Tag: meaning

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Oh, G’s

Stephen Wilhite led an animated life.

OK, his is not a name that leaps to mind like Maya Angelou, Steve Jobs or (heaven help us) Justin Bieber. But if you’ve been online at all, you touched his work. Wilhite, who died recently at 74, invented the GIF, the moving photos that turned social media into a special effect out of Harry Potter.

He also, years after their invention, triggered one of the internet’s most long-running minor debates with just five words:

“It’s pronounced ‘jif,’ not ‘gif.’”

Yes, like the peanut butter. That had actually been part of the documentation for  the Graphics Interchange Format since day one … which of course most people never saw. And in a jiffy (or even a giffy), we reconfirmed two essential truths of our species.

First, that people will argue about absolutely ANYTHING, and the flames only get hotter as the stakes get lower. Online battles over the “proper” pronunciation of GIF still rage back and forth with the intensity of a Star Wars movie, joining such timeless classics as “that stupid call in the Super Bowl” and “who needs the Oxford comma, anyway?”

After a while, the exchange gets pretty predictable:

“Well, the G stands for ‘Graphic,’ so of course it’s a hard G!”

“The U in SCUBA stands for ‘Underwater,’ are you going to start saying scuh-ba?”

“It’s like ‘gap’ or ‘get!’”

“No, it’s like ‘genius’ or ‘giraffe.’”

“Jif sounds stupid!”

“You sound stupid!”

“NYAAAAAAH!”

Verily, this is a philosophical discourse that Socrates himself would envy.

The second essential truth is more subtle. Namely, that the meaning of an idea doesn’t start and stop with its creator.

Any literature fans reading this will recognize this immediately as “the death of the author,” Stripped of PhD language (you’re welcome), this basically says that the author isn’t the only one who gets to decide what a story’s about. Just as an invention can be created for one purpose and used for another, a story can change when it reaches the reader’s hands. Yes, the author has intents and purposes, but the reader brings their own experience to the tale, which may lead them to discover something quite different.

It’s a little scary and a little exciting. It means that reading a story or watching a movie isn’t just a matter of cracking a code (“what did they mean by that?”) but a process of adventure and discovery (“what will I find here?”) J.R.R. Tolkien called it the difference between allegory – a strict this-means-that definition by the writer – and applicability.

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence,” he wrote. “I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

That’s challenging.

It means that while stories shape us, we can also shape them right back. It means that we don’t just have to accept ideas in couch-potato fashion. We can grapple with them, challenge them and take them in new directions. All sorts of concepts can be transformed this way, from fiction to ideologies to language itself.

So if 20 years down the road, the “hard G” folks win the GIF battle for good (or even for jood), it’s not an error or a crime. It just means the story wasn’t over.

It’s your tale. Choose as you will.

Just be gentle – or gracious – to those on the other side.

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In Translation

The difference between the right word and almost the right word, Mark Twain once told the world, is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. By the look of things, Heather had just swallowed a horde of lightning bugs.

“En route??”

Heather shook her head as she looked away from her reading material, torn between hilarity and disgust. “There has got to be a better way of saying ‘on the move’ than that. I mean, it’s just … just wrong!”

A little background may be in order here. Heather, like millions of people across the internet, decided to jump feet first into Duolingo. She wanted a fresh start that would keep her brain busy, so rather than resume her long-ago college pursuit of German ( from which she mostly retains “The window is dirty”), she instead went after French.

Funny thing. When you’re home a lot due to chronic illness, you wind up with a lot of time to spend on language lessons. A few months ago, she felt confident enough in her reading comprehension to try children’s books. So she found some old favorites in translation, the ones that she knew as well as her childhood phone number.

That’s a great way to navigate an unfamiliar road. But it also means that the potholes can be really jarring. And one such dip in the road came when The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe portentously declared that Aslan was “en route.”

“Really? REALLY?”

In the original English, the phrase is “Aslan is on the move.” Heather loves the feel of that phrase – the sense of something coming, of life waking up, of expectation and possibility and change. You could even see it as the opening of a chess game, the unfolding of a strategy that is just now beginning to show itself.

By contrast, to hear that Aslan is “en route” sounds like a package is coming from Federal Express. Definite. Predictable. Decidedly non-mystical. “Yo, I’m on my way, see you in about 15!”

Maybe that sounds a little finicky. But words matter. Even when they technically mean the same thing, they carry a different weight. As the writer Terry Pratchett knew, there is a hilarious difference between calling your epic tale “Gone With The Wind” and “Blown Away.”

The dictionary wouldn’t care. But we know better. What we say isn’t necessarily what someone else hears.

That matters to all of us. Not just the translators.

It means peeling back assumptions and old habits, and fitting yourself into someone else’s experience.

It means hearing stories that might not be comfortable, going places you haven’t been, learning how life and the world works for someone who isn’t you.

It means examining your mental picture like an engineer scrutinizing a design, trying to see what’s been left out – or maybe, should never have been put in.

It’s not easy. And we’re not going to get it right all the time.

But making the effort means a wider, more caring, more interesting world. It means living with chords rather than monotones, a library instead of a worn-out book, a rich and varied playlist instead of a track perpetually caught on a single earworm.

It means we actually hear each other. And help each other. That we become harder to fool with fears and hatreds because we’ve caught a glimpse of the wonder that may wait behind.

That’s worth it. Every time.

Listen well. New worlds await, and not just Narnia or Hogwarts. Maybe they’re still far off, but have no fear.

They’ll soon be en route.

Right, honey?

 

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And The Winner Is …

By the time this appears in print, the envelope will be open. The statue awarded. The orchestra will be playing the new Best Picture Oscar winner off the stage.

And then, approximately 30 seconds later, all the pundits will be arguing about what it means.

Mind you, for many of us, the Oscars mean about four hours that we’ll never get back, spent among memories, film clips, a few (barely) decent jokes, and at least one dress that makes everyone shout “WHY??” Sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful, often memorable for the strangest reasons – sort of a class reunion with higher budgets.

But we do go deeper. We can’t help it. We are a story-telling species and film is a storytelling medium. And it’s impossible to tell a story that doesn’t have some kind of meaning, whether it’s as simple as a fairy tale or as bizarre as “A Clockwork Orange.”

And so it’s only natural to ask: What sort of stories are we telling? Whose messages are we celebrating?

This year especially evoked a lot of chatter. If “La La Land” won, was it a honoring of Hollywood’s heritage or a dismissal of more challenging topics? Would  a victory for “Hidden Figures” or “Moonlight” be a recognition of more diverse stories or simply a reaction to last year’s ceremony? Should the producers of “Arrival” leave early and avoid the rush?

A lot of tea leaves get stirred before the ceremony; a lot of ink gets spilled afterward. And while I’ve done my share of prognostication, I think most of the experts are looking for meaning in all the wrong places.

Trying to derive a message from Oscar winners, frankly, is an exercise in futility. Because when it comes to its biggest award, Hollywood almost always plays it safe.

It’s an open secret. It’s why the Oscar odds are usually pretty easy to set, such as favoring actors who play real people (especially with accents or disabilities), animated movies that did well at the box office, or supporting characters with something quirky about them.

And the Best Picture? Often a drama, sometimes a comedy, rarely a musical, once and only once a fantasy film. (Thank you, Peter Jackson.) Socially significant can win, but it’s usually a safe social significance – think “Gandhi” and “Driving Miss Daisy” rather than “Brokeback Mountain” or “Network.” And of course, underdog stories are always beloved, from “Rocky” to “Slumdog Millionaire.”

Always true? As a journalist, I learned to never say “always.” But it’s often enough. Yes, the awards often recognize excellent movies, but they’re usually excellent movies that appeal to either a mainstream audience, mainstream Hollywood, or both. It’s not a field for living on the edge and the message sent is usually as simple as “We  know what we like – and it hasn’t changed that much.”

Which isn’t to say that pulling something deeper and richer from the Oscars is hopeless – but you have to look beyond the winners. For a truer picture of the times, you need to look at all the nominees.

When “All the President’s Men” and “Network” are among the nominees, you can draw certain conclusions about a society’s trust in its institutions and the power of media.

When the year of “Driving Miss Daisy” also includes “Dead Poets Society,” “My Left Foot,” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” it’s a time for stories of the overlooked and those left on the margins or learning to raise their voice.

And yes, in a year that incudes films about black female mathematicians (“Hidden Figures”), a religious pacifist in wartime (“Hacksaw Ridge”), a gay black man trying to find his identity (“Moonlight”), and even finding ways to reach out to another species through the power of language (“Arrival”) – well, it may just be that the scope of our stories, and of our storytellers, has gotten broader than ever before, regardless of who brought home the knickknack.

And the winner is … all of us. Without a doubt.

See you at the movies.

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O-Pun My Word

Saturday morning had come, and with it, Missy’s favorite routine: get in the car and go downtown for a visit to the bookstore and a bite to eat. Neither of us could wait.

Standing on the driveway, I unlocked the Honda, opened the door, and then told Missy the words that I’d said a hundred times.

“Ok, Missy, jump on in.”

She looked at me. Smiled her big 100-watt grin. And then very deliberately jumped in place.

I burst out laughing, in surprise as much as humor. She grinned along with me. With one carefully chosen move, Missy had joined the ranks of the Rochat family punsters.

At first glance, that might not sound like much of a shocker. Those of you who know me well know that I am an incorrigible punster – as in “Please don’t incorrige him.” I lived and breathed wordplay around the dinner table as a kid, then inflicted it on my fellow human being over years of headline writing for newspapers. My personal favorite was summing up a demolition derby as “Wreck Creation,” although a street fair that I described as “Planes, Trains, And Audible Squeals” wasn’t far behind.

So to live with me is to live with puns. Simple. Natural. Perhaps a bit painful, like living with an amateur orthodontist who likes to practice at home. (Brace yourself.) But certainly not surprising, right?

Well … not until it comes to Missy.

For those who haven’t met her in this column yet, Missy is my wife Heather’s physically and mentally disabled aunt. We act as her guardians, alternately caring for her and being amazed by the world she reveals. It can be a quiet world at times, since Missy says maybe a few hundred words per week – and at that, she’s gotten more talkative than she used to be.

We’ve suspected – heck, we’ve known – that Missy understands more than she can say. Give her directions like “Could you go to the bathroom, put some water in the yellow cup, and bring it back here?” and she does fine, when she’s not feeling sassy or contrary. Read her a book at night and she’ll sometimes comment on the plot, either verbally or physically. (If an injury is described, for instance, she’s been known to touch the afflicted body part and go “Ow!”)

Like a computer with a dim monitor and no printer, her output is a lot more limited than her input. Enough so that Heather and I often keep track of new words and sentences used, as proof that she’s adding to her capacity.

But punning, even visual punning, is a whole new leap.

Puns are often called “the lowest form of humor.” Like many paronomasiacs (pun addicts), I’ve taken that to mean that the pun is the foundation of all humor. It requires someone to hold two meanings in the brain at once and instantly understand both, to take the normal clarity of language and tie it in knots for entertainment.

It’s small wonder that the sign of approval for a pun is a wince. After all, it knocks out the keystone of language itself, that you can hear the same thing I say without misunderstanding. It’s language as taffy, soft and pliable.

Now Missy had added a bend of her own. And with that simple bend, our window into her mind not only opened up a little wider, it revealed a room we hadn’t even suspected was there.

That is encouraging beyond belief.

So thank you, Missy. Welcome to my hobby and a wider world. I knew you were capable of a lot, but this one went beyond anywhere my thoughts had flown to.

That’s right. The pun was mightier than the soared.

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Getting “Over” It

When the news broke, reporters and editors went up in flames. Within minutes, the stunned outcries and passionate debates were filling the social network.

Russia’s invasion of the Crimea? Nope.

The passing of Topeka’s most infamous preacher? Uh-uh.

The early exit of Duke and Kansas from March Madness? Maybe a little, but … no.

No, this was an issue designed to strike at the very soul of journalists everywhere. Are you ready? Brace yourselves.

The Associated Press declared that “over” could mean the same thing as “more than.”

I’ll stand back while you recover from the faint. Feeling better? Good.

OK, it sounds like a silly thing. Frankly, it is a silly thing. But from the commentary I saw from most friends and colleagues in the industry, you’d think it was December 2012 and the Mayan gods had come to demand sacrifice.

“NOOOOOOO! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!”

“That AP concession is making my brain ache.”

“More than my dead body!”

For those who don’t know — or, most likely, care — about fine points of journalism style, the AP’s stance for decades has been that “over” is a position and “more than” is a quantity. So it’s incorrect to say that I’ve had over a dozen arguments on this subject since the change was made.

Or at least, it was incorrect.

Excuse me while I grin.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of a style and grammar geek as any reporter. I’m insistent that “cement” is not the same as “concrete,” that “literal” does not mean figurative and that “enormity” is a horror, not a size. From the AP’s complex use of numerals (“Write out one through nine, except for all the times you don’t”) to the non-existent period in “Dr Pepper,” I fight the good fight and do so pretty well.

But — brace yourself — I don’t see the big deal here.

Part of my “meh” is because the AP has been swimming against the tide for a long time. “Over” as a figure of speech has at least a 700-year history, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a frequent guest on lists of “language rules that aren’t,” right up there with the myth that you are not to in any way split an infinitive, lest you be sentenced to a career on Star Trek.

But the larger reason is that the change does nothing to obscure understanding. No one who reads that “Babe Ruth was the first baseball player to hit over 700 home runs in a career” is likely to think that the Babe stacked up all those home runs like cord wood and then hit a ball over them, any more than someone would expect sunny side up eggs to come with a weather report.

It’s a harmless change. The end of a rule that existed only to have a rule. And really, don’t we have enough of those already.

And to those who fear that English is about to lose all meaning — well, the language has taken that step. Many times.

You could ask William Shakespeare. But he’d probably have to listen carefully to hear past your outlandish grammar and curious word choice.

You could ask Geoffrey Chaucer. But he’d likely understand one word in 20 at best, and that badly accented.

You could ask the anonymous Beowulf poet. Assuming you could even get past “Hello.” Or should it be “Hwaet!”?

Actually, you can’t ask any of them because they’re centuries dead. Minor detail. But you get the point. Language changes. Especially English. Over time, those changes add up. At some point, old and new become strangers to each other.

Our job is to keep clarity for the readers and speakers of now. While recognizing that “now” is a moving target.

By all means, fight to save useful words. Those are the paints that allow fine shades of meaning.

Absolutely, encourage prose that gives more clarity instead of less. Without mutual comprehension, there is no language.

But recognize the moment when a rule has become nothing more than a habit. In language, or anything else.

Those don’t help anything except stylebook sales.

And now, I think I’ve said more than enough on this topic. It’s time to sign off.

Over and out.

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Snownose

In the shady recesses of the Rochat back yard, the last holdouts of snow still linger.

For a little while each day, so does Duchess the Wonder Dog.

For those who haven’t met her yet, Duchess is our eldest dog, an 11-year-old mix of border collie and black lab who’s both too smart for her own good and too shy to be believed. A rescue dog, she latched onto my wife Heather like a furry guardian angel and still gets anxious on the rare occasions that the two of them are apart.

She’s getting a little slower these days, as older dogs do. She rests a little more, takes a little longer to hear her name, trots downstairs a little more slowly when it’s time for a run or a meal. She’s hardly on her last legs yet, but those legs have less hurry and more care than they used to.

Until the winter comes. And then something magical happens.

A sparkling fountain of youth arrives.

When the nights are cold and the ground is white, Duchess is in her glory. She crouches. Buries her nose in the snow. Takes off at top speed for the next drift. Buries her nose again. Then repeats and repeats and repeats, running an Indy 500 course through the yard, looking more like a puppy than a Grand Old Lady with every snowflake.

Like Clark Kent becoming Superman, Duchess has become Snownose the Unstoppable. No fear. Just pure unadulterated joy.

It’s worth watching. Even if it does mean opening the door … and opening the door … and opening the door again in hard-freezing temperatures just to see if she’s finished up her business yet. Not only is it fun to see the young dog I remember, but I even get a little jealous of how thoroughly she can lose herself in her wonder and exuberance.

That is, until I recognize in her joy an echo of my own.

No, I don’t spend Friday nights sticking my nose in random snowdrifts. (Well, not unless the walk is really icy.) But I have noticed that when I start to write, the rest of the world falls away for a while. Even headaches of near-migraine level will get pushed to the back as the cranial supervisor declares “Sorry, no time for that now. We’ve got a fresh shipment of words coming in and we need the space.”

Maybe it’s an extreme focus on the moment. Or the power of routine for someone who’s been putting fingers to keyboards for far too long. But at its core, I think it’s a passion, a liberation, even an embrace.

It’s knowing what you were meant to do. And then doing it.

And it’s a joy I think too many of us never discover.

That’s not a condemnation. Especially these days, many of us just try to make it from moment to moment, doing what we need to do just to keep life going. For someone burdened by the “now,” asking to reach for something more may seem frivolous, even cruel.

It’s not an easy escape. But when it happens, it can give the moments meaning.

And once reached, it’s hard to resist going back.

I know an author, Christopher Paul Curtis, who wrote his first novel on an assembly line. Literally. He’d double up on hanging car doors to give a friend a break, then take a few minutes to write here and there when his buddy did the same for him.

He reached for his joy. Even in the middle of a car factory.

And it changed his world.

Maybe it’s a battle to find even five minutes. Maybe those five minutes won’t produce the next hit song, or the recipe of the year, or the business that lets you lean back and retire.

But if the effort takes you out of yourself – no, takes you more thoroughly into yourself – that’s the real prize. And the more it happens, the more you want it to happen. Even if it means fighting for that five minutes again.

When you get there, it won’t matter.

All that will matter is the chill of the night. And the waiting dance of the snow.