Alan Jacobs

Averia, the average typeface

In Wittgensteinian fashion, I shouldn’t advance any thesis—but there is food for thought here. With some clever technology built by some clever people, Google has decreed on language and translation, confirming the nonsense of prescriptive rules—a small victory for the descriptive grammarians, if an obvious one—and that Wittgenstein’s remarks on language really bear an effective model of artificial means of learning it. Google Translate might not become better than humans at translation any time soon—perhaps it can’t be done. But at some point it will be good enough: cheaper and more convenient than hiring human translators (for many whose standards are lower, this is already true) or bothering to learn languages ourselves—at which point “good enough” becomes our standard. How do we want our machine translators to work for us?

Son of Dracula

These fears, however, seem to have been largely isolated; mass panics over genital retraction were not recorded until 1874. This was the year that, on the island of Sulawesi, a certain Benjamin Matthes was compiling a dictionary of Buginese when he came across a strange term, lasa koro, which meant “shrinking of the penis,” a disease that Matthes said was not uncommon among the locals and “must be very dangerous.” Sporadic reports of koro, as it came to be known, recurred over the years, and during the late twentieth century the panics proliferated. In 1967, an epidemic of koro raced through Singapore, affecting some five hundred men. In 1976, in northern Thailand, at least two thousand people were afflicted with rokjoo, in which men and women complained that their genitals were being sucked into their bodies. In 1982, there were major koro epidemics in India and again in Thailand, while in 1984 and 1985, some five thousand Chinese villagers in Guangdong province tried desperately to keep their penises outside their bodies using whatever they had handy: string, chopsticks, relatives’ assistance, jewelers’ clamps, and safety pins.

Since I’m the old-fashioned sort of person who clings to the belief that words, whatever their length, ought to mean something, I thought I’d check whether it’s really true that “words are getting shortened” by the constraints of the Twitterverse.

So I grabbed the text of Hamlet, the text of a number of P.G. Wodehouse stories (Leave it to Jeeves, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg, Absent Treatment, Helping Freddie, Rallying Round Old George, Doing Clarence a Bit of Good, and The Aunt and the Sluggard), and the 100 most recent tweets from the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student newspaper. I figured that the DP ought to count as a good representative of the Kids Today who are responsible for the alleged word-shortening trend.

I wrote a little program to adjust these texts in appropriate ways (removing the character attributions and stage directions from Hamlet, removing the Gutenberg boilerplate from P.G. Wodehouse, removing the @’s and #’s and URLs from the DP tweets, etc.), and then to count the letters in each word.

The result? The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP’s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters.

tastefullyoffensive:

Shakesbear

That bright ideas, far from guaranteeing against blunders, are often their cause is illustrated by the fate of the “D. D.” (i.e., dual drive) tanks launched offshore on D-Day. Equipped to float with impermeable canvas skirts, these were to propel themselves to the beach with an ad hoc propeller and then resume normal operation. Thirty-two were launched, their skirts deployed, but in high seas and (doubtless because of fear) too far from land. Twenty-seven sank with their complete crews, a tribute to stubborn hope, for tank after tank was launched seriatim, each sinking like a stone, observed by everyone on the launching ship. The Time-Life World War II volume dealing with the invasion devotes a full-color page to the D. D. tank without in any way suggesting that something went fatally wrong. “A TANK THAT COULD SWIM” is the caption.

Now he trod carefully across the carpet to the bed and stood silently looking down at the body of Berowne. Even as a fifteen-year-old boy, standing at the side of the bed of his dead mother, he hadn’t felt the need to think, far less to utter, the word good-bye. You couldn’t speak to someone who was no longer there. He thought: We can vulgarize everything, but not this. The body in its stiff ungainliness, beginning already, or so it seemed to his over-sensitive nose, to emit the first sour-sweet stink of decay, yet had an inalienable dignity because it once had been a man. But he knew, none better, how quickly this spurious humanity would drain away. Even before the pathologist had finished at the scene and the head was wrapped, the hands mittened in their plastic bags, even before Doc Kynaston got to work with his scalpels, the corpse would be an exhibit, more important, more cumbersome and more difficult to preserve than other exhibits in the case, but still an exhibit, tagged, documented, dehumanized, invoking only interest, curiosity or disgust. But not yet. He thought: I knew this man, not well, but I knew him. I liked him. Surely he deserves better of me than to gaze at him with my policeman’s eyes.

“Is it likely,” the anti-Stratfordians often say, “that these greatest of plays could be written by a half-educated glover’s son from the provinces?” To which one plausible answer is, “More likely than their being written by a known hack like the Earl of Oxford.” But a better answer is: Of course’s it’s not likely. There is nothing in the least likely about King Lear; just as Mozart’s career as a musical prodigy doesn’t make it likely that he would write the Confutatis of the Requiem mass, nor Picasso’s early virtuosity that he would produce Guernica. The greatest of artistic masterpieces are intrinsically unlikely — far more than that, they’re shocking: we can’t plumb the depths of their origins, and before their advent none of us could have predicted them.

The least likely things in the world are Bach’s B Minor Mass and the Iliad. There are no plausible ways to account for that heart-piercing moment when Hector tries to console his beloved Andromache without denying that he will soon be killed and leave her widowed, after which he bends to pick up his infant son, only for the boy to be terrified by the great plume of his father’s war-helmet. (But whoever Homer was, he wasn’t an aristocrat.)

Just so, it is not remotely plausible that anyone would make for us that moment when Don Pedro tells Beatrice that she was born in a merry hour, only to hear her reply, “No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born”; or make Macbeth say “Light thickens; and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood”; or cause Paulina to present to Leontes the statue of his long-dead wife, hint that it may be brought to life, and then tell him, “It is required / You do awake your faith”; or (is there a moment in theater more complexly glorious than this?) give us Miranda’s transfigured ecstasy at seeing for the first time in her memory human beings other than her father — “O brave new world, that hath such people in it!” — followed instantly by her father’s weary, knowing, gently ironic reply: “‘Tis new to thee.”

Moments like these are not explicable by any calculus of social privilege — nor by any other calculus known to us. Blustery assertions about how the poet “understands the inner workings of the court” or “has intimate acquaintance of legal terminology” are truly remarkable exercises in missing the point. If you are awed and incredulous at the thought that a glover’s son could teach us that sleep “knits the raveled sleeve of care,” but find the assignment of that image to a nobleman an adequate explanation for its existence, you are simply paying no attention to what really matters, to “the shock of the new” that every real work of art brings to us, no matter the social status of its maker.

Amazon is investing (and hiring) while many other American corporations are milking incumbent businesses, under-investing in research and development, and hoarding cash. To the chagrin of some traders, Amazon is distinctly NOT “maximizing near-term profits” — it is sacrificing near-term profits. It is making less money now in the hopes of making more money and creating more value later. And it is ignoring the howls and screams of short-term traders who couldn’t care less about Amazon’s long-term prognosis, add nothing to the economy, and just want to make money now.

If more American companies started to do what Amazon does — ignore short-term pressures, sacrifice near-term profits, and invest for the long-term — the American economy would start to heal itself quickly. America would create more innovation, more jobs, and more long-term wealth. And, just as important, more Americans would be able to go back to being proud of our corporations and innovators and entrepreneurs… instead of camping in parks and protesting them.