Nerds and Geeks and Nobodies that Count

Benjamin Nugent wrote an article for the July 29, 2007 issue of the New York Times Magazine called, “Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?” The answer is, a white guy. He cites Mary Bucholtz’s analysis suggesting he is hyperwhite. He writes poems to computers and speaks in ultra-precise English. Bucholtz finds that nerds choose Greek or Latin deviative words over Germanic ones, substituting “It is my observation that…” for “I think….” Of course, the scientific sound of the passive verb is part of the shtick also. Makes the nerd sound like an impartial observer.

By the time you finish reading that article, you begin to think the nerd/geek is some kind of a hero. He takes the white language to the maximum, refusing to steal and reuse any of the colorful slang ripped off from black culture. The author points out that TV writers have had fun tweaking the concept of nerd, applying nerdishness to black characters. But he implies that’s very rare in real life. Instead, the nerd tries to critique the mainstream white culture by exaggerating it, according to Nugent. You could see them as rebels, rejecting the tendency of the cool white kids to use ghetto slang. “You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having,” he tells us.

Is there a 'white' culture? One of my students once asked me that and I thought about folk dancing and all the differences that make Ireland and England fight, Serbia and Croatia fight, and said, 'No, there are many." So this nerd/geek deconstruction sounds too simplistic to me. It's very hard to classify people who are sorted into a category because they aren't something else (cool, sophisticated). Doesn't work for me. What do you think?

Spying on Words Where They Work and Play

Erin McKean wrote “Corpus,” which appeared in the NYT Magazine on Sunday, July 29, 2007. An editor for the New Oxford American Dictionary and blogger at dictionaryevangelist.com, she cares about words passionately.

The Corpus she describes is a context collection for words, an FBI précis of what that word has actually been doing. This collection is officially named The Oxford English Corpus (go to AskOxford.com for information about access; go to SketchEngine and take a one month free trial to play around with sorting your own words). She tells us selected insights from this spying on words where they work. “Fake,” for example, is illustrated by the dictionary as “fake painting.” What it really does most of the time is detect the “fake smile” or the “fake tan.” It is actually working in the description of your appearance, your identity, not in the description of mere things. Fake paintings don’t even occur in the top 50 uses of fake.

Her article is full of amazing snippets from the Corpus. One of my favorites is about the verb “migrate.” Turns out, it’s directionality is almost exclusively paired with “south,” not with “north.” You’d think no bird, no insect, no skier ever seeks the north, but of course they do. They just don’t do it with “migrate.” Try saying it yourself, “migrate north” sounds funny. What verb would you use for a crane that had spent the winter on the Texas coast and wanted to go to Canada for the summer as usual? Not “migrate” north, probably not “go,” but maybe “return?” But that implies he/she LIVES in Canada and just migrates south to Texas for vacation. What does that say about our innate assumptions about where to live?

You can go to the web site, enter ‘corpus’ and search, and then sign up for a month’s free trial of the Sketch Engine software that you need to run searches in the Corpus. They email you a password and the web address to use. Once you are on the web site, select a corpus (for example, select British National Corpus) and try the options that come up. My favorite is “Word Sketch.” I also like the “sketch-diff” selection that allows you to enter two words and see how their contexts differ, such as “embrace” and “kiss.” I started expecting similar lists, but they are quite different. Guess which one is used with ‘concept” and which with “goodbye?”

Here are some fun things to look up on Corpus:
East
West
Sunset
Sunrise
Begin
Finish
Great
Change
Peace
Home

If you like to play with words, give this a try! Let me know if you find something interesting.

Have you seen the moon lately?

My friend Aleta recently posted a prompt where she cited this quotation: "The moon develops creativity as chemicals develop photographic images."--Norma Jean Harris. I started thinking about how rarely I see the moon any more. When dating, I used to see it because I was out at night. Even if I walk from car to house in the dark, I don't seem to notice the moon now. But the moon is beautiful, well worth noticing. I looked for moon images on the web and found a site at http://www.astropix.com/ with some exciting and other somnolent images of the moon. Great food for writing thoughts, almost as good as smelling fresh strawberries (recommended by Gayle Brandeis in Fruitflesh).

Moonlight lends a mysterious quality to what would be mundane transactions during the day, and can make us want to know more, dig deeper into the motivations of our characters. Sensory input by smell, a very important writing tool, becomes easier to call up and incorporate when you're imagining a moonlit scene. Lots of flowers open or release extra perfume at night (not just night-blooming Cereus, with its ethereal beauty, but stock, jasmine, and many other flowers).

I was very taken with a great collection of pictures of the moon phases I found on aa.usno.navy.mil. Their names are worth refreshing in your mind: waxing crescent, waning gibbous...do you really know how a waning gibbous moon looks? And how it's different from a waxing gibbous? Very nice pictures, and good images to write into your poems or prose.

Why sports? For me, it's not the records broken...

Edward Wyatt profiled the 24-year-old winner of the grueling cycling race, the Tour de France, in the July 29, 2007 New York Times. I was very impressed with what I learned about this young man.

Alberto Contador won the Tour de France bicycle race at the end of July, 2007. In 2004, in the first stage of the Tour of Asturias, his brain hemorrhaged. He had the clot removed and remained in hospital during his recovery. He had to have a titanium plate inserted in his skull to close the wound from the brain surgery. No one knew if he would ever talk and walk, let alone get on a bicycle again. Looking back on that time, he said, “I felt like my whole life and career was going to take a different direction. It taught me to value other things a lot more.”

In 2005, when he had finished 21st in the Tour de France, his Liberty Seguros team was excluded from the 2006 tour because of numerous riders on that team whose names were associated with the Puerto drug scandal. Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes had batches of many cyclists’ blood, potentially usable for self-transfusions. Contador’s name first appeared on that list, but he fought and finally got an apology; it had been included by mistake.

He wrote an open letter to his fans, from which these words were taken:
“Life has shown me that experiences that at first sight seem harmful and unpleasant to us can always result in highly positive lessons for us.

“I will continue working, possibly with even more devotion—if that’s possible—to make you experience this beautiful sport and to hear you say once again that you believe in it and in me. And because I believe in a clean sport, as I have practiced it, we will collect the result of our efforts in a few years.”

It was hard to put up with all of the drug scandals affecting Vinokurov and Rasmussen, other cyclists who had excelled in the race before their expulsion. But seeing this young man succeed in spite of all of the adversity in his life was thrilling. That, rather than seeing a new home run record set by Barry Bonds, is the kind of inspiration I seek from sports.

Painting with Paint Words

Recently I heard the word "cerulean" and it made me think about oil paints and the wonderful names some of those colors have. Cerulean is a beautiful blue, although artists often mix it with other blues, or with white or green, making their own un-named colors. I thought about how I usually describe blue (bright, royal, navy) and realized that cerulean was more exciting. Then I did a search for oil paint and visited sites where you can buy it over the internet, reveling in all the names I found. And I thought, maybe people who visit West Coast Writers would like to try this themselves. Or, maybe they'd just like to think of great descriptors for colors, whether or not they come from oil paints.

I created a poem with blanks. This time, I'm not giving you any words to choose from, but asking you to suggest 16 words to fill in the blanks. I will award your choice of two books to a 'winner,' picked purely by my response meter. You can choose either Heather King's Parched or Susan Straight's Highwire Moon. I ended up with two copies of each book, and I think they are both wonderful, but I'd be willing to give the winner the second (unused) copy of either one.

Here is the poem:
Painter’s Garden

The cannas stood tall, matching the cardinal in their 1.___________________ blossoms
But taller still the delphiniums, rivaling the sea with their 2. ____________spikes.
And poking over their heads, the hollyhocks, blushing 3. _____________
Are dwarfed themselves by the giant sunflowers bright in 4. ____________

Here and there a buttercup peeks out with its 5._______________petals,
A late California poppy’s screaming bright in 6.________________,
Next to Mexican sage blooming in magenta from 7._________ leaves,
Each fuzzy flower rich with 8.______________.

The daisies look fresh and clean in 9.______________,
While Lilies of the Nile remember the river with their 10.____________.
The geraniums shine like a clown’s nose in 11. ______________
And the columbines hold up sunny 12.______________ blooms.

I feel for sad Bleeding Hearts, white tears from the 13.______heart,
Laugh at snapping snapdragons, flaming in 14.__________
Play with clovers, making chains of knotted 15. ___________ heads,
Make a crown of stock like 16._______angel wings, and dance.

One of the top ten towns....

Claremont, CA where I live, has been picked as number five on Money magazine's list of the top ten towns in the US. Is that good? I doubt it. If a lot of people decide to move here, the small town flavor that I like will be lost. We won't have tricycles full of toddlers in our Fourth of July parade; we won't have a politically correct "Egg Hunt" instead of an Easter Egg Hunt: we won't have Monday night oldie rock concerts in the band shell in Memorial Park. We'll become a city.

I think cities are fine in their place, but I don't want to live in one if I can help it. The problem, as Verlyn Klinkenborg pointed out in a recent editorial in NYT, is that California keeps on growing, projecting a doubling of population soon. Why not plan NOT to keep on growing? But that seems to violate all of our laid back principles, our laissez faire, our "whatever" approach to life. The problem is, planning to have a quality life without growing is HARD, and it's not fun to do hard things. But if we don't make any plans, then we'll be caroming off each other everywhere we turn. So couldn't we try to do some projections for limiting growth instead of encouraging it? Maybe Al Gore could help, he's taking on the giants these days. We will surely waste far too many resources and cause far too much pollution if we go on this way. It's time to wake up and think about these issues.

Do you agree? Or do you think it's just sort of a NIMBY response I'm having, saying I have mine but if I can, I'll keep you from having yours too? It's difficult to sort out motives here, for me too.

Let's Play a Little....

I just read Arthur Plotnik's article in the August, 2007 issue of The Writer magazine, "Making it rill," and it made me think of the fun of seeing and learning new words. His article was about landscape words, so here is a poem I made up using some of his words. See if you can match the numbered words in the poem with the lettered definitions below. Beware, there are more definitions than there are words, so you have to select, not just match them. If you post your answer, I will tell you if you got them all right.

Limning Landscapes--A Game of Landscape Words
Exploring again, I climbed and scrambled, scanning the ground
The rill_1 tried its best to distract me with its riffle_2,
Instead, I searched the arroyo_3 for a kiss tank_4,
Quiet and tranquil beside the scarp_5,
Hidden and silent, as different from
Yesterday's secret guzzle_6 and last month's pingo_7
As the freeway differs from a thank-you-ma'am_8!


a. waterfall b. rapids in a tiny brook c. divided stream d. dirt road e. low place in the dunes where water drains f. gentle ridge g. river bed h. collection of noisy birds i. sharply rising cliff j. upthrust of permafrost k. valley, often dry l. bump or hollow place that jounces the car driving over it m. pool of rain water in a natural rock basin n. small brook o. deep, quiet pool