F#@%* The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

I'm going to give Guy Deutscher's new book Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages a perfect ten gender-neutral pronouns out of ten; first of all, I love how worked up Deutscher gets about things like linguistic relativity-- otherwise known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-- which is the idea that the "character" of a language somehow indicates the philosophy of the culture that uses it (and he quotes from the American Journal Philosophy Today . . . "if English thought is in some ways more open to ambiguity and lack of system, it might be attributed in part to the relative variability and looseness of English syntax," and then he comes down heavy on this idea; here is Deutscher's rebuttal: "It might. . .  It might also be attributable to the irregular shape of hot cross buns. More appropriately, however, it should be attributed to the habit of English language journals to allow the likes of Mr. Harvey free range. . . ") and Deutscher also refutes the venerated Stephen Pinker in several places, but the main reason I like the book is it really does live up to its title in some very specific ways: you learn about the Guugu Yimithirr, a tribe who use no egocentric directions (right/left/behind you/in front of you) and instead only refer to the directions of the compass-- as in: "Can you pass the butter to the North?" and they learn this from an early age because that's the only way to speak, so they always know which way everything is facing-- whether they are in a dark room with no windows or recounting a story several years later, and they do not rely on the sun, they use other clues (and the children master this long before our kids master left and right!) and Deutscher also explains how nouns with gender (as in Spanish and Italian and French) have an influence on our associations about the object and he also answers that age old question: "Do you see the same blue that I see?" or at least he sort of answers it, and the answer is that you might see it slightly differently if you don't have a word for green . . . if you have a word for green then greens are greener, and if you don't then you might refer to the sea as "wine-dark," like Homer did, but what is important is that it is the language influencing the sensory perceptions and not vice-versa . . . if you start making generalizations in the other direction then he's going to go Sapir-Whorf on your ass!

My Time Is Near

The English Department has been hosting some creative parties lately: we had a Minute to Win It Party at my house (this was all Catherine, but still, the party was in the place that I live) and Liz and Eric hosted a Who Can Write The Scariest Story Party (and the stories were quite good and I feel bad for Stacy, who created a beautiful multimedia Case File, which was handed to me to read, but the complexity of the different documents-- fake newspaper articles, photos of a severed hand and a dead cat, an IM conversation, a medical report, etc.-- made me go into an over-stimulated coma, and so Liz had to take it from me, and I probably would have voted for it, if it hadn't stressed me out so much . . . and I couldn't figure out who wrote the other stories and I thought my story was well disguised but someone remarked that only Dave would have the main character eaten by a "series of animals" but I was glad I pulled a vote because the competition was stiff) and Jeryl Anne is hosting a Chili Cook-Off in a couple of weeks and this makes me think that I need to strike while the iron is hot . . . I need to organize my two great party ideas, which I have offered to the world free of charge, and which have been roundly ignored: I am talking about, of course, my YouTube and Survivor Parties, which I once again, offer to the on-line universe, free of charge, and which I expect to see implemented by close friends in the very near future.

My Attention Span is Wack

I didn't make it through The Wackness but that doesn't mean it's a bad movie, it's just a little slow and melancholy and repetitive for my taste, but the '90s hip-hop soundtrack is fantastic (think De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest and Biggie Smalls) and the dialogue replicates and parodies a time when everyone was trying to infuse some rapper chic into their lexicon, leading to the moment when the cool rich indie girl Stephanie gives the dope smoking and dope dealing main character, Luke Shapiro, some advice about how to live life: "I just look at the dopeness . . . but you, it's like you just look at the wackness, you know?"

Denial Ain't A River in Egypt

Most of us are happily in denial (I forget about my receding hairline each and every day, but a look in the mirror shocks me back to reality . . . the hair I had on my head in college has migrated to my chest and back) but here's an example from the new Slavoj Zizek book that will make you feel better about your own mild delusions; the Shindo Renmei, a Japanese terrorist organization that existed in the 1940's in Sao Paolo Brazil, refused to believe the news that Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, and used violence against those that did believe, but, of course, as Zizek points out, "they knew that their denial of Japan's surrender was false, but they nonetheless refused to believe in Japanese surrender" and I am sure they got plenty of other people that knew that the news was factual to believe otherwise, because when the alternative is a violent death, what's wrong with a little denial?

Zizekian Aphorisms

I started watching Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, but it seemed anecdotal in its evidence, without any real theory behind it (although I did like when Vizzini from The Princess Bride-- "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"-- talks about how the American free-market has evolved into something far different than what Adam Smith envisioned) but if you want to tackle something a bit meatier, try Slovenian super-brain Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End Times; here are two of his thoughts on modern capitalist society: "However once we accept that the economy is always a political economy, a site of political struggle-- in other words that its de-politicization, its status as a neutral sphere of 'servicing the goods,' is in itself always already the outcome of a political struggle-- then the prospect of repoliticization of the economy . . . is opened up," and "Today, since workers can increasingly be replaced by machines or by outsourcing the entire productive process, striking-- where it occurs at all-- is more a protest act addressed primarily to the general public rather than owners or managers, its goal being simply to maintain jobs by making the public aware of the terrifying predicament that awaits the workers if they lose their jobs."

High Concept Check-Out

The burly cashier at Stop and Shop told the dude in front of me that his total, $8.68, was a "palindrome," and that sometimes-- once in a rare while-- the total and the change are both palindromes . . . and I should point out that this guy is coaching a youth soccer team; the last time I ran into him he told me there are two kinds of bars: 1) the kind where you look for trouble 2) the kind where you don't look for trouble; he is a font of wisdom.

A Sacrifice I Will Make For My Children

For the next ten years I am going to exclusively listen to jazz and classical music-- no rock or punk-- so that my kids have the opportunity to disparage my lame and antiquated ways, and so that they have something to rebel against . . . you can't really enjoy Black Flag and The Misfits and AC/DC if your dad likes them too.

Ali's Favorite Story About Dave

Here is Ali's contribution to the incredibly popular recurring series I like to call Your Favorite Story About Dave (Fit to Print on a Relatively Tame Blog): we have to travel back to what I call pre-Sentence of Dave . . . it was summer vacation and I was pushing my six month old son Alex from Highland Park to New Brunswick, where I was meeting my wife and brother for lunch, but on the way I saw my friend's grandmother and she wanted to get a closer look at the baby, so I took Alex out of the stroller so she could hold him, and then we blithely continued on our way up Third Avenue and along Route 27 towards the bridge to New Brunswick-- it was sunny so I put up the little awning on the stroller and Alex was quiet, watching the traffic, and I was in that oblivious zone of serenity that you occasionally enjoy as a new parent when your child is content and needs nothing-- when something at my feet startled me-- someone had left a doll on the sidewalk, and I ran over the doll with the stroller and nearly stepped on it, and who would leave a doll on the sidewalk like that?-- but, unfortunately, it wasn't a doll, it was my son Alex, I forgot to strap him back into the stroller after I showed him to my friend's grandmother, and he had slid down the front of the stroller, but my vision was blocked by the awning, so not only did he slide out of the stroller onto the pavement, but he also endured a mild crushing, and after I recognized that this was my son and not a doll, I picked him up to assess the damage: he had skinned knees, and skinned hands and arms, and a skinned nose, and he was crying, but the injuries were all superficial (and superficially ugly) and I didn't have a cell phone and I didn't know what to do, so I pushed him to the restaurant, and I got some odd looks on the way there, but I knew that the only person who would know what to do was my wife, and she was at Makeda, so that's where I went, and I entered in a frantic state but my wife cleaned him up and he stopped bleeding and crying and we ended up having a fairly pleasant lunch.

Paradoxical Activity

When we begin Hamlet in my English classes, I like to assume the role of the skeptical scholar Horatio; I force my students to ask me if I believe in ghosts-- "Go ahead . . . ask me if I believe in ghosts . . . ask me!"-- and when they comply, just to humor me, I chastise them and reply angrily: "Of course I don't believe in ghosts! I'm a teacher! A man of logic and reason! Not a purveyor of fantasy and superstition!" and in a sense there's a grain of truth to my schtick, as is evident here, but an old student pointed out an apparent contradiction in my outspoken doubt of all things spooky: the fact that I found this movie incredibly scary suggests that my words may not accurately reflect my subconscious.

No Surprise Ending Here

This article makes the new anti-addiction drug sound pretty great (no urge! no craving!) but what happens when the addictive people who need to take this anti-addiction drug get addicted to their anti-addiction drug?

Where Good Ideas Come From: Steven Johnson

It took someone far smarter than me-- the polymath Steven Johnson-- to explain what I am doing here at Sentence of Dave . . . though you would never guess, I am actually continuing a 17th and 18th century intellectual tradition . . . seriously . . . in Johnson's new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, he discusses the English Enlightenment habit of keeping a "commonplace book" full of inspirational quotations, desultory thoughts, reactions to one's reading, opinions on current events, and a "vast miscellany of hunches," and most of the commonplace book keepers (such as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and John Locke) attempted to index their varied writings . . . but none of their indexing efforts worked as well as the internet, which Johnson believes has the right balance of organization and chaotic tension to spur new thoughts . . . and Johnson uses various "long view" examples-- including an awesome four squared grid categorizing two hundred major inventions from antiquity until now-- to show that good ideas often take a long time to form, with help from lots of different people and events, some serendipity, and often without the constraints of patents and corporations, and without the need for a single solitary genius who sees far beyond all others of his time; on the last page of his book he advises us to "go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."

I Realize I Have Learned Nothing

Note to self: do not eat a salmon burger before a night soccer game (and you'd think I'd have learned my lesson about heavy meals before athletic events in college, when I went to the Wendy's SuperBar before an intramural football game and stuffed my belly full of tacos and pudding, and then got burned play after play by a tall wide receiver who probably ate a banana or a granola bar or something  like that before the game, and waited until after the game to have a celebratory meal) but though our adult league game was a grueling battle-- I nearly puked-- we lucked out with a Diego Maradona "Hand of God" style goal in the waning minutes for the tie . . . and so we remain undefeated at 5-0-1.

Governor Christie Needs to Read His Shakespeare

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the characters are bound to each other both by their inherent status and by the contracts they enter-- this is what generates the conflict in the play (Shylock cannot escape his status as a vilified minority so he clings to his contract for a pound of Antonio's flesh; Antonio maintains his status as the merchant of Venice despite forfeiture, yet he will not break contract because Venice thrives on business, Bassanio has the status of a gentleman so Portia enters into the marriage contract with him despite his insolvency; Portia is bound by an odd contract to her dead father; Shylock's daughter Jessica would like to erase her status as a Jew by entering a marriage contract with Lorenzo; etc.) and whenever I teach the kids this, I start to apply the terms of status and contract to the world around me (the status of being someone's teacher is a an excellent one-- no matter how smart, famous, and powerful my students become in the future, I will always be able to say to them, "I taught you everything you know," and this is similar to the status of "coach," as no matter how far my players go in soccer, I can always say, "I got them started") and so here is my new application of the terms: the reason Governor Christie has incited so much anger and rage among the teachers of New Jersey is because he ignored (and sometimes assaulted) the status of being a teacher-- which is the reason most people teach: to be a respected individual in the community, to make a permanent connection with generations of students, and to feel as though you are doing something positive with your career . . . it's certainly not for the money-- so when he said teachers were using students like "drug mules" and that schools grant tenure to anyone "still breathing", and then immediately turned to financial and contractual issues, teachers took incredible offense, and, predictably, like Shylock, when they were robbed of any status, they clung to their contracts and refused a pay freeze . . . perhaps if he were more diplomatic with teachers about their status in the community, they would be willing to cooperate with him . . . but apparently he hasn't read his Shakespeare.

Stacey's Favorite Story About Dave

We recently reviewed Terry's Favorite Story About Dave, and today we will tackle Stacey's Favorite Story About Dave, and this story occurred P.S.D. (Pre-Sentence of Dave) so it may a be a new one for some readers but it is essential knowledge if you want to understand The Persona of Dave, so pay close attention: after swimming a set of grueling sprints in the LA Fitness pool, I stumbled out of the water, grabbed my towel and headed for the shower-- but in my oxygen deprived state, my brain on auto-pilot, I mistook the first shower-head I saw for the privacy of the Men's Locker Room, whipped off my bathing suit and started rinsing off . . . but, to my chagrin, I wasn't even near the Men's Locker Room, I was in the public shower in the window-surrounded pool area . . . stark naked and visible from the fitness floor as well as the outside world, but thank God a dude rounded the corner from the Men's Locker Room, and his odd expression alerted me that I was doing something very wrong; I snapped back into reality, grabbed my towel, wrapped it around my recently exposed genitalia, and ran to the safety Men's Locker Room-- blushing and humiliated-- and ducked into a curtained shower . . . how I mistook the pool shower, with its lack of curtains, for a locker room shower still boggles my mind, as does the fact that if a woman emerged from the hallway, fresh from the sanctity of the Women's Locker Room, she would have strolled into a hairy naked man in the pre-swim rinsing shower and I would have lost my gym membership and perhaps my job as well.

Dave's Key to A Happy Marriage

The key to a happy marriage is this: when you hear your wife pull into the driveway, get off the couch, race to the kitchen, and start doing the dishes . . . so that when she walks in the house and says "Hello?" then you can say to her, sincerely: "Hey, hon, I'm here in the kitchen . . . doing the dishes."

A One Sentence Review of a 562 Page Book

John Franzen swings for the fences with his new novel Freedom, and in a sense his Tom Wolfe-esque survey of America-- through the eyes of a disaffected athlete/housewife, an angry environmentalist, and a holier-than-thou indie rock star-- is spot on; he lampoons, ridicules, and skewers pretty much everything about modern language, relationships, liberalism, conservatism, sex, and-- of course-- freedom . . . it's a very, very long version of the REM song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" but the book needs an editor, it eventually folds back unto itself and becomes repetitive and Franzen pushes a narrative trick too far, but even though I skimmed the last hundred pages, there is a wonderful set piece at the end about song-birds and feral cats and I will give the novel eight cerulean warblers our of a possible ten, for its realism, its scope, and its archetypal characters that invite you to compare your own modern philosophy to theirs . . . but I should warn you, although there's a bit of a pay-off at the end, most of the book is mired in an existential irony that will make you question the significance of your life, and perhaps the significance of any human life on this wonderful green planet we inhabit.

Is This A Joke?

A Jordanian, an Indian, a Cop, a Slovakian Chemist, a Sicilian, and Red Headed White Guy walk into a bar . . . but it's not a joke; it is my adult league soccer team out for beers after a 10-3 win: improbably, we are now 5-0.

Kids These Days

So I'm eating lunch in the English office and this kid walks in without knocking-- which is totally unacceptable-- and he picks up this huge oblong case with a handle and a faux-alligator skin exterior, and I say to him: "Hey, what is that? An accordion?" and he says: "Yeah, it's an accordion," and he walks out without complimenting me on my correct guess, and-- in my eyes-- not acknowledging my guess was even ruder than not knocking on the office door because there could have been anything in that case, it could have been a type-writer or a set of silverware or a geode collection . . . but I guess that's how it is with the kids these days . . . or maybe that's how it is with accordion players these days.

Listen to Uncle Genghis

In Imperial Grunts, a fairly positive review of American special forces around the world, Robert Kaplan does remind us that we could have avoided our misadventures in Iraq if we would have remembered what Genghis Khan said: "Conquering a country while mounted is easy, but dismounting and building a nation is difficult."

Sometimes My Wife is Retarded Like Me

My wife had a long stressful day at work on Monday (she went to the wrong school for her work shop, and then when she finally found it, it turned out to be boring and useless) and then we had to coach our K/1 soccer team (and they were especially insane, perhaps because it was Columbus Day and they didn't attend school) and then she dumped the silverware all over the floor, and then-- despite her long and stressful day-- she set up at the kitchen table and started grading papers-- and after a few minutes, I asked her what she was doing with the chicken and she said she was going to have it for dinner and then five minutes later her mistake dawned on me, and I asked her if she thought she had put the chicken in the oven and she said, "Don't tell me I left it on top of the stove," and I said, "You left it on top of the stove," and she said, "Dammit, can you put it in the oven for me?' and I did and I was glad to do it because once in a while it's nice to see her act as retarded as me.