AmbivaBlog

The Promiscuous Apostrophe

I have a friend who always commiserates with me over punctuational and grammatical barbarisms (barbaric, that is, only from the viewpoint of a vanished civilization), malapropisms, and -- what do you call it when two similar words are confused? Like people saying "flaunt" when they mean "flout," or talking about "pouring" instead of "poring" over a manuscript (which always makes me involuntarily see them pouring a pitcher of water all over the pages so the ink runs). This is the friend to whom I gave Lynne Truss's EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES (the fact that it was a bestseller suggests there's a lot more of us out there, but where??).

She is 93 years old. And still caring about this stuff -- reflexively; I flinch when I see it -- makes me feel almost as old. I want to be hip and bow to the sovereign authority of usage, that goddess William Safire calls "Norma Loquendi." But I can't help it. I was too well-trained by a cadre of postmenopausal grammar-school teachers who did everything BUT whack your hand with a ruler. Those little misplaced apostrophe's (! I didn't mean to do that!) snag my attention like thorns in a cashmere sweater.

For example, I just went to BAGnewsNotes, where I read this:

One of the unique things about America is that, in it's self-importance, it always seems to lose it's memory.

And then, in the comments, I read this:

As to A Dot's suspicions regarding Michal Schiavo's motives, there isn't a player in all of this sad story whose motives were pure. I wonder what sort of a falling out the Schindler's and he had that would take them to opposite corners of the ring like that.

I don't mean to finger BAGnewsNotes or this commenter in particular. The promiscuous apostrophe is all over the web, like a virtually transmitted disease. It's probably generational, a reflection of what happened to American education after 1968 or so. It's also -- like the changes in the Catholic Church -- probably inevitably changing the language, like grass cracking pavement to force its way through.

Well, allow me to be the recalcitrant pavement for a moment. Resistance can only strengthen and select for the hardiest change. If change is inevitable, at least let it be an improvement.

I can see the possessive, "it's." "Its" never made any sense to begin with, when every noun "it" could ever stand for was converted to the possessive by an apostrophe: Molly's blog, the cat's meow. (Context is sufficient to prevent confusion with the contraction for "it is.") But then, to avoid sinking into chaos, let's please stand firm against the apostrophized plural. Otherwise I feel like the composer of "Carnival of the Animals," immortalized by Ogden Nash:

Camille Saint-Saëns was racked with pain's
When people addressed him as 'Saynt Sayens.'
He held the human race to blame
Because it could not pronounce his name.
So he turned with metronome and fife
To glorify other form's of life.
Be quiet please, for here begins
His salute to feathers, fur, and fin's.

- amba

UPDATE: When in doubt, just go here for ALL the common errors in English, including the ones mentioned above, with their corrections!

Pope Catholic Masturbation

I was watching Bill Maher tonight and someone raised the point that every candidate for Bishop or Cardinal approved by the late Pope had to be dead set against homosexuality, birth control, and . . . masturbation.

Curious, I looked it up.  (Google search:  Pope Catholic Masturbation.)  Yes, masturbation is officially considered a grave sin and a "seriously disordered act" (Pope Paul VI's words) by the Catholic church.  Why?  In part, for the same reason the Church opposes birth control:  "Catholic teaching is that sexual activity is intended for conception, thus masturbation is an immoral sexual practice because it does not permit conception."  In part, apparently, because it's too much plain dumb fun -- er, doesn't direct attention above and beyond the self and its grubby gratification:  "In addition, the Catholic Church teaches that masturbation breeds lust and selfishness, which takes one further from God."

My own opinion is that a) "Love thy neighbor as thyself" implies that you have to love yourself before you can love another, and that holds true in sexual development too, and b) if God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, He would have given us shorter arms.  But finally, I think it's a pretty trivial issue, which is why it isn't discussed much anymore.  Nearly everybody does it and it's silly to make them feel tortured about it, and guilt may even contribute to obsession and addiction, which is the sin and the problem -- not small-bore (and finally boring) pleasure.

But like so many idle Google searches, this one turned up a treasure:  the transcript of a "Frontline" debate on "The Catholic Church and Sex."  The staunch resistance to change and the yearning for change are right up against each other, both articulated with rare concision, clarity and passion.  Here's a taste:

I think American idea that somehow democracy is the answer to faith, that if we can only vote on this then we can determine truth . . . then what a small truth that is. . . . Hey, this is not a democracy, it's based on truth. Jesus did not take an opinion poll when he was on earth and today he's not taking opinion polls . . . to say, Gosh, you know everyone's unhappy with this so we've got to change it. Truth does not change.     - Susan Mangels

***

It works. The whole church's teaching, on openness and generosity to life. And when I see . . . the use of artificial means of contraception-- I see a NO. . . . If in the middle of the most intimate act of your marriage is a great big NO, which is what artificial contraception is. That NO spreads out into everything. And you get unwanted children. . . . That doesn't happen among the people I know. . . . It's this joyous sense of "We're going to accept that our love makes something". It's marvelous, it's exciting, it is something that works. All I can tell to people is "Try it." Because the tragedy of this age is that we have a whole generation of people who talk a lot about sex and who have never had real sexual intimacy. Because every sexual act contains in it a NO.     - Dale O'Leary

***

It's different in my tradition, in the Baptist tradition. Once you are married in a relationship of love and commitment, there is no other justification needed for the expression of that love sexually. That that is a God-given gift, the sexuality between man and woman, and there is no NO in that. In and of itself, it is all YES. If there is love, if there is respect and commitment and honor, it is all YES. And it has nothing to do with whether that possibly or will result in a child.     - Lynn Powell

***

This Pope has said some beautiful things about women. But he has also said some very significant things about women being at fault. . . . he spoke to a woman who was going to the Conference on Women, I believe in Beijing. And it's well-publicized that he said to her, "Women are the cause of men's failings".     - Richard Sipe

***

(On forbidding birth control)  Let me say something very clear. This teaching has been set down, it will not be changed. Not in this millennium, not in the next millennium, and those who are fighting it, will pass away. The spirit of this age is going to dissipate like every age before it, and the Church's teaching will stay firm, and a hundred years from now it will be more prophetic than it is today.

And the tragedy, the tragedy is that the ordinary Catholic is not being told this. They are being deceived into believing that this is something that can be changed. That if we had different priests or different bishops or someone else, this could be changed. It can't be. And it is wrong.     - Dale O'Leary

***

But the teaching on birth control you say will never change. And I say, that you are saying that the earth is flat, and that the earth is the center of the universe.     - Richard Sipe

***

And there are women in Africa, for example, who are living chaste lives within their marriage, they are faithful to their husbands, and their husbands come home and infect them. If there was a condom there, they wouldn't be infected.     - Lynn Powell

This wonderful faith in condoms! It just seems like this age is worshipping at that altar, and I will not worship at that altar, and the church will not.     - Dale O'Leary

***

I can only speak out of, if I can speak...(near tears) of what is such a profound and intimate and real part of the fiber of my being. To have experienced the call to the ordained priesthood. . . . loving the Church . . . willing to give my life for the Church, and having that Church say to me, "Because God created you a woman, you are constituitively unable, by virtue of gender, to have a call to the ordained priesthood".

It doesn't tell me just that it will not accept it. It doesn't tell me that it doesn't like it or it's uncomfortable with it. I am told in a statement of John Paul II that I am constituitively, by virtue of my creation, unable to have a call that I feel is part of the integrity of who I am.

When I am at Eucharist, the pain of that sometimes is so bad. I know that the call is not a right. Nobody has the right to ordination. The call to any kind of vocation that we are in is a gift of God. It is a grace. I did not look for it. . . .

I find it inconceivable that God, from the beginning, as John Paul says, it is in the mind of God from the beginning that women could never be called to serve the people of God through the ordained priesthood. That my God is so gracious, is so loving, is so much bigger than any of us, or the church will ever be, that this is impossible. It's a violation to me, that I cannot be begin to tell you how painful it is. I just can't.     - Sister Bettina Ferraro

There's much more.

- amba

"Good News About Old Age"

That was the heading under which Anne Strieber forwarded this story:

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Sex, cryptic crosswords and a good run could help ward off dementia and other degenerative conditions by stimulating new brain cells, an Australian researcher said Thursday.

Perry Bartlett, a professor at the University of Queensland's Brain Institute, said mental and physical exercise helped create and nurture new nerve cells in the brain, keeping it functional and warding off diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"Perhaps one should run a long distance and do the cryptic crossword, " Bartlett told Australian radio.

He said a chemical called prolactin appeared to promote new cells in the brain and could be found in high levels in pregnant women.

"Prolactin levels also go up during sex as well. So one could think of a number of more entertaining activities than running in order to regulate the production of nerve cells," Bartlett said.

The hidden good news here could be that pregnancy makes you smarter!

- amba

No Innocence Project in China

A Chinese man who confessed under torture to the murder of his missing wife - after a female body was found in a nearby reservoir - was freed last week after his wife showed up to visit their daughter. She was simply a runaway - and a bigamist - who pleaded the extenuating circumstance of mental illness.

According to the the L.A. Times story, this horrific tale is only one small window into a vastly corrupt, overburdened and careless justice system:

After 10 days of interrogations that involved beatings and sleep deprivation, She confessed to the crime. He was initially given the death sentence, despite numerous discrepancies in his story and the lack of a murder weapon or any DNA testing to confirm that the body was that of his wife. A higher court later reduced the sentence to 15 years.

Had the authorities investigated more carefully, She might not have spent a day in jail.

Zhang ran away from their home in Hubei province, later saying she had suffered from mental illness. She married a villager in coastal Shandong province and had a son who is now 10.

Details of the case highlight the country's dismal record on criminal justice and its widespread use of torture to extract confessions. It is particularly troubling considering China accounts for a majority of the world's executions each year.

According to Amnesty International, 3,797 people were executed around the world last year, about 3,400 of them in China. The group believes that many convictions in China are based on forced confessions.

This and other recent news stories from China paint a nightmarish portrait of a vast society in which millions of individuals, especially the rural poor, are lost as if drowned at the bottom of the ocean, at the mercy of corrupt petty officials even when the distant national government concerns itself with their protection, which it rarely does. Recently The New York Times ran a story about the Chinese government's move to abolish rural school fees, an insurmountable barrier to university education -- the only way up and out into the modern world -- that had driven many parents and students to fatal despair. The article pointed out that changing the rules at the top may make little difference at the bottom, especially if the government doesn't put its money where its mouth is:

[The] promise to eliminate school fees may ultimately be difficult to carry out in a country where changes announced by the central government are often circumvented locally. China already promises nine years of free compulsory education to all students. But faced with reduced government support, schools have attached a variety of special fees to make up for the lost revenues.

For rural families, these fees can account for a quarter or more of their annual income and often are a primary reason that parents leave the farm for migrant work. Last year, financial pressure was a contributing factor in several high-profile suicides or rage killings by rural high school and university students.

My heart rose and then fell when I read that story, because it immediately brought to mind another indelibly vivid and heartbreaking Times story, by Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, about Zheng Qingming, a gifted but doomed student:

His dying debt was $80. Had he been among China's urban elite, Zheng Qingming would have spent more on a trendy cellphone. But he was one of the hundreds of millions of peasants far removed from the country's new wealth. His public high school tuition alone consumed most of his family's income for a year.

He wanted to attend college. But to do so meant taking the annual college entrance examination. On the humid morning of June 4, three days before the exam, Qingming's teacher repeated a common refrain: he had to pay his last $80 in fees or he would not be allowed to take the test. Qingming stood before his classmates, his shame overtaken by anger.

"I do not have the money," he said slowly, according to several teachers who described the events that morning. But his teacher - and the system - would not budge.

A few hours later, Qingming, 18 years old, stepped in front of an approaching locomotive. The train, like China's roaring economy, was an express.

I strongly recommend reading this whole story. It will make you wish there was a way you could just give the damn $80 to the next Young Qingming. It will bring alive for you, in the person of a talented boy driven mad by closed doors, what it's like to live in a society where the entrenched corruption of Communism is layered over by the ruthlessness of capitalism.

- amba

"Popapalooza"

My brother Ally sent me this link, a visual representation of what's going on in the Vatican now, and he's right: it gets funnier the more you look at it. (Is nothing sacred?) It actually manages to be informative and hilarious at the same time.

- amba

The Seasons . . . of Life

Ooh, thanks, Time Goes By, for discovering Ageless Marketing. While "marketing" is possibly my least favorite word, conjuring up the merry chatter of meat cleavers on chopping blocks, and while David Wolfe's ostensible focus is how to sell more thoughtfully to graying baby boomers, he has tracked down all sorts of fresh and enthralling ideas on the stages of life and the developmental tasks of aging. For example, Jung's fifth (out of seven) tasks of aging, "Finding new rooting in the self":

The first half of life self tends to be more deeply rooted in the external world . . . In the second half of life, people tend to be more introspective (less dependent on external cues and clues to behavior); more individuated (less like their peers, hence more difficult to assign to niches that predict their behavior); and more autonomous (less easily influenced by external attempts to coax them into a course of action.)

Or this, my favorite:

Developmental psychologist Dan McAdams sees each season of life as having a “mythic theme” – a narrative quality in people’s unfolding life stories that predisposes the general nature of their worldviews, needs and behavior. . . . The duration of each season runs about 20 years.

The mythic theme of Spring is fantasy, a narrative mode that blurs the boundaries between the imagined and the real. Summer’s mythic theme is romantic, heroic – the season of “impossible dreams: “I can do anything I set my mind to.”

The mythic theme of Fall reveals a dawning sense of realism that flows from deepened awareness of one’s limitations and ultimate mortality.

The mythic theme of Winter, irony, integrates the fantasy, romanticism and realism of earlier seasons into a blended worldview in which the unexpected is the expected and good and bad are not viewed as independent of each other, but two sides of the same coin.

(Jeez, when you put it that way, I can hardly wait for Winter!)

So, you see, this website is not only of interest to what looks to young folks like "old folks" (this indistinguishable gray mass out here -- my hair's a heavy silver, and the kids selling movie tickets have given me the dismissive glance and the senior discount throughout my 50s). If you're young, you can also see your own season of life from a new perspective, and realize that it has changed and will change again -- this too shall pass. Here, for example, he talks about "The Romantic, Heroic Beliefs of Young Adults":

Unlike preadults, whose bent is passive expectation of serendipitous good fortune, young adults are in the main more proactive in seeking good fortune. They realize life rarely happens the way we want it to happen, so a person has to take charge and make it happen their way.

Whether in pursuit of intimate partners, job promotions, or the next rung on the social ladder, young adults generally view life in terms of challenges to be heroically faced and solved.

And don't think that astringent wisdom has no place in the world of marketing. Here's what David Wolfe says right after quoting "King Lear":

[O]nce our fear of life and death subside to be no more than being an occasional nuisance, the intellectual fraud that is the common fodder of marketing becomes boundlessly less tolerable.

And so it is that as the average age in the consumer universe continues rising, consumer resistance to traditional marketing will only increase unless a wave of professional rebirths takes place in the world of marketing.

- amba

UPDATE: On second look, I don't like all of this as much as I thought I did. I think some of it is reverse-ageist -- in essence, baby boomers saying "don't trust anyone under 30" -- and false the way all generalizations are (including this one). For one thing, it pretty much leaves out people who are depressives, introverts, and dreamers when they're young. They're all portrayed as conformist strivers, who become soulful individuals as they age. I don't think during the first half of life my "self [was] more deeply rooted in the external world." I'd be a lot better off now if it had been, but that's another story.

In Saddam's Face

The election of a Kurd, and his "sworn enemy," as the new President of Iraq is a delicious and deliberate slap in the jailed dictator's hairy face:

Saddam Hussein watched the televised election of Iraq's new president from his jail cell yesterday and was "clearly upset", a senior official said.

Jalal Talabani, a former Kurdish guerrilla commander and sworn enemy of Saddam, was elected to the highest office in a parliamentary ballot, bringing a new government a step closer.

Under Saddam the only way Mr Talabani would have left his northern redoubt was in chains or a coffin, but yesterday he arrived in Baghdad in a blaze of triumph.

Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shia who is finance minister in the outgoing government, and Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni Arab tribal leader, were elected vice-presidents. . . .

Mr Talabani, 72, promised pluralism and respect for Iraq's Islamic identity in his acceptance speech.

"After being liberated from the most hideous of dictatorships our people - the Arabs, the Kurds, the Turkomans and the Assyrians - want to build a new Iraq free from dictatorship and tyranny, a democratic, unified Iraq," he said.

They're really doing it!

(From The Guardian. Hat tip: Althouse.)

- amba

Too Fast

Two days ago, it was bleak and 40, a continuation of this unbroken winter. The trees in Washington Square Park -- which I watch with some ancient proprietary instinct, as the closest thing there is to "my land" -- were bare and the twigs didn't even have bumps on them. Except for the horse chestnut, which had painful pink swellings like the nipples of a precocious 11-year-old, each bud stuffed with too many leaves. Everything else was bare.

Yesterday it suddenly got up near 70. Blue sky, bright sun. Today was even warmer. (That's New York: winterwinterwinterwinterwinter . . . SUMMER!) Hurrying past the park, I almost didn't notice that the little fruit trees were already sprayed with a faint haze of pink and green. The forsythia had broken out in yellow dots. Where did all that come from?? The buds didn't slowly swell, the sun fired its starting gun and they exploded. Zero to 60 in three seconds. It was a little scary, like a game of "Mother May I" where you turn your back and then spin around and everybody's snuck up five yards on you. At this rate, the fruit-tree blossoms will be open the day after tomorrow and littering the ground in less than a week. All the trees will be mint-green, going for lush. And the year's most delicate moment -- one with which I feel a particular link, the week before my birth -- will be over before I have a chance to notice it.

Is this part of the sinister speeding-up of time that happens as you get older? Is time speeded up and filmed over by worry and burden at any age? Or have the trees themselves speeded up, out of anxiety at the troubled, shifting weather? Are they budding and blooming as fast as they can while they have the chance?

- amba

The "Strict Father" vs. "Nurturant Parent" Church

Pope John Paul II came from Eastern Europe. So does my husband. Both were raised in what Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff (yikes! another linguist meddling in politics!) calls "Strict Father" societies. I only just came across this "strict father/nurturant parent" dichotomy, which goes to show how few left blogs I read -- this meme is all over the progressive Web:

[T]he progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. . . .

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

Lakoff goes on to explain exactly how these two family models undergird the liberal and conservative models of the state. And the church, I might add. The heated discussion over what kind of successor to John Paul II should be appointed is right out of Lakoff's playbook:

In one poll, 87 percent of American Catholics said they had a favorable impression of John Paul II. Yet 57 percent said the next pope should moderate the Vatican's policies "to reflect the attitudes and lifestyles of Catholics today." . . .

Few expect the Vatican to diverge significantly from John Paul II's path on the cultural and social issues that have most divided American Catholics and left many feeling alienated. . . .

"The odds of having a pope who's going to change those things are very small," said Nancy Dallavalle, a religion professor at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution. "The question is whether we're going to have any kind of helpful dialogue, which has been impossible under this pope. A different style will have to come from the top."

Still, a significant segment of American Catholics admired John Paul II for his rigor, and dearly hope his successor will stay the course.

At the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Community in Alexandria, Elsi Campos said she wants another pope like John Paul II. Fingering a white plastic rosary, the Salvadoran immigrant said the next pontiff should "continue like John Paul was doing -- encourage the young people and keep an eye on the people who really need it, like the poor people. They need to have a strong father." . . .

Should the next Pope be a "strong [strict but benevolent] father"? Or a "nurturant parent" who listens and responds to the wants, needs, and views of his charges? Authoritarianism or democracy?

My siblings will be cringing right around now hearing, in their mind's ear, our mother yell, "THIS IS NOT A DEMOCRACY, GODDAMMIT!!" Ours wasn't exactly a "strict father" family -- it was more of an "arbitrary mother" banana republic -- but the point is, there were few, if any, "nurturant parent" families, as currently conceived, in the 1950s. We baby boomers, with the help of our legion of psychotherapists, invented that. As far as I can tell, progressives assume that it is entirely a good thing. Is it? I'm not so sure. I suspect much has been lost, as well as gained. (It's very interesting to me that my niece Rachel, a student at Pomona, was disgusted by a mushy and self-congratulatory George Lakoff lecture she attended.)

As I said, my husband grew up in an absolute Strict Father world. In his 50s, he'd still wake up triumphant and laughing from dreams in which he finally went back as an adult man and punched out the father who'd smacked him around as a kid at will and whim. Awake, he still defends that father's abuse ("I was a bad kid"), and there's no question that it has left all kinds of complications in his psyche. So when I argue with him, I argue from the "nurturant parent" point of view. (Hell -- I tell him I hate his father, sight unseen, and that we Americans, or our brave ancestors, came over here to get the f**k away from everything his father represents!) But when I argue with liberals, I'll take the other side. My arguments are basically four:

1) When you're a small child, there's great security in firm authority -- security against threats both from without and from within. 2) Having a strict (not brutal) parent gives you something clear to resist. Paradoxically, the people I know who had strict parents to rebel against have a much stronger sense of self than those who were raised in permissive, "And what would you like to do/wear/eat, dear?" families. 3) Fear is a definite component of respect. When Jacques and his old high school buddy talk about their severe (and eccentric) "professors," all these 60 years later you can still hear the awe, and the thrill in it. 4) Humans aren't born all bad, but we aren't born all good, either. We can go either way, and we need training as well as nurturing. Lakoff's "[assumption] that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better" is pure Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- a thinker my friend Jeffrey M. Schwartz calls the "evil genius" of the modern era, because his hugely influential belief that nature is inherently good has become a wholesale excuse for all sorts of terrible -- but "natural" -- behavior.

"Do as I say, not as I do" department:

Why should those concerned with education study Rousseau? He had an unusual childhood with no formal education. He was a poor teacher. Apparently unable to bring up his own children, he committed them to orphanages soon after birth. At times he found living among people difficult, preferring the solitary life. What can such a man offer educators?   Drawing from a broad spectrum of traditions including botany, music and philosophy, his thinking has influenced subsequent generations of educational thinkers - and permeates the practice of informal educators. His book Émile was the most significant book on education after Plato's Republic".

As usual with me, I think both extremes suck, and that being offered a stark choice between them is no choice at all.

- amba

Interesting conflict over conflict of interest

Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., of Oklahoma, an Okie from Muskogee and an OB/GYN, has been chastised by a Senate ethics panel for continuing to deliver babies back home while seving in the Senate (as he did in the House, which has different rules), and has been given till September 30 to close his practice. The Washington Post:

An outraged Coburn is vowing to fight the ruling, arguing that the panel's decision contradicts the Founding Fathers' desire for lawmakers to retain ties to their communities. . . .

For nearly two decades, Senate rules have barred members from holding outside professional jobs, such as those as lawyers, real estate agents and physicians, for fear that such services -- and compensation for those services -- might conflict with their role as policymakers. The Senate panel refused Coburn's request to grant him a special exception . . .

The decision is a blow to the freshman who pledged at almost every campaign stop last year to serve as a citizen legislator. . . .

Coburn argued that the nation's founders envisioned that legislators would continue to function as citizens in their communities, including as doctors. He said that he wanted to make only enough money as a doctor to cover his expenses, and that working as a physician does not pose the same kind of potential conflicts of interest that being a lawyer might.

He said that he has a duty to his patients, many of whom are indigent, and that he needs to continue his practice to maintain his skills and his medical license.

- amba