paperpools

Anatol Stefanowitsch is back!

Anatol Stefanowitsch at Bremer Sprachblog takes another look at a classic xkcd


(pop-up: And nothing for I'm glad I saw 'Epic Movie')

AS:

Ich bin ja ein erklärter XKCD-Fan, aber ich finde, dass er in diesem Fall durch die Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse für him und her eine Chance vertan hat, detaillierteres Wissen über die menschliche Natur herauszufinden. (I'm an avowed xkcd fan, but I think in this case, by amalgamating the results for him and her, he lost a chance to bring to light a more detailed knowledge of human nature.)

AS makes good this important omission, first by running searches in English according to gender:

(pop-up: Tu es oder tu es nicht, du wirst beide bereuen (Sören Kierkegaard) [do it or don't do it, you'll regret both])

and THEN by running searches for Ich hätte ihn/sie (nicht) küssen sollen


(pop-up: Das einzige, was ich bereue, ist das ich nicht jemand anders bin (Woody Allen) [the only think I regret is that I'm not somebody else])

Stefanowitsch has revealed several striking disparities between the anglophone and germanophone worlds of sexual regret - or, at least, disparities between the pools of regretful English and German speakers who feel called upon to share their disappointment on the WWW. (Perhaps English-speaking men are likelier than both English-speaking women and German-speaking men AND women to have no alternative to the kindness of strangers.)

There's a lesson to be learnt.

The lesson, of course, is that Randall Monroe and Antaol Stefanowitsch should collaborate on a T-shirt. Guys. Guys. You know it makes sense.

(Bremer Sprachblog, as so often, brings to mind the possibly apocryphal British headline: Fog in Channel: Continent cut off. In this case, it's the non-German-speaking world that's cut off from this consistently excellent blog; if you know any German at all, check out the rest here.)

Got back from the gym this morning (good) resolved to get a new bike basket (the last stolen while I was in Morocco). Was not sure whether there was enough money in my Postbank account. Went online. My Postbank account asked me to activate my new TAN list (a list of 100 numbers you use to authenticate online payments). I did. Recent activity was displayed. There was a debit of 160 Euros from LottoTeam.

I'm baffled. There was a letter from LottoTeam when I got back offering a 32 Euro voucher in return for taking out a three-month subscription to the Lottery, which I naturally don't want, with all my bank account details and a blank line for a signature. No idea how they got my account details, but surely (I thought) they can't take money from my account if I don't sign anything? I now look more closely at this letter. It says they tried to reach me by telephone twice without success, and the debit for the lottery is made monthly, and they will charge me 160 Euros unless I notify them to the contrary by postcard or fax. I naturally failed to notify them to the contrary, since I was in Florida, so they have taken 160 Euros from my account. Um. Are they really allowed to take money from my account if they simply tell me they will unless I tell them not to?

Anyway, I send them a fax, and I suppose I shall have to call them, and this is stressful so I turn in my hour of need to Bremer Sprachblog. In the comments section it emerges that Anatol Stefanowitsch is considering his options. The blog was started last January as part of the Jahr der Wissenschaften; it takes a lot of time; it may not continue in its present form. Say it ain't so, Anatol, say it ain't so! (What he in fact says is that Unesco has declared 2008 the Jahr der Sprachen, so there may be a reprieve.)

All this while I am mulling over my outraged response to LottoTeam. I have a quick glance at the Guardian; they have published Doris Lessing's acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize - a speech whose nearest rival for sheer idiocy is Paul Auster's speech for the Prince of Asturias Prize earlier this year. Auster's line was that no book had ever stopped anyone from killing anyone, never saved a child's life, never changed anything, a line which, even applied only to novels, could sound plausible only to someone who had never heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe. I had thought no one could top Auster for portentous intellectual laziness; I was young and naive. Lessing begins by talking about the desperate hunger for books in Zimbabwe, moves on to the indifference to books of boys at an upmarket North London school, moves on to sweeping comments about technology:

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

They say you're as old as you feel, which would make me about 963, and that was before Lessing went on to privilege books over oral composition, a move which might look plausible to anyone who a) thinks The Da Vinci Code is better value than the Iliad or b) has never come across Milman Parry's work on Homeric epic and oral composition. It's entirely possible that the book-filled mud hut of Lessing's childhood had a copy of the Iliad but missed out on Parry's classic papers in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 1930 and 1932, and entirely possible that Lessing never happened to come across developments in Homeric scholarship on leaving home, one would be rather less likely, one might think, to preserve this unselfconscious ignorance if brought up on, um, the inanities of the Internet. If you're as old as you feel then discovering that a Novel Prize acceptance speech can underperform the sort of blog post one dashes off in half an hour (without bothering to check Wikipedia) would make me about 1097.

Which might explain why I have yet to adjust to the telephone, that instrument of the Devil.

Trying to sort out minor problems with the proofs for an excerpt of Your Name Here which is to appear in n+1, not to mention major problems sorting out health insurance with the Kunstlersozialkasse (lead time 6 months) with help from Johanna (well, all right, I have mentioned them but the tedium is in the details and these I spare you). Came up against a terrible piece of self-knowledge while trying to tackle project management through a 45-day-free-trial to FoggBugz.

Foggbugz lets you establish projects, with cases within each project, and each case is assigned a priority level. There are also other excellent features - you can set up online discussion groups for customers, you can set up a WYSIWYG wiki either for internal use or public access, problems are raised and resolved, correspondence can be incorporated in the history of the project - it's great, exactly the thing publishers should be using. The thing that's very tiring, after all, is the fact that one often thinks one has resolved an issue through e-mail correspondence with Person A, except that Person A doesn't bother to tell Person B - there's no single place with a history of all the discussions relating to a book, the tasks to be done. Also, of course, people spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel; a technical problem may be solved for the production of one book, but the knowledge is lost, there's no reasonably public record of the solution.

So yes, it's great, but selecting priorities for various stages of various projects was bad news. The fact is, after all, that finishing the book on sexual codes is top priority, a 1 Must Fix, various articles that might or might not get published are a 2, and blogging is at best a 4 Fix If Time and if we're honest a 6 Fix If Time. So how can it be that I treat my 6 Fix If Time activity as if it were top priority, and my top priority activity as if there were all the time in the world?

Well, I know, but I'm not saying.

Tomorrow will be better.

On a more cheerful note, Anatol Stefanowitsch (who has luckily not yet had the Foggbugz Aha! moment) has a post today on the great Eskimo-words-for-snow debate (a term which would, as an earlier post suggests, itself count as a word for snow in Inuktikut).

Bremer Sprachblog has this quotation from an interview of Urs Widmer, a Swiss scholar and writer:

Unser Sprachgebrauch ist durchsetzt mit Anglizismen. Wie weit beugen Sie sich dem Denglisch?

Widmer: Wissen Sie, ich habe ein Verhältnis zur Sprache, das nicht moralisiert. Die Sprache tut, was sie tut. Und ich schaue zu, was sie tut, verwende das manchmal eins zu eins, aufrichtig, und manchmal mit kritischer Ironie. Aber die Sprache hat immer recht. Ich bin gegen Sprachkämpfe, gegen Vorwürfe, dass zu viele englische Wörter gebraucht würden, zu wenige französische, dass wir unsern Dialekt pflegen sollten. Ich bin einer, der wie ein Korken auf dieser Sprache schwimmt und dabei seinen wachen Kopf gebraucht.