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On the Correct Usage of “Begging the Question”

This is a public service announcement. “To beg the question” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

No. Quiet, baby. I know you think you know. That’s adorable. That’s why I love you. But you’re wrong. No…you don’t even have to say it. I’m a-gonna use it the way you think it should be used:

Some Douche: The financial cost of preserving indigenous flora is extravagant. In this economy, we simply can’t afford to spend that kind of money.

You: Well, that begs the question of whether it’s even ecologically necessary to preserve local ecosystems. One could argue that nature is whatever is natural, however it came to be there in the first place.

Right? That looks great, doesn’t it? But it’s not. It’s wrong. If you wanted to say that, you should have said:

You: But is it even ecologically necessary to preserve local ecosystems?

or

You: Shut up, douche.

imageBut it turns out the phrase “to beg the question” has a much more unique purpose. The simplest explanation is that it’s a way of calling out circular logic. If someone has begged the question, their premise and conclusion are more or less indistinguishable. To wit:

Some other douche: Correct usage of English grammar should not be predicated on some static set of rules, but should encompass anything in common usage. LOL. Hashtag grammar!

You: But why?

Some other douche: Because a language is a living entity that shouldn’t be limited by rules.

You: You just begged the question entirely.

Some other douche: Sure, but John Mayer kicks ass.

Make sense? Good. By the way, begging the question is only one of many logical fallacies that are fun to call people out on (particularly if you hate having friends)! Another favorite is the pretentiously named “ignoratio elenchi.” This is where you attempt to prove a conclusion by proving a related conclusion:

imageYou: Why do you think we shouldn’t have reasonable gun control legislation?

A third douche, who probably lives with the other two douches in some apartment where Sunday football is, like, a really important event, and there are duplicate copies of every season of Entourage: It’s really important that people are able to hunt, because it’s a primal need of every human being. I believe that if you aren’t able to throttle a baby deer with your bare hands, you shouldn’t be allowed to eat meat.

You: Honestly, I’d rather watch Entourage than continue talking with you.

3rd Douche: Then put that shit on the Blu-ray, dog.

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An Open Letter to Coffee Shops: It’s 2013

Dear Coffee Shops,

It’s 2013. Not 1913. Not 1813. 2013. To that end, I’d like to remind you of your role in the universe. Herewith are the Five Commandments of coffee-shop-dom:

imageFirst Commandment: Thou shall have wifi.

Commentary on the First Commandment: I realize that wifi costs money, and that people may come to your coffee shop in order to watch porn. But I would gladly pay $6 for a cup of tea if it means I can sit in a corner and not be bothered by anyone, for any reason, at any time. In fact, I’d pay $100 for that. Seriously. Try it. Put it on the menu. “Cappuccino and nobody bothers you”: $100. That coffee shop would clean up.

Second Commandment: Thou shall play music at a reasonable volume.

Commentary on the Second Commandment: I realize that every barista is either a musician or a DJ. I do. And that’s awesome. But this coffee shop is not said barista’s 12th-floor walk-up’s closet-sized bedroom, or the tenement basement he uses as a recording studio. It’s a coffee shop. And I love Radiohead, too; I just didn’t come here to listen to them.

Third Commandment: Thou shall not cover up thine electrical outlets, nor suffer them to be switched off at the breaker box. And lo, if there are not outlets installed in the floor underneath tables not wall-adjacent, then there shall be cables lain across the open spaces of your shop, and much tripping and gnashing of teeth.

Commentary on the Third Commandment: If you don’t understand this yet, coffee shops, you are offices. That surly crowd of tattooed punkers that came here at eleven, slightly hungover and unshowered? They came here to work. They are designing album covers and building websites for their parents and putting the finishing touches on the short films that will soon be rejected from the Indiana LGBT Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Festival. Can they do that without power? No. They are not gods. Only men, women, and whatever that thing with the blonde dreadlocks and the neck piercing is.

Fourth Commandment: Thou shall make good coffee and espresso drinks, and in the espresso drinks there shall be symmetrical hearts and leafs of foamy milk.

Commentary on the Fourth Commandment: People didn’t come here for your pastries, coffee shops. They didn’t come for your biscotti or your vegetarian wraps or your taste in soul music. They came for your goddamn coffee. Any barista who cannot make a good pour-over or macchiato shall be drawn and quartered before a small audience of his peers, and his grave shall be filled with badly over-roasted espresso beans.

imageFifth Commandment: Thou shalt not suffer Jack Johnson to play, live or otherwise, in your coffee shop. If Jack Johnson be sighted within 50 furlongs of a coffee shop, that coffee shop is thus tainted, and shall be moved forthwith to another location, citing as the reason: “Our dick of a property manager is raising the rent again.”

Commentary on the Fifth Commandment: At one point during the early 2000s, Jack Johnson was known to visit coffee shops and play a single, unending song for weeks at a time. The song is usually called “Bubble Wrap” or “Sweet Sweetness” or “Jack Johnson is Singing Now”. The original wording of the last portion of the fifth commandment (“If Jack Johnson be sighted within 100 furlongs of a coffee shop, he shall be killed.”) was changed when it was discovered that Jack Johnson cannot be killed until his guitar is thrown into the hot magma of Mt. Doom.

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Real Writers Count Words

I imagine that people who are seriously involved in any artistic pursuit have an innate and ineradicable dislike towards amateurs masquerading as professionals: the word “dilettante” is an epithet, after all (and a chocolate!). I’m no exception. You wouldn’t call yourself a construction worker if you put up a wall one time and it looked kinda nice; yet people call themselves writers who only put down a couple paragraphs every few months. These little sketches are usually autobiographical, poetic, and written in response to some extreme event (end of relationship, losing a limb, zombie apocalypse, etc.). If the writerly life is a long-term relationship, this style of writing is a nasty one-night stand in a cheap hotel with a disease-ridden prostitute who has “John Mayer” tattooed on her left butt cheek.

Luckily, over the years, I’ve found that there’s an easy way to distinguish a serious writer from a dabbler, and thus to save yourself the unnecessary reading of crappy autobiographical sketches called “Autumn”: words versus pages. It’s a throwback to high school and college, when assignments were given in pages:

  Teacher: Give me 10 pages on Chaucer by Friday.

  Student 1: What font size, please?

  Teacher: 12 point.

  Student 2: What font?

  Teacher: Verdana.

  Student 3: What spacing, please?

  Teacher: Double-spaced.

  Student 4: What margins, please?

  Teacher: I will murder you in your sleep.

  Student 5: What’s a margin?

Yet the professional writer quickly learns to measure their output in words. The primary reason is exemplified above; pages are variable, dependent on font and margins. If you paste something into the body of an email, pages disappear entirely. If you transport something from Word to Google Docs, you might lose or gain a dozen pages in the transcription.

Another reason for using words is that real writers like to commit themselves to a regular output. A dialogue-heavy scene can eat up pages, yet actually turn out to be very little writing:

  “Do you want to?” she asked.

  “Do you?” he countered.

  “I asked first.”

  “Did you?”

  She paused.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Shall we.”

  “Okay.”

  They did.

  “Was it good for you?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered, then turned into a pumpkin.

When I’m writing serious fiction, I aim for 500-750 words a day. For genre, it’s more like 1,000. Stephen King has been on a 2,000 word-a-day diet for decades, which is why his books are cubic (and often quite bad). This website allows you to search for the word counts of various books, if you’re interested. You can also find a paperback edition and multiply the page count by about 325 for a decent ballpark.

And now, a short list of metaphorical situations comparable to measuring your manuscript in pages:

Football: The score right now is four of those running things to three running things and two kicky things.

Business: Our company did very well this year. Our profits are equivalent to 140,000 Tickle-Me Elmos, and our revenues increased by the price of enough copies of “The What’s Happening to my Body Book for Boys” to sexually educate three-quarters of Malaysia.

Penis: It is the size of three baby’s thumbs laid out end-to-end, with a girth roughly equivalent to that of a baby’s forearm.

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On Speculative Fiction (Part 2 of 100)

OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Plot

imageWhen I was younger, there was nothing I loved more than a book without a plot. Have you ever read the 50-page interpolations of legalese that stud Gaddis’ A Frolic of His Own? No? Well, I have. What about taking on Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest in the SAME MONTH? That’s right. Suck it. And up until just a couple years ago, I had a hard and fast rule against stopping a book midway through. And by midway, I mean at any point past the first sentence. That’s right. Even if the first sentence sucked, I was gonna finish:

First sentence: What follows is a book-length list of adjectives that have been used to describe my balls.

My reaction: Hmm. I might learn some interesting adjectives.

First sentence: Lara Croft stared deep into the mouth of the cavern, wondering if the demons inside would mind her stealing their precious Jewel of Destruction.

My reaction: Well it can’t be worse than the Tomb Raider movies!

First sentence: Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

My reaction: I did not mean to purchase this book in Russian. However, the letters are so pretty, I guess I’ll give it a go. This line seems to say “Because cataracts create noxious apples ha apples, Kansas hectacres create hectacres no-boning.” Great stuff!

I’ve always been a completionist; It’s part of my OCD nature (the same nature that causes me to add up the number values of license plates and to never leave a dirty dish in the sink overnight).

But somewhere along the line, I realized that I was going to die. That’s right. Mortality reared its ugly head.

And suddenly, when I got bored a couple pages into a book, it seemed downright silly to keep going (I’m talking to you, Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum).

Some might call this laziness, and it’s true that sometimes one has to stick with something painful in order to get to the good stuff. But I think the distinction between entertaining and valuable literary works is a specious one, buttressed by intellectuals who don’t have the skill to say the things they want to say in the form of something that people might actually enjoy reading. David Foster Wallace is a perfect example. The man never wrote a readable novel, and yet he’s held up by the literary establishment as some kind of genius. The same goes for Rushdie, Bolaño (good short stories, but 2666 is plain stupid), and a million others (don’t even get me started on Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, which left me paralyzed from the brain down, necessitating months of painful physical therapy in order to recover).

Imagine if the same bullshit that goes on in literary criticism were allowed in food criticism:

imageEl Cocina

A New Mexican Restaurant

5 stars

El Cocina’s food is an experiment in mixing ingredients that clearly shouldn’t go together. While nothing on the menu—from the hot dog full of cake icing to the toast slathered in raw chihuahua—approaches the edible, and while the restaurant’s ambiance is roughly that of a Mexican whorehouse shut down due to health code violations, and while none of the waitstaff speaks English or responds to any requests other than “More hot sauce” and “Tell the mariachi band to play louder,” we believe that the wild originality of the restaurant is sufficient to earn our highest rating. Sure, the experience of eating here inspired two of this reviewer’s dining companions to drown themselves in the toilets (“which do not appear to ever have been washed,” according to the police report), but every meal can’t be aesthetically pleasant. In fact, some meals are important specifically BECAUSE they are so awful. I won’t be returning to El Cocina, but I recommend everyone reading this does go, immediately. If I were teaching a class on food, I’d even make you eat there.

Crap. I want to talk about Graham Greene, but this post is getting too long. Next time.

-t

Teaser: I love Graham Greene. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.”

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On Speculative Fiction (Part 1 of 100)

Which of the following does not belong?:

a) pocket protector

b) dungeons and dragons

c) science fiction

d) computer hacking

e) virgin at thirty-two

If you picked (c), you win. You’re also probably a gigantic nerd.

The term “speculative fiction” is said to have been coined by Robert Heinlein, who used it in an article in the Saturday Evening Post in order to differentiate his work (and the work of other writers he respected) from what was referred to, often dysphemistically, as “science fiction”. The term’s use has since broadened, and it’s now regularly used to refer to anything that isn’t strict realism, including magical realism, fantasy, and horror. It’s an important term, and I want to talk about why. Let’s start by looking at the two major genres for which speculative fiction is meant to be a replacement:

1) Science Fiction: What a ridiculous name this is. What does it even mean? Obviously, there should be some kind of focus on science. But that’s problematic on two fronts. Plenty of science fiction isn’t particularly concerned with science, and plenty of books that aren’t categorized as science fiction have a whole lot to do with science. We have to go a step further, and say that the term science fiction traditionally refers to books that feature sciences and technologies that haven’t been realized in the real world (yet). Whether it’s space travel, or time travel, or a chemical apocalypse, any author who makes a speculative leap is corralled into one big holding pen: science fiction.

2) Fantasy: Well, the first thing this makes me think of is Mariah Carey. After that, I think about sexual fantasties (which I probably would’ve done anyway, given the proximity of mid-90s Mariah, but still…). Next, I think about fantasy as escape (“Oh, but getting out of Pittsburgh is just a fantasy…”). Finally, I come to what’s actually meant by the term: novels full of castles, dragons, knights, wizards, elves, goblins, trolls, and fairies. Yet this seems even more ridiculous than science fiction. The etymology of fantasy, after all, is the Greek phantazein, meaning “make visible.” To my mind, that seems to describe ALL literature. And tell me, which of the following is more fantastical:

a) A king in an invented land who has to deal with the political machinations of rival courts.

b) A single man of good breeding with an income of 10,000 pounds a year (roughly $300,000 a year in 2012 dollars) who is willing to take time out of his schedule to round up your silly slut of a sister and force the town gigolo to marry her.

c) A woman, spurned in love, who grows old while sitting at her dining room table with a rotting wedding cake, teaching a young girl how to tease and torture men.

d) A boy who ends up on a raft with a tiger and survives.

e) A psychotic woman who fakes her own death and pins it on her husband out of boredom, and who is then convinced to take him back by his own brilliant deception.

[Answer Key: a) about 10,000 fantasy novels; b) Pride and Prejudice; c) Great Expectations; d) The Life of Pi; e) Gone Girl]

The second two books in this list are literary classics. The fourth and fifth are major critical and cultural successes of the past ten years. All five of them are entirely implausible in almost every major regard. So what makes one of them a fantasy? Actually, books like George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies cover much the same territory (except Martin’s have the cloying stench of magic, while Mantel’s give off the musty, masculine aroma of history). That’s not to say Mantel isn’t a much better writer, only that she is also writing a kind of fantasy. Yet she wins big important awards that no straight fantasy writer, however talented, could ever hope for.

All of which is merely to explain the necessity of a term like speculative fiction, which will hopefully replace “genre fiction,” “science fiction,” and “fantasy”. Under the umbrella of speculative fiction, it is no longer difficult to categorize Vonnegut, Orwell, Bradbury, Lethem, Saunders, and a hundred other brilliant writers who choose to explore something other than realism. You say you don’t go in for that ridiculous science-fiction and fantasy stuff? Well I (and Voldemort here), don’t go in for your ridiculous realism.

More on that soon. I’m not nearly finished with this rant.

-t

P.S. I more or less despise the Harry Potter books, and I think George R. R. Martin is an entertaining hack. However, Michael Chabon’s latest book made me sleepy, while Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot put me into a coma that lasted over a year. So eat that.

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On the irony of sesquipedality

Sesquipedality is the use of big words in writing (and yes, it is ironic, because it’s such a freaking long word itself). I just read the GMAU entry on it, and it’s reminded me of the daily battle I engage in as a writer, which I figured I would discuss here.

The battle goes like this: As a writer, you tend to know a lot of words. And some of those words are words that you know that other people don’t know. So what do you do? Use them, and alienate people? Or skip them, even though you know they’d make for better poetry on the page?

It turns out there are actual names for the two sides of this debate: Atticism (plain, direct) and Asiaticism (florid, bombastic). (And whether these are names to make Edward Said roll over in his grave is not today’s topic). Let’s briefly review the arguments for each side by letting them argue with each other:

Asiaticism: My gravamen here is that you are calling me pretentious just for using words you don’t know.

Atticism: Dude, stop showing off. Only nerds know what a gravamen is. And I am not a nerd. I have, like, six sports cars.

Asiaticism: I’m not showing off. The fact is that there is no word that means “gravamen” other than “gravamen.” I could talk around it, but as a writer, I care about efficiency. It’s like you gave me a leaf blower and a rake, then got pissed off that I used the leaf blower.

Atticism: But I don’t know the words you use. I don’t understand you. Is that good writing?

Asiaticism: You could look them up in a dictionary. Did a monster eat your thumbs?

Atticism: Actuall, yes.

Asiaticism: Well I was just trying to be clever.

Atticism: (under breath) Typical.

Asiaticism: You don’t need thumbs to read a dictionary, Atticus.

Atticism: But the dictionary is in the library, and I can’t open the door to get there.

Asiaticism: You have a library? In New York? How much is your rent?

Atticism: 3000 a month.

Asiaticism: How do you afford that?

Atticism: I was a thumb model.

Asiaticism: Ouch.

Atticism: Yeah. I’m looking for a new place.

Asiaticism: Anyway, you COULD look up words you don’t know.

Atticism: That’s true, but why should I have to, when you know a lot of perfectly good words you could use instead?

Asiaticism: Not perfect. Serviceable.

Atticism: Close enough. Don’t be a dick. I can’t be the first person to call you a dick for doing this.

Asiaticism: You’re not.

Okay, I think I kinda lost the plot on that one. But the point is you can marshall some solid arguments on either side of this thing. These days, the tendency is towards Atticism; I think this is partially because the conservative element in this country has fomented a distrust of academic learning, particularly academic learning that doesn’t hide itself behind plain language. Big words are inherently shameless. When you throw out a cathexis or aprotreptic, you might as well put on a t-shirt that says “I went to grad school and all I got was this t-shirt and a big vocabulary and $80,000 worth of debt.” Sesquipedality is elitist in the most literal sense. 

For my own part, I’ve mostly given up the fight. I used to keep a list of words I didn’t know, for eventual use, but I haven’t added to it in years. And the vocabulary I use in my writing has gotten smaller and smaller and simpler and simpler. I’m glad I’m CAPABLE of writing like that, but I hope someday to make use of my full vocabulary with pride, much in the same way a nudist probably dreams of going into work naked. Anyway, just remember that learning new words can be fun. As long as you don’t do it sporadically. Just ask Tai and Cher, from Clueless:

SCENE XV - MAKE-OVER AT CHER’S HOUSE

“Supermodel” Jill Sobule

(Various scenes of Cher and Dionne making over Tai, then Cher and Tai working out in the lounge room)

CHER

Squeeze in.

TAI

Cher, I don’t wanna do this any more, and my buns, they don’t feel nothin’ like steel.

CHER

OK, it will get easier, I promise. Just as long as we do it every day. Not just sporadically.

TAI

How do you know if we’re doing it sporadically?

CHER

That’s another thing, Tai. We’ve got to work on your accent and vocabulary. See, sporadic means once in a while. Try using it in a sentence today.

TAI

Alright.

CHER

OK, from now on we’re alternating Cindy Crawford’s “Aerobicise” and “Buns of Steel”, and reading one non-school book a week. My first book is “Fit or Fat”.

TAI

Mine is “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.

CHER

Good. Now that takes care of our minds and bodies, but we should do something good for mankind or the planet for a couple of hours.

(Josh walks in)

JOSH

Hey, brainiac.

CHER

Uh, the dreaded ex. Tai, this is Josh.

JOSH

Nice to meet ya.

CHER 

Hey! You know about this stuff. I want to do something good for humanity.

JOSH

How about sterilization?

(Tai cracks up. Cher and Josh enter the kitchen)

CHER

What do ya think?

JOSH

I’m amazed.

CHER

That I’m devoting myself so generously to someone else?

JOSH

No, that you’ve found someone ever more clueless than you are to worship you.

CHER

I am rescuing her from teenage hell. Do you know the wounds from adolescence can take years to heal?

JOSH

Yeah, and you’ve never had a mother so you’re acting out on that poor girl as if she were your Barbie doll.

CHER

Freshman psych rears it’s ugly head

JOSH

Hey, I am not taking psych.

CHER

Whatever. I am going to take that lost soul in there and make her well-dressed and popular. Her life will be better because of me. How many girls can say that about you?

(Josh and Cher walk back to the lounge where Tai is watching T.V. and singing along with the “Mentos” ad. God I hate those ads!)

JOSH

Be seein’ ya.

TAI

Yeah, I hope not sporadically

God I love Clueless.

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On Your “Unalienable” Rights:

When I was a kid, I thought a lot of weird shit. For example, I thought that the handicapped symbol was a giant G (which, logically, could really only stand for “gimp,”). I pronounced “sojourn” as if the j were an h (as in, “I love Sohurner Truth!”), for reasons unknown. And, like most people I know, I thought the word “inalienable” meant “unchangeable.”

It seems logical enough, especially considering where we all know the word from:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…

Extrapolating outward from the obvious root, the Latinalius, meaning “other,” I figured the word meant that your rights couldn’t be made into something other than what they already were. Of course, the actual definition of the word (also “inalienable,” which is a slightly better form) is “unable to be given away or sold by the possessor.”

It reminds me of that silly news kerfuffle a while back, about all the people selling their souls on Ebay. I like the idea that the Founding Fathers threw this word into the Declaration of Independence not because they wanted to make clear how important these rights were, but because they were afraid people would try to sell them.

Ben Franklin: So, about these rights we’re giving everyone. It goes without saying that you can’t, like, put them up on some auction website, right?

Samuel Adams: What’s a website? Also, does anyone have any beer?

Thomas Jefferson: People will sell anything, Ben. Fact is, I sold a human being just this morning!

Ben Franklin: Fine, fine. So I should probably put something in there about it. Is there a word for something you can’t give away or sell?

Thomas Jefferson: Um, inalienable?

Samuel Adams: I thought that meant you couldn’t change it. And seriously, where’s the beer at?

Thomas Jefferson: A lot of people think that, Sam.

John Hancock: I just want to sign something.

Ben Franklin: Wait, is it unalienable or inalienable?

Thomas Jefferson: Inalienable.

Ben Franklin: Shit. I already wrote it down. I’m just gonna leave it.

Samuel Adams: Screw this. I’m making my own beer.

Lucky for me, I’m not a strict constructionist. I believe that our country’s founding documents need to change with the times. To that end, I suggest an amendment to the declaration (the first, as far as I know). Let’s replace the word “unalienable” with “bitching.” We don’t manufacture much in this country that they don’t make better and/or cheaper in China, Thailand, or Malaysia. Really the only thing we have that they don’t is a bunch of freedoms. So let’s start selling that shit! What do you think the individual right to a free press would go for in Myanmar? How many fat stacks would a North Korean housewife drop for an opportunity to pursue happiness?

Let’s do this, America. Let’s monetize our freedoms like the Founding Fathers probably intended. I say there’s nothing inalienable except the right of every red-blooded American to alienate everything, and everyone, around him.

Um, but seriously, this is the greatest video I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen, like, 8 videos.

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Is it ironic? Do you think?

So this is a classic one. I know Dave Eggers has a big bit about it in the front of his “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (you can read a piece of it here), mainly as a response to his premature crowning as the king of cool hipster irony (whereas, in my opinion, irony hasn’t been cool for at least 20 years; how else to explain the über-sincere Wes Anderson (Keeping in mind that bathos is not irony), Colin Meloy (Keeping a sick bag nearby when listening), or hell, Dave Eggers (who keeps on writing books about suffering folks in foreign countries (like New Orleans))).

Anyway, a while back, I was arguing with someone. Let’s call him Mel, because that’s his name. And he made a sarcastic comment. To be specific, I had mentioned some scientific fact that was relevant to whatever ridiculous conversation we were having, and he answered, “Oh really? I didn’t know that.” Which is to say, he did know it, and he wanted me to know that he already knew it by modulating his tone of voice in a certain way that you can’t directly relate in text like this, unless you point it out. Which I’m doing. Right now.

And I said back: “Oh, how I love that old English irony.”

To which he responded: “No, it’s not irony, it’s sarcasm.”

What followed was a two-hour long argument about irony and sarcasm. To be clear, I was right, and Mel was wrong. To put it another way, Mel was wrong, and I was right. To put it a third way: Me=awesome, Mel=stoopid. But I’m not here to talk about the glorious surfeit of rightness on my side and the terrifying dearth of it on Mel’s; I only wanted to clarify the interesting relationship between sarcasm and irony. To wit:

Irony refers to any usage of language wherein the perceived or intended meaning is at odds with the literal meaning. Sarcasm is a sub-category of irony, in which the irony is used to disparage someone or something.

Example #1 (irony without sarcasm):

Situation: Brenda is describing her husband, whom she believes to be a simple janitor, to a friend. What she doesn’t know is that her husband is actually a contract killer, working for the mob. Her speech is intercut with shots of her husband carrying out various contract killings.

Brenda: My husband sure is a hard-worker. He cleans up like nobody’s business [CUT TO: Brenda’s husband mowing down a roomful of ninjas]. And if he misses a spot [CUT TO: the one ninja left standing, quivering in his black ninja booties], well he won’t feel right with himself until he’s cleaned that up, too [CUT TO: husband killing final ninja (for added layer of irony, he could commit said killing with a bottle of bleach, or some other cleaning product, or even a plunger)].

Explanation of Irony: See, Brenda is talking about her husband’s work as a janitor. But the words she uses still happen to apply in their new context (husband as contract killer). Her intention is at odds with the second layer of meaning (this would also be an example of dramatic irony, in which the audience interprets the second layer in a way a given character cannot, because of a disparity in contextual understanding).

Example #2 (sarcasm, i.e. irony with intent to mock):

Me: Well, black holes are actually very massive.

Mel: Really? I didn’t know that.

Explanation of Irony: See, when Mel says “Really? I didn’t know that,” his intended meaning is the opposite of what those words would typically mean.

Synthesis of the Two Examples: As you can see, irony can be a pretty complex creature, but sarcasm usually isn’t. This is why sarcasm (along with puns) is sometimes called the lowest form of humor. But the more important point here is that the British are famous (in the States anyway) for being ironic in a general sense. Thus, if someone British says something sarcastic, it’s entirely legitimate to say “I sure do love that British irony.” And sure, one could be more specific by saying “I sure do love that British sarcasm,” but this would be akin to looking at a chihuahua and saying “I really fucking hate chihuahuas” instead of “I really fucking hate dogs.” Neither is wrong. The focus is simply different.

In short, Mel, you sure have taught me a lot about the usage of the words “irony” and “sarcasm.” I don’t know how I would have reached this point of extreme illumination and intellectual satisfaction if not for your help.

So So Sincerely,

Tommy

P.S. Don’t be that guy who’s always complaining about how Alanis doesn’t know how to use the word. Just enjoy the song, and be glad you’re not in a car with four Alanis Morisettes, all of whom appear to have Tourettes, ADD, and probably crabs.

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On Adultery (etymologically)

So it never occurred to me that the reason adultery was called adultery was because you ran the risk of adulterating your bloodline. Honestly, I think I saw it more like this:

Guy #1: You know what kind of people cheat on their spouses?

Guy #2: What kind?

Guy #1: Adults.

Guy #2: True. Hey, we should come up with a word for that.

Guy #1: How about adultery?

Guy #2: Sounds good. So should we get back to this gay adultery we’ve been engaging in?

Guy #1: Works for me.

Or something like that. Of course, the connection to adulterate makes more sense, but I think it’s a little pessimistic about the genetic viability of the offending man/woman. “Adulterate” means “to render something poorer in quality by adding another substance.” But, given that inbreeding is bad news, and that genetic variation tends to strengthen a gene pool, a better word might be “supplement.” Then someone who cheats on their partner would be a “supplementor.” Then you wouldn’t need to wear a scarlet A, but a scarlet S. Like Superman!