WordWacky

Rarely am I treated to a new idea in the world of words. There’s something reminiscent of the refrigerator poetry that was so popular a decade ago, but somehow this is way cooler.

Here’s the latest in the series of Newspaper Blackout Poems by Austin Kleon:

There’s also a book coming out, so go preorder it. (Via @splintergen)

Want to read with me? I just joined the Infinite Summer initiative: a group of readers tackling Infinite Jest, the 1,079-page, heavily annotated tome by the late David Foster Wallace. (I think this book warrants the use of the word tome—if ever there was a valid Kindle argument…) There’s a daily post at the blog by one of several writers. I have had to abstain from reading them because I’m behind. I didn’t get my book until this week, so I’m on page 50, when I should be somewhere between 150 and 225.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother read to me every night until I could read myself. It was the highlight of my day—I was the child of a single parent, so one-on-one time was rare and precious. Add what was to become my lifelong addiction, story, to the mix, and you have one happy—if sleepy—preschooler.

Then there was school. Once everyone was able to read, we all would read the same stories and talk about them together. I was (am?) often the slacker, behind in my (school) reading, but I would still benefit from the social aspect of the reading, the discussion and analysis.

I’ve never joined or started a book club, though I’ve often thought about it. Post college, many of us are starved for some debate, a more in-depth reading of a book, or even just the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone else liked something, too. I’m pretty good about keeping up my Goodreads account, and while I often find good things to read there, it lacks the real-time interactivity that a classroom or a book club have.

So I don’t know if Infinite Summer will fulfill my need for social reading. As a social tool the Internet has its benefits (reach, specificity) and its shortfalls (anonymity, creepy people who profile well). And blogs tend to be less interactive—call them Web 1.5, perhaps. But I am following Infinite Summer on Twitter, so who knows. Maybe once I’m caught up and not concerned about spoilers I will really feel like part of the party.

As a child I wanted nothing more than to escape the world with a thick, long-lasting book. And now I want that same low-tech device to connect me to the world.

It’s an old trick, the dictionary hack. Hook up a server login page with a dictionary file and run all the words as passwords until you hit something. In this case, the program got to “H” for happiness, before the server opened up and all of the Twitter goodies fell out.

It’s not that impressive to me that the perpetrator was 18. Who else has all that time to spend, just to misspell Bill O’Reilly’s name on the FOX Twitter stream and let us all know he’s gay. What is impressive to me is that the security was so lax at Twitter that this was able to happen.

Via Twittown:

The details of the rudimentary hack reveal a startling lack of essential security within Twitter’s halls, and raises eyebrows about the potential for Twitter to be marketed as an internal collaboration tool for business use. The so called dictionary-hack has been a mainstay of hackers for decades, and the servers should have been configured to recognize the repeated login attempts. A lack of strong password enforcement (ensuring that passwords are complex) and a failure to “lock out” accounts after multiple failed attempts are a breeding ground for would be hackers and crackers - with a situation like that, it was only a matter of time.

As far as hacks go, this one was relatively harmless (though the Twitter execs trying to monetize the service may disagree with me on that point). Nobody’s bank account was drained. Nobody really believed O’Reilly was being outed by FOX News.

What’s interesting to me is how we use words as code. When we type them over and over into a server to get access to a website, they lose their meaning. Do you think that whoever set the “happiness” password felt happy every day while he or she typed it in? Devoid of context, words become little more than letter patterns, in this case motor commands from the brain. If there is any meaning, it’s “let me in, already.”

Say a word again and again, until the syllables run together, and you have a group of circular phonemes, not a word at all. (What the hell does “Om mani padme hum” mean, anyway?)

Names have a similar sort of meaning transfer. When I took the name Ruby, I thought a lot about its meaning. Now I rarely think about it, and I’m sure when my wife hears the word Ruby, she thinks of me before she thinks about a red stone with the hardness of nine mohs.

I am a word addict, but of all the qualities of words, the one I like best is that they mean something. They are the most basic metaphor of our human lives.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s don’t use common words as passwords. I would argue further that we should not use anything with meaning as a password. Let’s keep those meanings sacred, shall we? After all, 8-letter/number/symbol patterns are infinite. The number of words in any dictionary, on the other hand, is decidedly finite.

[Picture via MAKE:Blog]

My love affair with crosswords began in high school. See, when you’re cutting classes, it helps to have something to do to pass the time. I would do the Daily News or New York Times crossword, sometimes with my friend Denise. She would put two letters in a box to fit words that she wanted to place. It was infuriating.

That love affair revived a couple of years ago, and I dragged my wife in for a threesome. We’d trade the crossword back and forth when we were stuck, and sometimes — but not always — we’d get it all done.

It is my ambition to one day complete (solo, sorry honey) a Saturday New York Times crossword. Everyone thinks Sundays are the hardest, but that’s not true. It’s just the largest. From the Amazon listing for the Saturday book:

The Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle is the most challenging puzzle of the week, which is why it has gained such an eager following. The most serious solvers know that actually finishing the puzzle is no small feat.

No small feat, indeed. When I get any of the words in that puzzle, it’s a triumph. A girl can dream….

The word poverty originates comes from the Latin, paupertatem, via Old French, poverte. It is first recorded in Old English around 1225, as mentioned in a book published in 1868, Old English Homilies.

We use the word poverty, and its cousin, poor, casually, meaning broke, perhaps, or cash deficient. Yet we know true poverty when we see it, don’t we? In people who are homeless. Or people who debate between heating their houses in the winter and eating.

Growing up, I thought we were poor, my single mother and I, but she worked steadily, at the same job throughout my childhood, a good job by many standards — a job with the City that had good benefits. I didn’t have the same clothes or sneakers as some of my classmates, or a piano, and my mother slept in the living room of our one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. But in reality, by the definitions set out for us by the U.S. Government, we were not “poor.”

According to the U.S. Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines for 2008, a family of two, like ours, would have to be making less than $14,000 a year in the contiguous U.S. to be below the poverty line. We lived in New York City. It is unfathomable to me to think someone could live on that amount of money and still eat, get clothing, and use transportation to and from a job on that income in New York.

Apparently it is also unfathomable to the human services providers, too, because you qualify for food stamps at 130% of the federal poverty limit, for WIC at 185%, and often for Medicaid (depends on the state) at 200%. According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, “Research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs.”  So if the guideline doesn’t even determine what we consider poor, why set it at falsely low levels? Seems to me there can only be one reason: to deny people benefits. (But I’m a cynic. If you can think of another, please speak up.)

I’m taking three steps against poverty, starting today. I urge you to find three things you can do to stop poverty, however you or the government defines it. Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Donate. I’m going to take Brian from Copyblogger up on his generous offer to match 250% of my $10 donation to Save the Children! Unheard of, really, people. You should donate ten bucks, too.
2. Educate myself. In addition to the research I did for this post, I’m going to read a book that’s been on my to-read list for too long: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
3. Vote. You heard it here first. And I’m not a non-profit, so I can say vote for That One, please. If you don’t, please don’t tell me about it.

I’m not really a reader of USA Today. I think of it as too conservative and dumbed-down to waste my time on. Sometimes I glance at it over a hotel continental breakfast. And for some reason, my workplace, known for its staggering cumulative intellect, peddles this newspaper exclusively in the cafeterias.

But today, amid the ”greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression,” a friend pointed me to a story by Craig Wilson in the USA Today that is worthy of some note: it’s National Punctuation Day.

Today is National Punctuation Day, a day set aside to reflect on the fact a semicolon is not a medical problem. At least that’s what NPD founder Jeff Rubin, a former newspaperman, wants to impart.

I hesitate to write about punctuation since it has never been my strong suit. Commas especially. Or is it commas, especially?

I have long held the belief that I must have been sick the day commas were taught. Where to put them. When to use them. When not to use them. Do you put one before the conjunction in a simple series of three or more items? (The answer is yes. I just looked it up on Rubin’s website, nationalpunctuationday.com)

I am a great fan of punctuation. Generally I try not to be a prescriptivist when it comes to language rules, but I am so fond of punctuation that it’s difficult for me to keep my directives and opinions to myself. (Lest you now take great joy in scouring my prose for punctuation errors, let me disclaim that I am not perfect, and even the best of us punctuation nerds can benefit from an editor. So please, feel free to correct me.)

Opinions? What would opinions have to do with something so precise as punctuation?

Style guides, those taskmasters of prescriptivism, differ – for example, on the serial comma rule. The Associated Press Stylebook, which lords over the majority of journalism in this country, deletes the serial comma. While The Chicago Manual of Style insists upon it. Maybe it’s because my true love is fiction, but I take Chicago’s side on this (and most other) punctuation quibbles.

I read a good portion of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I didn’t finish it, in part because it was overdue at the library and in part because though it was funny, I wondered exactly how much of her British punctuation rules really applied to our ‘Merican habits. I did appreciate that, though she was not in favor of comma proliferation, it was a matter of taste, not standards.

I love the comma. For me, that half breath taken is like life itself, breathing its way into sentences. A little pause brings character and drama to otherwise flat, dull sentences. And when there isn’t a pause denoted by the comma, there is visual deliniation, a guide for the reader of the sentence. What commas do is eschew obfuscation — that is, they clarify a sentence. It’s especially important when some knob is trying to read your precious word strings aloud.

So I loved hearing that my liberal peppering of the comma was tolerated, even by those not so comma inclined, like Truss.

I’ve also made dear friends with the semicolon. As Wilson points out in his article, they are somewhat too pretentious for casual communication; I’m loathe to put them in e-mail. But they are handy little buggers, creating conjoined twins of sentences that would otherwise be merely adjacent.

So we come to the exclamation point, that much-maligned symbol of exuberance and emphasis. Like many students of my generation, I was initiated to proper composition with a slim copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. According to Elements, this abrasive slash marring the end of your sentence “is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands.” Egads! We’re using it wrong. Of course, Strunk doesn’t sink to talk at all about multiple exclamation points, which in my opinion are one of the greatest scourges of the Internet.

There we have it, my punctuation manifesto, in honor of National Punctuation Day. [Editor's note: Exclamation point omitted in deference to Strunk and White.]

I have to admit, when my ex-girlfriend first told me about Car Talk, I was skeptical. As she was the consummate driver, we were probably in the car when their show came on the radio, and she was probably, in her undeniable wisdom, telling me how great Click and Clack were. And I probably said something like, “A show about cars?”

But I listened, and she was right (she would say I was often wrong). It was more than a show about cars.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi, or Click and Clack, as they call themselves in honor of aging cars, are brothers who have been solving people’s car dilemmas on the radio since 1977. They became mechanics in 1973, originally opening a do-it-yourself garage that became The Good News Garage, a more traditional garage. Says their NPR biography:

In 1977, Tom and Ray were invited to the studios of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, along with other area mechanics, to discuss car repair. Tom accepted the invitation, and when he was invited back the following week, he asked, “Can I bring my brother, Ray?”

The show is a combination of commisseration about cars — from brand names to mechanical quirks — to real problem-solving. Their advice is human and opinionated, and often the brothers disagree with one another. More than once I’ve heard them settle bets between spouses and friends. And my own personal favorite part of the show is the Puzzler. For example, this one from July 28 of this year:

There is a series of nine numbers: 335 443 554 __ followed by a blank. What’s the blank, and why?

Give up? Here’s the answer.

Thanks to Doug at Car Talk who was kind enough to write back to me with what Tom and Ray were reading! Authors themselves, Tom and Ray have a new book out: Ask Click and Clack - Answers from Car Talk.

Ray is reading a book by one of the guests on Car Talk, a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.

Traffic is something I think about frequently, and at great length. I think (and speak) in phrases punctuated by expletives worthy of my Bronx childhood, as I address other drivers from the safety of my vehicle, which is invariably crawling along I-5 or SR-520.

Mary Roach from The New York Times says of Traffic, “My solution to the nation’s vehicular woes would be to make this good book required reading for anyone applying for a driver’s license.”

The driver of this book has a blog, How We Drive, that’s worth checking out, too.

The book Tom is reading, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, held me hostage. I looked it up on Google Books, and I found there were a good number of pages available to me. Within minutes I had lost track of the task at hand, and I was convinced that our destiny was to become human-computer hybrid beings.

The Singularity, as Kurzweil describes it, is the consequence of the speed with which technology is advancing. He predicts that technology and biology will merge. On page 9, Kurzweil says, “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine, or between physical and virtual reality.”

Futurism of this sort is perfectly familiar to us — in the realm of the fantastic, books and movies that we categorize as science fiction. But this is not a novel, and it’s not sci-fi. There is a Singularity Summit happening this October 25 in San Jose. Speakers include representatives of MIT, Berkeley, Intel, and IBM. It’s put on by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, whose mission is: “In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk.”

Bill Gates said of Kurzweil that he is “The best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” And Janet Maslin in The New York Times says the book “is startling in scope and bravado. Mr. Kurzweil envisions breathtakingly exponential progress, and he is merely extrapolating from established data.”

It does not escape my notice that Tom is reading a book by an author named Ray, and Ray by one named Tom. Even in their reading material, Click and Clack are inseperable.

Hey, Western Washington, tonight is a great night to eat out and support literacy in your own community.

Dish Up Literacy is an event sponsored by Page Ahead, an organization that promotes literacy by distributing books to kids and encouraging their parents to read with them. Eat out tonight, Thursday, September 18, at any of the participating restaurants, and they will donate at least 20% of their proceeds to Page Ahead.

Make sure to mention when you go that you’re at the restaurant for the event, so the proprietors will continue to participate.

Who’s Craig Newmark? You may not be familiar with the name, but if you’re an internet junkie living in a big urban center, you’re already on a first name basis with him, I promise. Craig, as in craigslist.org. When I mentioned I was doing this post, someone responded, “Oh, there’s a Craig?”

I used to want to write a book called My Life on Craigslist. (Yes, before someone made a movie.) For many years, almost nothing major has happened in my life without Craig as the middleman. I met my most fabulous ex-roommate — and now good friend — through Craigslist. I bought one car and sold another on Craigslist. Many free items, including a giant wooden arbor that we had to pry from the ground, have found homes in and around our house, courtesy of Craigslist. To say I’m a fan of Craig’s is a gross understatement.

Yes, there is a Craig, and from everything I’ve heard, he’s a very cool, approachable guy. He even personally responded to my e-mail when I asked what he was reading.

Craig is reading Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. First off, let’s stop and admire Craig’s dedication (and even more so, Stephenson’s) — this is a 937 page novel. Once upon a time that wouldn’t have been too big a deal, but these days novelists seem to tend to keep things short. If a novel nears 400 pages, I’m surprised.

It should be difficult to say what a book that approaches 1000 pages is about. If it’s not about pretty much everything, it should have been edited down, in my opinion. And that seems to be what Stephenson’s book is about: nearly everything. Said one Amazon customer review, “It is a difficult book to describe to others. In some ways, I felt like I was reading a novelization of Goedel, Escher, Bach.”

From the publisher’s description: “Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside ’saecular’ world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals.”

Booklist starred its review of Anathem, saying, “The novel is beautifully written …and, even though it runs to nearly 1,000 pages, it feels somehow too short, as though we’re made to leave this carefully constructed world and return to our own before we’re quite ready. A magnificent achievement.”

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post had not-so-flattering things to say about it:

[Anathem is] “…ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull. That’s an awful thing to say about a novel as formidable as Anathem, but there’s no getting around it. The made-up language is rebarbative (though often clever), the plot moves with elephantine slowness, and much is confusing (the process of decipherment actually drives the book, as characters and the reader Try to Figure Things Out), and every so often we just stop for a long info-dump or debate about cosmology, philosophy, semantics or similar glitzy arcana.”

I had to look up the word rebarbative (repellant), but otherwise I was left wondering if Dirda was not just the wrong audience for the book.

Now, I’m not too much of a sci-fi reader, but if there’s one place I do tread in the sci-fi world, it’s intellectual sci-fi. I like that sci-fi is involved with big ideas, though I sometimes feel cheated that there has to be a fantastic setting so that they make sense (this is, I think, what defines me as not into sci-fi). Stephenson, whom I admit I’ve never read, is among the giants in that realm. One blogger calls Snow Crash, Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk bestseller, one of the ten best intellectual science fiction novels.

If you want to attend a reading of Anathem and happen to live in the Portland area, Seattle-based Stephenson will be at the Bagdad Theater tomorrow, September 16 at 7 p.m. $5, tickets available online.

Listening to NPR on the way to work this morning, my wife and I heard Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED on Morning Edition. That book’s been on my reading list for awhile, as I am a fellow logophile who has been tempted to get neck deep in at least a few dictionaries, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary included.

The segment, which you can listen to on NPR’s website, is on the word bailout. The reference is to the dispute over whether or not the U.S. government is bailing out Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae by effectively taking them over with a large cash infusion.

As we probably all know, words have some weight, and I believe the argument is over whether or not the Treasury is putting too much into a lost cause. What Ammon Shea concludes is that whether or not you like the word, it’s appropriate to the situation — and you can tailor your definition by choosing the dictionary from which to draw its meaning.

Says Ammon:

Those who oppose the plan can point out that the Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines bailout as “the process of saving a company, plan, or other thing from failing by providing lots of money.” This would bolster their claim that the Treasury is subsidizing poor business practices and potentially throwing away billions of dollars that could help needy Americans.

Treasury secretary Henry Paulson could counter with the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary. A bailout can also be an instance of giving assistance to a failing economy. That would bolster the claim that the government is acting to save the larger economy, and not simply trying to help the privileged few.

The dictionary wars continue on, and if you’re like me, you quickly lose track of which side is which, as the meanings blur together and collide.

For me, the most interesting part of the dictionary is not the fine lines between one meaning of a word and another, but the etymology of the word. In this case, the etymology is not out of current usage. To bail [out] still means the same thing it did when first used in the 1600’s: to dump water out of a boat that is leaking. The alternative, of course, is obvious — the boat would sink.

As an aside, I did learn about a new dictionary from the segment, the Merrriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary. Who’s Garfield, you ask, and how did he get in on that exclusive dictionary team? Well, he’s a cranky orange feline, of course. [Editor's note: Personally, I prefer Garfield Minus Garfield.]