By the time you’re rushing to meet a midnight deadline, it’s already too late.
Facebook Manners
I said we’d adapt… And I guess we have already 
It looks like it’s turning out to be privacy week – tomorrow I’ll finish up with the second half of Playing Hookey.
Playing hookey – Part I
From the BBC – a woman fired because she was caught facebooking while claiming to be too sick for work.
Playing hookey is not a new thing; it’s just easier to get caught. But there is a new thing at work here, because you just can’t be stupid like you used to.
One simple answer to this kind of thing is to say, “Don’t play hookey and you’ll be fine,” which is a tired rehash of the old chestnut, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear.” It’s as blatantly false (and naive) as it ever was. This line of thinking ignores malicious intent. It ignores abuses of power. It ignores the fact that people are geared to see what they want to see, what they expect to see.
It presupposes a world of perfect information, where things only ever look exactly as they are, and where they never resemble any other thing but themselves.
When I go to run errands today, will I be robbing my office building? No, I’m hauling out the whiteboard and chair I purchased from the going-out-of-business sale held by a company in the building. How does the guard at the desk make that call? The sale was a year ago… why did I wait so long? Because I wanted to use the chair, but now we’re moving offices so my chair has to come home.
Here’s a beautiful story that is completely true, completely innocent… but looks a lot like a miscreant lifting office furniture. Gee, I sure hope misunderstandings don’t happen on a daily basis in this world
The interesting wrinkle in this story is that the employer created a fake profile and befriended the woman so that they could spy on her. She wasn’t just being careless, she was being spied on. That’s the kind of malicious intent that bothers me.
I don’t think this story is earth-shattering. We’ll all still be here tomorrow, going about our business as usual. This is exactly the kind of social occurrence that we can adjust to.
I’m afraid of something else…
Living in Contentment.
We all love to strive for excellence.
But honestly, most of the time… it’s not gonna happen.
Now, often people get angry when I say this.
“Don’t say that,” they chide. “Excellence is achievable… you need to motivate yourself!”
It’s such a shame when people misunderstand me… I fully understand the power of positive thinking and motivation. I do motivate myself, daily. Towards mediocrity.
I make sure to look myself in the mirror every morning and muster every positive and cheery thought; every rainbow, every fluffy kitten.
“Scott,” I say, “You have an incredible gift! You’re fantastic! You’re awesome at making completely justified, intuitive and reasonable assumptions! You do ordinary like no-one I know does ordinary! Now go out and have a totally average day!”
So far… it seems to be working ;-P
Transformation
This is the second piece inspired out of a course on prayer that I’ve been taking. The first is here.
“If nothing changes, things stay the same.”
(I love tautologies; they’re so true. This is my favorite flavour of Einstein’s classic quote, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”)
What does transformation mean to me?
It means that if you put me into the same old situation, something different happens, without any extra effort on my part. It means that I haven’t changed anything, and yet something different happens. Something different happens, not because I did anything different but because I am different. As an example:
You say, “Butter,” I say, “Chicken”
*Transformation occurs*
You say, “Butter,” I say, “safe than sorry.”
I haven’t done anything different, in fact, I’ve only done the same simple thing in both cases – supplied the first words that came to mind. Obviously in this case I’ve been transformed from someone who’s obsessed with food into someone who’s obsessed with jokes so rank they border on cheesy. That the words coming out are different means that I am different.
I didn’t have to do anything to support this new reality, I don’t have to work to keep the words coming out the whey they do. I just have to be. That’s transformation.
Now, because I’m talking about transforming people, I have to talk about God. People don’t change people. God changes people.
God doesn’t just want us to follow his laws. He tried that (it didn’t work). He wants us to give him permission to change us, to transform us. This is a happy thought. Among other things, it makes theology much simpler.
When you pose the question, “Why shouldn’t we sin freely because God will forgive it all anyway?” as a changing behavior question, it makes a certain amount of sense and is tricky to debunk.
When you pose the same question as a transformation question, it is immediately revealed as self-contradictory nonsense. Faith, the basis of salvation, means letting Jesus live within us and transform us. It’s a commitment to allowing him to change us into people who hate sin the same way he hates sin.
If the reduction of sin in our lives is the result of giving God the keys, then seeking to sin more means actively resisting God’s transformation, which means denying Christ in us and walking away from the entire basis for our being forgiven. Um. Okay… Let’s not do that.
A Struggle
In those areas where we haven’t allowed God to change us, the only thing we can reasonably expect is the same struggle that we’ve always faced, the same draining, daunting, depressing slog. There’s no basis for expecting anything else. We can quote Scripture and sing psalms all day long, but until we change, we’re merely setting ourselves up for disappointment and a bitter fall. It kinda feels like Romans 7.
If something we do comes as an effort on our part, there is always be struggle involved. The effort we exert means that there’s a struggle.
God says we should rejoice in suffering. It takes a special kind of person to rejoice in suffering and to come out of it hopeful. I’m tempted to say, “The kind of person that only God can make.”
God says we should have peace in every circumstance. I’m tempted to say, “The kind of person that only God can make.”
The point of this is not to deny the things we can do ourselves.
This isn’t to deny that we can build up good experience for ourselves, that we can be courageous and mature and happy.
This isn’t to deny that we can make good choices and reap the rewards of our good choices.
This isn’t to deny that we can work very hard and modify our behaviors, to the point where we look like completely different people.
We can do all this, but, barring some manner of transformation, we can never make the struggle go away.
If we could have, we would have by now, no?
Heavily Qualified Proverbs
Every proverb has a truer, more heavily qualified version.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… assuming no cliff-edge and/or mininal overhang.
A penny saved is a penny earned… neglecting the pennyworth of experience gained in the earning of a penny.
Haste makes waste… in systems (and at a scale) where reliability decreases with production rate.
Hindsight is 20/20… unless we’re reminiscing about High School. Then it’s all rose and/or puce coloured glasses. Ya shoulda asked her out, buddy.
Two heads are better than one… once you’ve picked your mark and proposed the sucker bet.
A picture paints a thousand words… except that stupid “Polar Bear in a snowstorm”. Sheesh.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket… although when you only have one it’s pretty tempting. (One egg or one basket… works either way)
God helps those who help themselves… and get on their knees and ask God to help them.
Waste not, want not… unless, of course, you simply have nothing to waste.
There’s no place like home… We’re not talking about home, right?
Talk is cheap… if you’re not a lawyer.
All good things come to him who waits… except the time he lost waiting. He’ll never get that back.
He who laughs last laughs longest… but sometimes if you “just got it” five minutes after the punchline, everyone just looks at you and you turn red and shut right up.
There’s no use crying over spilt milk… unless you do it loud enough and long enough and Mom gets tired of it and brings you another glass.
No man is an island… but if you split hairs endlessly and dissect common proverbs to a disgusting level of detail… Don’t expect to be flocked to at parties.
The Right to Write Right.
…must be protected. Right?
Extra! Extra! A linguist slams the canonical college compendium of grammar and style advice. Read all about it.
Everyone knows that there are corners of their native language that cannot be explained. (Ok, ok… English speakers know this). We don’t try to make excuses, we simply accept these aberrations for what they are.
“It just sounds better that way.”
“Ummm… I’m not sure why it is, but it just is.”
“No. Just don’t say that.”
We average people have a wealth of literary experience upon which to build our rules of thumb, and they suit us just fine. But for a linguist, hand-waving and burble don’t cut it. Let’s have a moment of silence while we all pity the linguists, shall we?
…
So what happens when a linguist pits himself against the de facto wisdom of the crowds? This is an interesting case to look at. I love cases where someone goes against popular wisdom, especially overwhelming popular wisdom. Is our riled linguist friend, Geoffery K. Pullum, right? Ooh! Oooh! I know! Let’s answer the question by posing a false dichotomy!
A false dichotomy for the sake of simplicity and concision ;-P
There are two possible answers to this question:
1) Yes. He’s a linguist and he knows what he’s talking about.
2) No. If everybody else says Strunk & White is the salvation of the language then it must be.
The answer to #1 is a resounding, “Yes!” He is a linguist. He does know what he is talking about. If he says that the book advocates lousy grammar, then it does. I’m far too lazy to learn more about grammar than he does, just in order to show him up over the internet. Instead, I’m going to say that he’s the head of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh (which he is) and leave it at that.
In short: #1, “Yes!”
The answer to #2 is a resounding, “Yes!” I’m sorry. If you find yourself saying “Everyone else is wrong.” you are wrong. I’m willing to make special exceptions (jumping off cliffs comes to mind), but certainly not in this case. Why? Because language is one of the few cases where everybody saying it actually does make it right. It’s true! It’s marvy. Fab. Far out. It rocks! It’s awesome! Even linguists grudgingly accept that D’oh! is acceptable and that thou art righte retarded shouldst thou thusly scribe.
Generally speaking, people make very few arbitrary decisions. There’s a reason for the way we act. Convoluted and twisted, perhaps, but it’s there. So if we’re all flocking to Strunk & White in droves (oh, and not just us… smart people too ;-P ), there has to (has to!) be a reason behind it. Maybe it’s that the bookstore is giving away a free ipod with every copy sold. Maybe a crazy old English professor has obtained nuclear weapons and is making demands from a hidden island stronghold. I don’t know.
If you want to ignore real, practical evidence, you’d better pony up a pretty good alternate explanation. Pullum can go shut up because, well… we said so.
In short: #2, “Yes!”
The Truth or What I Think
Umm… I’m not sure about The Truth so I’ll just share What I Think.
I own a copy of Strunk & White. I’ve even looked at it. In the fleeting moments that I’ve flicked through it, it was helpful. I’m sure that it is chock full of lousy grammar. Ok. I won’t use it to teach myself grammar. I’m not particularly interested in grammar. As a programmer, I’m really quite con-grammar. ‘Grammar‘ to me means a set of rules that govern a language. It can be pretty ugly sometimes.
Much of what is found in Strunk & White is fuzzy, anyway. It’s not a grammar manual. It’s a writing manual. It’s hedged and it’s qualified and it works best as a rule of thumb (the kind the linguists hate, remember?). It falls along the lines of, “Never do this. Unless you should. Then you can.”
That’s perfectly okay. In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s fantastic!
If you hedge your advice well enough, it doesn’t matter whether or not it is right or wrong. It matters that it raises a question.
If Strunk says “Don’t split your infinitive, except when you should” and I, pouring over my draft, stop and ask for a second, “Should I split my infinitive here?” or even “What’s an infinitive? Is this one? Is it already split?” then Strunk has done his job. I’m going to let you in on a little secret…
I don’t need a hard rule. As a native English speaker, I know what sounds best. As an author, I know what is nearest my intent. I don’t need to be spoon-fed the right way…
I need a question to ask, so that I’ll try the other way and not just blindly plough ahead with the first words to fall from my pen.
If I ask the question, “Which is better?” I’ll probably be able to answer it. But I need to know the question, and I need to take the time to stop and ask.
Of course, grammar is valuable, because if you leave it behinde, soone language becometh a bariere to communication, and once your meaning beomes unclear, all your noble efforts will come to naught.
“Tarzan right wrong in jungle!”
“Yes, Tarzan! We’ll return to England immediately and arrange a tutor!”
1 Thessalonians
Beleaguered, be encouraged! Your testimony shines.