http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9H6MdcNFsg

When I got into academia, I couldn’t stop thinking that the whole exercise of looking for deep meanings in literature was not without its compensating comedic moments. In the case of Monty Python, it was Pablo Casals plunging 400 feet into a bucket of boiling fat. In graduate school, it was a “real” professor who told me what literary criticism was “really” about. See the introduction to my forthcoming book on my life after academia.

That is not to say that Monty Pythonites could not be serious about literature. Terry Jones wrote Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery and one of my favorite Chaucer books, Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, which I will cite in my exposition of ‘The Knight’s Tale.’ I, too, have done my share of serious critical work, but Poker Tales is more in line with the fabliaux tales in Chaucer’s masterpiece.

Anyway, here’s the original Tchaikovsky for you humorless purists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFaq9kTlcaY

For the rest of you, buy my book.

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness.

That IS shocking. Here I was thinking that English has rapidly overtaken the rest of the world as the lingua franca of international communication and of international commerce much as Latin was the lingua franca of the Middle Ages. I guess I learn new things everyday.

The story is filled with tidbits like this:

The Cook County (Ill.) Board, apparently fed up with what it perceived as negativity in the mainstream media, decided to produce its own magazine to ensure “regular positive press.”

But the initial run of 5,000 copies had to be tossed because the magazine had too many spelling and grammatical errors.

I live in Cook County, and if throwing away 5,000 magazines was our biggest problem and not, say, government corruption, high taxes, and one of the worst school systems in the country (Chicago’s), then I would be all for shoring up the English language. But since this problem ranks towards (or at) the bottom of my concern with Cook County, I’ll have to pass.

Such stories are amusing. Take this one on how a typo messed up a billboard dedicated to praising ‘pubic (not public) schools’ in South Bend, IN.

They’re also comparatively rare. Sure we see more of them nowadays, but we see a lot of things we didn’t used to see. That’s because there’s more media now than there used to be.

Newspapers to Blame

Mr. Weingarten blames newspapers of all things for the decline of English, as if newspapers don’t have enough problems what with their going out of business on account of new and more efficient models of information delivery.

Why pile on to a dying industry? Perhaps it’s because Mr. Weingarten is part of the dying industry and hopes to save it by putting more pressure on the industry he loves before he retires. It seems to me that this is like smothering grandma with a pillow and then pulling the pillow away and urging grandma to “Breathe, Grandma, breathe!” as she gasps for air. To each his own, I guess.

In one of his columns, entitled, ‘Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga‘ (I’ve corrected the errant capitalization of Washington Post’s title to accord with my Chicago Manual of Style), he writes:

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

Everything is different today, and it’s much more confusing. For one thing, there are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as “a subspecies of goat.”

You’re a grumpy old codger, Mr. Weingarten. (That DOES feel better. Thanks!) But more than that, you’re going old, Mr. Weingarten, and like many old people, you are feeling the certainties which you once thought so solid and reliable slipping away. I’m only 48, but I’ve felt it too. In my opinion, the problem is not to be confronted by retrenching into your little, too-small world. The answer is to be found in opening yourself to new and yet-unexplored areas of experience.

A Perennial Topic of Conversation

This has been a topic of conversation…well, forever. That’s because the human mistake-making animal makes mistakes. No one in South Bend wanted to make a mistake that would embarrass the South Bend pubic schools. Yet, beneath it all I’m sure they’re better than, say, the Chicago Public Schools, which have not made such a mistake but are nevertheless worse off. It (and by ‘it’ I mean ‘##it’) just happens.

Typos attract attention, because, unlike normal language, they are so obviously wrong. When grammar mavens find people who do not know what they themselves do, they grow indignant. This is an inherent part competitive environments in which people are perpetually looking for some reason to lord things over others.

But, as I argue in Writing for People Who Hate Writing, no one really cares about your use of semicolons rather than commas if you have organized your topic in a way that is informative. On the other hand, no will care if you use semicolons exquisitely if your topic doesn’t speak to them (because they will have put your book, article, ad, or column down).

This enforces an obligation on a communicator to have a good message that will stand out in a crowd of good messages. But there’s more to it than that. It means that messages that accord with what’s already in our minds will click because they are already in our minds, while brand new messages will have a harder (though not an impossible) time finding purchase in the same mind.

Nevertheless, we all know (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’) that it’s more important to have our minds accord with the way things are, rather than the way things used to be, or the way we want them to be. In the economic world, those few people who find the future direction will be rewarded disproportionally for picking up on ideas that the rest of the world is too scared or ignorant to pick up on.

The same thing is true in the world of communication. And that means that we can expect to be read by a lot of people if we appeal to their sense that the good old simpler days are gone forever and that we, like they, long for them. But the best message is not that one but the one that forces engagement with some of the more unpleasant truths of life and resolves them in a new and as yet-unsuspected manner.

Though it may take longer to grow an audience, history will judge the forward-looking idea to be better than the backward-looking idea, though the backward-looking has many more readers at the time. Time does not standstill, though individual thinkers within time lose track of the fact.

My Plumber’s Model of English

Let me give you another example of what I mean. I use a plumber when my toilets get backed up. He has a lot of knowledge about plumbing and I have a lot of knowledge about grammar. If I were to apply my standard of grammatical knowledge to my plumber, then I would probably be able to get a plumber (even in Cook County we have plumbers who went to college). But the supply of plumbers would be extremely limited, as most plumbers (like Mr. Weingarten did apparently) have dropped out of college, if they ever went at all, and speak the horrifying language of ‘Dese and Dose.’

The diminished supply of plumbers comes from my demand that my plumber be able to recite his sentences in perfect English, an obligation which comes from my area of specialized expertise and not on my sense of his or her specialized knowledge of plumbing. If this form of narcissism is acceptable to Mr. Weingarten, that’s fine. It’s a free country. It’s not acceptable to me, because a brand new plumber may charge the same amount of money per hour as a 59 year old plumber but will (given similar tools and methods) take longer to figure my plumbing problem out than a plumber who has studied plumbing for the amount of time that Mr. Weingarten has studied his field.

On the other hand, a 59 year old plumber may be used to the old-fashioned ways of doing things and may resist the ‘new-fangled, time-saving ways of young whipper snappers’ in favor of old-fashioned, time-tested ways. Knowledge is not static, and when it comes to hiring plumbers time is money.

So our ability to estimate the costs of a plumber has nothing to do with age. It has to do with his or her knowledge of how best to attack a plumbing problem. That’s why we hire plumbers in the first place in a world of specialized knowledge. Hiring a plumber is costly, but it saves us having to figure out plumbing problems for ourselves.

Summary

My point is not that grammar is not important (it is). My point is that it’s not as important as Mr. Weingarten thinks. Organization matters far more than grammar, and forward-looking organization matters more than backward-looking organization.

What Mr. Weingarten has forgotten is the role that time plays in the universe. Times change. People have a hard time changing with the times. Despite his announcement that after 1,617 years of the English language prospering, Mr. Weingarten has decided that he is done with it (and at the height of its power at that). But I suspect, as you do, my readers, that it is Mr. Weingarten who has dropped out and that English will continue to change and (dare I say it?) prosper without him.

The show’s premise is that everyone works at a company called Veridion Dynamics. The company is evil, and everyone who works there knows it, but it doesn’t seem to bother anybody as much as it ought to. As an introduction to the show, watch this (very off-color) set of outtakes from the second season’s “The Impertence of Communicationizing” episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh7Nz4bIwss

Here’s a promo for the show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvKwXSQvWRc

The star performance in the show comes from Arrested Development star Portia de Rossi as Veronica Palmer. Someone needs to give her another show. Soon. Here she is in a promotional piece intended to raise interest in coming to work for the company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QNp1JGkVuU

The show usually has a fake ad for Veridion Dynamics, as well. Here’s one of many that you can find by typing in Veridion Dynamics into YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TcRjxPyhv0

The show is hysterical and reminds me more of Dilbert than anything else. You can watch the first season on DVD, but the second season is only available on iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix. Well worth it.

“For future applications out there the sky’s the limit,” David Edwards of the Biotechnology Industry Association said.

“If you can imagine it, scientists can try to do it.”

That IS good news! I only want to eat parts of various animals like webbed ostrich feet, buffalo backs, miniaturized swordfish swords, and human tongue. What are your scientist plans for me I want to know.

The newly-installed course will study film, comics and a full range of topics connected to Zombies and Zombie Survival, although it will probably sneakily make students learn about story telling and the proliferation of technology, too. Or Dickens. Or something.

And to think that some were anouncing that serious education is dead just a few short years ago. Not me! I think it is appropriate to think that this course is being offered in a literature department, where people are focused on themselves and Dickens and somethings in their imaginations. The physics of the undead render a scientific perspective superfluous. Zombies are purely imaginative works, and I wonder where my academic colleagues would draw the line between imagination and science where there is no science.

See my Halloween discussion of Zombies and their place in modern American culture if you want to learn more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU1zscJgeIg

What was wrong with my teachers?

The first video is of Lindsey Lohan’s e-harmony ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6g85lp2wJc

The second is of Justin Bieber.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AimrmMlD5Tk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-BAUG97gZo