What it is, what it's not

I shall start this entry with a disclaimer. The purpose of this exercise is to remember what I'm saying when I'm saying something. This is not a proclamation condemning people who use strong words lightly, and I'm not even saying I don't do the same. I make this disclaimer because this is an expression I catch myself using a lot, one a lot of other folks use, and I don't want to make people feel all guilty and icky.

So, without further apologies, here's the new feature I'm calling "What it is, what it's not."

OCD


What is: Obsessive-compulsive disorder. A serious and sometimes debilitating mental disorder characterized by severe anxiety combined with behaviors aimed at alleviating that anxiety. 


What it's not: Perfectionism, meticulousness, focus, caution, idiosyncrasy, fastidiousness, or attention to detail.


For instance:


If you wash your hands for a really long time because you don't want to get sick, you're fastidious. If you wash your hands until they bleed and still feel like you're crawling with germs, you may have OCD.


If you proofread a paper half a dozen times before you turn it in, you're meticulous. If you're so afraid of typos that you're terrified to write the paper, and it's jeopardizing your academic career, you may have OCD.


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You know what's weird that just occurred to me? We're so prudish that we call rooms with toilets "bathrooms," but little old ladies use the word "anal" in polite conversation. I don't know about you, but I'd way rather think about a toilet than an anus. Toilets can be clean and shiny, and anuses (actually ani, if we're being technical, I think)... not so much.


Ever wonder where this one came from? I mean, if someone's all meticulous and obsessed with details, you don't really associate that kind of person with gross body parts. Well, I don't anyway. This one's got Freud written all over it. His theory is that people who are all meticulous and fussy as grown ups didn't like to poop when they were babies - they were anal retentive. He also said that people who liked to poop when they were kids could turn out to be artistic, free-wheeling, loud... they were anal expulsive. So anal could really apply to either. Making me anal. Rock.


Funny thing about Freud... while his research and writings on psychology were ground-breaking, a lot of his theories, like the whole childhood pooping thing, have been dismissed by later research and stuff. Yet his theories - like the one about big cars compensating for small naughty bits - are immortal in pop culture. 


Maybe my next entry won't involve poop...

Potty Mouth

Before prohibition, women weren't allowed in saloons. Prohibition comes along, all bets are off, and now everybody's allowed in saloons, because saloons aren't allowed to exist. Ladies are in saloons for the first time, and since there are ladies, there need to be bathrooms (because where women go, bathrooms always follow, of course). They often slapped these bathrooms together in some tiny corner, and these little bathrooms were called powder rooms. Why powder rooms? Danial Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, doesn't say. What's more, my online resources, as usual, disagree. That's just about all they seem good for. On a related note, are you aware that an individual subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary is like $300 a year? Not cool. But I digress, as usual.

Anyway, I'd assumed that the term "powder room" was the twisted child of the Victorian era, a magical time in which "Chicken Breast" was a swear word and "blouse" was unspeakable. We'll have a long talk about the Victorians later, don't you worry.

At any rate, this got me thinking that the term "bathroom" itself is a quaintly euphemistic. I mean, we use the word for rooms in which it's really hard to take a bath. Unless you're tiny, I suppose. I like the Euro "water closet," because that's really what they are, sans bodily functions. 

Wikipedia tells me that the word "toilet" descends from the French word toile, for a towel used in hair care, and then toilette, for a dressing stand (on which sat a toile, I'm assuming). So that's even sillier than "bathroom" in terms of naming stuff after things only tangentially related to what they are, in the name of having to not talk about what it's really for. Oh yeah, I just dangled a preposition. Watch me go.

In grade school, we were supposed to call the bathroom the "lav," which comes from the Latin verb "to wash," so it and bathroom are basically synonyms, although one's in another language, so I guess that makes it less icky. 

I think we should just call a thing what it is and say "excretory room." 

Would you believe I don't have an appropriate photo for this one?

Skin

I think I was about six years old when I figured out I was white. I knew that black and white existed, but it didn't occur to me that it had anything to do with skin color - after all, I'd never met anybody with black or white skin, only shades of peach and brown. 

Yesterday I heard an interview with a dude named Guy P Harrison, who wrote the book  Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know About Our Biological Diversity. He said that when Irish immigrants first came to America, they weren't designated as white. They weren't good enough to be white. So that explains that.

The interview was pretty lengthy and it really gave me a lot to think about. I'd like to actually read the book before I talk much about it, but he says there's no such thing as race, scientifically speaking, and the differences we perceive between the races are due more to society than biology. 

The only thing we have to fear...

I've never been a fan the term "homophobia." Unlike terms like "racist" or "sexist," the word "homophobia" implies that gay people are to be feared. It makes hatred of gay people seem less like bigotry and more like caution.


Further, it implies that bigotry against people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (GLBT) is different from other "-isms"; racism, sexism, and agism. These words are associated with hate and bigotry, generally accepted to be bad things. Phobias, on the other hand are neutral things, they don't reflect badly on fearer. 


And of course, the term itself doesn't make sense. The prefix "homo" means "same," so "homophobia" isn't fear of homosexuals, it's fear of "the same." Actually, maybe that does make sense. Perhaps so-called homophobes are afraid that people who are GLBT are, in fact, equal to them. Maybe homophobes are afraid that people who are GLBT will live in the same neighborhoods as them, go to the same schools, have the same rights. Maybe homophobes are afraid of finding out they're not all that different than the folks they hate.


Or maybe homophobia is a different animal from hatred of gay people. Maybe homophobes are just folks who are afraid because they don't understand. Or maybe they're people who have been taught to fear people who are gay and haven't yet learned any different. I mean, I was afraid of sushi the first time I tried it. That may be a bad example since I hate sushi, but I think you get my meaning. Maybe calling someone a homophobe rather than a gay hater means there's hope for them yet. Or maybe calling someone a homophobe is an unfair label. Maybe we should use people-first language and call them people who are afraid. Or maybe I'm rambling.


The Internet tells me that the term first appeared in the late sixties or early seventies, and every etymology site out there credits another person for coining the term. And it probably gained traction due to the fact that "homoism" and "gayism" sound fairly silly. I've heard "heterosexism" and "sexual prejudice," but I think the best way to resolve the issue is to eliminate the sentiment.


Maybe we should change the vocabulary of hate altogether. Maybe we should just call hate hate. Racists aren't racists, they're people who hate. And heterosexists are people who hate. And sexists are people who hate. Perhaps that makes me a hatist.

Flame on!

You may find this hard to believe, but I have a few literary pet peeves. A few. Exclamation proliferation is right at the top.

It goes without saying that more than one punctuation mark at the end of a sentence is one too many, no matter how strong a sentiment you're trying to get across. Oh, I've slipped up on occasion; it's laziness, really. I don't want to put the effort into using words that show I'm emphatic, so I'll slather my sentence with cheap punctuation and hope no one notices. One exclamation mark will do, thank you. Any more, and you're just using superfluous punctuation to compensate for lack of willingness or ability to state a position effectively.

But it's not just glaring punctuation violations that bug me. In e-mails where I work, everybody says "thanks!" when we mean "thanks." This isn't illegal or improper or anything, but it's dangerous. Generally, when I'm sending a "Thanks!" message, I'm thanking someone for telling me how to update a router firmware, and while I do appreciate this sort of information, it's not worth breaking out the pompoms, unless you're really into firmware (*cough*that's what she said*cough*). But if you don't conform to the punctuation expectation, you might seem ungrateful or sarcastic. I mean, you could say "Thanks. :)," but I think that's probably worse.

The real problem to all of this is, what do you do if you are emphatic about your gratitude? If you send me a box of chocolates, that's way better than information about router firmware. How do you express that? You'd have to say "Thanks!!" which, as I mention above, is a grammar felony. It's inflation, is what it is. Pretty soon we'll be taking a basket of punctuation to the market and having our baskets stolen, punctuation strewn all over the ground.

Who is to blame for punctuation inflation? I have a hypothesis, but it's one that makes me very sad. I think it may be comic books. Now I call it a hypothesis because, while comic books have committed horrific crimes against punctuation for many years, I'm not sure if those crimes found their way to the mainstream. Seriously, though? Marvel Comics seemed to have issued a ban on ending sentences with periods that lasted through the sixties and the seventies. And I don't mean that hyperbolically. I didn't have a lot of friends when I was a kid, apparently, because once, I counted all the exclamation marks in X-Men Issue 1. 551. It's almost as sad that I did that as it is that I still remember it. I've got a mouldering X-Men comic from the 70s in which there is not one single period. Heaping helpings of hyphens, dashes, and ellipses, though. To go with the roughly 20 exclamation marks a page. Yeah, I counted. Shut up.

That's all I got to say. Excelsior, ya'll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Search for...

A McGuffin (or MacGuffin) is an element, usually an object, in a movie, that serves no other purpose than to move the plot along. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term; he explained the term in an interview thusly:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

Quote courtesy of thequietus.com

Some of my favorite McGuffins:

The Maltese Falcon, the Maltese Falcon - The falcon was said to be important because underneath the black enamel, there are a bunch of gems. Lot of time and effort could have been saved if Sam Spade and the gang had just gotten together and robbed a bank.

Pulp Fiction, the briefcase - I've heard more enterprising fans postulate that the briefcase contained Marsellus' soul (which had been pulled out through the back of his head, hence the bandage). At any rate, we never find out what's in the thing... and it bugs me to this day.

Saving Private Ryan, Private Ryan - I'm not saying it wasn't a great movie, but the quest to save Matt Damon's character was really secondary to the recreation of the storming of the beach of Normandy. On a related note, I'm still a little queasy from watching it... twelve years ago.

And of course, there's the Holy Grail:

 There have been volumes written on the topic, on what it is, what it symbolizes, and so forth, and I'm not going to add to them. But I suppose my favorite Grail story is the one in the movie The Fisher King. In it, the main characters go on a mad quest for the Grail, which turns out to be a trophy on some dude's shelf. I liked this version of the Grail because it didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was, and the filmmakers didn't use that coy The Lady-or-the-Tiger cop-out. The Grail was the journey, and that's all that was needed.

Pic is from outside the grocery store. They'll let you take pictures for a long time before they start looking at you funny.

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This here is one of the stories of the grail, as told by Parry, Robin Williams' character from The Fisher King

It begins with the king as a boy, having to spend the night alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king. Now while he is spending the night alone he's visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the holy grail, symbol of God's divine grace. And a voice said to the boy, "You shall be keeper of the grail so that it may heal the hearts of men." But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power and glory and beauty. And in this state of radical amazement he felt for a brief moment not like a boy, but invincible, like God, so he reached into the fire to take the grail, and the grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire to be terribly wounded. Now as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper. Until one day, life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man, not even himself. He couldn't love or feel loved. He was sick with experience. He began to die. One day a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. And being a fool, he was simple minded, he didn't see a king. He only saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king, "What ails you friend?" The king replied, "I'm thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat". So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink, he realized his wound was healed. He looked in his hands and there was the holy grail, that which he sought all of his life. And he turned to the fool and said with amazement, "How can you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?" And the fool replied, "I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."

As copied and pasted from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101889/quotes?qt0427101

That's very unique

A lot of word people like to complain that "very unique" is redundant, since "unique" means "unlike anything else." I disagree. If Versace creates a one-of-a-kind gown for Angelina Jolie, that gown is unique - it is unlike any other gown. If Versace creates a gown that allows the wearer to travel through time, that's a very unique dress. 

Biological Difficulties

We'll resume your regularly scheduled pontificating once my head clears.

Miss a day, learn a word