I Just… Really Like Ellipses… A Lot…

Despite my abstinence when it comes to writing in this blog or any type of formal assignment, I must confess that I am addicted to ellipses. Not only is this three-dot set my favorite punctuation mark for stylistic purposes in fiction writing (used scarcely of course... prose is all about the scarcity of what's good), it is also my go-to punctuation mark when I’m texting. The interesting thing about this bias towards ellipses is that, as Mathew J.X. Malady states in his article “What the… “ from Slate, “they don’t generally provide any sort of typing shortcut… ellipses often require more key strikes and time than the alternative punctuation they are intended to replace.” So what is it about ellipses that keep us using them like they are the best option?

To answer this question I would have to agree with Clay Shirky. He is quoted by Malady and basically states that the ellipsis is used in written conversation to create pauses and hesitations that a face-to-face conversation would naturally include. The natural flow that the use of ellipses gives to a text conversation makes me feel more comfortable than I would feel with completely well written statements and proper punctuation. Take the following conversation as an example:

Person 1: Well I’m taking a gap year after high school… getting my grades up and all… do you know how to solve polynomials for x^5?

Person 2: That’s cool… and yeah not really… I barely know what a polynomial is 

Person 1: ahhh crap… that’s fine… I’m just stuck on this one question...

Person 2: Just skip it already… I gave up on math ages ago… made everything better really

Fairly normal, right? The ellipses help transition to different topics of conversation as much as they help the conversation seem real despite the fact that it took place through Facebook messenger with a friend who currently lives in England. Now look at it with periods replacing all the ellipses:

Person 1: Well I’m taking a gap year after high school. Getting my grades up and all. Do you know how to solve polynomials for x^5?

Person 2: That’s cool. And yeah not really. I barely know what a polynomial is. 

Person 1: ahhh crap. That’s fine. I’m just stuck on this one question

Person 2: Just skip it already. I gave up on math ages ago. Made everything better really

Already the conversation sounds choppy and uncomfortable, even cold. The use of proper punctuation gives the conversation a forced tone, almost like a badly written screenplay where the characters don’t quite seem to be actual human beings interacting.

This relates directly to the TED Talk we watched in class (Txting is killing language. JK!!!) in which McWhorter talked about texting and social media not ruining the English language, but simply helping the language evolve to a point where we can write as we speak. For centuries now writing and speaking have been mostly unrelated even when they are considered to be a part of the same language. No one talks like the sentences in a book or even the sentences on this blog post. No one writes formal essays or literary pieces the way they usually talk. This is exactly the point of ellipses in texting and social media: writing as we speak. They give the conversation the flow of natural speech, whereas proper punctuation use would make it sound distant (well, even more distant considering how impersonal texting is anyway) and unnatural, like you are trying to converse as you would write a novel.

This phenomenon of writing how we speak has been growing since quick global communication began, getting stronger and more interactive as our communications systems get faster and faster. In a world of white screens and perfectly geometrical fonts, some personality is important. Through texts and messenger and even email the only way to express this specific personality and tone is through punctuation. 

Human conversation tends to be vague and loose, it tends to change directions constantly and to pause at unexpected moments, it tends to fluctuate and vary… let’s just say conversations can get very messy. I dare you to give me another punctuation mark that can be applied to express any and all of these conversational tendencies through white and blue iMessage bubbles. 

To Describe or to Prescribe… Apparently That is the Question?

Language is probably the most insane of all human characteristics, not only because of its complexity but also because it constantly changes, develops, and creates specific political/social contexts as much as these contexts create the aforementioned change and development. In the end language is a cyclical thing which humans invented and yet ironically do not fully understand. There are two ways to understand language: you can either try to understand language as it is used or choose to focus on the way language should be used. Linguists are divided between these two approaches to language much like people are divided between left wing and right wing politics (it’s more a sliding scale than an issue of black and white). The linguists that go for understanding language as it is used are commonly known as “descriptivists” while the ones focused on how language should be used are denominated “prescriptivists”. In The New York Times’ Room for Debate the article “Which Language Rules to Flout. Or Flaunt?” brought a descriptivist (Robert Lane Greene) and prescriptivist (Bryan A. Garner) together to debate language. The ideology (for lack of a better word) that I identified most with was the “reasonable [moderate]” descriptivism that Greene believes in. Language should be allowed to evolve and change (it is a human tool after all, it should change at the same rate as we change even though this would indicate that language is going to start changing faster and faster as technology develops and changes our society at a faster rate) but there are certain contexts in which grammar rules and conventions need to be taken into account. In Greene’s more able words: “There is a set of standard conventions everyone needs for formal writing and speaking. Except under unusual circumstances, you should use the grammar and vocabulary of standard written English for these purposes.”

Realistically, language will develop and change whether we want it to or not. Taking a realistic perspective once again, we can’t expect all the conventions of Wnglish to be taken into account when what matters is fast communication. In an informal setting, proper punctuation, spelling, and grammar may even end up being inconvenient. Take texting for example, when an instant message needs to be communicated it is much simpler to type “brb dinner” than it is to type “I’ll be right back, they’re calling me down for dinner”. In this specific context as well as in everyday conversation, informal emails, tweeting (or any other social media), etc. language has developed to make things easier. In my opinion, the creation of abbreviations and pragmatic particles as well as the disregard of common language rules and technicalities can’t be considered wrong in this context.

Journalism, essays, literature, speeches and formal letters are a completely different story. In these specific cases, the technicalities of language should be observed and obeyed simply because that is the way writing was initially developed. It wouldn’t be right to write abbreviations in a formal essay or to ignore the rules of punctuation in journalism. Unless you are disregarding the rules for a specific purpose, this context is not the place to be creative in the name of efficiency.

When we text or tweet or even email informally, we are writing the way we speak: for the sake of communication only and looking for efficiency above all. When we give a speech or recite a poem, we are speaking the way we write: unnaturally long and generally more descriptive, elaborate, and complex than our everyday conversation. This makes all the difference. Language for the sake of efficient communication may be deformed as much as it has to be deformed as long as the message gets across. Language for the sake of art, expression, or information needs to adhere to a certain set of rules. Granted, these rules don’t need to be as strict as: “’which’ must introduce a ‘nonrestrictive’ relative clause (a mere extra bit of information). Only ‘that’ can introduce a ‘restrictive’ clause (a crucial bit of definition)” but basic punctuation and grammar technicalities need to be present.

In the end, language will change and develop regardless of what we want to happen, how we use the language and how we choose to understand it depends on the context we find ourselves in. I would see absolutely no problem with the phrase “lol dude ur insane i don’t even get you” in a text message or as a tweet, it wouldn’t exactly cut it in a college essay though. 

Is There a Specific What to Superhero Status?

“What are the ways to create a superhero?” According to This American Life, a human mind is the only thing that can create one. They don’t explicitly state this in the two acts I watched; in fact, in the radio show the question is rhetorical and it is used only to introduce Zora: a woman who molded herself into a hero using a to-do list.  Despite this, in both Act 2 and Act 4 of this episode on superheroes, the creation of superpowers is a thing of the mind. Zora does it by writing a to-do list of everything that a superhero needed to be in her head, and then setting out to do every single one of the things she wrote down (these include learning to drive a helicopter, martial arts, weaponry, and CPR amongst others). The twins portrayed in Act 4 are completely different, it is the minds of people around them that created their hero status. They were seen as the two child super heroes of God’s Army in Burma mainly because God’s Army needed a way to gain more followers and instigate fear in those who challenged them. Everyone who knew the Htoo twins claimed that they had seen them using a super power of some sort. If they just knew about the Htoo twins they could easily narrate various stories about what the twelve-year-old kids could do in battle. There is only one way to create areal life superhero and that is making people (this maybe other people or yourself) believe that you are. It’s all a mind game. The real question is: What makes a superhero?

In her heroic dreams Zora saw herself as a woman who is powerful above any law of nature. She has impossibly long silver hair and a voice that sounds almost musical to anyone who hears it. In her dreams it is the magic tattoo that gives her powers. In real life she doesn’t have silver hair and she is not powerful past the laws of nature. Her powers aren’t granted to her by a tattoo (even though she does have one), they are granted to her by years of hard work and practice that she went through to achieve everything on her list. The Htoo twins in Burma know that they are special and they talk as if they were heroes, but it is mainly a craving for all the love and attention they never get in reclusion with the army. Unlike Zora, in the twins’ case it is other people and stories that give them power rather than any true accomplishment of theirs. In Zora’s case what makes her a hero is everything she did with the idea of helping people in mind, it is everything she still does to help people despite being rejected from her dream job at the CIA. In the twins’ case what makes them heroes is the fear they have instilled in other for the sake of God’s Army and the war stories they are stars in.

So what makes someone a hero? Some would argue it’s the urge to do good for the community. Some would argue it is the possession of a power that other human beings do not. Some would say it is doing things that others wouldn’t do, not necessarily good… just different. Today the word hero has even been used to highlight someone being funny or to encompass situations that wouldn’t be considered heroic in the traditional sense (ex: “Everything the teacher did he did the opposite, and then outsmarted all of her arguments. What a hero.”) 

In today’s society there is really no all-encompassing hero character because of these varying definitions of what it is to be “super”. In other words, a person may be a hero only to a certain population while being a neutral persona or even a representation of evil for others. This is why we find so much controversy around characters like Chavez and Petro in politics and such varied opinions about musicians like Bono and Shakira. This is also why soldiers are considered both villains and heroes, depending on which side of the conflict they are fighting for and which side you ask.  In the end, a defined thing creates a superhero, but there is no defined characteristic that all superheroes share precisely due to the previous fact. The mind creates a superhero; the mind gives it the characteristics it wants. No two minds will dream up the same superhero.


 

Do I Understand Comics Yet?

Today in class we read chapter 6 of Understanding Comics. Since we didn't have time to finish in class due to an extremely shortened schedule and College Counselling information, here are the questions on the chapter:

A. What does McCloud mean by “symbolic” on the bottom of page 144?

When he states that pictures in the 1400’s were becoming less symbolic McCloud means that any abstract aspects of painting were slowly fading away to a more realist tendency which sought to depict people exactly as we saw them.

B. Define the AP Lang term on page 147.

Colloquial (adj): used in ordinary or familiar conversation, not formal or literary.

C. Investigate one of McCloud’s allusions. What is the function of the example in the panel?

On a panel in page 146, McCloud shows a small portion of Georges Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. The idea of showing this painting is to explore the idea he posed in the previous panel: “Impressionism sent Western art toward the abstract vertex, but in a way that clung to what the eye saw.” The example of Seurat’s painting is perfect to express this idea because the painting is an example of pointillism (a form of art that moves towards more abstract style) while still representing a real scene we could see in the world.

D. In one sentence outline the main idea of this chapter. (Hint: Use the title)

This chapter explains how words and images can be used together to show and tell a story in different ways.

E. Draw an example of one of the categories established by McCloud.

 For practical purposes I didn’t draw a comic, instead I attached an example taken from the famous Calvin and Hobbes comic series. In this comic strip, the first panel shows an additive combination where the words add on to what Calvin is doing: waiting for the bus. The next three panels however, could be considered a parallel combination in which the images don’t necessarily reflect the thoughts. The images and what Calvin is thinking in these three panels are completely unrelated, making them a good example of a parallel combination.

F. How does this concept reflect narration vs. exposition? Create a diagram that demonstrates this.

Pictures                     Words          =            (In comics)

    =                               =                             

 Show                         Tell         

    =                               =

Exposition              Narration        =       (In written material)

These two can be used in different combinations that help make stories more interesting and attractive for a reader. One can be used more than the other à the author decides how to combine them and how much of each to use. 

A Better Conclusion...? (I Tried)

It would be possible to analyze the author’s use of anecdote to start the passage or his use of inductive logic throughout the essay, but it is the fallacious backbone of the piece that really plays with the reader’s perception of the argument. Overall, this essay can be dissected into a variety of fallacies which can be persuasive at first sight but ultimately disprove the author’s logic and render his argument invalid. Louv’s point about humanity’s decaying relationship with nature is ultimately weak and his argument about synthetic nature is left unfinished. Furthermore, none of his proof matches his conclusions and his slippery-slope-type of downfall into a future without nature makes no sense in the context of his examples. 

Goodnight. I Won't Sleep.

According to Maria Konnikova on her New York Times article “Goodnight. Sleep Clean.” sleep is the time during which our brain cleans out all the trash we accumulate in there on a daily basis. Even though it has always been ingrained in my brain (mostly by overly preoccupied parents) that sleep is essential to my well being, I had never thought about it in terms as drastic as the ones presented in this op-ed article. For a girl who sleeps an average of three hours a night, this article doesn’t promise any good. It actually sort of implies a high risk of suffering Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s… lovely.

“… there is a buildup of the types of proteins…normally [cleared] out during regular sleep, like beta-amyloids and tau, both associated with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia,” states Konnikova in her analysis of the new scientific discovery scientists have called the glymphatic system (the lymphatic system of the brain so to speak). This system consists of a liquid that literally cleans your brain and prepares it for another day full of trash intake.

If this is in fact true, my brain must be fuller than a dumpster. My sleeping pattern went off to war at some point between middle school and high school and it hasn’t come back ever since. Now, the issue is not that I don’t like sleeping per-se, the feeling of falling asleep is nice enough and the nothingness that fills you while you sleep is even better. It is the time I could be spending doing something productive that bothers me. I don’t like sleeping because there is literally no point in it for my life (other than survival).

Despite the idea Konnikova presents (the whole you-must-sleep-or-your-brain-will-slowly-become-contaminated-until-you-have-serious-repercussions deal) I basically live by the ideeology presented in the first sentence of her article: “SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time.” It doesn’t seem fair to my brain that I am expecting it to function without giving it time to fully recuperate after a day of trash storage, but then again school expects me to function AND remember the trash so my brain must be able to do it right?

If time needs to be wasted I’d rather do it on Tumblr. 

Actual full image: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj6va6Dnwa1qeablwo1_250.png

An Afterword and a Beginning

Even though we didn’t have to write for our summer reading, I feel like I can’t let this blog continue without mentioning the Afterword of Sidewalk. It was very interesting to me to read a different version of the book in general terms (how the research was collected, how it all started, etc.), especially considering that this particular information was written out by the man who inspired the entire study in the first place: Hakim Hasan. Whilst reading it I came to the conclusion that this study was actually a successful merge of completely different people. According to Hasan, Duneier managed to connect with the magazine vendors and the panhandlers way faster than he had imagined he would. Duneier also took Hasan’s advice in mind whilst writing the book (i.e. it was Hasan’s idea to include other street people in the book rather than leaving him as the only subject). Surpassing even this consideration, Duneier invited Hasan to teach a seminary with him about the street life and how it works. After reading this I can say that this book is a story and not a mere study. A study would be based on facts and statistics only. A story has characters like Hakim and Ishmael and Ron and it focuses on their backround and their life like Duneier does. The human factor in the study makes it a story (a factual story, but a story nonetheless), which in turn makes it bearable to read (it is pretty long).

In other topics, I started reading yet another memoir. Naked by David Sedaris has proven to be funny, self-depreciating, dirty, blatantly honest, and even tender at times so far. This collection of humorous essays packs a reconstruction so absurd of Sedaris’s life, that sometimes the line between truth and hyperbole is erased completely.

Only four chapters into the book, I have already managed to identify every type of humor we have studied in class. In the spirit of semester exams that are coming up, I will dedicate this blog post to reviewing the types of humor and finding examples in Naked. Granted, this will probably not be even close to one of the important topics in the exam, but it’s the fun one. So there.

Type # 1: Urbane Humor (puns/wordplay)
“’Oh, you mean the touching,’ my mother said” (page 13).

Taken in context, this comment is about David’s OCD and the way he has expressed it in school (touching different objects or even licking them). The way it is set up however, can make it a very clear innuendo because the entire phrase plays on the connotation of the word “touching” and… need I say more?

Type #2: Wit: not ha-ha funny- witty comments that make the audience think.

“What I really hated, of course, was my mind” (page 9).
Although this comment may not seem exactly humorous, it follows the theme of self depreciation throughout the book and makes the reader think about the gravity of what was happening to Sedaris. Of course people treated it like a joke and thought he was crazy, but by stating that he didn’t hate the objects he touched and licked but rather his mind that made him do it, and making it such an obvious statement with the “of course” added to it, makes the reader think of what he might have gone through. Sure, the book is funny, the author writes it that way, but he must have felt like utter crap all the time.

Type #3: Facetious Humor: is supposed to make you laugh (by far the most prominent in the book and a type of humor that doesn’t need explaining so a list it is):
- “For a time I thought that if I accompanied my habits with an outlandish wardrobe, I might be viewed as eccentric rather than just plain retarded. I was wrong. Only a confirmed idiot would wander the halls of my high school dressed in a floor-length caftan…” (page 18).
- “He thought I was masturbating and while I wanted to set the record straight, something told me I wouldn’t score any points by telling him that I was simply rocking in bed…” (page 19).
- “She had somehow tricked him, sunk in her claws, and dragged him away from his people. It would have been all right for him to remain at home for the rest of his life, massaging worry beads and drinking bitter coffee, but to marry a woman with two distinct eyebrows was unpardonable” (page 26).

Type #4: Banter: form of attack and defense consisting of clever insults and snappy comments.

“’Why don’t you try the knob,’ my sister Lisa would say. ‘That’s what the rest of us do, and it seems to work for us” (page 10).
At this point in the book Lisa is attacking Sedaris for the urge to touch the door seven times with each elbow. The snappy comment and the sarcasm she uses makes the attack funny, but it offensive to Sedaris all the same.

Type #5: Concession: agreeing with a point only to use it against your opponent. First accept your adversary’s statement at face value, then follow its logic to a ridiculous conclusion; or simply throw it back with a twist.
Actually I haven’t found an example of this one in the book so far but here’s a gem to consider:
LADY ASTOR: Winston, if you were my husband I’d flavor your coffee with poison.
WINSTION CHURCHILL: Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it.

All in all, these first few chapters of Naked are promising for some more morbid laughs in the future (honestly I didn’t even talk about the chapter called “next of kin” and if you have the dirty mind this book so appeals to I don’t even need to explain what it deals with). Perfectly touched with hyperbole, sarcasm, and self-hatred, Naked seems like a good read so far.