Category Archives: Writing

I Can’t Be Arsed

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I don’t usually use George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in public and rarely write them.

Mr. Carlin’s original words are what we now call “vulgar slang,” seven nouns, two of which often stand as verbs. Two excretory functions, four that denigrate, two action terms, and one that is every boy’s favorite body part. I’ve never been fond of bleep-censoring but it is still used by American network broadcasters to titillate us.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
–Mark Twain

Although Twain pretended he did not have a typewriter, he was a pretty smart feller. The modifiers we use in writing can take away from the message. That doesn’t stop us from specially crafting flowery, robust, descriptive text.

Some simply avoid the “dirty words” by substituting clean ones.

Liza Arden has said she “couldn’t be arsed” at work more than a few times this week. Ms. Arden is an engineer and no relation to the cosmetics conglomerate. Her cow orkers were unmoved by her phrasing which surprised her and sent me on this flight of fancy. Thanks to PBS and the Internet, there are probably few British substitutes for bothered that we haven’t heard before.

Substitutes? Google offers about 210,000 results for alternate swear words.

Bleep and fweep and meep and yeep are popular.
RedDwarf adopted smeg as an all purpose curse.
The movie peeps use airhead for rectally enhanced individuals.
Freak (and the ever popular freak off) explain themselves.

As Andy Rooney might say, “Gosh is for people who don’t believe in heck. Who the frell do they think they are?”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on “Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls.” Teens send 3,339 texts a month. Adults, just 323 per month. Me? I get two or three incoming texts in a busy month and those are usually mistakes.

Although Ms. Arden calls me a Luddite, that’s not because I cannot text.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “You’re too cheap to buy a data plan.”

Texters started abbreviating to save space and stay under SMS limits or to encode the looming presence of authority (LTTIC). Unlimited text plans have largely eliminated the need for brevity but typing on a micro keyboard is still typing on a micro keyboard.

I don’t text because I see brevity, misspelling, malaprops, and corruption replacing the richness of language. And I hate the tiny keyboard, not to mention picking out letters on a phone keypad.

“I sooo no ur thinking about me. So I thot I wud say hi! LH6”
“My luser cat did the CRZest thing. Off to vet.”
“Orf to home garden sho. I luv U. TBL”

DQMOT: I think the Brits do this better than we do but sooner or later it’s so satisfying just to have a good fuck.





Pravda

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My friend Dean “Dino” Russell is a roofer in the middle Keys. Dancing about on roofs all his life has made him the most physically fit man in the Home Depot; it also gives him an overview of life. He is the third-most conservative man I know.

This morning, Dino emailed me a copy of the CyberAlert compilation of news items reported in the daily BiasAlert. Calling itself “America’s Media Watchdog,” the Media Research Center News Analysis Division “document(s), expose(s) and neutralize(s) liberal media bias.”

The following examples aren’t very exciting but they lead to an important discovery about the “news.”

Tuesday July 13, 2010

1. Matthews to Democrat: What Percentage of Republicans Would You Put In the ‘Nut Bag’?
Chris Matthews, on Monday’s Hardball, brought on his own personal Congressman, Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, to review how his party was going to distinguish themselves from the GOP in the midterms with Matthews asking the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head if they were focusing on all the “crazy” Republicans, or in other words “nut collecting.” Matthews, after playing a clip of Barack Obama singling out Republicans Joe Barton, John Boehner and Roy Blunt, also reminded Van Hollen the President missed another “crazy” person with “B” name as he proclaimed: “If you’re going out looking for nuts, it would seem like you’d put [Michele Bachmann] in your basket.” Matthews even tried to pin down Van Hollen by demanding: “What percentage of the Republican Party would you put in the nut bag right now?”

Yawn. Chris Matthews is a syndicated “commentator,” not a reporter. Beck probably asked a guest “What percentage of Dumbocrats would you put in the ‘nut bag’?” yesterday, too.

2. CBS’s Schieffer Interviews Eric Holder, Ignores Black Panther Case
While devoting all of Sunday’s Face the Nation to an interview with Attorney General Eric Holder, CBS host Bob Schieffer failed to ask a single question about the Obama Justice Department dropping a voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers or allegations that the department has adopted a policy of ignoring such cases. At the end of the interview, Schieffer even asked about Holder’s infamous comment that the United States was a “nation of cowards” when it came to discussing race. However, the Face the Nation host failed to use that comment as a transition to the Black Panthers case, despite the fact that former DOJ attorney Christian Adams recently testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, accusing the department of adopting a policy of refusing to pursue voter intimidation cases that involved black defendants and white victims.

Yawn again. I watched FTN and included some of it in Sunday’s commentary. Bob Schieffer didn’t ask General Holder about a lot of things. He didn’t ask about U.S. v. Microsoft. He didn’t ask about Goldman Sachs. He didn’t ask about ACORN. He didn’t ask about the voter intimidation accusation made by Christian Adams.

Some of his questions were softish but they weren’t bad.

3. No Balance Required? MSNBC Features Only Pro-Gay Side of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Debate
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer on Monday appeared baffled as to why more U.S. politicians weren’t ‘standing up’ to demand the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” touting it as “a civil rights issue.” In the span of two hours, the cable network featured a gay member of the military and a conservative to discuss the issue. However, both guests favored allowing homosexuals to serve openly.

That is the most troubling of these examples, although not surprising. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) criticized Brewer live on the air; he said she was “absurd”, “fundamentally dishonest”, “irresponsible” and lacked “integrity” for her handling of interviews. She’s allegedly a news anchor, not a commentator and did her time as general assignment reporter. We should expect better.

None of this should worry us but for one terrible truth: the American news audience — including Dino and Rufus — has come to believe that Brewer and Colbert and Matthews and Beck and Limbaugh and O’Reilly are reporters and what they do is news.

What a Freaking Difference!

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“I missed fucking Asbestos Dust?” Rufus said. He was amazed. The rest of us about died.

For those just whooshed, Asbestos Dust is the nom-de-Net of a writer from Texas or Arkansas or maybe Alaska. I met him at a party in Pennsylvania to which Rufus was invited but did not attend.

Word choice makes a difference. Even word position makes a difference. “I fucking missed Asbestos Dust?” has a very different meaning than what Rufus actually said.

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be,” Mark Twain wrote. Regular readers will realize that I use little profanity in real life and even less in my writings. I will not use any of the other seven dirty words here today; younger readers need not tune to a different channel.

On the other hand, I will take issue with how the anti-science crowd uses its words.

NPR’s Science Friday focused on new nuclear technologies in the episode broadcast March 5, 2010 . Guests included Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown, Scott Burnell, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission public affairs officer, John Deal, CEO of Hyperion Power Generation, and Professor Richard Lester who heads the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at MIT.

“What is the future of nuclear power,” Mr. Brown asked himself. “It’s cost cost cost.”

Waste could kill nuclear power, he said. “Imagine if the billion dollar price tag [the per plant cost of the Yucca Mountain project] had been on the table when they were being considered, most of them would never have gotten off the ground.”

A billion dollar “extra” cost per plant sounds excessive, doesn’t it? It is exceptionally expensive if all you know is that one partial factoid.

“The volume of waste produced is very, very small,” Professor Lester said. A nuclear plant produces a couple of ounces of waste per person per year; a coal plant produces about 10 tons of waste per person per year. “We can afford to spend a lot of money on safely storing this material. The impact on the cost of nuclear electricity is actually very small.”

“Our cost … is just under 10 cents per KW-hour,” Mr. Deal said later. That includes the waste.

“What we have in this country, and that’s not going to help with the image of nuclear power, is the discovery that there are now 27 older plants with underground pipes that are leaking tritium, and tritium is a carcinogen,” Mr. Brown said. “In Vermont, as I recall, with the most recent instance occurring at Vermont Yankee.”

Tritium leaks sound pretty dangerous, don’t they? They are excruciatingly dangerous if all you know is one partial factoid.

The hydrogen isotope tritium is a by-product of modern nuclear reactor operations. It combines easily with oxygen to form “tritiated water” which can be ingested by drinking or eating organic foods. It is a radiation hazard when inhaled, ingested via food, water, or absorbed through the skin but, since tritium is not much of a beta emitter, it is not dangerous when simply nearby. It has a 7 to 14 day half life in the human body. That means a single-incident ingestion is not usually dangerous and it precludes accumulating tritium from the environment in your body long-term.

“There have been 27 instances … [but] they are not all ongoing,” Mr. Burnell said. “In the case of Vermont Yankee … the contamination is not reaching any drinking water sources; it’s not reaching the nearby Connecticut River. So it is not presenting any public health issue and we, at the NRC, are closely watching how Vermont Yankee is evaluating the situation to discover where the leak is coming from. We will make sure that they do identify it properly, that they fix it properly, and that in every instance they are doing what is necessary to operate the plant safely and in accordance with our regulations.”

“I’m not a geologist or an engineer,” Mr. Brown said as he evaluated the complex dance of creating and running a nuclear power plant. Ya think?

Word choice — what we actually say — makes a difference in what listeners understand. Mr. Brown certainly knows that. This is a real example of choosing words to propagandize rather than choosing to disclose the facts.

So, did we fucking miss A.D. or did we miss fucking him?

“It’s been too long since I had a taste of the Dust,” Rufus said.

There is no hope.

Only the Best F@%king News

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Knowing that no sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon, I shall be mercifully brief.

Calling your debate opponent a fuckwit shows two things: the caller has none of the latter and has no facts to argue.

My friend Rufus got sucked into one of the long running Internet arguments about something-or-other political. Doesn’t matter what.

Rufus has some faults. One is his belief that opinion laced with some facts is news. I know better than that. I write opinion laced with fact. I may be a journalist but I don’t write news. I may even break a story now and then but I don’t write news. On the broadcast front, Glenn Beck does opinion laced with some facts but he doesn’t do news. Jon Stewart does comedy laced with some facts but he doesn’t do news.

Rufus can be a little long winded at times. Rufus ‘splains everything. In detail. With supporting evidence. And twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was. He believes facts win debates.

He was ‘splainin’ stuff pretty well in this Internet debate until he dropped this bombshell at the beginning of a post: “If you listened to what Glen Beck actually SAID instead of just freaking out over him, you would understand that …”

Heh.

You know what comes next, don’t you?

Me, too. Replicator-827 answered with civility and aplomb, “I don’t listen to ANYTHING that asshole says, and if YOU do, that says all I need to know about you.”

DING DING DING.

Round over. You lose. Thanks for playing. Please visit our consolation prize department. It’s right behind that door marked “Egress.”

Of course, on his way out the door, the other great debater, the person who included the epithets Charlie Daniels, Cletus, “forced-birther,” invisible sky fairy, NASCAR, and “white trash,” turned around to say, “Do the world a favor and kill yourself.”

[plonk]

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
–Mark Twain

Writing — It’s Not for Sissies

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Last week, I began what will become a four-or-more-part series on writing. As I wrote, I didn’t realize that my pedantic need for encyclopediana would pop up here. A friend’s comments brought me up short immediately after I posted, “My job as a writer is to get it right.”

My friend expressed surprise at “a bunch of white guys defending Sosa’s skin bleaching.”

Unfortunately, that piece was about writing. Equally unfortunately I broke two rules, one of which is my own.

About a century ago in Internet time meaning in about 1997, Inklings Magazine commissioned me to codify the rules of editorial writing. The result was a pretty good article (if I do say so myself), Dick Harper’s 10-1/2 Hot Tips for Small-town Op-ed Writers .

Tips doesn’t explicitly say “Write so well that your readers understand you.” Tips does explicitly say:

2. Keep to exactly one (1), uno, single point.
Multiple arguments in an op-ed confuse the reader, the editor, and, probably the writer.

Regular readers know my strong points do not necessarily include staying on task. In Writing — It’s Not Just Cosmetic Anymore I blew the stay-on-task rule because I introduced three points in that piece: (1) writing well, (2) “problematic” portraits of people of color in literature and, indirectly, (3) Sammy Sosa’s relative blackness.

Some readers noticed the diversion into writing while black or white. Other readers thought my mention of Sammy Sosa’s name meant I had taken Mr. Sosa’s side. Or, perhaps, Mr. Pitts’. Not enough readers recognized that I wanted only to talk about writing well.

Means I must not have done that. I’ll try to do better next time.

I have edited the original piece in this series to remove some of the ambiguity. Next I shall look at wilful disregard on both the writer’s and reader’s part as well as at “writing while black.”