The Peristaltic Testator

This is a pile of frustration I've been saving up for a good weekend dumping. Therefore, as all good LJ posters should, I will now include ( an LJ cut. )

I made a rash observation the other day, noting in another's LJ my difficulty embracing a newish term "cis," used to describe people who are not transgendered. "Cis" is, apparently, a Latin prefix meaning "on this side of." So if you were born with an inherent desire to remain in your gender, you are "on the same side of" your birth. I honestly didn't know why it seems fadish and ethereal to me, destined, I felt, to go the way of Sunshine Unit or the improper use of education. (We're still waiting on the latter one, I know, I know.)

The weird part is, well, weird; I agree with the sentiments of using the term. I really do. What I disagree with is the extremely narrow group of society that actively uses the term to the point where many outside that group would not even recognize the term when used. We see this all the time with terms used in specialized fields, yes; but I hold that a term used in conversation should bear a definition on which all involved in the conversation can agree. Otherwise, I might literally say something that a third of the room interprets positively, a third negatively, and a third are left scratching their heads.


See what I mean?

Out of the mass who dog-piled me with accusations laced with F-bombs and references to idiots, exactly one person finally—Finally!—pointed out the source of my disquiet with an explanation I can understand. ( To the observation! )

Lately I've been reminded that I am woefully behind the times. The language has changed, and this time the word that I used to think I recognized has apparently been given a new meaning.

The word is privilege.

From recent reading, it literally means "private law." (Pratchett, The Truth, I can dig up the page number if you wish.) This makes sense. The privileged classes were in the past given to different courts (depending upon one's alleged offense) than the lower classes. This was especially true in the Medieval times when the landed were also the knights and supposedly the crown's own police force, sometimes the only people allowed to carry certain weapons. They were the law.

Over time, "privilege" came to mean circumstances where one party was given perks or advantages of other parties. In marine navigation, for example, the vessel with right-of-way was the "privileged" vessel, and the other the "stand down" vessel that needed to yield. Privileged access meant getting backstage, or into the private party, or whatever.

Now. . . I'm not sure, but it's being used and contorted as a negative. Someone with "privilege" supposedly has no right commenting about someone who has none, since (it should be obvious, by the tone given) that person's life circumstances make him (and yes, it's usually him) unable to empathize with another. Someone actually got excited when I mentioned I grew up poor, because that circumstance separated me from the "privileged." She said this as a kind of relief. Since we later dated, I wonder now if that was a kind of litmus test.

You see, I'm confused because, though poor, I had many of the amenities of life my richer friends envied. I could do things they could not. (I realize now it was because my folks trusted me, based on previous experience.) I had things they didn't. (Probably because I didn't break them.) And our family never felt poor, simply because we were taught at a young age the importance of pinching a penny until Lincoln stopped screaming.

Sure, I'm a guy. Pretty low on the scrotum pole, but swingin' a bagged pair nonetheless. Yes, I'm pale. My ancestors hailed from those pale countries where they were so unwanted their countries dumped them here in the States five or six generations ago. Those ancestors of my namesake were so addled with hunger after the Lumpers rotted Dad had now way to follow the family tree to its roots. We're from Ireland, true; but where exactly, we know not. Great-great granddad and his family was too hungry to remember.

And yes, I can understand where some of this privilege bashing comes from. Some guys act like jerks. I notice it and take joy in condemning it when I can. They treat the testes- and pale skin-free with contempt. That doesn't, though, mean it might be high time to abuse another fine word to describe what they do as an automatic element of their born condition, does it?

Problems happen when people can't agree on what the words they use mean in the ears over there. Winston Churchill noted that the British and the Americans were "two people divided by a common language." Heck, "fanny" means "butt" over here, and is slang for "vagina" over there. That's completely backwards.

So hey, Dear Readers. Slide a supposedly privileged guy a hint. Where did this word's new meaning come from? Is is worth the new meaning, or dismissable like, say, "empower?" If you can illuminate this debate, or even note with some certainty that it is debatable, I'd appreciate the input. I'll refrain from marking this one with my "Language Abuse! No Biscuit!" tag in the meantime.


Addendum: The Next Day: Enough have weighed in for "privilege" to be the latest example of language abuse. From here on no biscuit shall be given to misusers.

I recently mentioned that, in order to receive "full status" on my work's health insurance program, I have to complete a course littered with hurdles and chicanes. Supposedly, these programs (for which I am eligible for four or five) will show me steps to correct the unhealthy lifestyles with which I am currently destroying my productive longevity and get me on the path to Healthy Living(TM) . . . or, more specifically and honestly, to reduce the cost my employer is contractually obligated to provide me.

We've been doing this program for three years now. At first, the requirements were simple. There are three standards of status: gold, silver, and bronze. Fill out the initial form and Shazam! you're a Bronze Age winner. Participate in a "program" and Voila! you get the Silver Standard. Actually complete some goals along the way and Ta Da! I got the Gold standard.

There is a financial "incentive" (as much as the promise of beating someone with a stick with progressive intensity if they don't do what they're told is an "incentive"). Gold standard folks pay fewer deductibles and lower co-pays. For the very healthy, there would therefore be no reason to even participate. Anticipate actually going to a doctor once a year, though, and your out-of-pocket expenses increase with your decreased level of participation.

While a laudable goal, there is a sneaky long game in the midst of all this calming talk and helpful hinting. Each year, the act of successfully obtaining a Golden Ticket have gotten progressively more difficult. I thought this would happen. It seems I'm proving to be right. This strategy gives my employer the option of blaming the participants for their increased out-of-pocket costs. In fact, my head employer was on the radio. He first claimed that the program had reduced medical costs by $22 million for the county. I think he's probably right about that. Sadly, this means that $22 million in expenses has probably been shifted to the insured through increased out-of-pocket costs. When asked about the increasing difficulty keeping full benefits, he dismissively said that those who refuse to participate in the program -- or who fail to complete the increasingly onerous requirements -- just "don't want to be healthy".

Yes, he's a politician. He's adept at obfuscation, at misdirection. Rather than simply blather about this mendacity, I've decided to continue what I started in that one-off link above and let you be the judge. I'm going to copy the suggested stress management topics from the program, along with background "education" provided by the program as needed, and then post my journal responses rebutting their claim. Are they, as I suspect, pushing snake oil notions or double-plus good self-help duck speak? Or are the lessons provided actually useful and I'm just a curmudgeonly bastard for not listening to good advice when it's offered? I'll let you be the judge.

---

I don't believe it. I intended to do exactly what I wrote I would do above, I really did. But it seems I can't.

Somehow, with this mornings random keystrokes and link hunting, I completed the program. It didn't tell me what I actually did to complete everything, no. It just, well, "completed" me. While that's good news finance-wise, it seems that once I crossed that unseen finish line and completed the program the system deleted all my journal entries. It's now asking me to re-enroll in the program, as if I have never visited their site before.

Folks, imagine this: LJ has a program where, once you complete a hundred, a thousand, a million entries (insert your arbitrary number here), it deletes all of those entries and has you re-enter as a new user. Just imagine this. That's what has just happened to me.

I just sent them an angry letter demanding my entries back, saying how losing them would be unacceptably stressful. One would assume a program designed to reduce a person's stress wouldn't constantly subject them to more. There's some real and poignant irony in their doing this, don't you think? For that, they've just earned my "Language abuse! No Biscuit!" tag.

Bastards.

I'll be the first to confess: I am sometimes a real idiot. For just one example, listening to people yammer on but say nothing drives me completely batty. If you have nothing to add, why not shut up? (Then again, I do the same, so I don't vocalize this thought often.)

Inconsequential talk that really gets me, though, is often couched with real words that, when considered closely, actually mean nothing. It finally hit me this morning why those words mean nothing: because they denote not specific states themselves, but the absence of other states. In other words, by using these key words, one can make a completely accurate statement without being held to any particulars simply because the words they use can refer to as wide a range of situations as the language can describe, some of them even contradictory.

What words are these? Very, very common words, ones we should all try to immediately avoid. ( Really, what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? )


*Y'know, this usage proves so common in our language that there must be a word to describe words dependent upon absence. I would be happy to wrack my brains for a new one, if necessary, but I'd like to find and resurrect the existing one if at all possible first. Can anyone think of that word, the word I could use instead of all the terms qualified by these asterisks?

I'd like to introduce everyone to David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right and The Republican Noise Machine. In Blinded, he introduces himself as a progressive and idealistic young lad who had a rude awakening during his college days in Berkeley. He went to cover Jeane Kirkpatrick's speech to the college, and was deeply disturbed when protesters interrupted her until she was forced to leave the stage:

The scene shook me deeply: Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value? How, I wondered, could this thought police call itself liberal?. . . . The few outspoken conservatives on the faculty, and the Reagan regents, raised their voices in support of Kirkpatrick's free speech rights. The liberals seemed to me to be defending censorship.

(David Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 4.)

This and other incidents burned in his mind, Brock turned from liberal and progressive issues and became a cheerleader for the Other Side. ( He rose in prominence, changing the course of American history as he ascended. )

Ah, you can't get away from Microsoft's promotion of their new search engine Bing, can you? According to Patrick Cox of PRI's The World in Words podcast, Microsoft's Chief Exec hoped the name would "verb up," presumably to become a verb much as Google has over the years.

They might not have chosen wisely, though. Cox continued to note that Bing has many different meanings in Chinese (presumably Mandarin), but the meaning of "the fourth tone . . . means 'sickness.'

"It actually gets worse," Cox continues. "If you add another character to it, du -- so it would be bing du -- that means virus."

Nice one, Redmond. Is this another example of subtle truth in advertising like Wall Mart's Assterisk, or a complete oversight boner? Either way, it's Puerto Rico's Chevy Nova all over again: It doesn't go.

By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true Knowledge, to examine the Definitions of former Authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down; or to make them himselfe. For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning; in which lyes the foundation of their errours.

--Hobbes, Leviathan

I read this quote years ago not in the original source, but quoted in Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver. The quote appears at the head of a chapter titled Epsom, 1665-1666 in the first book (the original Baroque Cycle consists of three large volumes broken each into three books). For those reading Quicksilver, the irony/dissonance of the quote should be immediately apparent. You see, Stephenson makes masterful use of modern terms by exploring their etymology and probable origins, weaving words like "phant'sy" and concepts like what the enlightenment would resemble before it has actually happened. For the most part, he also avoids using modern terms like "scientist" (coined by William Whewell in 1833).

This encyclopedic research into our language's history becomes all the more puzzling, though, when he slips. His former care makes his errors glare.


Gottfried Leibniz

One of the many historical characters making an appearance in the fiction, Gottfried Leibniz says, "I concluded that there was little point in jury-rigging something." (Stephenson, Quicksilver, Harper Collins, 2003, p. 273)

Jury-rigging? Ah, no.

To be fair, Stephenson is hardly the first respectable author to have been tripped by this phonetic corruption. It sounds right. After all, one hears all the time about rigged juries, a convened panel of peers illegally influenced to side with either the defense or the prosecution. Since this smacks of manipulation, fiddling about with complex systems to effect repairs or (more often) poorly-executed engineering changes seems consistent as a definition.

Larry Niven made this mistake at least once in his early sci-fi writings, but changed after he started collaborating with Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle, better versed in military history than Niven, realized that "jury-rigged" was a phonetic corruption of "jerry-rigged," a term of derision dating back to the Great War. Anti-german sentiment ran high in the United States during what later had to be renamed the First World War. Patriotic restauranteurs pulled hamburgers from the menu, serving fried ground beef paddies as Victory Steaks. Frankfurters and Wieners became Victory Dogs, later just Hot Dogs. Americans adopted a favorite racially derisive term for low-cost baling-wire fixes and re-applied their scorn toward the jerries. For some reason, long after the war, long after folks forgot the emnity toward all things German, the conflation with juries was made, even though many still use the term to describe metal, rectangular portable gas cans.*

With this in mind, I hardly think the Austrian Leibniz would describe low budget fudging in decidedly anti-German terms, especially not 250 years before Americans coined the term itself.



Stephenson later refers to the barbaric act of bear bating. This was once a popular past time in Europe. Essentially one captures a bear, stakes it in the center of a square, then attacks it with several hungry hounds. Betting ensues. Sometimes the bear wins, sometimes not, but blood will be shed. The trouble is, throughout the books Stephenson calls it "bear baiting." (He's not alone; check out the name of the graphic I appropriated. The website source makes the same mistake. It's becoming far too common. Sigh.)

This mistake I can almost understand. You see, there is such a thing as bear baiting, often employed prior to bating. One sets something sweet and fragrant to lure bears to a trap. I was once, in fact, introduced to a very German sweet honey liqueur called bärenbat (sp?), or bear bait, a name which supposedly reflects the reason it was originally distilled.

After the bear is caught, though, a very different bating commences for the entertainment. "Bating" shares a root with the modern term "abate," both based upon a Middle English legal term meaning "to stop." The bears were stopped by a chain -- held at bay -- from chasing the hounds that beset them. (The bear in the above woodcut got lucky!) From this meaning we can also better understand Shakespeare's “Shall I bend low and, in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness, / Say this ...” from The Merchant of Venice.

(Addendum December 3, 2007: It seems Stephenson committed an even greater misuse than I originally thought. Later in Quicksilver, I read: ". . . I am only bating until I have raised money for the passage. . . ." (ibid, p. 725) That's right, a correct use of the term, albeit outside any reference to bears.)

I don't mean for my complaints to scare potential Stephenson readers. Despite the slips, The Baroque Cycle is often a mesmerizing read (though it takes place about 50 years before Franz Anton Mesmer made his fortunes, secured his fame and later infamy; but that's another story). I've read each of the three volumes twice now, and regard his Zodiac as one of my favorite novels ever. Do, please, read Stephenson.

But do be aware that, as a writer, if you choose to execute a difficult style, sometimes readers will most easily remember those times you trip along the way.


*Giving further credence to Hobbes' quote, see firstashore's correction below.

In Western society today, many can recognize the subtleties that separate those with and without, for lack of a better term, "It." One can spot It with surprising ease.

Those with It speak with greater grace and clarity on topics that hold attention without ostentatious delivery or overly attenuated volume. Their It-speak is perfect, with graceful alides, puctuated staccattos, effortless yet obvious accomplishments in vocal, glottal, dental and labial coordination. The It resort seldom to intentional rhyme or other obvious grammatical instrument, preferring to wax with rapt elocution on mesmerizing thoughts, with deftly constructed sentences and dizzying logic, and always with self-depracating humility.

Those with It dress like everyone else, in shirts and pants and dresses and shoes; but with It they look better. The same clothes on those with It fit better than they would on the rest of us, molding their bodies like well hung draperies, clinging to and accenting their better attributes while invisibly drawing notice from what many would consider physical detriments. No matter what we may pay to dress as well, we can only pale in comparison to those dressed with and by It.

Most commonly, those with It have in their command and possession more material wealth. One can denote the choice home or homes, the better automobiles, bespoke clothing and footwear, mechanical timepieces worn loosely and casually on the wrist that often mesh more moving parts in their works than most automobiles. Other accoutrements that draw the eye and the mind to the It conclusion and must therefore be noted include the casual bangles, baubles and trinkets pinned, clasped, pierced and hung from It bodies and clothes that command respectful glances and monetary appraisals.

These differences of distinction often find a source in early rearing. The It often come from sound genetic stock, parentage with plenty of It to share with the world. The wealth mentioned above allows their children attend the finest schools, institutions that often inculcate more than educate, instilling a distillation of higher quality in poise, outlook, diction, and other of the social graces obvious to even the most jaded or oblivious observer.

However, a caution: with all the shining and lofty language one can summon to express that inexpressible quality one sees in those with It, one should never, and I do mean this as an absolute prohibition without possible exception or allowance, refer to It with certain base terms.

Fer example, It ain't never right to sayz thems with It is "classy."

Last night, I heard about a horrible case of English abuse at the corporate headquarters of a large retail clothing outlet.

There the corporate-speakers refer to the points raised and the conclusions reached at various meetings as learnings!

My friend, who has worked there for years, always thought this improper usage a bit grating, but was so used to it she said nothing. She mentioned it only last night because a senior vice-president got a bit perturbed when his auto-spellchecker flagged the word as an egregious error, and cursed his computer!

Most of you people out there have jobs. What other abuses lurk in corporate halls undetected by the outside world?