I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Interlude. Let me explain how I arrived at this conflict; skip to the dénouement if the travelogue begins to bore you. [Note to self: look up or else coin the adjectival form of interlude; consider interludinous, interludinal, interludinary, interludine.]

The comparison of my writing with Dan Brown’s occurred earlier today, while I was visiting I Write Like, a momentarily amusing web¹ site at http://iwl.me. I arrived there from this CONJUGATE VISITS post (sorry, but its author yells the title). I happened onto CONJUGATE VISITS while looking up “supposably,” which I learned today is a word (note the absence of scare quotes around “word”), as opposed to a “word,” which would have been my first guess.

The next step back is a tad embarrassing. I only realized where I’d been before looking up supposably when I retraced my steps for this blog post; I’d gotten the idea to look up supposably from this article on the web site of Reader’s Digest, a generally icky place I wouldn’t have visited intentionally. A tweet from Phil Jimenez led me to the Reader’s Digest article (more specifically a bit.ly URL in the tweet, and I submit disguise-by-shortening as my excuse).

I don’t recall whether I read Phil’s particular tweet before or after I noted that he and I shared exactly one Facebook like, Dan Savage. That was no surprise, given what (or who? It’s a fictional character, so I’m not sure.) led me to Phil’s Twitter stream in the first place — Kevin Keller. Kevin, as you may know, made his appearance in Veronica #202 today; while I’ve yet to get my hands on the issue, I’d caught wind of it from Google News and consequently searched Twitter for the latest buzz, finding Phil, then Reader’s Digest, then supposably, then CONJUGATE VISITS, then I Write Like. In summary,

• I Write Like, from
• CONJUGATE VISITS, from
• supposably, from
• Reader’s Digest, from
• @philjimeneznyc, from
• Kevin Keller, from
• Google News, from
• daily routine.

Dénouement. On to my demonstration. Consider the following sentence, which I found on Amazon in a one-star review of CONJUGATE VISITS’s authoress June Casagrande’s book, It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences, here.

Copernicus was thrilled when he discovered that the earth revolves around the sun.

Casagrande and the reviewer both prefer this to “Copernicus was thrilled when he discovered that the earth revolved around the sun.” I on the other hand, presently compelled to say something about grammar, offer an even better sentence.

Copernicus was thrilled to discover that the earth revolves around the sun.

The proposition of Casagrande’s sentence (either version) has two parts. Deconstructing the sentence rigorously, it states first that Copernicus was thrilled, and second that Copernicus’s² thrill occurred when he made his now famous discovery. However, the second part of the proposition is perplexing, if only slightly. If the writer had stopped after “Copernicus was thrilled,” I’d have felt cheated, but because she’d failed to explain why he was thrilled, not because she’d failed to explain when he was thrilled. Emotions interest readers because of their why, not their when.

For most readers, I’m sure the second part of the sentence as written sufficiently explains the why. Similarly, if the “thrilled when” sentence were part of an SAT reading comprehension question, the “correct” answer to Why was Copernicus thrilled? would be a) Because he discovered that the earth revolves around the sun., not d) It’s impossible to determine from the reading. But why explain “why?” indirectly by explaining when? The turn of phrase “thrilled to discover” isn’t the only choice — one might say “thrilled by his discovery” or “thrilled to have discovered,” but it’s the best choice, and this is my blog. Also, I might have answered d) to the SAT question, especially if I knew I’d get to argue with a teacher about it later. I don’t brag about my SAT English score, and for good reason.

Epilog. Dare I paste this blog post into I Write Like? And if I do, then post the result here, then paste it in again, will the result be the same, and if not, and I repeat the process… [Update: The result is … H. P. Lovecraft. I’ll leave it at that. Tear from the fabric the threads that are old!]

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Postscript. You, dear reader, are a mensch for getting to this point. Let me know how I can return the favor. You are almost as much of a mensch as Itzik, who hired me as an editor … twice, the second time after knowing how I go on about things like this.

¹ By writing web and not Web, I comport with one of the “Significant Rule Changes” in the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The interested reader (which is to say You, because you’ve read this far into my footnote) can find the full list here. This footnote is not an endorsement of The Chicago Manual of Style.

² Ibid. Among the Significant Rule Changes are rules on the possessive forms of two kinds of names: those ending with an unpronounced “s” and those ending with an “eez” sound (in the latter case presumably when the name also ends in “s,” because there can’t be any debate on possessives like Lise’s). Copernicus falls into neither category, and I don’t know the latest rule on his possessive. My rule is to always add ’s to form a possessive (as in This is Steve Kass’s blog.) except maybe for Jesus, Moses, and princess. Even for them I’m not certain what I’d do, but they don’t come up in my writing much.

Observations
  At the most crowded locations, the density of people on the Capitol lawn today was no more than in a packed stadium. [references: lawn, stadium]
  Most of the people on the mall today were within an area of two or three reflecting pools in size (and white). [reference]

Estimate
  (2.5 reflecting pools) × (8 acres per reflecting pool) ÷ (6.5 acres per stadium) × (100,000 people per stadium) × (average 0.5 density) = 150,000 people. More than 87,000, perhaps. Hundreds of thousands, as in more than 200,000? Not too likely. A million? No.

That is to say, Brooks laments Americans’ lack¹ of esteem for “mental character.” Hear, hear!

While stereotypes are imperfect, and often dangerous, it seems to me that Brooks has dug down to an important difference between “liberal” and “conservative,” at least as those terms are recognized and represented in the sphere of public media. Dug down to, but not recognized or explored.

Brooks identifies as “mental flabbiness” the unwillingness to confront personal bias. He appropriately deplores herd thinking, confirmation bias, and the rigidity of political debate. All of which are indeed deplorable. Unfortunately, however — and unsurprisingly, given his political bent — Brooks stops short of what he might find a painful insight: the biggest obstacle to the status of mental character is the “conservatives,” not the “liberals².”

Conservatives in politics and the press deride mental character. A striking example of this conservative disdain is the one-liner that badly hurt John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign: “He was for the war before he was against it,” with its implication that to change one’s mind is a character flaw. It’s not. Sadly, too few Democrats thought it would be useful to stand up for mental character; instead many shot back their own “for it before he was against it” quips.³

I’d go on, but it’s late and I’m out of footnote characters⁴. Regarding other aspects of Brooks’s latest, see the Times’s comments section and, for what I hope are interesting tangents, my footnotes below if you didn’t hop down to them yet.

¹ Brooks might say “loss,” not “lack.” In Brooks’s narrative, mental character is a characteristic men once upon a time valued, if not possessed. (“This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated.”) He frames mental character as Christian myth frames Virtue or Grace, and like a conservative cleric might argue about the decline of religion, Brooks argues that modern Man has fallen or turned away from mental character, which, like Christian Virtue, is a state Man can only aspire to achieve through constant struggle (and painful struggle at that, though I suspect the arguably vivid allusions in Brooks’s essay to self-flagellation were unintentional).

The mystical fog in which Brooks envelops (or envisions) this “ethos” notwithstanding, he and I agree that society would benefit by placing more value on mental character as he describes and defines.

² The political spectrum isn’t one-dimensional, and I’m generalizing and categorizing,  but not too dangerously, I hope. My characterization, while generally valid, still admits outliers — but they’re exceptions that don’t diminish the value of the characterization. Among media outlets, for example, one “liberal” voice that is unfortunately antithetic to mental character on many issues is the Huffington Post (in contrast to the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Kos, MediaMatters, and scores of others). A “conservative” voice that thankfully shows considerable respect to mental character is the Atlantic (in contrast to [expletive deleted], National Review, the Washington Times, the New York Post, and scores of others). Such exceptions are relatively few.

³ Here I’ll risk exposing my own confirmation bias with some speculation: at least at first, I believe the Democrats hit back with the same “before he was against it” as one might return a schoolyard punch from a bully. This was quicker and easier than addressing Republicans’ base values. It might also have been less risky, because it’s not clear whether the public cared about candidates’ character more than their success at bullying. In a bullying contest, unfortunately, the conservatives are likely to win. (They’re better bullies by far. To wit: Beck, Limbaugh, Palin.)

⁴ Ok, I lied. I’m only out of the ones I can type without using the <sup>tag. But it’s still late.

I have my doubts about some of the other George Washington quotes Google News offers, too.

If the South Korean government can find a way to satisfy the letter of the law while channeling their economic activities away from Iranian institutions — non-Iranian banks, maybe in Dubai — that’s the first step.

Before ranting, though, let me be one of the first to greet all these new and beautiful U.S. citizens: “¡Welcome, and bienvenidos!”

This rant has two parts. First, let’s see what “have undocumented parents” means, so we know more about this 8% on whom the goons will be spreading their invective. The phrase shouldn’t mean anything other than “have undocumented parents,” but somehow it does, and not just because of headlinic license. It means “has at least one undocumented parent.” Here’s the relevant wording (emphasis mine) from the Pew report Brice describes:

A child has unauthorized immigrant parents if either parent is unauthorized. A child has U.S.-born parents if all identified parents are U.S.-born.

Well, that’s stupid. The asymmetry reminds me of the definition of Colored, as in for the purpose of what school you can go to, what train car you can sit in, and what drinking fountain you can use, and, before the 14th amendment was ratified, as in whether you were a U.S. citizen, more or less.

Next thing you know, today’s goons who want to abridge the Fourteenth Amendment will find a way to damn not only these youngsters but sus hijos y nietos también, no matter what, probably because fuck the Constitution and Bill of Rights, God tells them to.

Not to mention that “[s]ome pregnant women from other countries are traveling to the United States to give birth and then taking their babies back home to raise them as terrorists that would return to attack America,” a concern raised by Texas state representative Debbie Riddle, “a Republican,” that Brice thought fit to pass on.

Tattooing the letter U on them to start, maybe? (You can bet they’d have no problem paying for that medical procedure with government dollars.)

Part 2: The word “anchor babies” doesn’t appear in the Pew report, but instead of leaving it out of the article entirely, Brice fills us in. He knows that more people will read an article if it’s about anchor babies.

“Babies born to illegal alien mothers within U.S. borders are called anchor babies because under the 1965 immigration Act, they act as an anchor that pulls the illegal alien mother and eventually a host of other relatives into permanent U.S. residency,” says an organization called The American Resistance, which has described itself as “a coalition of immigration crime fighters opposing illegal and undocumented immigration.”

Minor partial credit to Brice for using the past tense when mentioning The American Resistance, but he forgot to mention that they are “no longer an active – or updated – Website or effort,” and haven’t been since 2006, according to — well, themselves, in a message they left on the web four years ago. The fact that Brice names them at all is goofy, to put it kindly. There are dozens of non-moribund organizations he could have called up. A Youtube link to a [expletive deleted] broadcast from within the last week, maybe.

That’s all. Have a nice week.

Every day or more, one of the news aggregator robots gets both my attention and my goat. Here’s one of today’s missiles: “CDC: Most Teens Choose to Abstain,” at cbn.com. The first paragraph:

A recent study shows that most teenagers are virgins, contradicting claims from family planning groups that most young people do not abstain from sex and more sex ed should be taught in schools.

Image by Kelley Boone, some rights reserved (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

This kind of blabbery drives me nuts. They might has well have said, “A recent study shows that the earth is flat, contradicting claims from Unitarians that the planets revolve around the sun and astronomy should be taught in schools instead of the Bible,” when in fact a recent study showed no such thing, and even if it had, it wouldn’t contradict what the Unitarians supposedly said. Maybe if I’d been on the debate team I’d know how to respond more effectively.

If I were a fundamentalist Christian who wanted to justify abstinence education, I wouldn’t quote or misquote studies, nor would I attempt to use logic. I’d be honest: “According to my church, the world is flat, most young people abstain from sex, and abstinence should be taught in schools right after study hall and before creationism. That’s what I believe, because faith in the church is my guiding light.”

Studies be damned, science be damned, the church is the ultimate authority. I might have more respect if they put it that way more often. (I would still object if it got to the point of the Constitution be damned and laws be damned.) Why should fundamentalists care a whit about the fact that science is consistent, well-founded, and predictive? Why should they care about evidence from studies and measurements, if faith, not intelligence, is their life’s compass? I can disagree, disapprove, and be dismayed, but I have no appeal. We live on different planets; we grew up in different universes.

Anyway, for readers who might appreciate facts and figures, let me explain the CBN’s vulpigeration.

What is “sex,” anyway? For its study, the CDC defined “sex” to be heterosexual vaginal sexual intercourse¹ only (though the boy need not stay on top). Many English speakers would call a bunch of other things people do naked with others sex, but the CDC’s restrictive definition should suit the Christian Broadcasting Network in two ways. First, this definition doesn’t infringe on the way CBN might define another word, “sodomy.” They might prefer it for that bunch of other things people do naked with each other. Second, it yields higher virgin percentages. As far as the CDC and CBN.com are concerned, you’re a virgin if you haven’t been part of any penis-in-vagina hanky-panky, even if you’ve gotten plenty naked and nasty with one or more hims or hers.

Fact: Most young people do not abstain from sex. (Or “sex.”) Not during their entire youth, which is what CBN.com suggested. According to the CDC study, most (65% of) boys aged 18-19 and most (60% of) girls in the same age group have had heterosexual vaginal sexual intercourse. The CDC numbers suggest that most young people do abstain from sex “sex” until about age 17 or 18, but abstaining until you stop abstaining is not the same thing as abstaining. Using the CBN.com logic, you could say that all people abstain from sex, ’cuz they all do — until they stop, and most stop, as we know from all the babies being born and abortions being performed. Few babies (or aborted fetuses) are incarnate nowadays.

¹ Additional information available on the internet.

Many of the reports have illustrations intending to show the initial changes or recent tweaks (for example Technorati, GoogleWatch, and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab). However, none that I’ve seen paints a useful picture of what many users (including me) dislike about the new design, with the new tweaks or not.

Here’s the change from my vantage point. For each capture, I’ve scrolled to just below the “Top News” — to the top of the individual news sections like U.S., Sci/Tech, and so on. These are scaled-down screen captures of nearly the full 1920-pixel width of my screen and most of its 1200-pixel height, omitting some browser falderal.

Old Google News format (still in place at news.google.ca).

New Google News format (single column view).

Google News format (two-column view).

In unveiling today’s two-column view, Google tells me I can “now once again view two columns of news headlines.” Instead of deconstructing Google’s announcement, I direct you to the screenshots. At the top is the two-column view Google provided before July 1. At the bottom is the two column view Google is “once again” providing. Can you spot the differences?

On one screen, I used to see about 14 stories from news sections I selected. Then Google decided to give me only six. Now I see eight or ten, which brings me to today’s arithmetic fact:

14 = 8 + TWO HUGE WHITE RECTANGLES OF EMPTINESS.

That’s the first-order approximation. On closer inspection (I apologize for not having linked the full-size images, but you can still see some of this), this is a better approximation: 14 + important details + little junk = 8 + TWO HUGE WHITE RECTANGLES OF EMPTINESS + fewer important details + some junk

Less obvious than the TWO HUGE WHITE RECTANGLES OF EMPTINESS, but not worth ignoring, is the new design’s omission (in both new formats) of the lead story’s author(s). I can’t keep track of reporters now the way I could back when I was learning to read news, but I’d still like to see who the author is (without an extra click) especially given that the alternative seems to be some more WHITE EMPTINESS.

If you’ve gotten this far, you might be formulating a question about the EVEN LARGER #F3F6ED RECTANGLES OF EMPTINESS that surround the content here on my very own soapbox. Good question. If I had Google’s resources, not only would this blog be far more popular and interesting, you’d get it in a stunning, device-appropriate format. (At least for a few years, you might, until I went to the other side.) You’re getting what you get, #F3F6ED EMPTINESS included, because it’s easy for me to do and it seems like a reasonable compromise that accommodates a variety of screens and devices, none too badly. If I had Google’s resources, I might also be able to employ someone who could write better answers to hard questions, but I’m not entirely sure, given the AQ (answer quotient) from Apple and Google lately.

If you have something to tell me about my blog’s design, by all means do, and I’ll listen. I can’t promise changes, but I can and do promise that if I change things, I won’t tell you I’m giving my reader(s) what they wanted unless that’s truly the case.

Finally, if I seem more consistently cranky than usual lately, or if I mention Canada a lot more often than before, well, now you know why.

According to the abstract,

Our findings suggest that men experience a conflict between their relatively intrinsic preferences and gender norms and that they tend to forgo their intrinsic preferences to conform to a masculine gender identity (when they have sufficient resources to incorporate gender norm information in their choices). Women, on the other hand, appear to be less concerned with making gender-congruent choices.

The authors found that men, when asked to choose between two foods, one with a straight macho masculine description corresponding to American societal “norms” for guy food and the other that was gay sissy feminine more what Americans might think of as girly food, they picked the guy item almost two-thirds of the time. If, that is, they had plenty of time to ponder their choice. If they were rushed to decide, though, they picked girl food choices more often — about 55% of the time, on average. Women, on the other hand, choose girl food about two-thirds of the time, regardless of whether they’re rushed to decide.

The authors conclude (in more precise language than my paraphrase) that men, unlike women, are cognitively self-regulating their decisions according to societal norms of gender expression. In other words, while men like girly food as much as girls, they’ll decide not to order it (forgoing food they like in order to look like “real men”) if they have time to think things through.

It doesn’t surprise me that men put energy into “behaving like men,” even when it sometimes conflicts with their intrinsic desire. (I’m not so convinced that men are as unlike women as the authors say.¹)

The authors describe the effect they saw as “making gender-congruent choices,” but I might envision it another way: men put a lot of energy into avoiding anything they think will make them look gay. How different is what the authors call “threats associated with gender-norm transgression” from fear of being labeled a fag?

In any case, special thanks to the authors for their menu of “feminine” and “masculine” menu items, which was half the fun of the paper. Here are a few selections. I want all of them, but hold the shredded American cheese.

• Martha’s Vineyard Salad Mixed baby greens and fresh spinach with toasted pine nuts, dried cranberries, cucumber, red onion, and a warm Vermont goat cheese crouton with a balsamic vinaigrette
• Chunky Fudge Cake Ice Cream Vanilla ice cream, smothered in hot fudge with chunks of chocolate fudge cake, whipped cream, and peanuts
• Vitello Carciofi and Asparagus Beef medallions sautéed with asparagus and artichoke in a light demi-glace sauce
• Damon’s Specialty Pizza Ground hamburger, red onions, roasted peppers, and mozzarella cheese
• Western Salad Chunks of barbequed chicken with shredded American cheese served on greens with a side of Ranch dressing

¹ The authors’ findings suggest that men do this, but women don’t (or do to a much smaller extent). But the authors only studied university undergraduates at (I assume from their affiliation) a largish private Midwestern university. For that population, it’s fairly reasonable to generalize, and perhaps for that population this in fact is a guy-only thing. I’d speculate, but with no support from the study, that the effect is present among men across most segments of the U.S. population. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find the “I better order something gender-appropriate” effect in women, too, in some places (richer white populations in the South?). Studies in populations other than undergraduates would be nice to see.

The danger in generalizing from undergraduates, who are readily available to university researchers, to the general population, has fortunately been getting some press lately. It’s a real danger.

There are plenty of other interesting angles to explore. To what extent this effect is expressed ought to depend on the environment. Do men (with time to think) pick guy foods more frequently when they’re dining with several guys as opposed to when dining with a single woman? (I’d put money on yes.) Are there differences between straight men and gay men? (I’m not sure I’d bet on this one.)

Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant-Major
Tuck me in my little wooden bed
Snog me now Sergeant-Major
We all love you, Sergeant-Major
Even when your neck grows rather red.

 Images from the public domain.

You’ll find a link to the leaked survey here.