Coloured Glass

sense and sensibility

When you work with language as a profession, few things are more frustrating than the fact that language debate is always dominated by raging prescriptivists - the people that want to tell you how you should use language; rules and regulations make for easy headlines, but language is a complex business.

Descriptivists - linguists who think it's more worthwhile to examine how language is used and to compare it to the rules we do have than making up new rules - are rarely making themselves heard at the same volume.

One of the best blogs around for descriptivist commentary on current language issues is the Language Log, home of linguists Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman. Go check it out.

Among the more entertaining reads: this piece explaining why Dan Brown is "one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature". Good, geeky fun.
And lots of links to other parts of their ongoing crusade against the poor writing in Brown's novels.

"Dialogue", says those who want to speak

I found that line in the 1981 notebook of the brilliant Elias Canetti.

It holds a quite pointed challenge for current advertising. There's certainly no shortage of words about dialogue and honesty in 'advertising 2.0'. But the most important kind of honesty is honesty of intent.

Do we really mean it when we say we want 'dialogue'? Or are we mostly saying it because we know the consumer won't listen otherwise?

If you have a genuine interest in dialogue, how will it show?

If you don't, wouldn't it be better to find a more honest form of advertising?

What kind of backlash can be expected if advertisers keep saying 'dialogue' yet giving speeches?

gwen lee remembered

Today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Gwendolyn La Pinski, once known as actress Gwen Lee, now probably very much forgotten.

Once upon a time she acted circles around Joan Crawford in Untamed, 1929, an early talkie, was absolutely mesmerizing in the mysterious thriller The Intruder, 1933, and I think I had a bit of a crush on her when I was 10 or 11.

completely innocent

Recently I've become acquainted with the fine people of innocentdrinks, the UK's, and soon Denmarks, favourite smoothie makers.
Since there's no such thing as knowing too many nice people, I thought I'd just point them out to you. Go knock yourself out on their website. Even if you're not really that interested in fruit, you'll find the answer to many important questions, like "What is love?"

The Ernst Stavro Blofeld of their creative empire is Dan Germain - his blog is also a fine read. Some sweet and quite tender stuff about fatherhood in the early going, and now that he's regained his composure a bit, a hilarious post about having a beard.

someone else's life

Wow, that was unexpected. Through a Bush-inspired googling of Camus I somehow ended up on Newinventory.co.uk, and pretty soon I found myself reading away a large chunk of my life. I have no idea what that site is - maybe everyone in the world but me knows about it already. Seems like some guy's journal, 441 days beginning a week after 9/11 2001. No real explanations, no name or resume; just a thoroughly fascinating read.

Like being thrown into a life blindfolded.

This image from the site quite accurately captures the strange mix of pretentious, innocent, angry and vulnerable bits thrown together.
And here's the journal. Be prepared to lose a bit of time, though. And to unexpectedly find yourself thinking about sentences like this one:
"I wonder what birds make of rain?"
or: "Some days there is nothing to report. This is one of them. It is not, of cource, but I am tired."

And do forgive me if you already knew about this.

Bush: texas (st)ranger

This has got to be the funniest story of the day. MSNBC is reporting from George W's summer vacation ranch that he has been reading Camus' The Stranger.
Somebody get the guy some pr advice, fast. What staff member thought a novel about the remorseless killing of an Arab (shot 5 times, no less) was the best way to show off the ol' cognitive powers?

Might have been 'White House Spokesman" Tony Snow, who said Bush "found it a quick read" - it is - and added: "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism."
Really? what, Kierkegaard? Blaise Pascal?

UPDATE: aug 14 comes a Slate article on the subject, with John Dickerson offering this comment on the above quote: "Oh please, Tony, go into it. This is no time to be vague". Heh.

feeling good, then not

Went for a run today. Beautiful weather, nice grip, lungs doing reasonably well to keep up.

Liked: passing people rather fast.

Disliked: feeling slightly superior about it.

Made me think of a note by Danish poet Per Lange:
"In everything we find reason to feel superior to others. Even in the fact that we don't take sugar in our tea."

the hermetic fallacy

yeah, I didn't know it was out there either. But apparently it's taught at the Danish Authors' School ("Forfatterskolen"). The class of 06 is being profiled in a series of interviews in Berlingske Tidende; today it's Karin Toft, who may or may not be an excellent writer. I hope she is, since it seems to be a painful affair. "Writing has started to hurt", she exclaims, and her tired smile looks appropriately pale and world-weary. Poor thing.
Anyway, the point of the interview is that "the hermetic form is the most democratic, as it puts everyone on the same level." In other words, if you don't quote the classics, you're not leaving the slow kids behind.
Well... except not. Let's consider a bit of hermetic poetry, shall we? Nothing really exotic, just something like e.e.cummings' if i love You.

if i love You

if i love You
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries

if you love
me) distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each (shyly)
other, what clouds do or Silently
Flowers resembles beauty
less than our breathing

Does anyone really think that all readers are created equal when meeting a text such as this one? Our mind's ability to wrestle with paradoxical and enigmatic expressions is a skill aquired through practice, effort, reading tons of texts. It's just... mindboggingly arrogant to claim differently. Or ignorant, at least. And I don't really know if it's sad or inspiring that someone can be taught this exact skill for two years and come away thinking that as long as you don't reference, say, historic events that your slow-witted readers wouldn't know, you're really writing for the masses. Oh, well.

photo shop chop job

It's been a handful of days now since the Reuters photo-altering story broke over @ Little Green Footballs, and even Danish newspapers are beginnning to pick it up. Since there's no such thing as having too much of a good Photoshop hack-job, here's a nice clean cut of Hajj's F16-shot:

If only people abusing the clone tool would clone different parts of the picture for once. Same thing with the Beirut cityscape-shot. This one just jumps right at you. You could be standing on the ground watching this F16 miles away and still say "hey, that's 3 identical flares, isn't it?" Except, if you saw it, there would only be one, I guess.

So, the reason I'm bringing this trite story up again is to point to a really interesting read over @ Slate, Jim Lewis' thoughtprovoking rundown of the problems of establishing a code of ethics for news photography and post-processing. When is a photo 'real'? When it shows what was on the film? When it shows what the photographer saw? Or what he thinks he saw?

It brings some much needed perspective to what looked for a while like a conspiracy-theory witchhunt on bad photoshoppers everywhere, regardless of intent. Like Associated Press' blunder with the "cloned-hands-man", hilariously dubbed George Cloney by a commenter over @ Gawker. Also, home of the priceless comment from reader 'flashman': "it looks like something his child might have done [with the clone tool] while he was on the can". That would've been something.

stupid is as stupid does

these are my glasses.

I like them. The problem with fancy plastic frames is that they can't stay on too well when you're running around. My wife told me this before I bought them. But it's ok, because when I go out on a run, like tonight, I wear my old glasses. My wife also told me, that while that might be fine now, it won't when I've had the strenght of the lenses adjusted a couple of times. Nonsense, I said, because I really liked those glasses, and I can just use my old ones.

Tonight I ran into a tree.