Not so bad, the dentist

We all know how dentists amuse themselves. They stuff our mouths full of metal rods and whirring things and then play twenty questions: "How ya' been? Your kids playing ball this year?" We gape and say "Ah hah. Hah uh hah uh wah wah." Very funny.

But dental humor will have to take a silver medal in this competition. The funniest sounds come from the chiropractor's office.

My chiropractor has me lay face down on the table so that I'm talking into a crack; everything I say sounds like it comes through a toilet paper tube. Then he runs a vibrating massage machine over my back and asks me how my kids are enjoying Wyoming. "THeEeYy lLiIkKeE IiTt aAaAa lLlOoOTtT", I say. Sounds like I'm talking through a fan. Somehow he keeps a straight face, but of course he has already tipped off the receptionist: "Jenny Mae, slip over by the door while I work this next guy over; don't let him know you're there, but you gotta hear this! Sounds like he's talking through a fan!"

The machine off, we proceed to the manipulation. "Did ja do anything fun this weekend?", he asks, and just as I draw in my breath to answer he CRUSHES the spinal column between my shoulder blades. "I daioughargh!", I comment. "Is the heat getting to you?", he wonders--CRUSH, CRUSH, CRUSH.

Rarely have I felt so silly. Not so bad, the dentist!

Beating around the phrase-bush

My book of figures showed itself this afternoon. As I cast about for today's turn of phrase, my eye fell on periphrasis:

We are all too familiar with this particular mode. We live in a world in which the killing of a spy is the elimination with extreme prejudice of an intelligence-gathering operative. And in this world we secretly think that if all periphrasis could be eliminated, bereaucracy would wither away, along with its academic handmaidens, the social sciences. We needed to be reminded, therefore, that legitimate uses of periphrasis do exist (such as substituting "academic handmaidens of bureaucracy" for "social sciences" in order to contribute to their elimination with extreme prejudice).

No sooner did I pick up my own employer's Bureaucracy Handbook than my eye fell on a delicious example of the above. As soon as I had my eye popped back into place, I read the following aloud to anyone who would listen:

"Faculty" refers to those who engage in teaching during the school year and activities directly related thereunto.

If "engage in teaching" means anything more than "teach", it implies that the teaching motor is always humming. Sometimes we just let it hum while we do other things, but sometimes we drop it into gear and engage that source of power. I knew a fellow once who walked into a classroom and carelessly dropped his teaching directly into fourth gear; he nearly plastered himself across the whiteboard. Be careful when you engage your teaching: that thing's not a toy!

Maybe the Duck can tell me the name for a one-word periphrasis, where you use a much bigger word than is needed. The plague in this category is "utilize". I have never heard a case where it could not be replaced with "use"; people just want to utilize bigger words to sound importantatious.

In theory, of course, "utilize" could mean "make useful", as "sterilize" means "make sterile". That is the dictionary definition, but in the common and usual circumstances of every day locution the item or term in question is periphrastisized for maximal utilization of vocabulary and linguistic resources.

Fun with the news

The book of rhetorical figures used for my ongoing "figures of speech" project is still hiding in a box. Multiple search sessions have not unearthed it, so for the moment that project is on hold--deep apologies.

However, we can always appreciate the figures around us. In an otherwise unfortunate news piece, an anonymous journalist had a little fun with words, breaking the rule that good journalism requires bad prose:

Bale, who was in the UK to promote the new Batman film and attend its London premiere, is on bail until September pending further inquiries.

That makes me happy.

It also makes me think of the Duck.

I may be an Ignoramus, but please don't treat me like one.

My cable internet connection went on the blink, so I called the company. To my distress, a computer answered the telephone and starting asking questions and giving orders. My situation adequately described by a series of "Yes" and "No" entries, the computer asked: "Do you want to wait to speak to a representative or do you want to fix the problem?"

Well, when you put it that way....

My acquiescence registered via voice recognition software, the computer explained: "Fixing the problem will require four steps. Do you have something to write down the steps?"

I scrambled to open a Word doc and mouthed my affirmative.

"Alright. You will have a chance to hear each step again after I explain it. First, locate the power supply to your cable modem and unplug it. Then plug it back in." The computer paused to let me write this out, and then queried, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

No, I got it--unplug and replug the modem.

"The second step is, locate the power supply to your wireless router and unplug it. Then plug it back in." Again the computer paused to let this sink in, and queried again, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

No, I can handle that--unplug the router and plug it back in.

"The third step is, shut down your computer." A third time the computer paused so my slower CPU chip could catch up, and asked cheerfully, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

Aarg! No!

"The fourth step is, turn your computer back on." Again a pause, and I twitched as the computer inquired yet a fourth time, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

Never in all my days. First it insinuates quite plainly that human representatives are useless, and then it spoon feeds me "Turn everything off and restart it" in four steps, insulting my comprehension at every opportunity! They say that when computers get artificial intelligence and take over the world, we'll be lucky if they decide to keep us as pets--but right now I belong to the master race, ignoramus or no, and I'd appreciate it if cocky answering machines on steroids would keep that in "mind".

The Moose is behind all this, I just know it. He got us thinking of computers as humans so that we would get used to thinking of humans as computers. Once we compare ourselves as computers to the computers that are actually computers, we can't compete; we can't calculate as fast or conclude with such freedom from error or store such vast quantities of data. This proves (whispers the Moose through every automated genie or wizard) that we are inferior. Therefore we should step back and let our technologies rule the world in our stead.

Welcome to Technopoly.

Why can't we all just get along....

One of Ray's early efforts, the hippy movement, was rotten in many ways--a juvenile piece he threw together, not really his mature stuff--but I like a lot about it. I like the back to nature craze, the joyful attitude, and the desire to build a society based on love and unselfishness.

More on the downsides in an upcoming post, but for the moment I just want to point out the major flaw in any plan for building a society based on love and unselfishness: lots of people are hateful and selfish. Read history.

But now the Moose has let loose his masterstroke: Barack Obama, the man who means to deliver on that society the hippy movement could only talk about. And in fact he does have a strange effect on people.

Take for example John Talbott. While his prophetic works in economics earn the praise of the toughest critic, he has also written a book called Obamanomics. Here's the blurb:

Obama's greatest strength is his ability to bring the country together. For too long divisions among races, religions, political views, cultures, genders, and sexual preferences have prevented Americans from coming together to solve the most important problems of our generation. Global warming, lobbying reform, poverty, health care, wars, terrorism, education, housing and banking reform, and energy and water shortages-these are complex global problems that Talbott argues cannot be left to the free market business world or governments to solve.

Once emphasis is placed on citizen involvement, real solutions become apparent to our most pressing problems. A completely laissez-faire world of unregulated markets and uncontrolled globalization can be returned to a properly regulated free market that responds to the voice of a democratic people. And the American values of goodness, justice, and fairness to all Americans reflected in this young man of Africa and Kansas can once again be incorporated into our economic and financial system.

Notice that poverty, illness, and war will be cured by this new economics. Note also that this new system will work because we will all get along and be unselfish. Note finally the reason we will be so transformed: Obama's "ability to bring the country together." In other words, Obamanomics works because each American accepts Barack Obama into his heart as his personal president and leader.

Temper, temper!

[Note to reader: this post was written hastily, so there is no intended figure today. Sorry!]

I recently had a brief dispute--brief meaning 4.7 seconds--about the classic theory of the four temperaments. Just in case I need to reference this theory in the future in persona Ignorami, I want to lay out my thoughts.

The best treatment I know of the subject is Art and Laraine Bennet's The Temperament God Gave You. Until I read that book I thought I understood how to discern the temperaments but in fact had only a fuzzy grasp of things. For example, my own dominant temperament, the melancholic, can mimic the anger or aggressiveness of the choleric at times; my subdominant phlegmatic side can play together with the melancholic to look almost like a sanguine.

Someone once suggested to me that the irascible and concupiscible powers explain the four temperaments. A strong irascible power makes one choleric, while a weak irascible power makes one phlegmatic; a strong concupiscible power makes one melancholic, while a weak concupiscible power makes one sanguine. Here is where the dispute arose a couple of days ago, so let me clarify.

Picture the irascible and concupiscible powers mapped on a grid, with the vertical line representing the irascible and the horizontal line representing the concupiscible. To be choleric you have to be towards the top of the vertical line, while to be phlegmatic you have to be near the bottom of the vertical line. To be melancholic you have to be at the far right side of the horizontal line, while to be sanguine you have to be at the far left side of the horizontal line. To find your overall personality mix, you find your point on the horizontal, your point on the vertical, and then do the standard graph maneuver of locating the point next to both of these on the grid. The result will have both slope, indicating which side is dominant, and length, indicating the overal strength of temperament.

Note that the temperaments are plotted on a continuum. You could be right at the center of the line and therefore neither choleric nor phlegmatic strictly speaking. In that case, you might have some features of one and some of the other, but the overall result would not be particularly strong in either direction. The same goes for the melancholic/sanguine continuum. You could not be strongly choleric and strongly phlegmatic, or strongly melancholic and strongly sanguine.

However, you could be strongly melancholic and phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic, or sanguine and choleric--one strong mix for each quadrant of the graph. In this case you can have both temperaments strictly speaking, although in practice one will tend to be dominant over the other, if only slightly.

Lastly, we have to recall that temperament is not destiny. The saints are often very difficult to place on the temperament continuum because they have overcome the vices of their temperament and acquired the virtues of the other temperaments. One cannot be natively disposed both a strong choleric and a strong phlegmatic reaction, but by living well one can acquire the reactions of a choleric in one circumstance and of a phlegmatic in another circumstance, depending on what is appropriate. Acquired virtue makes hash of my temperament grid.

Oh gee, sis!

A quick post just to have something up, here. The figure for the last two posts was Auxesis, Arranging words or clauses in a sequence of increasing force:

First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon.

I am quite at a loss for a mnemonic image on this one. Any immediate thoughts?

The Scandalous Success of Atheistic Intellectual Projects

Any number of post-enlightenment intellectual projects have started in error and achieved tremendous success: modern biblical studies began as an attack on Scripture and ended by contributing mightily to our understanding of Scripture; the theory of evolution seemed to its original audience to remove God from the equation, and yet has explained all manner of conundrums of zoology; modern science in general began with the rejection of formal and final causality and gained an almost unimaginable power over the material world.

A quick and general account of this phenomenon is that man is an imperfect knower. Sometimes what is in itself an error actually counterbalances one of our flaws and leads to truth, like a man who aims away from the target because his gun doesn't shoot straight.

One example of this has been on my mind lately. Only after philosophers denied the "Cat First" principle did technology achieve its modern miracles. First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon. Why would mechanical mastery depend on philosophical loss?

Basically, it is because all men at all times and in all places are tempted to substitute imagining for reasoning.

When men could not see the tiny, tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they imagined the tissues of the cat as continuous; when they tried to imagine how the cat's tissues achieved their various functions, the result was rather blurrily attributed to the "powers" due to the "nature" of the cat and its tissues. In other words, imagination favored thinking of cats as one thing.

But once men discovered the tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they could imagine the mechanical processes leading to the various operations of the cat. More importantly, they inevitably imagined the cat as made up of billions of little wholes, because substantial unity is in fact extrasensory and so unimaginable. So then imagination favored thinking of cats as many things.

In an odd way, then, the belief that a cat is one thing prevented men from achieving a mechanical mastery of the world by encouraging an imaginative error, just as mechanical mastery of the world now prevents men from seeing a cat as one thing by encouraging another imaginative error.

This is the way of the Moose: imagine, don't think. He loves pictures and hates words. But our universal tendency to go with the more sensible and vivid--with the imaginable--makes it difficult indeed to ignore Ray Moose.

Hot blog with mustard

The process of moving is eating my blog. First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

Perhaps this blog is of no account in the face of Ray Moose's mega-corp hippy big-brother free-thinking organization, but I still feel bad about missing a week at a time.

Star lichen

What a week! Between work and packing I’ve barely been able to post, and even when I get to the computer I never have time to put on my special Ignoramus mask and cape.

And the figure I was stuck with is as boring as they come: asterismos, adding an unnecessary word to emphasize or draw attention to what follows:

…and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists".

So unobtrusive is this figure—and I begin to wonder whether it is a figure at all—that I simply couldn’t make it the most striking sentence in a long post. The only way to catch it would have been to focus on the short post with just a few lines.

Boring or not, useful or not, I must memorize the figure, so: Picture a gentle hill on which has been placed a completely unnecessary stone staircase; in fact, it was only put there to emphasize the fact that there is a hill. So unnecessary is this staircase on such a gentle hill that no one ever uses it, so it is so covered with moss that you can’t see the stone at all. In fact, on closer examination, it turns out that “a stair IS moss.”

Lucky me

While the Moose has confined all matters religious and moral to gushy emotionalism, he has somehow managed to persuade the world that we need a scientific study to tell us that we have noses on our faces. When the Moose Media try to be objective about things that really matter, the result is a poll:

Survey indicates Bible hard to understand

...A survey commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Federation found that even those who reported reading the Bible said it was not easy to understand.

Well now that's a relief. I make my living teaching Scripture, and if it were a breeze then my children would have no bread on the table. Having spent several years trying to explain Scripture to college freshman, I'm glad to know at last that the Bible is not easy to understand. My students will be glad to hear that, too.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists":

Diotallevi described as fundamentalist those who chose the response: "The Bible is the actual word of God, which must be taken literally, word for word."

Would the Catholic position be that Scripture is the potential word of God? Virtually the word of God? Metaphorically the word of God? Not really the word of God?

But a Catholic who had read 1Thess 2:13, or even his Catechism, and wanted to respond that Scripture is actually the word of God, would probably not want to say it "must be taken literally" as a blanket statement. Surely everyone knows there are metaphors in Scripture!

On the other hand, what does it mean to take a text "word for word"? Is the alternative to skip some words? Surely a Catholic would not endorse snipping up the Scriptures.

Wrap these stumpers into one sudden polster's puzzle, undoubtedly sprung in an Italian accent over the telephone during dinner, and what you get is literally this: con-fusion.

The Shrine of the Moose

I'm a bit worried about the Mass we attend. We were told it would be an extraordinary experience, and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

The subliminal effect on my children could be devastating.

But what to do? Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick. Subliminal effects are bad, but conscious and over effects are worse.

A brief respite from words

I sinned = debt on

As usual, the Duck nailed it: Asyndeton, the ommision of a conjunction, was the featured figure of the past few posts. And the way he can rattle off other figures I didn't even know I was using is frightening.... But in reply to Fr. Barry, I did mean "deadly" in the sense you took it.

For the mnemonic image, picture a donkey selling the word "AND" to a pawn shop. That should link "Ass in debt" on to the omission of a conjunction in your memory.

Starship Capitalism

My father-in-law still has a ticket, given him some thirty years ago I think, to the moon. While the technology did not exist for private space travel when the ticket was sold, nonetheless it guarantees that whenever such technology becomes available the holder of the ticket will get a ride.

Well, Dad, it's almost time to claim your seat. Private space flight is real, and the galaxy's first spaceline, Virgin Galactic, is building ships and selling tickets. The company's founder is deadly serious.

Why does anyone want to go to outer space? I can think of three reasons.

First, everyone loves a good adventure. We all like to read about voyages to the end of the world, to the center of the earth, past the cave of the Cyclops, through the valley of Shangri La. Now a company with offices and brochures offers a guaranteed romantic trip for a preset price, and anyway if anything goes wrong you can sue them, so there we have it: adventure for the average man!

Second, it resonates with the evolutionary mythology of our day. At least since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, popular imagination has connected space travel with evolving on, becoming the superman, achieving wisdom. While science and popular science are equally steadfast in denying that nature acts for an end--that plants grow leaves for the purpose of imbibing the sun, that spiders spin webs for the purpose of catching flies--popular science at least has endowed the cosmos as a whole with a purposeful striving towards its destiny. The same purpose impossible in the parts is the point of the whole: the whole universe has been groaning in travail until now, awaiting the revealing of the Ubermensch--and beyond. While the scientific proponents of an evolutionary world view may honestly intend to exclude all purpose, by making it a world view they make it a popular mythology, and by making it a mythology they cast it in the role of giving purpose and direction to life. Space travel offers hope to modern man.

Third, generalizing a little from that last point, we all want to find the ultimate realities of life. Since modern man is trained to think of all things, including himself, as a machine, he finds no depth in the world immediately around him. No use probing further in, so all he can do is probe further out: he travels around the world, explores the forests, climbs the mountains; when that is old he goes around the world faster, makes satellite maps of the forests, computer generates the mountains; when that is old, he either retreats into the imaginary world of television or probes further out to the real domain of outer space. Not coincidentally, his imaginary world of television feeds him a regular diet of imaginary space travel.

But to be honest, I don't think the average man today would go to space if television signals didn't reach that far. To hope for space travel in the future may give hope to life, but actually to have been there might be a desolating experience. The earth seen through the pressurized windows would look like the photographs we have already seen; weightlessness would be neat for a while, but would hardly feel like evolving to the next level; in general, space is an environment reduced rather than enlarged, unfit for man not because it is beyond him but because it is beneath him, unable to support life because of its poverty rather than because of its greatness.

When the first manned space flight broke through the atmosphere in 1961, the Russian communist astronaut looked around briefly and radioed triumphantly to the home base that he had not seen God. Atheism demonstrated--and a telling symbol of what awaits the average man in outer space.

The most thrilling adventures are in the rich world around us. When we have traveled the world, mapped the world, computer generated the world, made a video game of the world, there remains yet the return to real natures. Grant that a cat is a cat, not a machine, and untold vistas of discovery await us.

"Further up and further in!"

Frigidum!

Two days ago, I learned that I will teach Latin this fall. I read Latin easily enough, but they want me to teach Latin in Latin to students who respond in Latin: I have to speak, write, think Latin! My wife and I have undertaken an immersion process together, and I have begun leaving Latin comments on my friend's Latin blog.

So I was happy to find this.

A change of rules and one clarification

"Find the figure" has been fun, but I need to change the pattern somewhat. To give myself more scope for rapid posting and more time to practice each figure, I am going to start posting several times using the same figure. Once I set out the definition and mnemonic image for the figure I have been using, the subsequent posts will start the next figure.

I think multiple posts will also help readers (oh, that hopeful plural!) spot the figure, but brings up a needed clarification.

When I originally proposed the game, my idea was that readers would look for the line that stood out, that seemed most fresh, most zingy. If that line turned out to be the figure of the day, they win for finding it and I win for successfully pulling off the figure. In other words, you don't have to name the figure: you can just say, "This line seems like it."

OK, now to get some actual posts up!

This figure is so poignant, it just--

The figure for the last post was Aposiopesis, breaking off as though unable or unwilling to continue:

When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

For the mnemonic image, picture yourself holding a giant sledge hammer dashing the end of a large-print sentence to smithereens. Directly in front of you, a giant apple with a face stares at the flying pieces in astonishment. The verb "dashing" reminds you that this figure often uses a dash at the end, but the key phrase is: "Apple see yo' pieces."

I'm trying to give up coffee, OK? It's the best I can do.

Living in the dump

My friend JB and I got to talking about environmentalism the other day. He knows a lot of the Green people are nuts, although of course he doesn't know about Ray Moose and the prehistory of the sixties, so he is generally down on "save the Earth" movements. He doesn't like the fact that the Vatican went carbon-neutral, for example, even though he sees nothing wrong with being carbon neutral. In his view, it symbolically aligns the Catholic Church with an anti-Catholic crowd.

Now he has a point. In fact, JB may have caught onto one of Moose's schemes: just like the Nazi's needed an emergency to get folks to hand power over to Hitler, so today global warming is the Big Crisis demanding that something be done so fast and so effectively that we need to hand over all our power to the government. Sound crazy?

Yeah. Crazy like a Moose.

But then JB brought up an argument against recycling. Of all the resources in the world, he said, surely we have a lot of sand and a lot of trees. So why are we recycling glass and paper? The recycling process loses money, as you can see from the fact that no private agencies undertake to do it: it's always government run. And we are nowhere close to running out of room for dumps and landfills. We recycle, he argued, to make ourselves feel better.

Now let me focus the conversation. I don't know whether his premises are all true: Does glass actually degrade when buried? Do we have that many trees? He could not verify the premises either; he just read the argument somewhere and liked it. At the moment, I am not worried about whether the premises are true, but about whether the argument follows.

JB is an economist, and he has acquired what I call a quantitative mind. He tends to focus on amounts, credits and deficits, formulas, limits, mechanical possibilities. Mathematical thinking has become not just second nature for him but a way of seeing the world. But I have what I would call a qualitative mind, so I tend to focus on form, nature, beauty, goodness or badness. This makes communication difficult.

At the time, I didn't say much of anything. But my reaction to his argument was that I would be willing to pay more for glass and paper to prevent another landfill from happening. The landfill itself is inherently displeasing to me. You start with a prairie or a wood, then you plow down the trees and grass, then you dig up not just the topsoil but all the layers below, then you fill it with trash, refuse, broken bottles, disposable diapers, plastic bags. When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

The thought depresses me. This is not an argument, I know, but could it be a perception of something true? A sure sign of a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood of crime and desperation, is trash in the yards. A sure sign of depression is when a person stops cleaning his house and just lets it go. There is something inherently disordered about just trashing because it's easier and cheaper.

I think that is why the Vatican went green, and why Popes have spoken in favor of environmental stewardship. It's not because pollution is causing an immediate crisis; maybe it is, but that is not the ultimate point. It's not because the Vatican wants to curry the favor of the left; maybe the left likes what the Vatican says about environmentalism, but that is not even the proximate point. The point is that healthy human beings clean up after themselves. When we are right with God and right the world, we atone for sin and pick up trash.

We can ignore Ray Moose. This is not his issue.

I can't tell you how bad I have been....

I am afraid I owe my honest readership an apology. Oh, what a bad boy I have been! For two days I puzzled over how to use Aporia, which is talking about not being able to talk about something. Then suddenly I realized that my problem was its own answer.

Now it puzzles me that an online source defines Aporia otherwise. More thought needed on that one.

Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simple enough. An enormous limestone letter A, riddled with pores, stands erect as a man tries unsuccessfully to scale it. Part of his problem is that a huge pitcher is pouring water over the top. So the figure that expresses your unsuccessful effort to express your thought is the porous A, or "A porous", or the "A pouring"--any of these should bring Aporia to mind.