Ntuple Indemnity

If you follow this blog regularly, you may have noticed that one individual has received a lot of attention lately; that individual being Steve Smith, one of the University of Alberta’s highest-profile student politicians by virtue of the fact that he actually does stuff. On the other hand, if you follow this blog regularly, you are probably Steve Smith himself, and I invite you to point out the fallacy in my assertion that there is in any way a linear correlation between “lack of uselessness” and media coverage. Regardless, while I taking a much-needed weekend off from the Internet, the Students’ Union’s most influential advocate of Simon & Garfunkel took it upon himself to start his own weblog.

In his first entry – which, like every inaugural post, fumbles for a sense of direction and waits for Godot – he mentions this page, calling me “a brilliant writer, who posts beautifully crafted (though all together too infrequent) treatises on movies, language, student journalism and, of course, hack.” Why thank you, Steve. The parenthetical remark is duly noted and will be addressed to the best of my abilities.

That promise is one to regret on a somewhat immediate basis, due to a little thing called “academics”. I would typically use a sentence like this to go into detail with respect to what homework it is I am missing, but lo and behold – a barometer of irresponsibility has emerged for me without my even bothering to ask. Hot on Steve’s heels comes Video Games and Building Blocks, another weblog that sprung up over the weekend. This one belongs to Josh Bazin, who is enrolled in half my classes. Think of him as a proxy for expressing my Software Engineering woes.

But when one talks about online diarism as a medium for expressing woes – and let’s face it, the vast majority of blog material nowadays consists of exactly that – we are led to an interesting question. Why write blogs?

The easy way out is to cry “exhibitionism” and leave it at that, but in no way is it that simple. For one, the vast majority of blogs start with no audience, aside from a number of personal friends and possibly second-degree acquaintances. It is extraordinarily rare that someone will read the public diary of a complete stranger in whose life he or she has no vested interest. Not every journal is as politically relevant as Salam Pax, as comprehensive as The Volokh Conspiracy or as laden with technical expertise as Grant Hutchinson’s Splorp. Normal blogs – actual personal diaries about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens – are of very little appeal to a voyeur removed from the context. Often, they are read by those within two degrees of separation from the author; rarely are they ever intended to be more.

These diaries are, in a way, a natural evolution from e-mail as a medium of correspondence. As some people will have no doubt discovered, maintaining all the promises to “keep in touch” scribbled in the inside cover of your high school yearbook requires a tremendous amount of repetition. Why not write one letter to everybody? Because CC’s are first and foremost impersonal, and a static roster of recipients carries its own sack of problems. The average recipient of a mass e-mail regards it as spam and junks it immediately, if not through an automatic filter. Furthermore, there are inevitably hard feelings from interested parties excluded from the list. The solution is to leave the reception of this information at the discretion of the reader; hence, the rise of the blog.

Class dismissed.

That was the most predictable Oscar ceremony ever, but at the same time, entirely devoid of controversy. Most of the vitriol this year can be directed at the shortlisting stage, and was already covered in the previous post.

If there was one film to finally hit the eleven mark again, it was The Return of the King. The clean sweep was clear as soon as it took Adapted Screenplay, the one that was most likely going to hold a consolation vote. But in the context of rewarding the entire trilogy – for after all, it is one movie, only with a split release sequence – well done, Academy.

The big question is, what conceivable project will next hit the eleven mark, or even break it? This may not be as impossible as it seems, given that The Return of the King was a rare winner that received no acting nominations. The sweep, though, could be attributed to both the onus to compensate for the losses of the first two – something that should have been done from the start, and was three years in the making – and a weaker, less competitive field this year. Facing facts for a moment, if The Lord of the Rings was not in the running, it would be a much tighter race, with the well-crafted but just shy of worthy Mystic River taking the prize, but win counts maxing out at five or six. Needless to say, it would be indicative of a relatively sparse year. On the other hand, if that opened the door to Finding Nemo, I would not complain – until it failed to win, that is. But this is all idle speculation.

To hit such an astronomical nomination count, let alone a win count, you need to work with built-in epic material from the start. Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings are all epic pageantry material. The Last Samurai, on the other hand, is not. It needs to be something that makes everything before it look small.

That said, the one to watch out for next year is Troy, not because it will get eleven Oscars or even eleven nominations, but because it is based on exactly the kind of source material that should poise itself for those numbers, from possibly the one cinematogenic storyteller bigger than Tolkien. But it doesn’t have ten hours to work with, now does it?

What we can expect in the film industry over the next few years is an influx of people trying to make the next Rings, like certain attempts to make the next Titanic (see: Pearl Harbor). The attempted-epic market already saturated itself this year, so let’s not see this trend spiral out of control.

The moment of the evening, of course, was Michael Moore in the midst of a “fictitious war” in the Pelennor Fields.

One would think that December would be the zenith of this online record, given the sheer volume of material to discuss; unfortunately, the overwhelming quantity of happenings – for good or ill – ultimately mitigated the publication of anything useful on this here page.

Based on the unlikely assumption that the entire readership has, in fact, not abandoned this page and left it for dead like a Students’ Union VP on Khao San Road, some updates are in order.

First things first: No, I have not seen Cold Mountain, Master and Commander, The Last Samurai or Lost In Translation. This abnormal deficiency of Oscar-season movie criticism, or any criticism at all, will hopefully change over the weekend. One must remember, however, that Laziness Conquers All – a certainty as physically entrenched as the Law of Ropes.

Yes, I did see The Return of the King, albeit only a single-digit number of times. Apparently there was an expectation that after surviving the marathon known only as Trilogy Tuesday, I would immediately write a detailed scene-by-scene analysis of the entire film – geek’s prerogative, one might say. I actually did this; immediately after returning from the cinema, I wrote two comprehensive analyses on the Entmoot forums – some rambly general first impressions and the rather more comprehensible adaptation notes. It has been suggested that I post these more permanently and prominently. This may or may not happen.

Coming up soon, should I have time to do it this weekend amidst catching up on the current state of cinema and editing the next UADS newsletter, will be an annotated photo album detailing various misadventures in Inchon and Bangkok, followed by the World Universities Debating Championships in Singapore.

Eventually I will do some kind of 2003 wrap-up, which will quite predictably be full of praising The Wind Waker and Finding Nemo and determining whether or not they compensated for an otherwise pretty bleak year. Don’t hold me to this.

This week’s edition of The Economist takes a stab at the new verbal dumping ground of the unpublished and unpublishable:

Golden blogs

Blogging, to the horror of some, is trying to go commercial

SOMETHING is afoot in the still rather geeky world of “blogging” that could make publishing web logs as mainstream as e-mailing or instant messaging. AOL, a big internet service provider, is getting ready to offer its members free blogging in a few weeks’ time. This follows Google, the world’s most popular search engine, which in February bought the company that makes Blogger, a free programme for publishing web logs.

Web logs, known to their users as blogs, are web pages for self-anointed pundits—personal online journals, often updated throughout the day, full of raw, unedited opinions and links to other sites. Most are what one would expect from a new internet medium: nerdy, inane and barely grammatical, and intelligible only to teenage subcultures. [emphasis added] But others are erudite and thoughtful—such as andrewsullivan.com, a political commentary. Some are used in business—team members can keep abreast of progress on a project with blogs instead of messy trails of group e-mails. There are blogs for numerous online “communities”, including fat people, vegetarians, and Democratic presidential candidates. By some estimates, 750,000 people now blog, and the number is growing daily.

Because blogging is becoming so popular, people are belatedly pondering its economics. Blogging certainly incurs costs, including the expense for web hosts of storing all those journal entries. On the other hand, it also creates small, tight groups of readers that could make ideal target audiences for advertisers. Like search engines, once considered loss leaders, there is therefore an opportunity for “monetising something cool,” reckons Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Read the full article. It’s a good read, and The Economist never fails to impress me with how it can pull off things like a summary of the entire state of the Internet in a sentence, as in the boldface statement above.

Yes, the whole weblog revolution is precisely based on independence, amateurism, and content free of editing, as pointed out by David Winer. Nevertheless, I do believe in one barrier that should be imposed if commercial blogging services want to have a hope in hell of establishing themselves as legitimate and not exploitative services.

It’s simple: create a respectable brand name by hosting respectable blogs. It’s a two-way relationship – selling the brand name will sell the blogs, making the service worth the money. It would draw a line akin to that between real book publishers and online print-on-demand services that don’t give a damn about what’s between the covers, though I am not speaking of regulation of content, but something much simpler: literacy. Have all the clients send in a sample piece of work, or pass a language aptitude test. Put it in the Terms of Service: the content of the blog doesn’t matter – just make it readable.

Think of an online magazine – not a publication, but a network of articles, free of editorial intervention regarding content, but coming with the guarantee of being intelligible. Societally, the most damaging devil-spawn created by the Internet is neither piracy nor pornography: it’s illiteracy. Weblogs are terrific for their freedom of content and accessibility, but they are beating the English language further and further into the ground.

Would people pay for what is essentially a language certification? If they want to stand out from the trash-heap and build a viable readership, yes. It’s like paying for commercial web hosting and a domain name instead of floundering around on GeoCities. Obviously, the people running the big-name blogs that already have readerships in the thousands don’t need this – but the rest of the Internet does.

From The Weekly Standard comes Robert Hartwell Fiske’s review of the already much-ridiculed Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh:

This new slang-filled edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary does as much as, if not more than, the famously derided Webster’s Third International Dictionary to discourage people from taking lexicographers seriously. “Laxicographers” all, the Merriam-Webster staff remind us that dictionaries merely record how people use the language, not necessarily how it ought to be used. Some dictionaries, and certainly this new Merriam-Webster, actually promote illiteracy.

…

As most people know by now, dictionary makers today merely record how the language is used, not how the language ought to be used. That is, lexicographers are descriptivists, language liberals. People using “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested” does not displease a descriptivist.

A prescriptivist, by contrast, is a language conservative, a person interested in maintaining standards and correctness in language use. To prescriptivists, “disinterested” in the sense of “uninterested” is the result of uneducated people not knowing the distinction between the two words. And if there are enough uneducated people saying “disinterested” (and I’m afraid there are) when they mean “uninterested” or “indifferent,” lexicographers enter the definition into their dictionaries. Indeed, the distinction between these words has all but vanished owing largely to irresponsible writers and boneless lexicographers.

…

Of course, it’s in the financial interest of dictionary makers to record the least defensible of usages in the English language, for without ever-changing definitions–or as they would say, an evolving language–there would be less need for people to buy later editions of their product.

A few months ago (before the new edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate was published), I took a poll of Vocabula Review readers and discovered that 68 percent of the respondents rejected the strong descriptivist idea of dictionary-making, and only 4 percent would necessarily bow to the definitions and spellings found in the dictionary. More than that, though, the new Merriam-Webster is a sign that dictionaries, at least as they are now being compiled, have outlived their usefulness. Dictionaries are no longer sacrosanct, no longer sources of unimpeachable information. Dictionaries are, indeed, no longer to be trusted.

…

Over the last forty and more years, linguists and lexicographers have conspired to transform an indispensable reference work into an increasingly useless, increasingly needless one.

Well, isn’t this a regular pickle. On one hand we have the descriptivist approach that language is moulded by usage and misusage, which leads to dictionaries that model our society – specifically, our increasingly illiterate society. On the other hand, dictionaries that stick to the prescriptivist approach – though this is more significant regarding inclusion than definitions – are criticized for obsolesence. One recent criticism of Chambers, Britain’s pre-SOWPODS Scrabble word source, was (to paraphrase) that much of it existed only to provide for legal plays in said game.

Neither approach sounds particularly good. We do need linguistic standards to which we must adhere, especially in this age when first-world illiteracy is at an all-time high, thanks to the dark alliance of lazy typists and the Internet. At the same time, one needs to recognize that commonly adopted buzzwords and malaprop definitions are still fundamentally words and definitions, and a dictionary without them is an incomplete dictionary. Of course, all tabletop dictionaries out there are heavily edited and woefully incomplete as it is, which is why my homepage is Dictionary.com – it’s not quite there yet, but it’s another step up the ladder.

Fiske’s review itself, while noteworthy, does have its more questionable moments. He laments how “far-out” is still around despite its allegedly temporary relevance, in spite of the fact that yes, people do still watch movies from the sixties. He criticizes the inclusion of “alright”, but I defer to this usage note in the similarly disreputable American Heritage Fourth:

Despite the appearance of the form alright in works of such well-known writers as Langston Hughes and James Joyce, the single word spelling has never been accepted as standard. This is peculiar, since similar fusions such as already and altogether have never raised any objections. The difference may lie in the fact that already and altogether became single words back in the Middle Ages, whereas alright has only been around for a little more than a century and was called out by language critics as a misspelling.

One interesting case study, for those of you with too much time on your hands, is how dictionaries should approach a word like “gay”. Clearly it has the two distinct meanings, the “happy” one and the “homosexual” one, and I would not hesitate to ridicule a dictionary that excluded either. At the same time, shame on the dictionary that defers to the teenage school-bus usage of the word as applied in a derogatory manner to anything “stupid”.

My point? The line that divides overly conservative and overly liberal dictionaries is blurry and necessarily full of double standards. There is no happy medium, which is why using multiple dictionaries is the best solution.

Maybe.