ultimately a closed system.

Yes, external sources are indicated at the bottom of articles. But the providing of sources, while important in terms of academic honesty and paper-trailing, never stopped scholarly publications from taking something very close to a “voice of God” position with regard to their subject matter. And it doesn’t stop Wikipedia from doing the same thing. How often have you bothered to go look up all the books and articles listed at the bottom of a Wikipedia article, and carefully analyzed how the information was gleaned and pieced together?

The editorial emphasis on balance and completeness and objectivity is another troubling sign. What’s wrong with balance? What’s wrong with it is that it’s a mirage. Any undergraduate who’s taken a reasonably decent mass communication course knows that what the news media call “balance” is simply an editorial or presentational style. And it requires constant reinforcement. “We report; you decide,” says Fox. “We’ll give you the world,” says at least one radio station (or conglomerate, probably, at this point). The idea is that the discouse provides a perfect substitute for the reality, so you can consider yourself to have been served the reality when you consume the discourse.

Wikipedia operates, I believe, in exponentially greater faith than the news media. But the philosophy of representation is the same, and it’s very old-school. An article is a simulacrum of a discrete, finite reality, and an article’s suitability for publication can be measured by how closely it has cloned that reality. While there’s often room for improvement, every article has the noble goal of achieving a perfect fit with its subject matter, and the potential to do so.

The fact, however, is that it’s not in the nature of written discourse to be a perfect fit with some arbitrary slice of reality. It doesn’t work that way. There’s no shame in acknowledging this, but Wikipedia battles against it.

What troubles me is not just that it’s child’s play to debunk the “voice of God” philosophy of discourse, but that I’d thought the Web was doing a pretty good job teaching people that reality and discourse actually map to each other sloppily, crazily, contradictorily, and ironically. Measured both by its editorial policies and by its wide, eager adoption as a centralized authority, Wikipedia unfortunately pushes against this more intriguing and, I would argue, more balanced take on things.

As of this morning, I can't find my London cell phone. Yes I know it sounds pretentious for an American even to have one... but I go to London usually two or three times a year, and you really can't have any kind of social life over there without one. Anyway, I'm at home in the U.S., and I can't find the phone.

That means I will almost certainly have to buy another one, solely because I'm too stupid to have put it away properly last time I got back from London.

I consider the price of the new phone to be a Stupidity Tax payment. I pay several hundred dollars a year in Stupidity Tax. I forget to cancel hotels; I neglect to send in rebate forms; I lose things. I have to say, the losing things thing is very deep-rooted; there's more to that syndrome than stupidity. Still, to the extent that I lose expensive things that should be simple to keep track of, their replacement is Stupidity Tax.

Thinking of all of this as Stupidity Tax actually makes it a little easier to deal with. It's just part of the cost of living. Of course I'd like to reduce it as much as possible. But it's unlikely I'll ever reduce it to zero. Life is too much of a sieve to hope for that. At least I can keep things interesting by rotating the reasons for the tax: a lost item here, a forgotten bill there. I'd like it not to get too interesting... but the Stupidity Tax is here to stay, so I might as well try to adapt to it.

I don’t think you have to be a language snob to wince (and laugh) at the way advertisers misuse English. They’re protected, of course, by the myths that surround their profession. If they get their grammar wrong, or misuse an idiom, they must have some ingenious marketing reason for doing so—or so people are willing to asusme. In fact, I think what’s happening is that the lousiness of the American educational system is trickling up into the ranks of copy writers and copy editors and basically everyone in the chain of custody of commercials.

The one that got me writing this post is a Verizon radio ad, specifically an ad for Verizon’s phone/cable/Internet triple package. It features the usual fake testimonial sound-bites from actors pretending to be customers. That’s par for the course, until one of them says (and the stuff in square brackets is a paraphrase; the rest is verbatim):

“[Verizon gives you a great deal,] providing all three services and not pulling any punches.“

I love the image of a Verizon repair person coming to my door and slugging me in the jaw, as hard as he or she can. (I’d rather it not happen, but I love the image.) It is, of course, completely clear that the person who wrote that line has no idea what the expression “pulling a punch” actually means, and neither do the executives who paid to have the ad written. I surmise that they think it means “pulling a stunt”, so that not pulling any punches means you’re entirely honest. Or something. Who knows?

I suppose that if Coors can actually bring to market a product called “Artic [sic] Ice”, then Verizon can sleepwalk through the process of producing radio commercials. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me any more. I no longer expect the ostensible gatekeepers to know what they’re doing. They probably never did, but I do think it’s gotten worse. And funnier.

I’m a sort of mediocre good sudoku solver—flashes of brilliance, too lazy to bother writing in all the possible values of each field so not in the running to solve a lot of the harder puzzles. But I enjoy them, and I go through phases of doing them quite a bit.

I also do crosswords—specifically, British-style cryptic crosswords. I’m quite good at those. I rarely finish one completely, but I still consider myself good at them because I often come within, say, two or three clues of finishing. And if the answer is something I’ve never heard of, I give myself partial credit, so to speak.

It’s actually the answers that I’ve been thinking about: the answers to crossword clues, and the answers to Sudoku.

When you work on a crossword clue, there’s a very specific goal for that clue. Clues can be fun, even in isolation. You can work on a crossword puzzle with someone else, even someone who can’t see the puzzle; you just give them a clue, and tell them how many letters you’ve already got, and they can work on it.

Sudoku are different. You can’t really say to your friend, “I’ve got a square that’s missing 2,8, and 9. The blank boxes are the center, the top right, and the middle left” and expect your friend to come up with a solution.

And after you’ve worked on a crossword puzzle – more to the point, after you’ve given up – you want to see the solution. When you see the answers to the clues you didn’t get, you may feel stupid or you may feel vindicated (if you decide the clue was bad, or the answer was something you truly never would have been able to come up with).

That’s where I wonder about Sudoku. You always get the solutions in the back of Sudoku books, or published the next day in the newspaper. But why, exactly? I can’t imagine working on a Sudoku, failing to complete it, and then looking at the third box from the left in the middle row of squares and saying, “Oh, of course! Seven!” The individual squares just don’t have the same relation to their answers that crossword clues have to theirs.

Another kind of weird thing about the solutions to Sudoku is that, at least if you put yourself in the right frame of mind, seeing them doesn’t matter. If I set out to solve a Sudoku rigorously – with no guessing, never filling in a box until I’m sure about it – having access to the solution doesn’t really make my job any easier.

What all of this amounts to is, I think, that the culture of puzzle publication dictates that solutions accompany puzzles, but not too closely (at the back of the book, or a day later), even though this way of doing it is a rather odd fit, in some respects, for Sudoku. No harm done, of course. I just find it kind of funny.

Just spotted on the on-screen program guide for Cablevision: “When a female Secret Service agent is killed, detectives investigate clients of her husband, a well-connected lobbyist.”

Years ago, there was a kind of riddle or puzzle in circulation—something to the effect of:

A father and son are in a car crash. They’re taken to the hospital. The doctor comes into the room, looks at the boy in the bed, and exclaims, “My son!” How can this happen?

I’d like to think that that riddle is obsolete. But I wonder. Apparently television blurb writers still feel the need to specify that a character is a female Secret Service agent, not just a Secret Service agent, even though reference is made to “her husband” in the same sentence.

I can understand alluding to a character’s sex—or ethnicity, age, sexual preference—if it’s materially relevant to the plot. The dramas of our culture involve these things, and there’s no reason that dramatic representations can or should be expected not to revolve around them. If an episode of a show is about child pornographers, I don’t expect the description not to mention children. If it’s about a serial murderer of gays, I don’t expect the description to be poker-faced on the matter of who the victims are.

So there are cases where the issue is the message, so to speak.

I don’t know, because I haven’t seen it, but I suspect the “female Secret Service agent” episode isn’t one of them. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. That still leaves the question: what the hell could the “her” in “her husband” mean, except that the agent is female? Even if the plot does hinge specifically on the femaleness of the agent, “her” conveys that femaleness completely and unambiguously. There is literally no possible reason for the presence of the word “female” in that blurb.

I dislike the implication that it’s unacceptable to keep the femaleness of a Secret Service agent unrevealed even for a handful of words. That’s no good. If people find themselves thinking it must be a man and then revising their view later in the sentence, so be it. They should have to do that, if they assume that “Secret Service agent” means male agent, or that “teacher” means white teacher, or that “man” means heterosexual man.

Enough already with these regressive habits.