Useful consciousness

In this morning’s paper there was a story about the rupture of the fuselage on a Southwest Airline 737-300 jet.

An aviation expert is quoted as saying that, in such circumstances, “At an altitude above 34,000 feet, the Southwest pilots would have had only 10 to 20 seconds of ‘useful consciousness’ to get their oxygen masks on or pass out.”

No doubt this “useful consciousness” is expert language, even jargon of the industry, but it strikes us non-experts as odd indeed. And then (it struck me, at least) as hilarious.

Of course, the expert, John Gadzinski, is talking about reaction time that a pilot would have to take crucial action. “The higher you are,” he goes on, “the less useful consciousness time you have.”

Passengers, presumably, would have just as little time to secure their oxygen masks, and one witness recounts some passengers fumbling and falling in their frantic haste to secure oxygen.

It would be good to cultivate useful consciousness, even if we can't all attain the Higher Consciousness of the wise.

But the language is hilarious, I mean, because taken out of this strict expert context, and tucked into an everyday sphere of discourse, it might suggest that most of us are flying most of the time with little “useful consciousness.” We’re flying by the seat of our pants, perhaps. We’re not straightening up and flying right. We’re on autopilot.

What do we do in fact with this incredible gift, this blessing, of consciousness? How do we develop it, pursue it, improve on it? Do we see the world in its freshness and, yes, fresh hilarity? Or do we plod along in the ruts, in the ox carts (not airplanes) of our daily habits?

I don’t mean here to provide psychological counseling. (Who am I to suggest direction?) But to say that language reflects our habits of consciousness, and unconsciousness. (Some would say creates these habits.) And that changing our language may change our lives. Being more conscious of how we use what we use every day (language) can make a qualitative difference.

Take an obvious example. We all know people whose every other word seems to be the f word. Now if they could cut their vulgarity in half, and then replace that half with words and phrases more appropriate, or more exact, even if they are measures of the anger and frustration the speakers may be feeling, this new verbiage may reflect / create changes in the life. They will begin feeling, and being perceived as, not quite so angry, marginal, out of the loop.

Or, another example, take an engineer who, proud of his expertise, her mastery of arcane lore, has no idea when he speaks to laymen and press that he’s using insider language. Every other word is not a swear word but a tech word, and he baffles us as much as the angry, obscene speaker may.

In less dramatic instances, consider just about any business brochure or website you come across. If it’s not full of jargon, it uses stale language, the hard crusts of yesterday’s banquets. Old scraps that should’ve been thrown out with the garbage long ago.

A local academic, who advises watershed districts (one of my clients is the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District), has set up a Watershed Game workshop in which participants “learn how their choices can prevent adverse impacts.”

Oh my, my, my. Save us from the adverse impacts of such game playing! From the dents in the head we’re sure to receive from such bruising jargon! How can someone who talks like this, expert as he may be, lead games? He has forgotten how to play with language, for sure, and language creates, if it doesn’t just reflect, our reality.

Well, you say, business is business, and we’re in the business of selling, not making bread or art. People care only what you say, not how you say it.

Which is true enough, at the surface anyway.

But don’t we all want to sell — and buy — something fresh and new? No matter if it’s a commodity, or a highly rare or technical service, we want the sizzle with the steak. And cliches don’t sizzle. Jargon doesn’t compel with its aroma. It beats us into submission, into the hematomas of the everyday workday. Yes, sure, it adversely impacts us, rendering us if not dead then on life support!

Useful consciousness, at last. Isn’t that what we’re after in business as in life?

Literacy: its own reward?

It’s easy to be cynical in these cynical times, surrounded, as we are, by various illiteracies:

• Pop culture, with its contempt for age and authority
• Commercial culture, with its money as the end-all-and-be-all
• Hedonist-nihilist culture, with its lack of connection to anything larger than an orgasm

As someone trained in language and literature, I might be expected to have my nose down in a book. (Or up some other part.) Book! What’s that? Book! What’s that for?

Earnest, playful, dreaming, ideal, will kids grow up to read? Or will they be absorbed in mindless pleasures?

A retired friend who taught for a living reads voraciously. He reads novels, history, sociology, religion, science. He reads to get ahead, could be, which may be, deliberately, behind where the rest of us are going. Chris gives me a flying precis of the last half dozen books he’s read, then throws up his hands, and asks, “But, really, what use is reading?”

Doesn’t it improve the mind? I say.

Maybe it’s a process rather than product? I suggest. A process that generates a bit of light in this time of so much darkness? A bit of cool in this time of so much heat?

It’s not my intention here to talk about politics. (It only increases the temperature, quenches the light.) Or to mention religion, either. (Its effects are similar.)

I’d like, rather, just to pose a question. Does reading do anything? Does it have any uses? Or is it, well, just beautiful, fantastical, airy, impractical, platonic, archaic, feckless?

Do individuals need reading? Do businesses? And to what end? And to what purpose?

Are those of us who read, for duty and, yes, pleasure more than a little like the Libyan rebels, holding back the forces of brutality and darkness?

(As Hemingway said, in another connection, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”)

Think outside the box: really outside the box!

Derek Diedreksen's Gypsy Junker invites you to think outside the box!

Well, we’re all so busy thinking outside the box these days — that’s the exhortation, isn’t it? — that we fail to see the box we’re trapped in. The box of cliches, jargon, obscure Latinisms, and boxed-in thinking in general.

Seems like a loony in Massachusetts has set about to right this problem — in a nouveau-Thoreauvian way.

In Walden, Thoreau opined that a man might live with dignity in a house the size of a railroad storage box, the kind he saw beside the tracks at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, the kind that held RR supplies, I suppose. Thoreau was keeping his tongue in cheek, as usual. He was full of wit and banter about the follies of his fellow man, whose misfortune it was, he asserted, to be trundling down life’s road with his house and all his possessions on his back.

We don’t have to be a follower of Thoreau or know much about him to see that he makes some kind of paradoxical sense at least. (Do you think he’d have many followers on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook, now that it’s the popular thing to do, the boxy kind of thing we seem to seek?) We stress quantity so much, that is, that we forget about quality. Qualify of life, if you will. (Argh, I hate that phrase!) Or quality of time and space to inhabit and explore.

A recent New York Times article shows that Thoreau has a follower and friend in contemporary Stoughton, Massachusetts, a fellow named Derek Diedreksen who is into thinking outside the box. You see, he has been constructing in the back yard of his modest two-bedroom house a series of “micro-shelters” that he calls the Gypsy Junker, the Hickshaw, and the Boxy Lady. Like Thoreau with his cabin, Diedreksen has made his constructions out of materials he’s scavenged or bought on the cheap. Each has cost him less than $200. (In Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out his expenses for boards, nails, mortar, etc. penny by penny.)

Of the Gypsy Junker, the largest of the three structures, Diedreksen says, “Originally, it was going to be a place to brainstorm for my book [about the micro-structures] and my designs. … There’s no better place than inside someplace that is unconventional and bizarre. It helps you think outside the box instead of sitting in some white-walled room.”

So there you have it. If you really want to think outside the box, get thee to a micro-structure if not a nunnery. All that breathing the shallow air of white-walled rooms will do you in. Guaranteed!

Savvy, humble, and willing to commit

This is sad, friends, and true. I’m at an age where I read the obits for pleasure. (Thank God it was them, not me.) And look at the job ads, too, with wonder.

This morning I ran across one that, like so many others, seems to have been written by a robot.

Among other impossibilities, it called for an account executive who was “savvy, humble, and willing to commit.”

Isn’t this like asking for a 40-year-old virgin?

If you’re savvy, friend, you’re not going to be particularly humble.

And if you’re humble, you won’t be cunning and savvy.

That’s the nature of the beast.

But this bit of linguistic legerdemain is pretty common. It’s a bit you can find in all kinds of ads that ask for unique individuals who can think outside the box (including the box of cliches) — and be 100% team players (another cliche).

We need to remind ourselves how humble we must be!

In the world of thinking outside the box, we don’t say we’ll think outside the box.

In the world of team playing, we do. (We say rah! rah! rah!)

So which box do they want — creative thinking or conformity?

And how far are they willing to accommodate really new ideas?

(Rodney King, beaten by the cops, might say, “Why can’t we all just get along?” And those who are beaten and cowed by the bosses might ask the same.)

I’m not making an argument for cat fights and sabotage. Rather, I’m suggesting that real creativity may come at the price of real 100% collaboration not to mention groupthink.

How can we have it both ways?

The lowly possessive

People are so freaked out about apostrophes that they misuse them: here, just because a noun has a terminal -s, the writer adds an apostrophe! "No Dogs" is simply the subject of the sentence ... and "Guide Dogs" the object of the preposition except. What the heck is that comma doing in Toilets?

There’s been a heated discussion lately, in a LinkedIn group I belong to, about the fate of the apostrophe. As in people’s right to know, a dime’s worth, the Wentworths’ property taxes.

Other languages have the possessive case, of course, but don’t have the apostrophe. Is it an atavism, a useless carry-over from a fussier age, a tax that grammarians impose on the ignorant (as the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged)?

Yes and no, I think, to all the above.

The apostrophe originated in 18th century England, at a time when grammar and spelling were being standardized. The appearance of this mark, in fact, seems to be based on a false assumption. Anglo-Saxon, the language of early England, had no such mark, but simply added an -s to a word to indicate possession. (This is the same tactic that German uses today: der Mannes Hut [the man's hat], das Weibchens Dirndl [the woman's skirt]). But, for better or worse, for the time being, we are stuck with the apostrophe to indicate possession (as well as contraction), and to omit the apostrophe is to court a low opinion among grammarians and other careful literate folk.

And as long as we’re observing these sorts of things (are observant grammarians, like observant Jews, say — and belong to a conservative tradition), let’s rehearse the basic rules.

Possessive singular

• To form the possessive singular of most nouns, simply add ‘s:
  • John’s hat
  • Mary’s blanket
  • the cat’s meow
• If a noun ends in s or x or z, you can add just an apostrophe or the apostrophe plus s, depending on which sounds better or which is established usage:
  • Xerxes’ armies
  • jazz’s beginnings
  • asbestos’s dangers

Possessive plural

• To form the possessive plural of regular nouns, which end in s, simply add the apostrophe:
  • the animals’ behavior [more than one animal]
  • the monsoons’ predicted course [more than one monsoon]
  • the foundations’ pleas [more than one foundation is pleading]
  • the Joneses’ absurd pretenses
  • the Swansons’ property rights
• To form the possessive plural of irregular nouns, those not ending in s, add the apostrophe plus s:
  • the men’s demands
  • the women’s taste in fashion
  • the children’s story hour

Questions, comments? Please ask or comment below.

Going viral: must we?

It’s the sheer unrelenting uninventiveness of jargon that gets me.

The way a new word or phrase sweeps through society like a tsunami or, to use an example, “goes viral.”

A closer examination of these bits of jargon reveals metaphors that are born one day and, like flies, die that same day, as dead metaphors, though they live on and are used.

So, then, “going viral.”

A YouTube post can go viral when everyone clicks on the Internet site.

A phrase itself, like “going viral,” can go viral when everyone, suddenly, starts seeing it in print. (Do we read print anymore? Print not produced by texting?)

Yes, the metaphor, originally striking and original, dies almost immediately, becomes a dead metaphor, for few people recognize it any more as a metaphor, a simile or comparison. It’s just words, dead words, dead flies, detritus that piles up and connects us to each other in a kind of disease or diseased network.

If a bit of language, or a video, goes viral, isn’t it by definition virulent? Doesn’t it, like a virus, have the power to spread rapidly — but also to infect?

If we are infected by this virus, then aren’t we too sick?

And if we use the phrase or video, aren’t we spreading the disease?

We don’t have to be high priests of language, purists, “gloomy grammarian in …  golden gowns” (thanks, Wallace Stevens), to realize that unconscious use of language makes us susceptible to all sorts of diseases. We spread the germs. We don’t realize we’re ailing. We don’t realize we’re being overtaken by these germs, even as we do their bidding, willy-nilly, the way an HIV-positive person may succumb to the virus.

If we must go viral, can we develop some consciousness of our predicament?

So that we don’t spread the jargon, the cliches, the disease indiscriminately?

(For a good example of viral hype, see BuzzFeed, the kind of contemptible tripe we’re all too used to in the infotainment sphere. For a quick consideration of how jargon corrupts, see “What Is Your Gibberish Component?”)