B8005-3 Arguments: Clarification of Facts

THE CLARIFICATION OF FACTS: We could say that some arguments serve to clarify definitions, where ambiguity exists, by positing compelling, factual information, that effectively destroys the competing claim. To “win” this sort of an argument, thus, is to furnish decisive facts to another person. Illustration: a First Grade teacher had a particularly disruptive child in her classroom. She told the child to sit down - repeatedly. But the child refused. So the teacher flipped on the video recorder that had been installed in her classroom and she recorded the antics of the disruptive boy. Later, she called the parents of the boy and asked them to come to the school for a Parent/Teacher conference. The parents came, and when they were told about the disruptive behavior of their son, they vigorously denied that “their child would ever do anything like that.” Rather than listen to a series of anecdotal narratives about the relative saintliness of their child, the teacher asked the parents to watch a short video tape, as she turned on the video recording system. She told the parents she wanted to show them something before they made their counterarguments. When she played the tape of the child’s previous classroom behavior, the overwhelming evidence seen on the tape could not be refuted by the parents. The “facts” were just too compelling. The parents told the teacher that they would talk to the child and that they “would straighten everything out.” The next day the youngster showed up in the classroom with two black eyes and other marks on his face that indicated that the parents had, indeed, “talked” to the boy - by “hand.” The child sat in his chair, never said a single word, and never ventured out of his seat the entire day. He was a perfect angel.

B1006-6 Captain Ja-Boom Tisch

     Sometimes a comedian’s act is accompanied by a small band.  We see this quite often on late-night television programs here in the U.S.A.  The drummer in the band accentuates the comedian’s “punch line” with a roll on the snare drum, followed by a single bass drum thump, and a stab at the cymbal.  If you listen carefully, the effect sounds like “Captain Ja-Boom Tisch.”  Say that a few times out loud and you will hear the drummer’s “raspberry.”

     President Obama is the personification of that drummer’s flourish: “Captain Ja-Boom Tisch.”  Yesterday, at his news conference, he tried to explain an economic principle.  He struggled to put the concept into words because, frankly, he doesn’t understand economic concepts.  As my friend said, "Listening to him explaining economics is like listening to my old lady explaining how a nuclear reactor works."

     Captain Ja-Boom Tisch reminds me of a young man I met years ago who was attempting to teach industrial hydraulic maintenance procedures to a group of grizzled, old maintenance men.  He kept saying things to the men that were patently false or absurd.  The men hooted at his foolish suggestions.  Finally, a colleague told him to sit down.  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” he said.

     Yeah.  Captain Ja-Boom Tisch.  Economist extra ordinaire. Have a seat right here, Mr. President.

B4023-3 Aesthetic Speed-Bumps on Campus

     Years ago, when I lived in one of those cold and snowy states in the Upper Midwest, I went to school in the middle of a corn (maize) field.  The school had been built on land that had formerly been an old  airport.  The land was so flat that your dog could run away and you could still see him three days later, as one wag put it.  And that was the problem: the wind swept across that land in the Winter without obstruction until it encountered the silly architectural speed-bumps there.

     In my opinion, many architects are supremely impractical people, and it often strikes me that they design buildings and structures, not for people per se, but rather for some strange notion of what is aesthetically pleasing.  On that corn-field campus the architects placed the parking lots 300 meters (about 1,000 feet!) from the school buildings - and if that alone wasn’t sufficient reason to strangle them for their impracticality - they also excavated the land and created sunken parking lots.  Good idea, right?  In the Winter, the snow settled in the parking lots and buried the automobiles there.  In the Spring or Fall, heavy rain turned those parking lots into lakes.  But it was all for a good cause: none could see the cars in the parking lots from the perimeter road.  For some reason, it was aesthetically pleasing to a quirky cadre of architects not to see automobiles.

     There were many Winter days when I trudged through the drifted snow and biting wind with a classmate or two and listened to their bitter complaints.  Almost always they wanted to choke the fool who designed the campus parking lots.  “No,” I told them, “Just put his office in the school building and make him walk out on this corn field every day for the next year.  He’ll get the idea that aesthetically pleasing has a much lower rank than practicality.”

B4023-2 Education: Field's Law (1)

     Today, boys and girls, let’s talk about Field’s Law.  There are several ways to state that law.  Field’s Law says you’re in deep financial trouble if you cannot see the end of your steam lines.  Or - to state the law in a slightly different way - as the density of a university’s physical plant decreases, the fixed costs to maintain that physical plant increase.

     Now, what do I mean by that?  Let me give you a little example.  I recently visited a small, tenth-rate university (about 10,000 students) that occupies a fairly large “footprint” or amount of land.  The campus itself was spread over perhaps five square miles, with a jumble of buildings that seemed to have been erected without any apparent visionary plan for orderly development.  To me, it seemed as if those buildings were added to the campus without much thought just because state monies or benefactor donations had suddenly become available.  There didn’t seem to be any compelling reasons why the performing arts center, to cite one case, was crammed into a spooky swale at the edge of the campus.  The entire physical plant of the university had an ad hoc feel to it.  It looked like something my brother-in-law had designed.

     One day I stood near a museum at the edge of the university campus, and I looked across a parking lot half-filled with cars.  At the far end of the parking lot there was a steam generation building for the heating and cooling of the buildings on the campus.  The building was near nothing worth speaking about; it was probably another “just put it over there” capital improvement project.  The building was a very large plant and its steam pressure lines and steam condensate lines stretched for miles underground around the campus. During the Winter months escaping steam could be seen everywhere - a veritable Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, much like the fuming fumaroles in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska in the early 1900s.

     I thought about the crews of people it took to maintain all of that equipment, the armies of maintenance workers and steam specialists who would have to be employed for the simple task of keeping the buildings heated or cooled. I'm not sure about the numbers, but I would have to estimate that there would be several hundred people involved in just that aspect of the school's operation. The thought occurred to me that there was a direct correlation between the length of steam lines on that campus and the fixed costs of maintaining the campus. Field's Law: The longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.  If you cannot see the end of your steam lines, you’re in deep trouble.

     And it also occurred to me that a school whose main business should be the education of students was engaged in something that had no relation to that core mission at all. Because of the sheer size of the campus, many people were engaged in grass cutting, groundskeeping, snowplowing (at the appropriate time of year), food service,  custodial and janitorial services, plant and equipment maintenance, and security services - all of which activities have nothing to do with education. Anyone might ask why one of the largest employers in the city has the bulk of its employees engaged in activities that do nothing to advance the university's core mission of educating students.  Why is that?

     At a time when state budgets in the U.S.A. are in deep deficit - like everything else here - and there is talk about cutting educational grants to universities, the local university and its trustees are preparing a capital spending package to present to the state.  They want to erect another building.  I told my friend that doing so would just exacerbate the university's fixed cost problems.  He nodded his head thoughtfully.  "Not only that," he said, "but it will make things worse, too."

There is corollary to Field’s Law: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

A Rose for Your Rose Garden

Thanks for inviting me to participate on this blog. I hope I don't embarrass you or Arnaldus of Villanova.

B8004-1 Evidence

Quite often, one encounters people who live a “scientific” life. They have learned certain scientific precepts (really, “opinions”) at the feet of other scientists, and they have learned to use a scientific jargon that colors their thinking. It is amazing how often these scientists pretend that somehow their thinking is superior to that of people who live an unscientific life because of their facility with those precepts and with that scientific jargon. Yet, they are surely a deluded people.

Take the case of religious revelation: scientists reject this out of hand because it lacks a grounding in the material world. They will insist that one cannot believe in such things because there is no material basis for it. They then further complicate this difficulty by arguing that logic must rule where materiality is absent. Their argument, in its simplest form, goes something like this: “If I can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist.” That is really another way of saying that they do not find the evidence of revelation to be credible because it lacks a certain type of materiality.

Ah, yes. Sweet materiality. It is such a dangerous thing, this materiality. For, if one insists upon grounding everything in materiality, eventually, one runs into sustained and intractable contradictions. The scientist rejects the biblical story of creation, for example, because it does not accord with his material view of nature. It seems fanciful and absurd to him. But more importantly, the biblical story of creation is rejected, because it lacks the kind of evidence that the scientists seeks in marshaling his arguments. It is based on revelation rather than in material nature. Of course, the scientist rejects that kind of evidence because it is a based on, well, revelation, instead of “science.”

Then, the scientist does a very curious thing. He explains the world on the basis of logic. That the world exists is really beyond question. The scientist’s problem is to explain that existence, and he rejects the revelation from biblical sources. Therefore he has to explain the existence of the world strictly in terms of materiality. But if the world is all there is (to paraphrase Wittgenstein), then one cannot look for explanations beyond the material world. So, at that point, logic takes over. The most reasonable explanation for the existence (or the creation of the world) is sought by the scientist because there is no experiment any scientist could conduct that would demonstrate the formation of the material world. Materiality, per se, is beyond experimental manipulation. The only thing left is logic, and the scientist gives us his best reason for the existence of things.

But isn’t that a very curious thing? Instead of experimentation, the scientist gives us a reasonable narration; instead of facts, he gives us reasons; and, instead of proofs, he gives us opinions. Funny thing for a scientist to do, that, eh? Where is his scientific method? Where is his epistemological integrity? How can he reject revelation with such ease, and then present us with nothing as an explanation for the world, and still consider what he’s doing to be science? You don’t want the messiness of creation by God to explain the existence of the world? Okay. Well, why not try the Big Bang Theory? Yeah, let’s run with that. We’ll take an event that occurred say fifteen, twenty, thirty billion years ago. Pick your own favorite starting point. I won’t quibble over half a dozen billion years. It happened so far in the past that nobody can call you a liar if you miss it by, say, one or two billion years. That’s always the very best strategy: have a scientific theory about something that cannot be checked by other people. Then supply a number of unassailable principles, such as, the color of light receding from the viewer (“red shift”), to supply the logical underpinnings for the explanation of that creation. Play with the theory until it sounds very logical and reasonable, and then presented to the public as science.

Excuse me, but how is that any more “scientific” than foisting any myth upon an unsuspecting public? Why would a scientist’s hollow reverberations of his own mind be more “scientific” than the evidence supplied by the Bible - or any other evidence for that matter? Why does the opinion of a man wearing a white laboratory coat trump that of a theologian with Holy Scripture in his hands?

B4023-1 We Are What You Made Us

     A coworker once told me that he was sitting in his livingroom while his wife’s bridge club was playing cards in the adjoining dining room.  The women began to talk about the failings - big and small - shared by all men.  They were pretty brutal in their assessment of the deficiencies of men.  They kept looking at him, snickering and trying to gauge his reaction to their snide remarks.  But he was imperturbable.  Finally, when they couldn’t take it anymore, they asked him directly what he thought of their remarks.  He just smiled. 

     “When I was growing up,” he said, “my father worked in the mill.  The only time I ever saw him, he was asleep on the couch.  My mother was a stay-at-home-mom (like all mothers were back then), and she was the only person who talked to me or had anything to do with me.  Later, when I went to school, my first teacher was a woman.  In fact, all my teachers were women, until the tenth grade, when I had my first male teacher.  All my influences - from my youngest years until I was about sixteen years old - came from women.  So if you don’t like the way us men turned out, blame the women who made us what we are.”

B9011-1 Rules

     Some years ago I attended a high school girl’s basketball game and sat behind a young boy whose sister was playing in the game.  The boy noticed that whenever the basketball went through the net, the  scoreboard numbers changed. Most of the time the score increased by two points when the ball went through the net.  One time, however, the boy noticed that the score increased by three points. He seemed to be quite alarmed by that, and he turned to his father and said to him, “They gave her three points for that shot.” The father told his son, “That’s because the referee likes her better than he likes the other girls. That’s why he gave her three points.” One could see that the young boy was quite distressed by the apparent injustice of that.  “That’s not fair,” he said.
 

     But why is it unfair?  Why is it unfair to give one person three points for a basketball shot while another person only gets two points for the same shot?  And really, what difference does it make how many points one gives a particular person for a basketball shot?  It’s just a game, isn’t it?  Couldn’t the referee announce to everyone when the team players first step on the basketball court that all the girls wearing blue uniforms will get three points for their shots and the girls wearing red uniforms will only get one point?  What would be wrong with that?
 

     Most of us would have some rather severe problems with that. Most of us would cry out at the severe injustice of such a decision because we have in the back of our minds a knowledge of the rules of basketball. What we find offensive is not the raw, arbitrary nature of such a decision; rather, what we find offensive in the referee’s decision is the noncompliance with the established rules of basketball. We object to his arbitrariness because it fails to obey the basic rules of basketball. At the end of the day, we object to his decision because it will not allow the game of basketball to be played in an orderly manner.

     If rules do not exist in a game, the players will concoct the rules as they play. Little by little, a process of refinement will take place. There is, of course, a great deal of give-and-take in that rulemaking activity. And it’s almost impossible to say at any given time that the rules are now fixed and complete and finished and that no further refinement as possible. And yet, there are basic requirements for rules that have to be met in almost any game and those requirements might look something like this:

Place: Playing the entire game within a defined boundary marked by painted perimeter lines, walls, etc.

Time: Playing for a defined period of time: periods, quarters, innings, etc.
 

Behavior: Playing the entire game with coherent standards of player conduct and scoring.
 

Authority:  A particular person (referee, umpire, line judge, etc.) - alone - decides any contended issues between the contestants, teams, players, etc.

     When rules are established and sports competitors play according to those rules - however those rules are established - the winner(s) of the competition can be ascertained with certainty, and without recourse to arbitrary and biased influences.  Rules allow the true or objective winner of a competition to emerge.  Rule-less competition, by allowing a subjective and arbitrary “winner” to triumph, offends the common-sense notion of justice that each of us holds.

C1015-1 Writing Stories: Dialogue

A. GOOD DIALOGUE IS OFTEN INCOHERENT (This Example is From the Movie, Topsy-Turvy):

(1) Kitty: [sitting in her bed, looking at Gilbert] “Did you dine at the Beeksteak Club?”
(2) Gilbert: [sitting in a chair alongside Kitty’s bed, looking straight ahead] “Yes...somewhat unsatisfactorily.”
( 3) Kitty: “Oh! You missed Mrs. Chad’s rarebit curry.”
( 4) Gilbert: “One gets the impression that everyone is snickering behind one’s back”
( 5) Kitty: “Perhaps you could have some for tomorrow’s lunch.”
( 6) Gilbert: “‘The King of Topsy-Turvydom!’ It’s humiliating!”
( 7) Kitty: “You look a little uncomfortable.”
( 8) Gilbert: “I’m comfortable enough. [pause] I watched a bit from the wings.”
( 9) Kitty: “Oh, did you?”
(10) Gilbert: “First Act. Seemed to be going rather well, surprisingly.”
(11) Kitty: “There, you see. [pause; looks toward the foot of the bed; then she looks at a book she holds in her hands] Would you like me to read to you?”
(12) Gilbert: “No, thank you. I’ll leave you. You must be tired.”
(13) Kitty: “No, I’m not in the slightest.”
(14) Gilbert: “It’s wrong for me to unburden myself on you.”
(15) Kitty: “Don’t be silly. That’s why I’m here. [pats the bedcovers with her hand] Come and talk to your Kitty.”
(16) Gilbert: [rising from his chair; looking off into space] “Sometimes one wonders why one bothers. They say jump; you jump. [turning toward Kitty] Good night, my dear.” [Gilbert exits the room]

B. COMMENT: Real dialogue often does not follow previous statements in a way that would imply that one statement is linked to another with some linguistic or logical necessity. Instead, one might notice an abrupt disconnect between statements, as in the sample of dialogue above. I use the word “statement” here to mean any verbal utterance by either party in the dialogue.

In this scene, William S. Gilbert, the lyricist of those redoubtable Gilbert & Sullivan works, is seen sitting on a chair in his wife’s (“Kitty”) bedroom. He has just returned from the opening performance of one of his newest operettas. He is rather distraught by the uncharitable comments of a newspaper critic about his work. Kitty, however, true to her depiction in this movie as a rather flighty person, begins by asking a highly irrelevant question. She does not ask about the performance of the operetta; instead she asks about something much more prosaic. She asks about his supper.

Kitty’s straightforward question in statement, (1), “Did you dine at the Beeksteak Club?” is answered in a logical and linear manner by Gilbert in statement, (2), “Yes...somewhat unsatisfactorily.” Then Kitty adds a slight irrelevancy, (3), “Oh! You missed Mrs. Chad’s rarebit curry.” Gilbert’s response, however, pertains to comments made in a newspaper about his latest operetta, (4), “One gets the impression that everyone is snickering behind one’s back.” His remark does not respond to Kitty’s comment about Mrs. Chad’s rarebit curry. The screenwriter uses this bit of misdirection in the dialogue to reveal aspects of Gilbert’s and Kitty’s personalities that could not be given by other means: the two have a tendency to talk past one another and to ignore the other’s statements. Kitty continues her statement, (5), “Perhaps you could have some for tomorrow’s lunch.” Gilbert counters with, (6), “‘The King of Topsy-Turvydom!’ It’s humiliating!”

This incoherent dialogue results from incoherency of agonistic concerns. As long as the speakers have exactly similar interests, the dialogue is coherent. But when the speakers do not share the same interest, the dialogue slips into the incoherency of divided interests: she speaks about the things that most attract her interest, and he speaks about things that concern him. As a result, they “talk past each one another.”

Artistically speaking, it would not be wise to allow an incoherent dialogue to continue apace. Appropriately then, the screenwriter nudges the dialogue back into a fleeting coherency with Kitty stating, (7), “You look a little uncomfortable”, with Gilbert replying, (8a), “I’m comfortable enough.” But then things slip back into incoherency with another burst of irrelevancy: Gilbert adds, (8b), “I watched a bit from the wings.” His statement does not follow the previous comments about looking “a little uncomfortable.” He has steered the conversation back to one that should be expected of a man returning home from a premier of his operetta.

Even so, Gilbert’s statement, (8b), “I watched a bit from the wings,” introduces a new coherent dialogue, when Kitty replies, (9), “Oh, did you?”, and he responds with, (10) “First Act. Seemed to be going rather well, surprisingly.” Kitty approves by saying, (11a), “There, you see.”

Then the dialogue collapses into incoherency once again when Kitty says, (11b), “Would you like me to read to you?” Of course he doesn’t want her to read to him: he wants her to engage in a dialogue with him about his operetta. Instead, she asks such an irrelevant question that he decides to terminate the conversation, (12), “No, thank you. I’ll leave you. You must be tired.” She replies (coherently, by the way), (13), “No, I’m not in the slightest.” He slides off into another incoherent response, (14), “It’s wrong for me to unburden myself on you.” She replies (coherently, again), (15), “Don’t be silly. That’s why I’m here. Come and talk to your Kitty.” Gilbert answers her with a non sequitur by saying, (16a), “Sometimes one wonders why one bothers. They say jump; you jump. And then he adds the most incoherent statement of all, (16b), Good night, my dear,” and the scene ends.

In my opinion, this is a brilliant piece of dialogue.

C. PRINCIPLES: Authentic dialogue is often non-linear and incoherent. This is reflected in the fact that segments of dialogue do not always follow each other in the way that we would expect. Instead, dialogue is frequently disjunctive and incoherent. Stylistically, the artist properly utilizes this aspect of dialogue to flesh out his characters in a story and to give them definition.

Authentic dialogue reflects the concerns of the speaker. That is, the character speaking a line of dialogue usually expresses the things that concern him and not the things that concern others. At its most extreme case, such a dialogue may appear as two separate, parallel arguments that intersect only briefly - if at all - and then only temporarily. At the other extreme, the dialogue may be completely coherent. In fact, we have a term of art for a person who is unusually good at engaging in a conversation: we say that he is “a good listener.” What we really mean, however, is that such a person follows the expressed concerns of the other so well that no incoherency can occur. The “good listener” adopts the concerns of the speaker so completely that no disjunction is possible. Since there are agonistic characters in a story - characters who “fight each other” - their dialogue must be agonistic at times.

Authentic dialogue utilizes just enough incoherency to make things interesting. Just as a small amount of spice can enliven food, an over-abundant use of spice - or incoherent dialogue - can ruin the product. A measured amount of incoherent dialogue gives stylistic strength to a story. But, dear friends, all things in good measure.

B1006-5 Atomkraft

     I worked with a bipolar person years ago who was the funniest man alive when he wasn’t shooting the place up.  Most days the man was hilarious.  But there were those days of darkness when he was dangerous beyond belief.

     One time, when he was on a rather profound “downer,” he filled the back seat of his automobile with high-powered rifles and ammunition, and drove to his step-father’s house and began shooting into the side of the building.  He shot some two-hundred rounds of armor-piercing ammunition through the house, until the police converged on the scene.  Then he stood behind his car and exchanged gunfire with the police.  His car and the police cars were riddled with bullet holes.  When he ran out of ammunition he surrendered, and the police took him to a mental institution for “evaluation.”  He spend six months there and was released after his medication was adjusted to make him more-or-less normal.  They gave him a certificate of mental health and he returned to work.

     He came back to work as a changed man.  He was so dulled by his medication that he was no longer the funny person everyone knew so well.  Instead, he was moody and dull.  It was impossible to talk to him about his shooting incident.  But one day he told me that he had a peculiar thought while he was trading gunfire with the police.  He said to himself, “Man, a guy could get killed doing this.”  Indeed!
 

     Recent news reports I’m seeing in the United States about Germany’s decision to shut down its seventeen nuclear power generation plants remind me of that bipolar co-worker.  It’s like seeing and old and dear friend suddenly veer off into episodes of totally non-rational behavior.  Atomkraft (or nuclear power) supplies some 22.6 percent of Germany’s electrical power.  But there is a genuine fear that Japan’s nuclear problems might be replicated in Germany. Chancellor Merkel proposes - as I understand it - to shutter these plants over a period of years (until 2022) and replace them with coal-fired or natural gas-fired plants.  But those fossil fuel plants will drive the Greens nuts and raise serious “greenhouse gas” concerns.  More likely than not, those plants will not get built.  The other alternative - windmills planted in the North Sea - would require such numbers to replace the existing electrical power generated by Atomkraft that the rotation of the Earth would be slowed by the sheer numbers of windmills required.  Somehow, I see Germany beginning to shoot armor-piercing bullets through its foot.

 
     My bipolar co-worker failed to take his medication for several days during a long national holiday weekend.  He returned to his step-father’s house (newly repaired) and shot the place up again.  He went back to the mental institution for a year, got himself another certificate that said he could return to work, and returned dull and moody.  And then I heard, after I had moved away from the area, that he shot up his step-father’s house for a third time,  He is, as I understand it, still institutionalized and will never be released for the rest of his life.

 
     Germany, in my opinion, is loading the back seat of the automobile with guns and ammo even as we speak.

F3200-1 Writing Stories: Emotions

1. THE CASCADING OF EMOTION: Emotions do not occur in isolation with one another. Rather, something external triggers a cascade of emotions in the person. To give a typical example, suppose a person gets a letter from another person. The letter is opened and read and the reader becomes angry. Usually, the event is depicted in just such a way: he read the letter and he got angry. In reality, the emotional cascade the person goes through takes place something like this: 1). the letter sparks curiosity in the reader: “What is it?”; 2). the reading of the letter leads to the comprehension of meaning: “What does it mean?”; 3). The person realizes the implications of the letter: “I can’t believe she really means this.”; 4). the person has an emotional response, i.e., gets angry; 5). The person “cools off” and regains her composure in a process I call the coda. So, the cascade seen here, then, is curiosity, comprehension, implication, emotional response and coda. The emotion of anger does not occur in isolation: it results from the cascade or chain of events that precedes and precipitates it, and it is followed by a cascade of events that follows it. The cascades always terminate in a coda or “letting off steam” period that eventually returns some stasis to the individual. When depicting the cascade in fictional characters, it is always necessary to show each behavioral activity that finally results in the ultimate emotion (but see below).

2. THE CLUSTERING OF EMOTIONS: Again, to take the previous example of getting a letter, the cascade leading to the emotion of anger engenders auxiliary emotions, such as, betrayal, confusion, despair, grief, hatred, hostility, irritation, resignation, resentment, revenge, sadness, shame, sorrow, etc., whose aggregate effect is to produce a cluster of emotional responses. To state merely that “a person got angry,” does not list the full panorama of emotions that the person might have at the time. Remember that the emotions are triggered by a cascade of events and produce clusters of attendant emotions. Emotions seldom occur in isolation with one another other and it is important to remember that when depicting emotional responses in fictional characters. Show the whole shebang.

3. THE SPECTRUM OF EMOTIONS: The range of emotional responses is characterized by a multiplicity of apparent and unapparent emotions. Some emotions are highly visible and almost always are understood by the observer without any misapprehension. Strong, powerful emotions, such as anger, hatred, etc., are in this category. Whenever a person is extremely angry, the observer will almost invariably know that the person is angry. Other emotions are practically undecipherable because one cannot “read” the outward evidence of the emotional response in the facial appearance, gestures, verbal clues, etc. of the other person. Yet, it would be a significant mistake to misread or ignore those relatively unseen emotional responses because they form the basis for enduring and settled opinions in the person whose emotions are being misread.

B1006-4 Latin Class

     I went to one of those anal high schools, with ruler-wielding nuns.  We were seated alphabetically and I was tied to a near-moron classmate for four years.  I decided to take Latin so he wouldn’t follow me and ruin another class for me.  He was surprised when I told him what I intended to do.  But, after some thought, he decided “to take Latin, too.”
 

     Our Latin teacher was cross-eyed and you never knew for certain if she was speaking to you or to some person on the other side of the room.  The near-moron frequently miscalculated her field of vision.  She could throw a blackboard eraser at anyone in the room and hit that person precisely on the forehead with the eraser.  The lady had an arm on her.  The near-moron left the classroom on most days with a patina of chalk dust on his face.
 

     Now you can see why I turned out as badly as I did.  I fell in with evil companions during my formative years.

B1006-3 The Words We Use

THE DIPHTHONG VERDERBERS:   Do you know what bothers me the most about the current Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) scandal?  It is neither the reprehensible things that man did, nor the sheer depth of knavery he showed in his shenanigans behind his wife’s back.  Those things are bad enough in themselves.  It’s not that.  Rather, it’s the habit of journalists to call the man by a word that sounds to me like “weener.”

     Now, I understand the smirky, eight-year-old’s attraction for double-entendre, and there have been endless examples of simpering journalists snickering their way through Mr. Weiner’s indiscretions.  It’s been great fun for journalists to link this sexual scandal with body parts.

     But there is a problem with that.  There already exists a name for an object that is pronounced “weener.”  It is spelled wiener, after the Austrian city (i.e., Wien, or Vienna to you), where those ballpark favorites were originally invented.  Mr. Weiner’s name should be pronounced as “whiner.”  If you do not believe me, consult any German dictionary with a pronouncing guide for diphthongs.  Here’s the rule: I before E is pronounced as E; E before I is pronounced as I.

 
     In the United States we regularly ignore those rules.  Most of us are familiar with something called “Bayer Aspirin.”  We say “bay-er” here instead of the more correct “buy-er.”  We call our “Braun Electric Razors” with a word that sounds like “brawn” instead of “brown.”  We regularly mangle those diphthong-laced words.

     But journalists have given us oddities that must make the rest of the world wonder greatly at our inability to say simple words.  Are you familiar with Chernobyl?  “Cher-noble” is actually pronounced something like “Chairna bwill”  Hezbolla?  It’s actually “Hezb Allah” instead of the “Hez Bollah” that we often hear.

     Most beginning students of the German language encounter the descriptive phrase, Deutsch verderber (meaning “German destroyer or murderer”) when they mispronounce or mangle German words and phrases.  German language instructors love to apply that label to students.  We should have a similar word for journalists who call Anthony Weiner anything except “Anthony Whiner,” even with the enticements of the double-entendre they find in “weener.”

B1042-7 Walking the Plank

       Well, another economic advisor is getting ready to jump Captain Ja-Boom Tisch’s ship.  What does that make now, four people?  Or is it five?  All of them curled up in the corner like last Fall’s leaves, wondering if spending another half-trillion dollars, or a trillion dollars, or two trillion dollars would have put the “economy” back on its feet.
    Once again, children, Keynesian economics does not work.  You have all the evidence that you need to realize that Keynesian economics does not work.  Pay attention now.  Let me say that again, “Keynesian economics does not work.”  You cannot spend yourself into prosperity.  Were that true, every Greek would equal Croesus in wealth.
    All of those so-called “economists” will return to their tenured academic posts to infect future generations of students with their failed notions of how the world works.  It’s too bad that someone doesn’t stop them at the front door and redirect them to the abundant employment opportunities available at Walmart.

C2001-6 Public Speaking Fundamentals

16. SPEECH AS A PERFORMANCE ART: Many speakers spend long hours preparing and rehearsing their speeches. Often they believe the text of their speech must be refined to perfection in order to produce an acceptable speech. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. The text hardly matters at all. Let me repeat that: The text hardly matters at all. And that’s one of the hardest lessons any speaker ever learns. Your audience doesn’t give a hoot about what you say. But your audience will listen with particular attention to how you say it.

Think of a businessman standing behind the lectern, reading a long and tiresome list of financial performance accomplishments. “In the fourth quarter, our business was suddenly confronted by an unexpected array of challenges...blah...blah...blah.” He could recite the Gettysburg Address in Morse Code and be just as effective as a speaker. No member of his audience could possibly pay any attention to what he says because his delivery makes his listeners absolutely deaf to his speech.

Some of the best speeches ever made lack serious structural and logical content. But all of the good speeches - without exception - are delivered with panache.

17. FACIAL HAIR: If you have a moustache or a beard, get rid of it. The1960s are over, and hardly any of you will ever become gunslingers or mule skinners in this lifetime. Those are the only occupations that require facial hair. For the rest of you, a moustache or beard makes you look ill-groomed, slovenly, and unfit for the rigors of civilized life. Your beard will only make you look like a nine-year-old paint brush.

What if you say, “Hey, I like my moustache or beard. What difference does it make if I wear that sort of thing on my face?” Well, personal grooming preferences aside, there is a very sound (pun intended) reason to get rid of them: they muffle sound. They will make you sound like you have three rolls of toilet paper wrapped around your head.

The area around the mouth - the upper lip, cheeks, lower lip and chin - reflect sound. Not all of the sound coming out of the mouth is directed outward. Some of it is compressed and actually travels rearward toward the mouth. It is vital for audience comprehension that those rearward sounds be reflected back toward the audience. Facial hair absorbs those sounds and builds muffled incomprehension. The sounds coming from the nose are absorbed into that gunslinger moustache and disappear completely. Moreover, the sounds from the mouth are lost in that snarly beard.

Do you want to be understood? Then get your razor out of the medicine cabinet and use it.

18. NUN BUOY HEAD ROLL AND OTHER BIG NO-NOS: Some people like to roll their heads from side to side like a nun buoy in ship’s channel. And when you watch them do that while they are speaking all you can say is this: “Black Port on Entry.” You cannot hear or understand a word they say because their body language says, “Look at how stupid I’m acting right now. I’m trying to be a black nun buoy bobbing left to right in the rolling surf. And you shouldn’t be paying any attention to what I’m doing. I am an idiot.”

The head roll, of course, is the moving or kinetic variation of the Chihuahua Head Tilt. Some people like to tilt the head to one side to let the water run off, or to keep the brains from spilling out of the opposite ear, or to show curiosity when offered a small treat. It’s a cute and precious thing to see on a small dog. But a public speaker who utilizes that technique is reduced to a simpering fool.

You are not a black nun buoy or a Chihuahua. Keep your eyes level and your head still. You cannot make proper and credible eye contact if your head is moving or if your eyes are not horizontal.

C2001-5 Public Speaking Fundamentals

14. SPEAKING FROM THE HOLE: Imagine, if you will, this situation: a brunette decides to add highlight coloring to her hair. For a while she is delighted with the results. But highlighting is often a very high maintenance operation. Because she is forced to reapply this highlighting in order to maintain a certain consistent appearance, she often falls into the trap of coloring all of her hair in that highlight color. She then becomes a walking contradiction. Her complexion and her hair color no longer agree with one another, and she takes on that hard, “truck stop hooker” look. Believe me, this is a common problem today. Many women have no idea that they look that way to the world. In their minds they believe that they are attractive. They believe that they have that same look they had when they were towheaded four-year-olds. But the inappropriate hair coloring makes them look cheap and hard and used.

Let us further imagine that such a fake-hair woman is required to give a speech. Her auditors will spend most of their time assessing her looks rather than her words. She will be speaking from a hole - a hole that she herself has dug and thrown herself into.

There is a principle involved here. Never ever place yourself in a hole before you begin your speech by the way you look or dress. Do not dye your hair so that you look like a hooker. That’s pretty basic. Do not wear unfashionable clothing that invites ridicule and contempt. Don’t put your makeup on with a brick trowel. Leave your jangly ear rings at home. Give your audience your best appearance, your best grooming, and your best speech. Don’t give them something to laugh at. Don’t give them a reason to dismiss you before you even open your mouth.

15. PAINTING YOUR OWN PORTRAIT: Sometimes comedians like to start their act by telling the audience what a terrible time they had getting there. No one - absolutely no one - is interested in the problems the comedian had getting there. There’s a very sound reason for this: the members of the audience know immediately that the comedian is stalling for time because he is not prepared to start his act. Instead of preparing a proper introduction to his routine, he gives us this nonsense about his personal life that we are not interested in. And then he expects us to sit there and pretend like we are interested in his goofy problems. But we have come for a comedy act, not an autobiography.

There is a principle involved here as well. Normally, when we go to a comedy club, we expect to see a comedy act. We might call that expectation the expectation of context. If the marquee on the building advertises a comedy club, we would find it very strange to go inside and hear a philosophical discussion about the Mind-Body problem, or strategies for dealing with lawn pests. The context, then, supplies the relevant expectation in our minds. Whenever we are presented with something other than a comedy routine in a comedy club, that expectation of comedy is frustrated and we become annoyed with the person who supplies that frustration.

So, we might summarize this principle by saying this: no speaker should ever begin his speech by painting his own portrait. He should never tell his audience that he is very nervous; that he’s no good at public speaking; that he doesn’t know how to begin; that he doesn’t know what to say; that he’s so...did I mention him being nervous? Yeah, well, we all know he’s nervous. His auditors don’t give a hoot that he’s nervous, or that he’s a bumbling, fumbling idiot who doesn’t know how to begin a speech. They came to hear his speech and the speaker should give the speech without all those preliminary brush strokes that actually paint him in the parti colors of a fool.

Then too, there’s another problem with standing up there and whining about how hard it is to begin: the speaker sets up a context for failure. Each time the speaker tells of another difficulty that he is having with giving the speech, the auditors are less and less likely to want to hear anything else he has to say. Each complaint, each revelation of some frustration, sets up an expectation in the auditors’ minds that the person speaking has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. The longer the speaker stands there and lists all the personal difficulties he is having starting his speech, the more impatient his auditors become. But there is a limit to the patience on the part of the audience. When they do not find the speaker beginning his speech immediately, their minds shut down and they do not want to hear the balance of his speech No matter how quickly he abandons his simpering “poor me” act, the auditors will fold their arms across their chests and sit there and allow their minds to go numb. There is no recovery from such a bad beginning: whine about yourself and you will lose your audience. Guaranteed.

C2001-4 Public Speaking Fundamentals

12. READING THE SPEECH: There are many people whose position in the work world requires them to give public speeches from time to time. Often such people are not used to giving speeches at all, and consequently, they are not used to giving speeches well. This public speaking inexperience is often expressed in such things as excessive stage fright, jitters and other examples of stage - or execution - related difficulties during the speech itself.

They compound those execution troubles, moreover, by taking the time to write out the speech word-for-word, and then they stand before their audience and read that same speech word-for-word. Almost uniformly the results are exceptionally poor and unacceptable. Is that any wonder? What person in his right mind would want to listen to somebody reading some unintelligible mishmash for twenty minutes?

But why are the results poor and unacceptable? Shouldn’t a well-thought-out and well-written speech be more readily acceptable to an audience than some extempore speech given by a person without notes or written material? One might be inclined to think so. The actual reality, however, is quite different from what one would expect.

Speeches which are read often fail to catch the lilt of spoken language. Instead, such speeches emulate the nature of written language rather than the nature of spoken language. We must remember, however, that written language is invariably artificial and contrived - except when it attempts to accurately capture actual dialogue - because written language is an argument rather than a story. Understand that highly important point: written language is always an argument. If the speaker is a gifted reader (and most assuredly, almost no one is), his speech may be marginally acceptable. But there are so few people who read well naturally: most adopt a sing-song - and monotonous - speaking style when they are reading - with absolutely dreadful results.

One problem with reading a speech, I fear, lies in the inappropriate use of juncture. Natural, spoken speech is often characterized by fits and starts and spurts of language, well-separated by strategic pauses, or with what linguists call juncture - the “silent space” between words. An inept reader invariably fails to properly render the text with appropriate uses of juncture. Instead, the reading sounds like a tape recording of a sewing machine running, with all of its cloying mechanical monotony. In the end no one in the audience will be able to recall anything at all about the speech. And that, of course, is the real test of any speech: can a member of the audience paraphrase what the speaker has said? If the auditor cannot paraphrase the speech, then that person surely cannot remember the speech. And, if the speech cannot be remembered, then it cannot influence the auditor, which is the ultimate intent of any speaker’s efforts.

Moreover, another problem with reading a speech, I think, lies in the inherent bulkiness of the written text. Invariably, a written sentence is longer and more convoluted than the spoken sentence. The added length requires additional time on the part of the listener to make those words comprehensible. But the speaker who reads his speech has a tendency to go through his material in a nonstop sort of manner, preventing his listeners from comprehending what he’s saying. The problem can often be corrected simply by writing the speech using very short and accessible sentences. But not many speakers are capable of doing that. Instead, they compose 18th century sentences, filled with endless parallel clauses and phrases, and then they wonder why no one understands what they are saying when they read that mishmash to their audiences.

Let us summarize. A written speech is an argument. Arguments list reasons or descriptions of things, and suggest alternative courses of action for the auditor to employ. The actual speech, however, is a verbal performance that aims to persuade the listener. And if the speaker presents, instead, a list of reasons, his listeners end up with a bullet-list or a to-do list that can be stuffed into a purse or pocket and be quickly forgotten.

13. SEWING-MACHINE SPEECH: You’ve all heard them: they speak in a dull (and rapid) monotone, without syntactical separation or juncture, hardly pausing long enough to capture another breath, and chattering away like a ‘53 Chevy with really bad lifters. They have all the intelligibility of a pan of frying bacon: all sound, sizzle and splatter; but nothing of any real substance. They could talk to you for three days without letup and you wouldn’t understand a single word they said. They are sewing-machines pretending to be speakers, and their lazy, inconsiderate speech habits are never ever worthy of your attention. Walk away from them. No, I just said that incorrectly. Get on your feet and run away from them.

C2001-3 Public Speaking Fundamentals

6. PAUSE: At critical points in your speech, pause long enough to make your listeners reflect on what has been said and to refocus their attention. The most difficult lesson a speaker ever learns is the lesson of judicious silence. And that is so because it is completely counterintuitive: it would seem that a speech should consist only of continuous talking. But every speech should have periods of intentional silence in it to jolt the auditors back into full focus. Silence in a speech builds great tension in the audience. Once the speaker learns that lesson of judicious silence, he will begin to realize the very great power of closing his mouth so his listeners can refocus in order to hear him again. Five seconds of silence will completely re-boot a dead audience. A fool chatters to a sleeping audience; a wise man shuts his mouth to wake them up.

7. DISTANCE: Stand near your listeners to establish an intimate speaking distance, and to avoid the perception of remoteness. Do not hide behind a lectern. Walk right up to them and speak to them as a father would speak to his children. When you stand close to your auditors, you violate their “space.” But you must violate their space in order to persuade or to convince them. They will never feel threatened as long as you stand (or hide) behind the barrier of the lectern.

8. IDIOSYNCRATIC PHRASING: Avoid sandwiching your syntactical units of speech with empty idiosyncratic phrasing, such as, “you know,” or “right?,” or with superfluous grunt words, such as, “er,” “ah,” “um,” or “and dah.” Speakers quickly lose their audiences when they fill their narratives with all those stuffers.

9. EYE CONTACT: Look at your audience members individually. Look directly at a particular person, holding your gaze there for a sufficient period of time to engage that person. Move that eye contact to another person and repeat the process during the entire speech. Do not stare at some imaginary spot on the floor just ahead of you or at the walls or the ceiling. Instead, actively look at your listeners. Make them uncomfortable with your eye contact in order to keep them focused on your speech. Never look from, say, left to right without pausing slightly to look directly ahead.

Always coordinate eye contact with gestures. Both of them are required simultaneously to give coherence to your speech. Disjointed and unconnected gestures not only look awkward; they also pull the auditor in two different directions at once because of the lack of visual coordination. The “eyes” tell a different story than the “hands.”

10. AMPLITUDE: Always speak in a somewhat constricted range of vocal amplitude. Avoid the extremes of shouting or whispering. In every case, do not bomb the target with a pillow wrapped around your munitions, i.e., do not make the “central point” of your speech in a muffled or attenuated - and hence, unintelligible - voice. The “punch line” should be delivered in a rather loud and well-articulated voice in order to make it understood and effective. If necessary, the “punch line” should be repeated to ensure that the audience gets the point of your speech. Be especially aware of extraneous noises when you deliver the “punch line.” A rude cough by someone in the audience that comes out just while you are making your most important point will smother comprehension in the audience. Always be aware of competing noises when you are giving a speech.

11. IDEAL SPEAKING VOICE: Find a comfortable speaking voice and use it. Avoid timbres that are either too high or too low. You will always know when your timbre is inappropriate because you will feel a great deal of strain on your voice when you speak with that unnatural voice.

Women, especially, should seek to avoid that “little girl” shrill voice that many people (especially men) perceive as irritating or nagging or whiney. Think of the simpering teenage girl chattering away rapidly in that eeky little head voice and you’ll know just what I mean.

Also to be avoided are the “shushing librarian,” argumentative, or scolding voices that serve only to force the auditor to concentrate on the relative “bitchiness” of the speaker,” rather than to allow the auditor to focus on the content of her speech. Such women would do well to cultivate the lower registers of their natural voices in order to produce pleasant and attractive timbres.

C2001-2 Public Speaking Fundamentals

1. SPEAK TO THE EYES: Stand erect, with your eyes level, in a posture appropriate for giving a speech. Look directly at the eyes of your audience. Do not look at their feet. Do not slouch. Do not stare at the floor when you talk because you cannot be heard when you do that. Do not speak to the carpet. The carpet cannot hear you. People will think you are mumbling because, well, frankly, you are mumbling: you are speaking to the carpet instead of to them.

Do not stare at the ceiling when you talk because people will not believe that you are speaking to them when you do that, either. Do not speak to the ceiling. The ceiling cannot hear you. Speak to the people instead. Do not stare at the “exit sign” over the door. The sign cannot hear you.

And lastly, do not stand there with your eyes closed when you give your speech. I saw a man do this once, and it was probably the most unnerving thing I had ever seen in my entire life. I don’t know what he did to keep himself from falling over as he stood there with his eyes closed. And it was so distracting that you could not concentrate at all on what the man was saying. Standing there with your eyes closed might work well in a DUI screening test. But it doesn’t work in a speech. Open your eyes. Look at your audience. And speak.

2. SYNTACTICAL UNITY: Speak in complete syntactical units of phrase, rather than in periodic bursts of speech. Do not say (as Jimmy Carter would), “I just want to say......that I have come here......to speak to you today...blah, blah, blah.” Instead, speak in complete sentences from beginning to end, without those annoying and unnecessary pauses. Speak from the beginning to the first punctuation point and then pause. Speak until the next punctuation point and pause again. Speak between punctuation points. Understand that: Speak between punctuation points. Continue this process until you have completed your speech. Incidentally, some might argue that the perception of Carter as an incompetent president stems from this very lazy speech habit that he used. The principle is sound: Speak like a fool, and people will come to believe that you really are a fool.

3. DICTION: Speak slowly, clearly and forcefully, from the beginning of a syntactical unit until the very end. Enunciate deliberately and distinctly. Never rush your speech. Never slur your words. Pronounce each word as if it were vitally important. When necessary, repeat important parts of your address - words, phrases or ideas. Be particularly aware of people in your audience who cough (or create disturbances - crying babies, etc.) at precisely the same time you are attempting to make your most important point. It is always better to repeat what you are saying than to risk being misunderstood because some rude person coughed your speech into incomprehension.

Young people, in particular, should study the speech patterns of older people and attempt to emulate that speech. Adults quite often will not tell younger people that their speech patterns are absolutely incomprehensible to anyone other than other young people. The youngsters, quite naturally, then believe that there’s nothing wrong with their speaking habits. But those kids need to be told. Many of them speak like eight-year-old girls at a pajama party - with all of that tittering, breathless, sewing-machine speech. The only way such youngsters could ever be taken seriously would be to stand in front of a dog with a cookie in their hands. No one else on the planet will pay any attention to them because their speech habits make others stop listening to them. Chatter like a monkey and your listeners will go deaf.

4. MODULATION: Speak in a well-modulated tone from the beginning to the end of each sentence. Do not drift off at the end of each sentence, or swallow your words, or turn your head away from your audience so that your meaning is lost to your listeners. Allow them to hear every single word of your speech. Always speak with a chest voice rather than a head voice, and when you do that, project your voice to the far wall of the room in which you’re standing. Speak with enough force that you can hear the natural resonance of the room. When using a microphone, pay attention to the fact that oftentimes such instruments are unidirectional and if you turn your head even slightly away from the microphone, it will not pick up your voice.

Always be aware that a speech can whimper into incomprehensibility when the energy level of the speaker dies before the speech has ended. Often the speaker starts out forcefully, only to allow his speech to die on the vine of muffled speech before his speech has ended. The principle is clear: Speak in a well-modulated tone from the beginning to the end of each sentence, and from the beginning to the end of the speech.

5. ASK QUESTIONS: Engage your audience by asking questions frequently. Make sure that your listeners are required to listen attentively in order to avoid being caught daydreaming and being unable to answer one of those questions because of inattentiveness. Do not allow your listeners to sleep on your watch.

F2104-1 The Management Club

    When I worked in western Wisconsin, I was a member of the Management Club, a rag-tag group of foremen and supervisors.  They let me join the club because I was a salaried employee who supervised the maintenance employees once or twice a year when the maintenance foreman went on vacation.  I really shouldn’t have been a member of the club because I wasn’t a day-to-day manager.  But they let me join anyhow.
    A co-worker named Mikkelson tried to sign me up for the club.  I wasn’t attracted to a club like that because it seemed to offer nothing that interested me.  I mean, think about it: you have to work with those guys every day.  Why would you go out and socialize with them at night after you’ve been fighting with them all day long?  But Mikkelson said you got your $10 annual dues back two or three times in benefits.
    The club had four “outings” each year.  There was something called a “Couples Steak-Fry,” where, as Mikkelson explained, “You could bring your old lady and get a steak dinner for $5.00.  Not a bad deal, right?  You’d get your dues money back right there with that one event.”  Then there was “The Golf Outing,” where everybody pretended to golf while attempting to drain the quarter-barrel of beer they were hauling around on their golf carts.  Things could get kind of ugly with the deadly combination of Budweiser and Nine-Irons.  Then there was the “Christmas Party,” where, Mikkelson explained again, “You could bring your old lady and your kids.”  He didn’t seem at all attracted to the Christmas Party himself because “They ain’t got no beer at that affair.  Just Santa Claus and shit.”  But the outing you really wanted to attend, he said, was the Smelt Fry.  Yessir!
    The Smelt Fry was your basic guy-affair: deep-fried smelts, french fries, beer (lots of beer) and euchre card games.  Mikkelson said that after everybody ate and started drinking that “they would be flopping around like fish on land.”  And he wasn’t lying about that one bit.  I had a plate of smelts and some fries, drank a beer or two, and then I went home.  I was the sensible one.  I could see all that spilled beer on the floor and a general rowdiness beginning to settle in among the men.  So I left.  Most of the other men, however, stayed at the clubhouse and drank until they ran out of beer at about 11:00 pm.  Then they went bar-hopping.  When the final count was tallied, the club lost three members who were fired from their jobs because they were in jail and couldn’t report for work.  One man was up on a felony count: something about discussing the issues of the day with a police officer while waving a pistol in his face.  Three or four were out on bail, awaiting trial, for public drunkenness and property damage.   They had remodeled buildings with their automobiles, you see.  We had half a dozen DUIs (Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol) and multiple cases of beer-induced adultery that led to divorces later on.  All in all, a pretty productive night.  And they managed to do all that with only 125 members.  Just think what that Management Club could do with 32,000 members: why, the USA prison population would double.
    We moved to Appalachia shortly after the Smelt Fry.  So I never got to see the antics at the Golf Outing.  But I would guess that giving every golf cart its own personal quarter-barrel of beer was a recipe for membership reduction of a rather large magnitude.  As a comedian said, when commenting about how fast you could make mistakes with a computer, “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.”  I would add the Management Club outings to that list, too.

B1043-1 Angel Food Cake

    My mother had an uneasy relationship with telephones.  When the phone rang, she often had a look of fear or trepidation on her face as if the Gestapo had come suddenly, knocking on the door, in the middle of the night.  She had a great reluctance to answer the phone, and it was only after five or six rings that she ventured a rather tepid “hello.”  Then her conversation invariably included three other words as well: yes, no, and bye.  Always in that order: “hello,” “yes,” “no,” and “bye.”  Four words.  One minute tops. And then the telephone receiver was back on its cradle.
    One day she was mixing the powdered egg whites from an angel food cake mix.  She had just emptied the contents of the packet - marked with a big “Package A” - into the mixing bowl and started to mix.  Then the telephone rang.  Very slowly she made her way to the telephone and she stopped the ringing after five rings.  Her conversation began true to her usual, tentative form.  But it suddenly it veered off into an extended - and most convivial - conversation.  She told me to “watch the mixer” as she waved her hand in the general direction of the machine.  I suppose that I was about eight years old at the time.  I had no idea what it meant to “watch the mixer.”
    She continued to talk on the telephone, even going to the effort to pass the telephone through the arched opening between the kitchen and the dining room.  She sat on the chair in the dining room while she continued her conversation.  I could not hear what she was saying.  I noticed, however, that she laughed out loud at several times during her conversation.  Perhaps it was not the Gestapo on the telephone after all.  But I couldn’t imagine who it might have been.
    The egg whites worked themselves into a thick froth after ten minutes.  I looked toward my mother for advice about the egg whites.  She was hidden from view in the dining room.  So I continued to “watch the mixer.” After fifteen minutes, the egg whites began climbing out of the mixing bowl.  I used a spatula to fold them back into the bowl.  At twenty minutes, when it was impossible to keep the egg whites in the bowl, I turned off the mixer.  She stuck her head around the corner and asked me why I turned off the machine.  “I can’t keep the stuff in the bowl,” I said.  She ended her telephone conversation and came into the kitchen.  When she saw the stiffened egg whites, she had a very surprised look on her face.  She asked me what I had done.
    I didn’t know how to answer her.  I was told to “watch the mixer,” and that was just what I did: I watched the mixer.  I hadn’t done anything.  “How did you get those egg whites that big?” she asked.  “I don’t know.” I told her.  “I just watched them.  I didn’t do anything.”
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was getting pulled into the clutches of something I now call “competency.”  It was always possible to hide completely in ignorance and never have a single person in the entire world suspect that you might be able to stand next to a food mixer, and to transform the contents of “Package A” into towering mounds of egg whites.  But somehow I did just that.  And since I had that strange  - and now un-hidden - talent, I was given the task of making an angel food cake every Saturday for the next four years.  “Billy,” my mother explained to anyone who would listen, “makes the best angel food cake in North America!”
    I found that it was impossible to escape from that cake-making responsibility.  My brothers, when asked to mix up an angel food cake, invariably botched the job.  I was stuck with that Saturday routine until Grandma Tyndall asked me to “take care of her garden.”  She was going away to visit with her sister for a couple of months and she wanted me to keep her garden weeded and watered.  I agreed and began well enough.  But the allurements of Summer dulled the bright promises I had made to Grandma Tyndall.  Weeks went by without me even thinking about the garden.  When Grandma Tyndall returned, her garden was a hopeless, tangled mass of weeds.  “I will never let you take care of my garden again,” she said.
    That very next Saturday I took the contents of “Package B” from the angel food cake mix and dumped it into the mixer.  “Package B” was flour and it did not mix with water to produce those stiff peaks of egg whites.  It only made a sad little puddle of paste in the bottom of the mixing bowl.  “I don’t know what happened,” I told my mother when she saw the abject mixture in the bowl.  She pushed me out of the way and called my younger brother.  “John,” she said smiling broadly, “I’m going to show you how to make an angel food cake.”
    Once again I was hidden from view in the cave of “Creative Incompetency.”  John, however, was caught out in the open.  He began his stint as an angel food cake baker, not knowing exactly what had happened to him.

B8003-1 Opinions

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF OPINIONS:

a. OPINIONS ARE COMPLEX INFERENCES: They are inferences drawn from factual or non-factual data, or from other opinions, or from narratives, or from anecdotes about the material or immaterial universe.

b. OPINIONS CAN BE EXPRESSED IN ANY TERMS: They can be expressed in any terms thought to be useful by the holder of the opinion, and are not limited to mensurability even when they contain pseudo-mensurable elements as in some of the following examples:

“Two men robbed the gas station.”
“The nine pennies in the drawer belong to Robert.”
“I got a double eagle on the seventh hole.”
“Some Democrats want to turn this country into a socialist state.”

c. OPINIONS CANNOT BE SUPPORTED BY FACTS: Opinions are not mensurable assertions and can never be supported by facts. They are assertions of belief based on credible (and sometimes, incredible) evidence. The evidence, however, may be Formal, i.e., the rational and logical entailments of consistent and well-structured propositions; or Circumstantial, i.e., “he was there, so he must have done it;” or Anecdotal, e.g., “families that eat together regularly are less likely to have kids who get into trouble.”

d. OPINIONS ARE ALWAYS SUBJECTIVE: Sometimes opinions are considered as low-grade or “subjective” facts”:

e. OPINIONS OFTEN DO NOT REQUIRE A LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION:

f. THE TEST OF AN OPINION IS ITS REASONABLENESS: Opinions are always gauged on their reasonableness and consistency. Since by their very nature opinions cannot have elements of enumeration, extension or duration, opinions are tested by conformance to some known standard of fluidity and grace. If the opinion itself seems to be reasonable and logical and consistent, without compelling errors, it is deemed a good opinion. Often times in scientific circles, this particular test is applied to things such as the Big Bang Theory and Evolutionary Theory. In both cases, there is no factual content to test. As a result, the Big Bang Theory and Evolutionary Theory are often subjected to the LBR Test: if it “looks ‘bout right,” then it passes the test.

g. OPINIONS MAY NOT BE QUANTIFIED: It does not make sense to say, for example, “George Bush is 2.6 percent (or 26 percent or 260 percent) evil.”

h. OPINIONS ARE NOT SELF-REFERENTIAL: They imply everything beyond themselves in the same way that a logical contradiction entails everything else.

i. OPINIONS, GENERALLY, ARE NOT VERIFIABLE AND REPEATABLE BY OTHER COMPETENT INDIVIDUALS: However, others may support similar opinions, or others may support opinions that do not agree with those opinions. One should recognize that considerable variation exists with opinions. As a general tendency, though, the results vary considerably from person to person to the point that opinions may differ widely - even to the point of outright contradiction.

j. OPINIONS ARE NOT TRIVIAL:

k. A COLLECTION OF OPINIONS CONSTITUTES A LIST: As opinions themselves can imply everything, so also lists can imply everything. Lists, sometimes called “data,” are used, however, to form subsequent opinions or more deeply articulated opinions. But the lists themselves are not limited to a definite conclusion.

l. OPINIONS, COLLECTIVELY GROUPED IN A LIST, ARE NOT INTER-RELATED: They are intransitive and independent of one another.

m. THE CONFUSION OF OPINIONS WITH FACTS: Science, as a self-styled, mensurable activity, frequently falls into the error of confusing opinions with facts. All scientific “evidence” is ultimately based on opinions and not on facts, even though the “data” will appear to be “factual.” In fact, the work of science is to make opinions appear to be objective by quantifying that which cannot be quantified.

n. THE MATHEMATIZATION OF OPINIONS YIELDS PARTICULAR DESCRIPTIONS OF RELATIONS:


OPINION NARRATIVES:

a. BIKER LOG: Some time ago I was directed by others to a web-site that featured a so-called report of a bicycling trip across the state of Iowa. On the whole I found this report unsatisfactory for several reasons. The author had a very perky and sophomoric style of writing that eventually enervated the reader with its strained effort to be funny. The attempts at humor were so contrived and forced that the work was difficult to read through in its entirety (I couldn’t finish it). It was far too long to keep anyone’s attention, and if one did not share a cycling passion with the writer, it was uninteresting as well.

Instead of supplying a useful narrative to his readers, the writer had only observations and opinions of what he had seen on the trip across state of Iowa. And invariably, the citizens there were pictured as hopeless and flawed individuals, who had voted Republican in the most recent elections, and who entertained perverse ideas, such as hostility to a variety of liberal views on taxation, gun control, and the death penalty, etc.

On the whole, the antic style of this particular writer reminded one of the perpetual class cutup back in grade school who always attempted to amuse his classmates with his highly inappropriate coprolalia. Either that, or this writer sounded like an inept person who tried to tell a joke that you had already heard before, and told that joke with such a telegraphic style that you were bored to death before the person ever got to the punch line. The only thing that could possibly make his writing worse would be his writing with him under the influence of quart of tequila.

On the whole, though, the article was useful for the lessons it taught about writing in general, strange as that may seem. Normally, one would expect to find a cycling report that described the trip and some of the things that were seen on the trip and some of the lessons that are learned there. Instead, the reader was treated to an endless, piecemeal memory-dump on the part of the author. Particularly annoying were his uses of foreign words and phrases mixed in with the most trite language possible. I suppose one was supposed to gauge his sophistication by the use of those haute words, but his childish style ruined the effect completely. By combining those sarcastic and ill-chosen words in the same sentence, the man merely looked foolish, like the rookie writer trying to be a sophisticate and a comedian at the same time. It simply didn’t work.

But I would have to say that his complete lack of narration gave a very staccato effect to his writing - almost a bam-bam-bam slide show effect - that made it very difficult to see the point the man was trying to make in his writings. Instead, each paragraph detailed a separate, unconnected view of what he saw on that cycling trip.

The comments were stated as his opinions of what he saw and did on that trip; or opinions of what he thought about the inadequacies of the citizens there; or his opinions of life in general. And he offered those opinions over and over as if any reader in the world might be interested in what he thought. But instead of being something that could be received with grace, those opinions merely showed a disillusioned and bigoted fool, who seemed to be convinced that the world thought he was God’s gift to writing. Of course, he wasn’t. Fools always come off as fools; they’re seldom seen as geniuses or as God’s gift to anyone. And this writer was no different. He was a garden-variety fool, with touches of literary talent, who managed to annoy everyone who looked at his piece of writing.

b. RAW OPINION: “The greatest of this [environmental] writing is neither sentimental nor obvious - instead, it is very nearly shamanistic, allowing the natural world to translate itself into English in all sorts of ways. The emotional ways, taxonomic ways, descriptive ways, intimate ways, Olympian ways. It is a community of writers, with all the particulars of their upbringings, tastes, genders, mental states, seeking faithfully to serve as some sort of connection between people and the rest of the world. That faithfulness demands the most scrupulous accuracy - you have to know the tree’s resilience, the coyote’s circling route, the carbon molecule’s structure. But it also demands that you care, which is the highest form of objectivity [emphasis not in the original]” (Bill McKibben. “Speaking Up for the Environment,” The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, Marie Arana, ed., New York: PublicAffairs, 2003, pp. 363-364).