This piece by Douglas Hofstadter was funny, but I don’t agree. I think common usage is the king, and people should only contravene the king’s orders under dire circumstances. I also don’t agree with Vihart’s tweet that “Gender neutral pronouns have failed again, and again, and again… which means they have the persistence to someday succeed.” So the more I fail, the more likely I am to succeed? Doesn’t sound mathematically rigorous. The English language changes to whatever form it wants, nobody can predict it, and none of those changes are intrinsically better or worse – the Grimm’s Shift of ancient times was no different to the “ebonics” of today. Just a mutation that seems to have survived.
But if we were able to redesign the English language to be as convenient as possible, what would we do?
Graphological changes
– Make every character unique – no mirrors or flips. Make it impossible to mistake b for backwards d, or M for upside down W.
– Rearrange the alphabet so that commonest letters are at the front, and less used letters are at the back. There’s no reason the alphabet should run A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z instead of E-T-A-O-I-N-S-R-H-D-L-U-C-M-F-Y-W-G-P-B-V-K-X-Q-J-Z. Maybe then we won’t call it the alphabet, we’ll call it the epsilontau.
– Optimise the English script for handwriting. Make it so that x (for example) can be written with one stroke – perhaps by connecting the two lines with an arch.
Linguistic changes
– Incorporate Japanese’s honorifics. They’re useful as hell. They let you add trick out sentences out with emotion and color and nuance. “Yes, Spongebob-sama” is a nearly the opposite of “Yes, Spongebob-chan.”
– Add some pronoun modifiers so we can tell multiple people of the same gender apart. You want effective anti-gay therapy? Imagine giving yourself an embolism trying to puzzle out gay erotica (“He pressed him closer and ran his teeth over his neck…”). Maybe call the subject him1 and people in further proximity him2, him3, etc.
– Fix “w” so that it isn’t three syllables long. Have you ever tried to give someone a website address and had your mouth block up with dubya-dubya-dubyas like a jammed printer? This article suggests a pronounciation of “wu”.
– Remove the indefinite article, like Greek does. And if we get get away without the definitive article, so much the better. I hate a‘s and the‘s sitting in between the real words. Somehow they cause my trypophobia to flare up.
Answer: read his books. It will happen sooner than you think.
It works like this. You start reading a Haruki Murakami book. It doesn’t matter which one. You’ll be blown away. You might even think he’s the best author you’ve ever read.
Then you’ll read a second, third, and fourth book. At some point, the bloom will leave the rose. You’ll become bored of his style, bored of alienated male characters eating spaghetti and listening to records, bored of the way he invokes the warmth of the Beatles and Respighi to cover up the emotional coldness of his stories. You might read a fifth book. But you definitely won’t think of him as the best author you’ve ever read.
I’ve had this experience many times.
When I was 7 I was a huge Goosebumps fan. It was revelatory that books could be as exciting as a cartoon. Somewhere in Goosebumps 2000, I started to wonder: why does he give his characters names? They are interchangeable. Call them “The Boy Character” and “The Girl Character”, “The Oblivious Father/Mother”, “The Bully”, and so on. Why not? Wouldn’t it save mental clock cycles if you didn’t need to figure out which character occupies what role in the story?
When I had this realisation, I could take no pleasure in Goosebumps. I’d seen what was behind the curtain. I started to feel a bit resentful, as if RL Stine had swindled me.
When I was 12 I read Stephen King. The realism of his stories appealed to me. No matter how bizarre and surreal they get, he never forgets to give his characters dry mouths and headaches.
But after many books, he lost me. I’ve read him for so long that I’ve learned all his tricks, and now he seems like RL Stine 2.0 – a sophisticated manipulation artist who presses buttons and jerks you around. I don’t hate him. Put me in a cell with Doctor Sleep and I’d read it. But only after I get bored with playing the cell bars like a xylophone.
When I was 22 I discovered Junji Ito. Extremely atmospheric and frightening HP Lovecraft-inspired manga. I read about 3,000 pages of his stuff, and then suddenly, lost interest. He can’t tell a story very well. I found myself speed-reading through the dialogue to get to the next gory image. I was desensitized to his good points, and chafed raw by his bad points.
Does this sound familiar?
It’s been said that Mad magazine was the last time anyone took fiction seriously. They exposed and deconstructed the machinery of telling stories, and it was now impossible to see a romance scene in a movie without thinking of the inevitable Mad parody. But truthfully you’ll arrive at that realisation without Mad, it just takes time.
Do you have a favourite author? Do you want him to remain your favorite author?
Then never read another of his books again. Not a single one. Even reading another word is contraindicated. You can’t allow the novelty to dissipate. You can’t allow yourself to realise that your favourite author sucks golf balls through a garden hose.
It’s sad how whole families are torn apart by simple things, like wild dogs – Jack Handey
Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened – The universal law
You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. – Julie from Crystal Nights
When the axe came into the woods, the trees said: ‘But at least the handle is one of us.’ – Turkish proverb
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water – John W. Gardner
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible – Voltaire
Luck is statistics taken personally – Penn Jellete
Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be. – Kurt Vonnegut
A good friend will always stab you in the front. – Oscar Wilde
I believe I have found the link between animals and civilized man. Itβs us – Konrad Lorenz
Mr. Chamberlain likes to take weekends in the country. I shall take countries in the weekend — Adolf Hitler (apocryphal?)
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come. — Rabindranath Tagore
As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried. – Ben Horowitz
We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions – Ian Percy
He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination – G.K. Chesterton
How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold. – Marquis de Sade
