Effing Swear Words

Oxford Languages defines swear words as “a word of a kind used to express anger or other strong emotion and regarded as coarse, blasphemous, or otherwise unacceptable in polite or formal speech.” Coarse speech is stated as being “lacking in refinement; crude or vulgar” (accompanied by the sound of pearls being clutched) … Oh, my! “Blasphemous speech” is “speech against God or sacred things” which we cannot have here in the U.S., a secular country. Of course, religious minorities have their own rules, but they do not apply in general. And “Unacceptable” … to whom is it so?

In other words, swear words are, as George Carlin indicated … “Bad Words.” Mr. Carlin became famous because of a routine he called “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” In that diatribe he stated his opinion, that there were no bad words.

In the Anglo-American language traditions, we are still suffering from the Norman conquest of England in 1066. When the Normans took over, the “rulers” spoke French (Normandy being in western France as we know it today) and the conquered peoples spoke English (… and Welsh, and … Gaelic, etc.). To address the court one necessarily spoke in French or hired someone who could because speaking English to the ruling class was just so vulgar. This is, by the way, we have the still stupid legal doublets like “cease and desist,” and “null and void,” and “aid and abet,” “last will and testament,” etc. when the two terms mean the same damned thing. The legal system had to serve to two populations, the rulers and the ruled, so doublespeak became popular.

Swear words are often referred to as “profanity,” which harkens back to “the sacred and the profane” and the definition (Source: Oxford Languages: relating or devoted to that which is not sacred or biblical; secular rather than religious) tells us that profanity is something to be striven for … in a secular country.

What prompted this post was a comment from a sincere follower of this blog that I had seemed to be using more profanity than I had in the past. S’truth, I have. Profanities like “Fuck Trump, Our War Mongering President” seem to just flow out of me.

Since I do not wish to be discourteous, I will examine whether my use of language is necessary to make my point. If the chosen swear words do not seem to be needed, I will pare them out.

More Legal Doublets (for you fans of such)
Cease and desist: Stop an action and do not resume it.
Null and void: Having no legal force; invalid.
Aid and abet: To assist in committing a crime.
Terms and conditions: Provisions of a contract.
Fit and proper: Suitable for a position.
Give and bequeath: Transfer property via a will.
Force and effect: Valid and binding.
Mind and memory: Mental capacity.
Breaking and entering: Illegal entry into a premises.
Assault and battery: Physical threat and unlawful physical contact.
Will and testament: A document declaring a person’s wishes for their property after death.
Each and every: All individual parts.
Free and clear: Without encumbrances (e.g., in real estate).
Heirs and successors: Those who inherit or take over a position.
Wear and tear: Depreciation from normal use.
Order and direct: A directive from a court or authority.
Indemnify and hold harmless: To secure against loss.

Postscript Most of Carlin’s seven words are of Anglo-Saxon origin, which tells us something about prejudice.

Why is the Idea of a Self So Puzzling?

In consciousness studies, the idea of a self is bandied about. Some say it is an illusion, others say, well, very different things. I am not well-versed in the literature of consciousness or “the self” but it seems fairly obvious as to what is going on, at least to me, which may be a sign I am completely mistaken.

The idea of “the self” seems a simple matter of access.

Evolution has shaped us both physically and mentally. (I use the word “shaped” because theists have ruined the word “designed.”) It seems obvious to me that prey animals, such as our species, need a capacity to remember. If I eat a particular plant and am sick as a dog for days after, if I can’t remember that experience, that experience has no value to my survivability. Similarly, the idiot who sees a tiger and goes “Here, kitty, kitty” to the lovely pussycat is unlikely to survive. We don’t need to perform that experiment ourselves, just observe others doing it. But we need to be able to remember it.

Once memory is established, the ground has been laid for the development of imagination (and we are not the only species which imagines, something all dog owners can appreciate). Imaginings are nothing more than synthetic memories. If we can create memories, it isn’t a huge leap to creating possible memories, say involving scenarios with that tiger which has moved into my neighborhood. Imagination is a huge advantage to a prey animal, giving them multiple “memories” to use to choose future actions from. (We also then need a way to distinguish real memories from synthetic ones, but details, details….)

To do all of this we must become aware of our thoughts, whatever those are. (I wish we had a better theory of thoughts, rather than putting all of our eggs in consciousness research baskets.) And then comes the so-called “Theory of Mind” which is when we look into the eyes of a fellow human being and register that there is someone home, someone with memories, imaginings, thoughts, the whole magilla, just like us. But we do not have access to those memories, thoughts, etc. It really does seem, however, like those others have them. (When languages evolved to be able to convey complex information, sharing one’s memories of a recently deceased loved one or a special successful hunt, certainly undergirds the idea that “others” have their own memories, because they aren’t exactly like our own.)

Recognizing all of this means that there is an access wall around us, and we assume around “them,” too. We have our memories, thoughts, etc. and they have theirs. This is sufficient to establish the idea of “self,” mine and thine.

So, why is this mysterious?

And being able to recall memories, real or imagined, implies a framework being established to make that possible and such a framework can’t be very far from being able to create and recognize one’s own thoughts, I would think.

If we only knew what the fuck thoughts were (prototype synthetic memories, aka imaginings, what?)!

Of course, I could be wrong … as I have proven many times in the past.

But, But, But …

The current theoretical darlings of cosmologists are dark matter and dark energy, even though there are no identifiable causes for their existence or mechanisms for their effects. Dark matter was conjectured because of phenomena observed that could only be explained by either the law of gravity varying from place to place or some new mysterious source of gravitational force existing, one that we cannot see. Well, everyone knew that gravity, or the law describing its effects, must be the same everywhere, so they settled for the mysterious source of gravitational force.

The same goes for dark energy. Since they believe space is expanding (specifically space-time, but only between galaxies, not within them) they were perplexed when their measurements showed the rate of expansion was increasing. Now, with no mechanism or description of how a non-material thing like “space” could expand, they came up with another mysterious force: dark energy, again something that we cannot observe, but is causing the expansion of space-time to accelerate.

But now, as the blog EarthSkyNews reports: “A new analysis of nearly 2,100 supernovas hints that dark energy – the mysterious influence driving the expansion of the universe – might change strength over time. If so, it would point to surprising new physics that could affect the fate of the universe.”

What the fuck, Cosmo-nerds? Gravity cannot vary from place to place but dark energy can? Apparently they haven’t noticed that if one peruses the problems by speculating that gravity can vary, most everything falls into place and no weird conjectures need be made. I guess they really like the rabbit hole they have plunged into. Now where did that damned White Rabbit go?

Postscript Would it break their spirits to say “the hypothetical mysterious influence driving the expansion of the universe” or the mysterious influence conjectured to be driving the expansion of the universe”? Scientists do tend to talk about hypotheticals as if they were real because everyone in their audience knew what was what. (“Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?”) but this is wildly inappropriate for things written for lay audience. What were their editors thinking?

Have You Watched “The Swarm”?

I started watching a series on Max last night entitled “The Swarm.” It is an ecological catastrophe, set in locations around the world: Canada, England, France, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Belgium(?), with a large cast of characters. Central to the action so far are scientists, my people, and I have no complaint about how they are being treated as they are being treated maybe a bit better than we deserve, but I do have a complaint.

To see if others had the same complaint, I searched the Internet for complaints about the show, and a cursory inspection of some of those didn’t show anyone with the same gripe I have. Interesting.

My gripe is that when people with different mother tongues get together, they speak English. This I can hear and read in the CC. The Canadian characters speak English, although one First Peoples character speaks his native tongue to other members of his community.

My gripe is that when characters of the same country get together they speak their native languages: Italians speak Italian, the French speak French, and so on which is absolutely expected … and my bitch is that there is no translation. The language settings are “English w/ English CC.” That’s it.

When viewing foreign made films, my preference is to hear the native tongues and read the English translations. I am not a big fan of stuffing English into the mouths of people speaking a different language. But I have lost maybe 20% of the dialogue so far as I am not a polyglot. (I speak a little German and Spanish, read a bit more, but the characters speak so fast that I can only pick up a few words.)

Do any of you have this same problem with “The Swarm”? The lack of similar gripes in my cursory Internet search suggests that maybe this is a Max production problem and that earlier viewers didn’t have this problem. Also I pondered that this may be an experiment to show folks how others feel when not adept in your language.

Is Consciousness Beyond Understanding?

The trigger for this post was the sentence: “How this organ (the brain) produces consciousness remains highly mysterious.”

One could (should?) have said “How this organ produces consciousness remains as yet unknown.” To refer to the source of consciousness as mysterious is iffy in that the definition of “mystery” is:

1. a : something not understood or beyond understanding (Source: Merriam-Webster Online)

The “something not understood” part is fine, but “beyond understanding” is ridiculous and that is the part that most people think of when they hear the term “mysterious.” So, that post-inducing sentence is a loaded claim. And as a fan of the English language the modifier “highly” makes no sense when applied to the “not understood” part but works with the “beyond understanding” part more, so the focus is shifted there again.

How would one go about determining that something is “beyond understanding”? How long would you have to try to understand something to reach this state? How many people would be required for the effort? How much money needs to be spent in the effort? These are questions I bring up when people claim “science cannot explain … <fill in the blank here>.” In order to understand something scientifically, there must be people working on “the problem” for a substantial amount of time as well as money to be spent in the effort. Look at the questions answered by billion dollar atom smashers. Those questions could not be answered before those machines were built, no matter how hard someone thought, there just wasn’t enough data of the appropriate kind. If thinking hard was all that was needed, the ancient Greeks would have developed quantum mechanics.

I suggest that the problem of consciousness has been seriously studied only since the invention of brain scanners, ca. 1970-1975. Prior to that all we had were electroencephalograms (EEGs) as data and they are hardly up to the task. So, we have been scientifically studying consciousness for about 50 years. Since this is a tough problem, it will probably take another 50 or even 100 years to crack it. Until the problem is cracked, we do not even know which data are important and which are not.

It sure as Hell doesn’t help to declare anything to be “beyond understanding” because there is no way to determine whether that is true or not, it is just a claim of impotence … on the speaker’s/writer’s part.

Sometimes a Blurb is Enough—The Transformative Power of Near-Death Experiences

Note—This series is an attempt on my part to sift through books which are readable from those that are not. Steve

The Transformative Power of Near-Death Experiences: How the Messages of NDEs Can Positively Impact the World by Penny Sartori and Kelly Walsh

Discover the positive effects of NDEs in this “well-written and thought-provoking” study full of near-death experience true stories (Anita Moorjani, New York Times–bestselling author of Dying to Be Me).

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are often transformative—not only on an individual level, but on a collective level too. This book contains a selection of inspiring stories from ordinary people whose extraordinary experiences have changed the course and direction of their lives, opening each and every one of them to the power of divine love.

Recent years have seen a dramatic change of attitude towards near-death experiences. Unfortunately, the ongoing debates about near-death experiences have detracted greatly from their transformational effects and how empowering they can be for the whole of mankind. For those who experience them, near-death experiences often instill the knowledge that we are all interconnected and part of one great whole.

This book aims to inspire people from all walks of life, creeds, cultures, and faiths to the transformational power of the message of near-death experiences—and to show how the love experienced during the NDE has the capacity to heal minds, bodies and souls.

That’s the blurb.

So, even though the subtitle of the book includes “How the Messages of NDEs Positively Impact the World” the blurb goes on to say “Unfortunately, the ongoing debates about near-death experiences have detracted greatly from their transformational effects and how empowering they can be for the whole of mankind.”

So, this book is a plan for how NDEs can impact the world because they haven’t as yet done that? If they can, why haven’t they? Why is a plan needed?

As I have said often enough that I do not deny that people have experiences when they have brushes with death, but I struggle with their interpretations, for example: “I saw a bright white light and felt loved and accepted, it must have been Jesus” (a paraphrase from memory).

I also know that Air Force pilots undergoing centrifuge training (to prepare them for the effects of high speed maneuvers in jet fighters) report seeing a bright white light and feeling really really good just before passing out. The trainers found this out when they saw pilots getting back in line for another go and debriefed them. The explanation is that as the blood supply to the brain diminished, the optical range of the eyes was diminished and the body was flooded with feel-good endorphins because clearly the pilot was in deadly danger. Resulting in only seeing a bright white light and feeling very calm and loved.

Religious experiences are one thing; their interpretation an entirely different thing. Even calling an experience a “religious” experience is an interpretation.

Quite some time ago I read a great deal about NDEs and found them fascinating. Religious, no, fascinating, yes. But then I seem to be quite resistant to the charms of religions.

Compact Yet Weird

I am taking about the English language. Consider Exhibit One (see photo below):

This is the back cover of a box a manual bread slicer was shipped in. There is marketing stuff in six different languages: German (upper left), English (lower left), French (upper middle), Italian (lower middle), Spanish (upper right) and Dutch (I think—lower right). All say the same thing, at least to the best of my ability to discern that.

And relax, I don’t expect you to be able to read the texts, I just want you to consider the amount of space they take up. The English version takes up the least space, German the most and the others in between. I discovered this interesting fact, that English is a compact language, but a bitch to learn I am told (too many weird grammatical rules, irregular verbs, and weird spellings).

I learned this when we got the brazen idea to publish our archery magazine, Archery Focus, in four European languages. The magazine sold all over the world but only to an English-reading audience. And, for example, archery is way more popular in France than it is in the U.S. and also popular in Spain, Germany, and Italy (less so). So we hooked up with a European partner who arranged for the translations. As soon as the text of the magazine was available, I emailed it off to our partner, who then directed it to his translators, then the translations came back to me and I had to lay them out, make PDF versions, and post them to our website. In the masterplan we were to seek out adverts from archery suppliers in those countries but we never got that far. The biggest problem we had were basically unreliable translators (or they weren’t being paid enough to direct their full attention).

So, some versions got made, others did not. We also immediately had subscription problems, mostly in a country I won’t mention (Italy). Our software shut down a subscriber when three or more people logged in simultaneously using the same pass codes. The first subscription sold in Italy set a record in having eleven people logging in within hours, using the same pass codes.

We tried a great many things to promote the success of that magazine. Maybe the time wasn’t right. Maybe we weren’t the right people to do it. Maybe the idea was bad. I don’t know.

What I learned is that each of these languages needs different amounts of space to post an article. And you can ask any layout artist whether they can just shove a larger amount of text into a small space and make it fit by adjusting line spacing, letter spacing, the font used, etc. and they will tell you, sure … but I won’t do it. Such practices go under the heading of “Stealing Sheep,” I believe in New Zealand and are generally frowned upon.

I had to move things around, even add pages from time to time, which is a luxury we couldn’t do in the old days when magazines were only printed on paper. You couldn’t add just a single page, you had to add a signature, usually eight pages, because of the way pages were printed, folded, stitched, and stapled, etc. But with electronic publishing, add a page? Sure, no problem.

I spent many an hour sweating bullets fitting the type in place. And then, well proofreading was almost impossible. Proofreaders should be native language speakers, well educated in the topic being read as well. Hell, even mainstream publishers can’t afford proofreaders now, relying on copy editors and spellcheckers instead (which is why so many typos show up in the books and magazines you read). The only proofreader we could afford was me and thank goodness, the layout software I was using, Quark XPress, was designed for multilingual publishing and had dictionaries available in all of those languages. Of course, many of the specialized terms that applied only to archery were not in those dictionaries and so I had to go chase them down, creating my own archery concordance. (The International Archery Federation was once sited in Geneva, Switzerland and they produced an English-French archery dictionary because that organization was bilingual (like Quebec in Canada), but that was the only one. Long after this experiment died, I finally managed to acquire a copy of that dictionary, but I gave it to a French author as an enticement fro her to write for us. I regret not having a copy and maybe should have Xeroxed it before I mailed it to her, but that is also “stealing sheep” as it is still under copyright.)

Save the . . . Languages?

An article in The Guardian began with these words:

Every year, the world loses some of its 7,000 languages. Parents stop speaking them to their children, words are forgotten and communities lose the ability to read their own scripts. The rate of loss is quickening, from one every three months a decade ago to one every 40 days in 2019 – meaning nine languages die a year.

The UN’s culture agency, UNESCO, says predictions that half the world’s languages will have died out by the end of the century are optimistic.

Half of the world’s languages will die out . . . are you alarmed? I am not.

There are valid reasons for preserving some languages, at a bare minimum to be able to translate texts in those languages, and there are many other reasons: the embedding of a culture into a language, and so on.

But as time goes on, there seem to be fewer and fewer global issues and almost everything has repercussions on a much larger scope. Consequently more collaboration and cooperation will be needed as we go forward. And what keeps us apart more than not having a shared language?

And even when we have a shared language, we struggle with having shared meanings. I commented on a blog in which the author declared herself to be “apolitical” which to her meant “not affiliated with any political institution or organization.” She got blowback from a commenter who disagreed with her. From my viewpoint the commenter was using another definition of the term, namely: “not interested or involved in politics.” The blog’s owner was definitely interested in politics but considered herself not to be ideologically linked to any side in any dispute. The same word had two different meanings, similar but different, and thus a communication block occurred.

Communication is hard, very hard.

Communicating via 7,000 different languages is folly. Maybe three would be tolerable, certainly fewer than 10, but seven thousand?

As to these expiring languages I must quote Ivan Drago, “if it dies, it dies.” (Actually Drago said “if he dies, he dies” but you get the idea.) If the native speakers of these languages cannot garner enough support amongst them (or convince a few billionaires to take on the task), then their language will die. It is normal. It is natural. And it is not worth making a global effort to make sure any of them survive.

The True Source of Everlasting Life

“If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth writing.”

(Poor Richard, aka Benjamin Franklin)

Strange Utterances

I run across quotes every day which are puzzling, for example “There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.” (Leonora Carrington) I understand the sentiment but the concept is incoherent. These kinds of things pop up many times a day, things like “Science cannot explain . . .” and “God is unknowable.”

I will argue otherwise. If you can’t put it in words, you don’t understand what it is you are talking about. It is not the mode of communication which is weak, it is your use of it.

Art is definitely a mode of expression that communicates and if there are things about a piece of art which are unsayable, why is so much written about those pieces of art? The experience of a piece of art isn’t all that hard to put into words. And I understand that trying to create the experience of seeing a piece of art with words instead is a fool’s errand. It is intellectual synesthesia, like trying to explain a taste as a touch or a sound as a pain.

Sure, there are plenty of things that are very hard to translate into words, but gosh we seem to do that on a daily basis.

And I always ask when confronted with such sentiments, “How do you know that?” So, your god is unknowable? How did you learn that? How did the person who taught you that learn that? It is the same with the phrase “Science cannot explain <fill in the blank>.” How can one possible conclude such a thing? First, has science tried to explain that thing? If not, then how do you know it cannot? If science has tried to explain a thing and has not, then all you can say is that science has not explained that thing yet. A common utterance is that “science cannot explain consciousness” when all one can conclude is that “science has not yet explained consciousness.” Of course science has only been trying to do that for a century or so, while philosophy has been trying for several millennia (and failed). And “other ways of knowing” also haven’t crack the nut of consciousness.

Most of these statements seem to be sourced in a desire for there to be mysteries in our lives but the statements are simply wishful thinking. As to art, we now have tools, these whacko AI illustration generators, which take words and translate them into “art.” Could it be that art and words are merely translations of the same thing, and all translations are imperfect, apparently? So, could one of those AI thingamajigs turn a piece of art into words and thus make it sayable?

Is great puzzlement. And, I guess, I have made more than a few claims that were not supported at the time, so I am not free of this sin.