Irony, Illustrated

What we like about this photo is that the two signs—the one endorsing English and the other butchering English—were quite clearly written by the same hand. Presumably the little girl’s.

Irony, Illustrated

If you want to get technical, we will be forced to admit it’s possible that this fellow is protesting the stupidity of the Moran family, whoever they are. But you’d have to be a moran to believe that.

This is Why Your Auto-Spellchecker Is Not Enough: Special Yearbook Edition

In order to keep private citizens from unnecessary embarrassment, we’ve chosen to pixelate the face in the above photograph to protect the identity of the poor, unfortunate kid who, thanks to this little mishap, has been revealed to be a complete Nazi son of a bitch.

The Comma: Punctuation's Unsung Hero

The World's Deadliest Drinking Game

About a week ago, we more or less accidentally discovered the deadliest drinking game in the history of human civilization.

We realize this is a bold statement to make, and one that requires a certain amount of qualification. We admit that it is, in fact, possible to create a drinking game more deadly than the one we’ve discovered. Some examples that we absolutely recommend you do not ever, ever try include:

1. That drinking game where you take a shot every time you breathe.
2. The game where you take a sip every time somebody writes something offensive or stupid on the internet.
3. That one that involves turpentine.
4. The one where you re-create a day in the life of Oliver Reed.

The difference here is that the above games are obviously deliberately designed to kill you, whereas our discovery, is intended to be fun and entertaining, with your unavoidable death being merely an accidental if unfortunate side effect.

The single rule of this game is as simple as it is devastasting: listen to Mike Emrick talk, and take a shot every time he says something weird.

Hockey play-by-play announcer Mike Emrick, wo earned the nickname “Doc” after having graduated with a PhD in Phraseology from Thesaurus State University in 1976, is well known among America’s six dozen hockey fans for his enthusiasm for the sport and for his unusually wide-ranging vocabulary. So when this drinking-game rule demands that you take a shot when Emrick says something weird, it doesn’t mean talking (or, God help us, dressing) like Don Cherry. It means, rather, that you should have a drink whenever Emrick uses a puzzling or intriguing replacement for some of the sport’s more mundane verbs.

Let’s face it, there aren’t that many ways to describe propelling or directing a puck with a hockey stick—not for most of us, anyway—so we tend to stick with a small, meat-and-potatoes variety of verbs: Shot. Sent. Passed. Pushed. Bounced. Deflected, flipped, tipped, fed, held, lobbed. That’s about it for most people.

Not for Mike Emrick, though. Emrick seems to view this linguistic limitation as a challenge, and throws out a cavalcade of synonyms as easily and naturally as we might down an impossibly large number of alcoholic beverages.¹

Lest you think we’re exaggerating, the following is a mostly-complete² list of words used by Emrick during his call of the March 10, 2013, NHL game between the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals. Words used more than once are indicated by the numbers in parentheses:

• Knifed (4)
• Careened (2)
• Filtered (6)
• Ricocheted
• Swatted (2)
• Kicked (2)³
• Rocked (2)
• Jammed (3)
• Sailed
• Spiked (4)
• Banked (4)
• Pushed
• Tucked (2)
• Corralled
• Speared (4)
• Chipped (2)
• Nudged (4)
• Squirreled⁴
• Floated (6)
• Plucked
• Popped/plopped (3)
• Flagged (2)
• Muscled (3)
• Cancelled (2)
• Punched (3)
• Hoisted⁵ (5)
• Reversed (2)
• Pitched (3)
• Brushed (2)
• Ripped
• Jabbed (2)
• Stymied
• Dealt (6)
• Paddled (2)
• Batted
• Blistered
• Shuffled (2)
• Shanked (4)
• Padded (2)
• Hacked
• Rattled
• Squibbed
• Lugged (2)
• Trigger-pulled⁶
• Steered (3)
• Chopped
• Scooped
• Spiked
• Slugged
• Shaken
• Twisted
• Angled

Conspicuously absent from this list is “scaled,” which we know from viewing experience is one of Emrick’s favorites. Also worth noting is that near the end of the game, a clearly exhausted and mentally drained Emrick describes a puck as going into the corner. Even the greatest have limits.

So, at the rate of one shot per oddball word,  you have now just consumed 116 shots in the span of a single three-hour game on a Sunday afternoon. Congratulations! You are now dead, unless of course you are Oliver Reed . . . in which case, congratulations! You are now dead.


NOTES
1. When we write “we” here, what we actually mean is “you.” We can stop any time we want. You’re the one with a problem.
2. For some reason, our wife and houseguests seemed to think it was appropriate to talk about hockey when there was a hockey game playing on the TV in our living room, so we were somewhat distracted and can’t guarantee that this list is comprehensive or 100% accurate. But given how little headway has been made in the scientific study of Mike Emrick’s vocabulary, we’re satisfied with our results.
3. As stated above, all of these terms were used to describe propelling or directing a puck with a stick, and not to describe any of the hundreds of other actions possible on a hockey rink, including but not limited to kicking. So in this case, the puck was not kicked in the traditional sense—that is, with, you know, a kick—but rather not-kicked with a stick, in a non-kicking motion.
4. See note 3, above. To the best of our ability to tell, enhanced by repeated slow-motion replay, the puck in question was not, in fact, propelled or directed in any way by a squirrel.
5. In some cases, Emrick may have used the word “foisted.” We are aware that the word “foisted” rarely makes any sense in a hockey context, but that doesn’t mean Emrick didn’t use it.
6. Emrick did not, in fact, use this phrase in the more conventional arrangement of “he pulled the trigger,” but rather as written, along the close lines of “the puck is trigger-pulled down the ice.”

Irony, Illustrated

In his defense, his sign doesn’t say anything about knowing how to write in English.

Irony, Illustrated

To be fair, why would the literacy program try to help newspaper writers? 

They’re not miracle workers.

You’re Quoting Shakespeare, and You Probably Don’t Even Know It

 

 

you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise—why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then—to give the devil his due—if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then—by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts!—it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare. 

—Bernard Levin, from The Story of English

Speling is for Ccks

Brought to You by the Wieners in Washington 

 

Disclaimer: the following column contains photographic evidence of a naughty word that you may well find offensive and/or funny, provided you’re not one of those folks with lifeless, burned-out little cinders where your souls used to be.

Bobby Cox, the longtime manager of the Atlanta Braves, was honored—sort of—by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, May 4, 2010, to commemorate his long and distinguished career in major league baseball. At the end of the 2010 baseball season, Cox will step down from the job he’s held for twenty-five years, during which time he led his team to multiple World Series appearances and one World Championship. Two U.S. Senators, Georgia’s Johnny Isakson and West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller, praised Cox in statements to be entered into the Congressional Record, and then presented Cox with a cake thanking him—sort of—for the half-century he’s dedicated to playing, coaching, and teaching the sport he loves.

I’m encouraged by our two governing parties’ willingness to occasionally put aside their unhealthy partisan bickering and work together in a respectful and possibly even friendly way—Senator Isakson is a Republican, and Rockefeller is a Democrat—and would be even more pleased if they occasionally did so towards some end that wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things, as utterly insignificant as talking about baseball.

Unfortunately, though, the event turned out to be at least as much of a black eye as a feather in anyone’s cap. If you haven’t heard about this already, the cake makers got the Braves manager’s name wrong. And no, they didn’t misspell “Bobby.”¹
 

Whether this was deliberate or an accident is hardly the issue, at least for me. If it was deliberate, it’s certainly a rude and nasty thing to do, and it’s so troubling, childish, and offensive that I doubt I’ll giggle at it for more than a couple more days. What’s more important and disturbing to me—and what should be embarrassing to anybody who caught a look at the cake before it was presented—is that it somehow made it all the way from the cake shop to the Capitol without being noticed, mentioned, or corrected. The odds against this happening should be astronomical, for several reasons:

1. Only three managers in baseball history (Connie Mack, John McGraw, and Tony LaRussa) have more wins than Bobby Cox. No other manager in history can match his fifteen division titles. He’s a four-time Manager of the Year, and has won five National League championships and one World Series, having beaten the equally-insensitively-named Cleveland Indians in 1995. In other words, he’s pretty well known, and if you’re not immediately familiar with his name or who he is, he’s quite easy to look up online. Seriously, try it yourself. If it takes you more than about six seconds to find the right way to spell his name, either your computer is broken or you're some sort of stupid cock.

2. Nobody on Earth has ever, ever had the last name of “Cocks.” Seriously. And anybody who isn’t aware of this fact isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, allowed to work in government because they are—that’s right—stupid cocks.

3. A pretty typical going rate for first-class proofreading is around $25 per hour. The time it takes to read “Thanks For 50 Great years, Bobby Cocks”—seven words—is approximately 4 seconds, or just under $0.03 for the whole job.² Three cents to keep the folks in our government from looking like really, really stupid cocks is money well spent.

4. The estimated budget for the U.S. government for fiscal year end 2010 is 3.552 trillion dollars. If my math holds up, the cost to hire (for example) me to proofread this cake would have represented right around 0.0000000000008% of our national budget. Or to put it a different way, it would have cost three cents (see above). I paid more than three cents in taxes this year, so the government has the money . . . and even if the government didn’t have the money, has that ever stopped them before?

5. While I’m not intimately familiar with the paths baked goods take through Capitol Hill security, I have to imagine that at some point this cake probably would have been taken out of its box and actually looked at, possibly poked at or scanned to make sure it wasn’t actually a delicious but deadly explosive. All it took was one page, or aide, or lobbyist, or security dude with a wand to look at it and say to somebody “hey, you do realize that this word means ‘dicks,’ right?” And that didn’t happen

I suppose I’m making this a bigger deal than it really is,³ and I understand that this particular typo didn’t appear on, say, landmark legislation or a nuclear anti-proliferation treaty—as far as we know—but if nobody out there has the brains to notice an embarrassing, offensive, and obvious misspelling of a famous man’s very simple name, what the hell kinds of mistakes are we allowing into our nuclear anti-proliferation treaties?

As embarrassing as this is, we should all be thankful that the cake people were asked only to write out the guy’s name. If they’d been told to draw a picture of Cox, who knows what we would have ended up with. I certainly wouldn’t have posted it here.⁴

NOTES

1. Photo from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, used without permission but also without malice, intent to defraud, or possibility of financial gain, and all in the spirit of good fun.

2. For what it’s worth, the letter F in “For” should not be capitalized, and the letter Y in “Years” should be.

3. Just like a typical guy.

4. For the record, lest you think I’m a Braves fan, I’m not. I’m still mad that they beat the Rockies in the 1995 Wild Card round, and the Tomahawk Chop may well be the stupidest thing on Earth—D.C.-area cake decorators not included.

Knowledge is Power

One of the many intriguing observations Carl Sagan makes in his bestselling 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is that slaves in the pre-Civil War United States of America were not permitted to learn to read. This in itself is not exactly a revelation—I imagine that it’s more or less common knowledge—but how Sagan relates this fact to modern-day America, where most of us were told from a very young age that knowledge is power, is keenly insightful and more than a little disconcerting. As Sagan put it, quoting Frederick Douglass along the way, this

was a most revealing rule: Slaves were to remain illiterate. In the Antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. “[To] make a contented slave,” [Douglass] wrote, “it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.” This is why slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reason and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Now, it’s probably fair to say that being fined or whipped—or even both—isn’t as harsh a penalty as being, say, sent to prison or killed (or both), but it’s also fair to say that these punishments are exceedingly vicious given that they were meted out for teaching someone to read, an activity so contemptibly familiar that distressingly large numbers of unashamed Americans don’t even bother with it anymore.

According to a poll released in 2007 by Associated Press–Ipsos, 27% of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2006. Now, reading at a pace of a single page per day would be enough to get through an average-length book in a year. That’s less than five hundred words a day—maybe five minutes’ worth of work for a slow reader—but roughly 80 million Americans either couldn’t do that or didn’t bother to try.¹

Granted, this statistic applies only to book-reading, so it’s very possible that some or all of those 80 million people read something else over the course of 2006. American readers have thousands of magazines to choose from and at least five or six surviving newspapers to read, not to mention millions of street signs, cereal boxes, and insightful billboards.

And some of this decline in book-reading could be attributed to the Internet, where the staggering volume of free and easily accessible reading material at least somewhat compensates, one could argue, for its dubious relevance, quality, or sanity. But be honest: do you really think that folks who don’t read books (or magazines, newspapers, or cereal boxes) go online to find reading material?

Neither do I.²

And granted, that AP-Ipsos poll is from three years ago; it’s possible that since 2006, some of those millions of non-readers have turned things around. Given how easy it is (or, at least, should be) to go from reading zero books a year to reading one—by my math, a net increase of just one book—a measurable improvement here should be a piece of cake. But it seems at least likely that reading in the United States of America—much like common sense, common courtesy, the 33⅓ RPM record, the barbershop quartet, and the leprechaun—runs the risk of continuing to dwindle into insignificance. That’s dangerous, Sagan tells us, and while he’s focusing mainly on scientific literacy in The Demon-Haunted World—rather just on literacy in general—I’m inclined to agree with him.

An illiterate society is an ignorant one; an ignorant society is an illogical and superstitious one, easily swayed by hucksters, tricksters, charlatans, demagogues, and dictators. Knowledge really is power, and ignorance is slavery.

In The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan draws connecting lines between laughable (and sometimes horrible), obvious superstitions of our past to their surviving descendents, the superstitions and pseudoscience of today. As he sees it, Dark Ages humanity’s belief in demons (specifically succubi and incubi),³ astrology, and witch-burnings don’t differ significantly from modern humanity’s fixations on the “face” on Mars, alien abductions, astrology (still alive and kicking, for some reason), the healing powers of crystals and magnetism, the Bible Code,⁴ Ouija boards, the “lost continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria,⁵ and pretty much every word ever printed in the Weekly World News.

There are plenty of ways to have your mind taken away from you—you could trash it with drugs and alcohol; you could be struck by an anvil or a falling piano, Tom and Jerry–style; you could, like Phineas Gage, have a giant metal rod explode through your skull; you could have your head ripped off by bloodthirsty Care Bears.⁶ But don’t just give it away for nothing. Our abilities to learn and to reason are what makes us human—that and some crazy genetic bullshit I won’t even try to understand⁷—don’t let ’em take them from you without a fight.

NOTES

1. Some time ago—probably right around the time the AP-Ipsos poll came out, in fact—I had a brief conversation with a woman who claimed, without embarrassment, to have read only five books in her lifetime. She was probably in her early thirties, and had had to read a couple of the books for school—two books in (presumably) twenty-four semesters being not a particularly bruising pace—and one of the other three on her list was a book on the Atkins Diet. Call me picky, but I don’t think that counts.
2. To be fair, I suspect that readers and non-readers alike go online for roughly the same things: a. porn, b. shopping, c. porn shopping, d. fantasy football, e. porn . . . x. to settle bets, y. to check e-mail, and finally z. for insightful reading material.
3. Sagan makes a very convincing connection between the Dark Ages’ succubi and incubi (horny little demons who, although their existence was commonly accepted, went completely undetected by anybody except the humans they seduced in the night) and today’s alien abductors (horny little bald aliens who probe their victims quite thoroughly and rudely). These aliens have apparently mastered space, time, travel across impossible distances, and the ability to slip silently and undetected from the exosphere through skies blanketed by radar by a watchful military, all the way down through solid walls and into your bedroom . . . and they're sex-obsessed but haven’t the faintest clue what’s going on with human biology. If it's generally (of not universally) accepted nowadays that these demons were mere myths, why are we any more willing to give credence to their little grey-skinned descendants?
4. Sagan doesn’t mention the Bible Code in The Demon-Haunted World; that addition is mine. I hope sooner or later to share my thoughts on the subject, once I figure out more or less what they are.
5. Think Atlantis, but in the Indian Ocean. Or possibly the Pacific. An old roommate of mine once told me, at great length, about the “serious” book he was reading about the search for Atlantis. I still don’t know whether to cringe at the subject matter and at how ready he was to believe it, or just be happy that he was reading.
6. Don’t even try to tell me you don’t think this could happen.
7. I’m using irony here. Get it?