Linguistics & Science Fiction Network Online Bulletin
**NOTE: This bulletin is mailed only to members of the L&SF Network, and only by request. If you receive a copy by mistake, please let me know and I'll take you off the list immediately, with my apologies.
Greetings and salutations from your editor, who is an exceedingly Crochety Crone at the moment. Come the day that adults reclaim the United States of America, you'll find me pleasanter.
1. I want to recommend to you briefly here the January 11/18, 1999 issue
of The Nation, much of which is devoted to the current mess. I'll be coming
back to it in detail in the next L&SF, but wanted to mention it here
-- especially the opening section, which is a set of editorials I don't want
you to miss, both pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton.
One describes the American public's behavior as "an information age act of mass civil disobedience"; one discusses the irony of the Congress trying to throw Clinton out for heavy petting and the denial of heavy petting, at the same time that they ignore the (in the editorialist's opinion) actual high crime and misdemeanor of bombing Iraq without consulting Congress; one discusses the peril of Russian/U.S. relations now backburnered by the heavy petting crisis.
Whether you agree or disagree with the positions taken, these are well-written and well-argued statements about the current comic opera which -- so help me -- revolves around and is driven by a dialect difference. (My apologies to those of you who genuinely believe this is not a heavy petting crisis but the end of civilization as we know it, threat to the rule of law, and so on; my assessment is not intended to trivialize yours.)
2. Did you hear the interview on NPR when Elizabeth and Bob Dole were asked
if Elizabeth Dole would be running for President? The lines I found most
interesting came along when the reporter asked the potential First Lord what
*he* would be doing while Elizabeth Dole was serving as President. "Why,
I'd be looking after the nation's interests," he said. (Maybe he said "the
nation's business." He mumbles a tad.) *Will* they say "the first Lord,"
do you suppose? First Husband? First Spouse? First Man?
You remember what happened when the commentators tried to do that number with "our boys and girls in the Gulf"; they crashed in flames and did hasty switches do "our men and women in the Gulf." Suppose they start with "The First Lady and the First Lord..." and crash similarly; what will they switch to?
3. The latest "Jessica's Biscuit" mail order catalog has a Star Wars Cookbook,
complete with recipes "from Jabba Jiggle to Wooke Cookies." Order number
is G-7515;; price is $11.96 and postage. 800-878-4264, or go to
www.jessicasbiscuit.com.
4. I recommend getting a copy of the current "Linguistics 1999" catalogue
from MIT Press. Many books that L&SF members would be interested in,
with detailed and informative descriptions. (Example: "Language and Reality,"
by Devitt and Sterelny; description opens with "What is language? How does
it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of
langauge influence our view of the world?" Try 800-356-0343, or go to
http://mitpress.mit.edu.
5. In the January 1999 LOCUS, on page 71: "We're running low on commentary
pieces and would like some more. We pay $125 for a 1,200 to 1,500 word piece
on some aspect of SF and fantasy -- what bothers you, an insight, a fresh
opinion, etc. E-mail is still the best way to send anything." The only e-mail
address given is Locus@Locusmag.com; you may want to check this by going
to www.Locusmag.com to see what's posted.
6. Every couple of months I do a websearch using my own name, just to see
what's going on out there. The latest search turned up a set of "Book Notes"
(like Cliff Notes) that is a seven-page summary of my book titled "How to
Disagree Without Being Disagreeable." I have no idea why it's there or what
it's for, but it does a pretty good job. It leaves out some things I consider
important and is be-typoed, but that's standard for an item like this. You
might want to take a look at it. Address:
http://w3.mit.edu/mbarker/www/ideas/disagree.txt. (I tried to find out more
by looking up "M. Barker," but that turns out to be the name of an M.I.T.
library, not a prof, so it didn't help. And it's not important.)
7. Decades now I've been pleading with the phonologists to devise a system
for writing down English intonation (the tune the words are set to); you've
been present for some of those pleadings. Until we have such a system, people
are helpless against the "But all I said was...." defense from verbal abusers.
It struck me the other day that there's something that might work, at least
for computer-generated documents. Suppose we used the array of type sizes
that are available on our computer word processors, with larger and larger
type indicating more and more hostility; would that work?
Suppose you set up pairs of utterances, with "Baseline: Speaker X: "This is a neutral utterance" followed by "Speaker X: "How could you do that?" and then "Baseline: Speaker Y: "This is a neutral utterance" followed by "Speaker Y: "HOW could you DO that?" With the varying degrees of hostility indicated by larger type size?
My e-mail software won't let me demonstrate, of course, but that should be enough to make it possible for you to help me with your suggestions. (This would be essentially what comic book artists have been doing since Day One, very successfully; I should have thought of it long long ago -- or one of you should have suggested it.) Your input would be very welcome.
8. My own abbreviated editorial: The Republican House of Representatives
refuses to rank one example of a crime or sin against another. "Perjury is
perjury," they say. "Lying is lying." They are utterly binary. Fortunately,
the God they profess to serve is not bound by any such constraints. That
God will have two offenses to compare, contrast, and judge. Offense One:
Bill Clinton engages in heavy petting with a woman not his wife and then
does his best to hide that fact.
Offense Two: A government body composed of well-clothed, well-housed, well-fed individuals with total healthcare provided to them round the clock spends fifty million dollars plus of taxpayer money hounding Bill Clinton -- while ordinary men and women and children go without housing and food and medical care in this country, many of them living in the streets or in their cars...and while millions of people all around this world die of starvation and exposure and ignorance, not to mention dying of diseases that we know how to cure for pennies. I am absolutely certain that God will be able to tell the difference.
9. If you didn't read the "Announcements" page in the last L&SF, you're
not aware that today is the deadline to pre-register for the March 1999 GAVSD
Institute in Tulsa....or you may have read it and forgotten. This is a reminder.
(You can pre-register by e-mail; payment by Februrary 2nd is not required,
just notice to me that you'll be attending.)
That's it for this time.......
Suzette
