The Names of Thoughts
Spoken language is a beautiful, hopeless attempt at expressing thoughts with small movements of our faceparts and air. Out through the mouth; in through the ears. Written language is a beautiful, hopeless attempt at expressing the same thoughts and actions with notation on a surface, made by hand. Out through the hands; in through the eyes.
We come to writing after speaking and spend much longer acquiring it. The thoughts are first and we learn their names. We get more organized on paper, learning to spell the names of our thoughts; arranging them in straight lines, more or less. And this changes us.
By reading, we might learn words that we’ve never heard before and might not ever speak out loud. This is the same as studying a picture of a hotel where we have never stayed: recognizing a place without quite knowing what it feels like to arrive there. Dictate a thought onto a screen and you might feel the strain of trying to adopt the device register. (Perhaps yet another form of language that has yet to be formalized or maybe just a parlor trick, like juggling chainsaws.) In any case, it, too, feels strange: out through the mouth, in through the eyes.
Our speech and writing evolve, but are never quite the same because they can’t be. They are from different worlds; they are different worlds. Where the ears must be quick, the eyes can linger and return. Where the mouth and tongue must be agile, the hands can pause indefinitely to fidget and fumble.
This would probably sound very different if it weren’t written down.
Dinner Conversations
Two areas in which humans have advanced far beyond any other species are food and communication. We prepare food like no other animal not only by cooking, but by using an elaborate set of tools and techniques. And, of course, our language abilities have developed to an almost inconceivable level when you consider the range of complex and abstract concepts we can efficiently discuss; like what to make for dinner tonight.
We are not unique in either eating communal meals or our ability to communicate. We do stand out, however, near the edge of a certain precipice with another trait: the danger we face by talking during dinner.
The anatomy of most animals’ throats are such that an extremely important flap of tissue—the epiglottis—is directly on top of the windpipe (larynx) and closes it off completely from the rest of the throat throughout the entire act of swallowing. We humans, however, have a longer-than-usual passage above the epiglottis and the air that we breathe can carry with it the food and drink that we’re swallowing. Where animals have a railroad-type switching apparatus to keep food moving along the right track, we have more of an on-ramp/merge/off-ramp highway traffic arrangement; there are chances for both collisions and missing an exit, so to speak. In other words, if we attempt to both inhale and swallow simultaneously we may actually succeed at both—and immediately choke on our food.
Humans develop this “low larynx” after we are born, which creates a physiological hazard but also enormous acoustic and linguistic advantages. Other primates and human babies simply cannot make the same kinds of robust vowel sounds that adult humans can; vowel sounds which are found in almost all languages and are thought to be important for being clearly understood: the /i/ in “heed”, /u/ in “mood” and the /a/ in “palm”. Despite the fact that even today in the United States, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death, evolution has apparently gathered more than enough benefit from human speech to offset the losses.
The simple, yet profound pleasures of cooking and sharing a meal with friends and family—talking and laughing in the kitchen and around the table—are quintessentially human. And, uniquely, they encourage a certain discipline: the subtle refinement in behavior of making a separation between taking a bite and taking a breath to compensate for an anatomy that no longer does.
Specialization is for Insects
I have been fond of the passage quoted below for a long time. It isn’t to be taken literally, or perhaps even seriously. I think I like it because it evokes a deep sense of range and potential—of capability and agency. Perhaps it’s also a reminder that we can use our amazing and uniquely human faculties compassionately. (Emphases are mine):
A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
conn a ship,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
balance accounts,
build a wall,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
cooperate,
act alone,
solve equations,
analyze a new problem,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Striking a Chord
I’ve noticed that over time it’s become less common to use the term ‘vocal cords’ and much more common to use ‘vocal folds’ instead. This seems fair, since I used to envision the apparatus as an array (or perhaps a bundle?) of thin ropes when it was ‘vocal cords’ and now I think of them as… well, something else. They’re nearly impossible to describe, and even when you look at several pictures of them they are difficult to comprehend at first. But ‘folds’ doesn’t immediately come to mind and they certainly don’t look like cords. I guess when I hear the word ‘fold’, I think of laundry and something that’s actually folded over, not just flaps of material. In any case, I think they kinda look like lips. (I don’t think there will ever be a movement to use the term ‘vocal lips’, but the description makes more sense to me, despite the somewhat awkward imagery and potential for confusion. Nonetheless…)
I also used to think that the misconception was simply caused by homophones: ‘cords’ and ‘chords’ sound exactly the same. A cord can be considered, among other things, to be a rope except not quite as stout. The vocal folds are like lips (to me), and so they are decidedly not like ropes (to me). However, a chord in the field of geometry is a straight line that joins any two points on a circle, the diameter being a very special case. If you consider the lips on the inside of your throat (yup, still a little weird) that can open and close, you might come to appreciate that each of the vocal folds is attached to the side of the throat, forming a chord instead of a cord.
Never mind that no one writes ‘vocal chords’, and never mind that ‘chord’ comes from the Latin chorda (rope) which brings us neatly back around to the wrong idea about what vocal cords actually look like.
Reading Out Loud
If you read your own writing out loud, you might hear words and phrases that don’t belong. You can then rewrite it to sound more natural—more like you. The funny thing is that it’s not the version of you that usually does the talking. It’s still you, but clearer for having first discussed it with yourself.
If you repeat this process over and over, you might catch yourself saying very interesting things; things that you never could have said unless you had first heard them from another version of you, reading your writing out loud.
Combinations
Combining ingredients is one of the foundations of cooking and a hallmark of the human diet. It is second in importance only to the technique of using heat to prepare food and is unparalleled in its ability to provide variety and innovation. Animals tend to eat whatever plants or animals they can find in the order that they find them, but humans are unique in gathering together multiple ingredients in order to combine them into a final product that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I will now suggest a hierarchy that illustrates a range of possibilities, from basic to sophisticated:
1. Foraging or Grazing: eating things in the order that you find them in the cupboards or refrigerator. This is the approach taken by animals, teenagers (if they are different), unsupervised children and hangry adults. Any edible item is, of course, a candidate for this approach, whether is it cold or room temperature. Feel free to consider this a fancy, multiple course meal if fruits or vegetables make up one of the selections, e.g. leftover pizza followed by an apple.
2. Assembling: combining 2 or more ingredients together into a single food item, such as when making a salad or a sandwich. This is an excellent technique when there aren’t leftovers readily available because they have all been consumed during a Grazing meal.
3. Actual Cooking: combining 2 or more ingredients, plus 1 or more forms of non-microwave heat. Examples include soups or stews, hot dish, stir fry or a complicated sandwich. (A peanut butter and jelly sandwich counts if you toast the bread first.) Almost any breakfast item is an excellent candidate for this approach, at any time of day.
No Words
We had been chatting, mostly about work, during most of the walk that night until we came to a large clearing. We turned off our lights and stood in the dark for a few moments, listening to the snow laying on the fields, the trees standing in the distance, the clouds above.
We listened to see if we could hear anything, which is different from listening to understand what someone is saying. Peace and quiet are words that feel much different when you hear them directly.
Bodies in Motion
There is something about the swing of a pendulum or the sweep of a second hand. You know that there is a machine at work, but it’s still relatable. After all, we’ve chosen to call the pointy things on analog clocks “hands”, not “pointers” or “indicators”. (I might have chosen to call them “arms”, since they’re much longer than they are wide, but no one asked.) Those kinds of clocks have faces, too.
Lots of things have anatomical names: tables and chairs have legs and a back (OK, everything seems to have a back—it’s usually on the other side of the front), hammers and nails have heads, bread can have a heel, bolts can have shoulders and roofs can have hips. It’s easy to think that when we needed to name these parts or features, perhaps the thing that came to mind was the body part it reminded us of. Everybody knows what an elbow is, so if you’re looking through a pile of plumbing parts…
Digital clocks are minimalist information displays: compact and efficient. Four or six digits that change abruptly, a little punctuation and maybe an “AM” or “PM”. No second hand, whether a continuous sweep or discrete movement. No movement through space, however confined, to trace the passage of time. No face, no hands—no features that I would be tempted to name after a part of my body or anyone else’s. (No, “colon” doesn’t count. And stop giggling.)
We have an intuitive grasp of mechanical movements, since we are very much physical beings, and we can often imitate them. We have an appreciation for the qualities of acceleration and speed, precision and tempo because we recognize them as desirable.
But a mechanical clock or analog gauge isn’t an organism. It’s something less than a tree, but something more than a carefully placed stick casting a shadow on the ground. It’s sophisticated and tangible, and we can see something of ourselves in its features and behavior, even if we have no need to name it.
Unclear
I heard the owls tonight on my walk; low and quiet, but persistent. Impossible to see them in the trees, of course. I continued onto the dark trail that goes through the woods. It hadn’t been cleared, but the snow was packed down along a path—difficult to see, since it was just as white as the rest of the snow. I felt my way along the length of it, gently weaving within the bumpy, shallow rut. And I saw the silhouettes of 3 or maybe 4 animals far off in one of the snow-covered fields. (Deer? Must have been.) I paused for a couple of minutes to see if they might come closer, but they kept their distance and I finally realized further waiting was pointless.
It’s frustrating to not be able to see things clearly. Holding still is helpful to both see and hear small details, but the walk was the point. I needed to feel the exertion and the cold night air after too many hours of sitting still and trying to see a clear way through a complex set of technical issues at work. I didn’t have a solution when I got back, but I did have the feeling that any movement along a narrow path would be helpful.
Pictures and Words
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why wouldn't it make perfect sense that a gesture, a smile, a shaking of the head—in context, of course—would communicate as much or more than a well-written sentence? Maybe even a paragraph?
What images lack in precision they more than make up for in bandwidth. And besides, reading between the lines is a form of seeing.
Adjustments
When you’re cutting up vegetables or meat and you need to adjust to get a different angle or position, you can move three things:
the knife
the food
your body
The knife moves, of course, as you make the series of cuts along a piece of food. Some small adjustments can be made, but mostly you want the knife to stay in the same area—where your grip is sure and your hand and wrist are comfortable. Where you can confidently control the knife; where you can make smooth and efficient strokes. Think of working your way down a carrot.
Moving the food instead of the knife is necessary when you’re finished with one piece and grab another (duh), or when the cut requires a knife angle that you can’t easily or safely accommodate. Think of dicing a potato or an onion.
Moving your body is usually reserved for big or awkward tasks that don’t lend themselves well to moving the food. But it’s not because you need to change the grip on the knife, necessarily. It’s more likely because you need to see the food better and it might be simpler to move yourself than move the food. Think of moving around to cut up a pork shoulder or getting yourself over the top of a large squash to slice it in half.
Knife, food, eye. Put another way: tool, problem, perspective.
A Few Thoughts On Precision
A couple, a few, several: these are handy terms in English when you don’t want to (or can’t) specify exactly how many of something you’re talking about. You see people walking their dogs on a nice day and you comment that you saw “a few” because you don’t feel it’s necessary to relay an exact number. You see “several” birds fly overhead because you couldn’t count them by them time they were gone and because frankly it doesn’t matter. You felt “a couple” raindrops on your way home—you get the idea.
I used to think that this was efficient and harmless until a few years ago. There was some serious discussion around whether or not the use of these words to describe approximate quantities was appropriate in a certain professional context. So, I figured I would just find a good reference for the ranges of each of these words and we’d be able to at least frame the discussion around those well-established and helpful conventions.
Wrong: nobody really agrees on how many a couple, a few or several are.
To be clear, I’m very certain that I’m correct when I say “a couple” and I mean 2—possibly 3. A “few” has always felt like it was between 4 and 6 or 7; maybe more. But “several” means between 6 and 8, or from 5 to 9. Whatever the range “several” covers, it should average out to seven. If you say “several”, you should be thinking “I’m pretty sure there were seven, but I’m going to give myself a little wiggle room just in case a photograph surfaces later.” I mean, “seven” is practically the root of the word “several”.
But, no. Some people believe that “several” can mean as few as 3, which is patently ridiculous, if you consider the following equation:
several = seven = 7
Some people believe that “a few” can mean as few as 2, which also seems absurd: scientifically, that’s “a couple”. And I can’t even begin to understand what kind of brain damage people have suffered in order to believe that “a couple” can refer to as many as four of something.
I used to think I understood what people meant when they said that they spent several hours painting a room last weekend. Now I wonder if they’re the kind of freaks who think that “several” just means more than two.
And I do find it a little distressing that there could be some overlap between “a few” and “several”. How do you choose between using one of those terms over the other? How they sound in a sentence? If you feel like uttering 3 syllables or only 2? (Which, let’s face it, is really only a couple of syllables in either case.)
So now I find myself avoiding using all all of these terms but “a couple” because I feel like there’s no solid ground to stand on any more and it’s just annoying. I’ve switched to using actual ranges when it matters (“about 5 minutes until dinner”; not “a few”) and just saying “a bunch” for everything else.
Snowscape
Our walk last night was in a proper snowstorm: tiny, hard flakes lightly driven into our faces by a steady breeze. We’d already gotten well over an inch when we left and it kept up the whole time we were out.
There’s so much light in the winter when it snows. According to the almanac there was a full moon, but it was hidden by the clouds that poured snow out into the night. The city lights reflected off the low clouds, the falling snow and the bright white blanket spreading out and growing thicker by the hour. Only the trunks of the trees and a few dim shadows provided darkness—everything else glowed softly from endless ricochets of light between clouds and snow.
Sounds were attenuated as much as the as the light was enhanced. The occasional car passing by was muted and muffled. No echoes responded to our voices if we spoke. We accidentally startled some ducks as we walked by a pond, but even the relatively loud quacks and flapping of wings were quickly hushed by the snow.
It was the kind of quiet that might make you look around a little bit more to see what, ordinarily, you would be alerted to by sound. To avoid being surprised like drowsy ducks. Sound informs us what is all around—360 degrees of auditory early warning. But it was still; the kind of quiet that settles the mind.
Deepening snow seems to absorb as much effort as noise: walking became more deliberate, more like trudging as we passed through areas where drifting had begun. Our outgoing tracks were nearly filled in when we returned—the once crisp outlines as softened and diminished as the sounds of our footfalls.
I was surprised that I didn’t even hear the snowplow pass outside the bedroom window early this morning. Drowsy ducks, indeed.
A Chance Encounter
This year, all of the meetings have moved from a conference room to a laptop screen. When things get back to normal (whatever that is), I assume that many of those meetings will move back into a conference room.
What if, in the meantime, the conference room changed? In fact, what if the conference room changed frequently?
We’re used to the long table and the chairs and the screen at one end of the room. But what if we took it upon ourselves to change the physical space that we meet in periodically? What if, instead of chairs and a conference table, there was suddenly a bunch of high-top tables for groups of 4-5 people to stand at? What if there was a long, low table and cushions on the floor for sitting on? What if there was no table and just the cushions?
Granted, there are obstacles to this, both cultural and logistical. You’d need space to store the extra furniture and who among us (Westerners, anyway) wouldn’t feel a little indignant at having to sit on the floor?
But the variety of sitting and standing postures that we (again, I mean mostly Westerners) so desperately need to regain a little mobility and flexibility would increase. There would certainly be a little discomfort at first, but a little discomfort might also encourage everyone to honor the scheduled stop time for once.
And it just might be fun to see what the meeting room looks like when you arrive this time.
Refresh
Cooling food down is as much a part of cooking—especially baking—as heating it up.
Rest and recovery is as much a part of exercise as the actual workout.
Silence is as much a part of speech as sound, and whitespace is as much a part of writing as words.
So what? So nothing exists without its opposite: big deal. That’s just the rising and setting sun; the tide rolling in and out; inhaling and exhaling.
Where does inspiration come from? How do these things become new again? By breaking the routine, perhaps. By shaking up and disrupting the rhythm with mistakes, with obstacles, with constraints. Maybe even with boredom.
A missing recipe ingredient can trigger an educational search for a substitute ingredient or an alternative recipe.
Anything can be exercise if you carry more weight with you, and it can help you better understand and appreciate the way you move and hold your body.
Haiku poetry requires a specific number and pattern of syllables, forcing a certain kind of economy of words.
There is a difference between the cycle of presence and absence that’s needed to make a thing work in the short term; indeed, to work at all. Over the long term, something different is needed to introduce variety and help form new ideas.
Movement is Life: Part II
The primary function of our brain is to keep our body alive, which it does mainly by moving it around. From digestive movements to blinking our eyes to beating our heart to moving our arms and legs in pursuit of something to eat, our brains manipulate our bodies in the service of survival.
In times of stress, we often feel the need to do something, even when there’s nothing to be done. The British, among other cultures, have created a lovely ritual to address this situation: putting the kettle on and making tea. Movement is important if for no other reason than to give us a feeling of agency and to ward off feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Action is an antidote to anxiety.
If we are helpless or restrained when our safety is threatened, we might feel worse afterward than if we had been able to act. After all, our brains are responding with the same chemical and metabolic response whether we can actually move or not: it’s giving us the best chance for survival by getting ready to fight or to flee or to get help or any number of other actions. It takes longer for the adrenaline to wear off and we don’t feel the same sense of accomplishment if we can’t use our bodies to address the emergency at all—whatever action it is that we feel would be best.
A comforting and intriguing phenomena is that even long after an experience of helplessness, one can diminish persistent negative feelings about the event by using the body to enact a successful response: to rescript the scene without the constraints. To move and act and feel that sense of completion that was missing. To let the brain save the body by moving it.
Movement is life.
New!
A couple of updates:
There is now an Archive page that lists all of the blog posts in a condensed format, organized by month for easy reference.
I’ve added a new page to the site called “Uneasy”. It focuses on usability problems with common tools and products—the big and little design blunders that can make life frustrating. I’ll drop new posts on Uneasy approximately whenever I feel like it.
Trays Revisited
Trays are, as I’ve noted before, powerful and efficient tools. But just as they carry coffee and Belgian waffles, they also carry a deeper meaning.
Using a tray is an expression of refinement. This has little or nothing to do with the materials the tray is made of or its provenance. The tray is a symbol as well as a tool and its use signifies a deliberate effort to deliver items with dignity and grace. One could simply gather up several items into one’s hands and arms and armpits like a clumsy, soon-to-be-apprehended cat burglar, but making the small effort to fetch a tray for the errand can transform the struggles of a bungling oaf into an elegant and seemingly effortless gesture. As a result, both the deliverer as well as the recipient take part in something a bit more elevated.
The medium may be the message, but if that message arrives on a tray you can be sure that it’s being delivered with the fullest expression of hospitality.
Are We All Philosophers Now?
Philosophers must be a busy bunch this year; there are so many different things to think about. It isn’t that there is anything completely new to think about, but there are so many very concrete and escalating situations to tackle that deal with perennial issues in the area of moral philosophy, otherwise known as ethics.
I suspect the word “philosophy” probably conjures a very boring university lecture being given by an old white man in most people’s imagination. This is both true and false. (Aha! A paradox!)
It’s true because, yes, that lecture does happen. It is false because that is not the sum total of philosophy. You can see philosophy happening on most television shows that deal with human nature and decision making: any medical drama, any legal drama and any reasonably intelligent police procedural. At some point, a human has to make a decision that is difficult because it isn’t quite clear what the “right” thing to do is. We label this “entertainment” instead of “philosophy” when we watch imaginary characters struggle with these decisions on-screen.
There are myriad questions posed about loyalty (to whom, under what circumstances, despite which consequences?), making a choice that may have potentially devastating effects without complete certainty (will the surgery be successful or kill the patient?) or making a trade-off between two important but difficult-to-compare aspects (appearance or physical ability versus risks to health).
I don’t know if philosophers get hired to consult on these shows to help create interesting situations or describe the work the characters might engage in to find solutions. Probably not: the problems themselves abound quite naturally (they have for some time now) and I suspect that writers are sufficiently clever students of human behavior to find solutions that are satisfying to audiences.
And I’m equally sure that philosophers are not being hired in large enough numbers at influential technology companies or government, where they might skillfully describe potential dangers and other second-order effects of implementing a given technology or policy on an arbitrarily large scale. Or to simply serve as a counselor who can provide illustrative and relevant thought-experiments that help us see the potential problems differently and with a bit more depth; with a bit more humanity. Or even to merely provoke a healthy seriousness in considering the issues at hand.
The truth is that we all have to make difficult decisions sometimes. We have to take up the work of choosing between two or more things that create tension in our values and how we understand the world.
But, of course, everyone thinks they are an above average driver.