Come restaurant with me

A mastery of parallel constructions is one of the skills that separates the careful writer from the slapdash. Our world is rife with false parallelisms: “As a teacher, I will need to possess patience, warmth, respect, and be a good listener.” Ugh.

Airports are pretty reliable places to observe bad writing. I had to spend about 83 minutes of my life in one the other day, and, sure enough, I saw a false parallelism that made my skin crawl for a good five minutes or so. It was part of the slogan (if you can call it that) of the restaurant near my gate. Here it is:

Now let’s take a look at those words beneath the restaurant’s name and try to insert them into some kind of grammatically parallel structure. It won’t work, but what’s interesting about this false parallelism is that it is palindromic in its falseness. That is, the elements are parallel in both directions, excluding the final element. Observe:

“Come to Scotty Browns. It is a restaurant. It is a lounge. It is a socialize." 

“Come to Scotty Browns. You can socialize. You can lounge. You can restaurant.”

With the middle element being equally plausible as a noun and a verb, we can’t be quite  sure which element actually makes the parallelism false. Maybe lounge is meant as a verb, in which case the noun restaurant is the false element. If lounge is a noun, then socialize is the offender. 

I found this rather confounding as I sat staring at the sign with nothing else to occupy my thoughts. (I was by myself, of course. Maybe I should have gone to Scotty Browns and enjoyed the socialize they have there.) I began to wonder if I wasn’t just observing the bleeding edge of language change; maybe restaurant is expanding to become not only a noun but also a verb. It’s happened before with contact and access, so why not with restaurant?

Maybe in the year 2013 we’ll say to our friends, “Hey, if you’re not busy Friday, why don’t we restaurant?” Our social communication could be revolutionized. Here are some other possibilities:

“I’m pretty broke, so I can’t restaurant much for a while.”

“I love New York; the restauranting is divine!”

“So this totally creepy guy tried to restaurant me the other night, and I had to lie that I had plans with my sister just to get him to leave me alone.”

If it’s the case that in ten years we’ll all go “restauranting” without giving the term a second thought, then I guess I have to commend the proprietors of Scotty Browns for bringing linguistic innovation right into the mainstream. They’ve shown the masses how to be flexible and creative with words. Usually this is the kind of thing that only poets do. 

Half and half

Is the glass half-empty or is the glass half-full? I guess it depends on what we’re talking about here. Are we thirsty or are we not? That could definitely influence our interpretation of this glass and its contents. If we’re not thirsty, then I guess the question is meaningless. We’re indifferent. The glass could not even exist, for all we care.

But if we are thirsty, then surely we regard the glass as half-empty, because we’re disappointed to have so little water to slake our thirst. Unless we’re not really that thirsty, in which case the half-capacity glass provides just the amount we need, so we consider it half-full. Or unless we’re desperately thirsty, in which case we’re glad to have anything at all, and we would again consider it half-full. 

But how large is this glass? I think that matters, doesn’t it? Because if it’s a tiny juice glass, then it might not be satisfying even when filled to the brim. And if it’s a big tumbler, then just a quarter of its volume might be enough to satisfy us. I think I’m entitled to know what kind of glass I’m looking at. Does anyone have figures on the average size of a drinking glass in America? 

Is it truly sufficient for the purposes of this question, though, to only consider glasses in America? Other cultures may drink out of considerably larger or considerably smaller glasses. I don’t feel I’m prepared to answer this question without being given the time and the means to explore the world and observe more drinking glasses. 

(Is it weird that I always imagine this glass being filled with water? It makes sense that it would be, because water is the one beverage we all need to survive, but maybe other people are imagining something else. Does the glass’s being filled with juice or beer or wine affect how one perceives its fullness or emptiness? A baby would want the glass to be filled with breast milk, after all. Gotta remember the babies.)

I feel like I need to be told what the water in the glass is even meant for. Is it there to be drunk? Maybe whoever poured the water in the glass intended to use it to water a small plant. In that case, it’s probably better to have it at half capacity, so it won’t run down the side and make a mess while being poured out. So you’d have to call that half-full.

And mustn’t we also consider how the water level came to be at the halfway mark to begin with? If someone filled the glass to the brim and then drank half of the water, leaving half of it for me, I couldn’t help but regard that as half-empty. It has been emptied by half. But suppose someone takes an empty glass and carefully pours water to exactly the halfway mark. They have taken nothing and replaced it with something. Half-full. 

But, God, if I just happen upon this glass without knowing who poured the water and when, isn’t it awfully presumptuous of me to begin projecting my views and my needs onto it? I mean, this is just a glass, right? Where do I get off pontificating on its fullness or emptiness, as if I’m the center of the universe? Other people have needs, too, and it isn’t my prerogative to go labeling a glass from just my own narrow viewpoint.

I really shouldn’t be so selfish.

Silent achievements

In a book about cycling I read recently, the author tries to convince readers to shun the world of spandex-wearing racing cyclists and instead ride for the sheer joy of it. He advises cyclists who feel themselves pressured into participating in over-serious cycle events to ask themselves this question beforehand: Would I do this if I couldn’t tell anyone about it? If I couldn’t wear the t-shirt afterward—if I couldn’t tell friends, family, and coworkers about my weekend-warrior sweatathon—would I still choose to do it? His point is that most of us would say no—we’d rather join a buddy for a casual ride out to the swimming hole.

It’s a great question that cuts down the pretensions of the athletic “image.” I think you can take it further, though, and apply the question to life as a whole: What would I choose to do with myself if I could never talk about it?

Suppose you lived in a world where no one was ever going to ask, “What do you do?” You could write, sell, or build whatever you wanted, and have your name attached to it, but you could never bring up the topic of your vocation to anyone. People would have to make the connection of your name and your creation on their own. You could say, “I’m Art Fry”—and let them realize who you are—but you couldn’t say, “I’m Art Fry, inventor of Post-it Notes.” 

In that situation, what would you spend your time doing? A handful of people could answer, “Exactly what I’m doing now.” But most couldn’t. Our sense of what we find intrinsically rewarding is usually clouded by what we find—or think we will find—socially rewarding. Prestige and recognition misdirect us into doing things we dislike.

If people could no longer boast of their achievements, we’d probably see thousands if not millions of people in high-status jobs suddenly quit. Law firms and investment banks would empty pretty quickly. Enrollments at Harvard and other prestigious institutions would drop considerably. Politics might disappear entirely. How would a politician sustain his morale when robbed of the opportunity for self-promotion? 

That’s not to say all lawyers and bankers are self-deceiving hypocrites working at things they hate in the hope of being admired, nor that they are the only ones doing so. Surely there are some lawyers who love what they do, and just as surely there are aspiring novelists who don’t really enjoy creating literature, but who just want to “be novelists.”

It might be impossible to fully separate our genuine enjoyments from our desire for    social gratification. For all we talk about doing what makes us—individually—happy, we assert just as often that human beings are “social animals.” We don’t live in solitude, and everyone needs at least some kind of recognition. Even work that seems more purely creative—writing, architecture, fine cooking—is still done for an audience.

It’s probably fatuous, then, to ask “What would you do for no recognition? What would you do just for yourself?” If we had no one but ourselves to live for, we’d probably all commit suicide. So the better question is probably, “What would you do for no recognition other than that which the work itself generated?” That line might be a bit clumsier to include in a motivational speech, but it’s probably the best way to get to the truth.

Terrible baby names

Back in the ‘90s George Carlin did a bit on how he was sick of guys named Todd. It’s a newfangled, weak-sounding, goofy name, he said. He listed a bunch of other ridiculous boys’ names—Cody, Tucker, and Flynn being a few of them. He’s right; these are silly names. And things have only gotten worse since the ‘90s.

If you spend any time around people who are at the baby-making stage of life, you’ve probably encountered some real head-scratchers of names lately. It’s not limited to boys. Baby girls are suffering, too. American society is currently in a state of baby-naming anarchy. Anything goes, evidently. Mothers and fathers are naming their kids after fruits, turning surnames into first names, using improbably spelled foreign names, and even (it seems) inventing names out of thin air.

It would be impossible to compile an exhaustive list of all the bad baby names I’ve heard recently. But you know what kind of names I’m talking about. Like when your cousin comes to a family get-together and says, “This is our new baby ______,” and people furrow their brows a bit and say, “Oh.” Or the baby announcements in the employee newsletter: “Eric and Katie welcomed their new son ____________,” and it looks like they filled in the blank by mixing up Scrabble letters on the kitchen table.

I think in the past few years I’ve heard more bad baby names than good ones. Classic names like Paul, Michael, Jane, James, Claire, and Katherine seem to be on the wane. If you were to ask the parents why they chose not to use one of these more recognizable names, you’d probably get the same response from all of them: “We wanted something unique.” 

It’s almost an admirable impulse. Almost. Why wouldn’t a kid want an unusual name? It sounds like what everyone wishes for: going through life being one of a kind, and without any effort. What parents don’t realize is that it’s actually out of selfishness that they choose their strange baby names. No one chooses “Ryder” over “Peter” because it’s likely to make the kid happier. They choose it because it’s likely to make them, as parents, seem hipper (or something). 

Parents have a difficult time seeing their children as independent people, and so they don’t consider what it might be like to live as an adult with a name like “Fenton” or “Milligan” (for a woman, no less!) or “Camden”. Would you really want people to do a double-take every time you introduced yourself at a party? Would it not be better to be able to say, “Hi, I’m John,” and just be done with it?

Picking up where Carlin left off, Louis CK does a bit where he says “there should be a couple of laws” about what you can and can’t name your kid. I think there used to be laws about that, and they were collectively called “culture.” Parents 100 years ago had just as much freedom to name their kids whatever the hell they wanted, but they didn’t, because they were living in a society that actually had expectations for civilized behavior.

So is it symbolic of the decadence of American culture that we now have no norms for what we call our kids? If our baby-naming has descended into anomie, will our morals and relationships follow? Maybe so, but I’m not one to predict the future.

One thing I will do is give parents-to-be this advice: give your kid a name that could plausibly be that of a soldier, an artist, or a corporate executive. Those three vocations pretty well cover the entire spectrum of life choices. See how well the proposed name fits into each of these blanks:

“_______ has been decorated in battle several times over for bravery, selflessness, and outstanding skull-crushing ability.”

“An invite to _______’s SoHo loft is one of the most coveted status symbols in the New York art world.”

“_______ cleared eight figures last year through a series of hostile takeovers and cutthroat stock market deals.”

If the kid’s name works for all three of these, go with it.

Golly ghee

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Page 6.

In the city of the future . . .

The previews for the remake of Total Recall (I’m not going to bother seeing the whole thing) show a city near the end of the twenty-first century—for the sake of this essay, let’s just say it’s 2092. The city of the future has all the things you would expect: flying cars, robot cops, and buildings that seem to hang in midair. At first, 2092 sounds pretty far off. It seems plausible to imagine our cities will have been drastically transformed by then. But it’s actually just 80 years away. How much is going to change in that amount of time?

Take another example: Blade Runner, made in 1982, opens with flying cars, flaming industrial wastelands, monolithic skyscrapers, and a sky totally obscured by smog. The title card says it’s the year 2019. A lot could happen in the next seven years, but I think it’s fairly safe to say Blade Runner’s art directors were pretty far off the in how they imagined the  future. 

It’s a problem in most films set in the future, even those that really try for something plausible. The creative team imagines many highly visible changes to our reality: cars that drive up the sides of buildings, wholly synthetic food, homes made out of clear plastic. But the truth is that technological changes are rarely so high-profile. Most of the important ones, in fact, are nearly invisible at first glance. 

Thinking again about the timeframe established in the new Total Recall, what would be most shocking to Americans of 1932 if they could see footage of “the future” of 2012? 

Imagine showing New Yorkers from 1932 a low-altitude flyover shot of the city of 2012, at a scale where they couldn’t see people, cars, or advertisements. There might be nothing at all to shock or impress them, other than that the city had gotten bigger. It would look quite familiar, just the way a city ought to look. The urban flyover is a commonplace of films set in the future. We always see a cityscape transformed beyond recognition. But New Yorkers of the past would find plenty to recognize in the New York of 2012.  

Now imagine moving in to a smaller scale and showing them footage of a walk down Fifth Avenue. The first things they’d notice would probably be the changes in fashion and the changes in car design. Men are going out in jeans and hoodies and driving streamlined cars made in Japan? No doubt these things would genuinely shock them, but clothing and automobiles aren’t recent technological developments. They had those things in 1932, just in different forms. They also had neon lights and recorded music, so an average urban street scene would not impress them, as far as technology goes.

It would only be when we started to show things in higher resolution that they would see the most important technological changes in the last 80 years. A quick stroll down Fifth Avenue might not be that impressive, but if we began poking into coffee shops along the way, looking at laptops and iPhones and explaining the internet, then even the most worldly viewer in the 1930s would have to be impressed. 

It takes a bit of digging to see these technologies, yet they’ve done more to change our lives than a flying car ever could. Compared to the internet, a flying car is kind of boring. The latter changes only how we commute. The former changes how we communicate. 

Business, socializing, and information exchange have all been revolutionized in the past 80 years. But these things are hard to show visually. They don’t translate well to film. What do translate well to film are the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, around the turn of the last century. That revolution took place on a huge, visually awesome scale. Accordingly, these are the changes from which filmmakers extrapolate their depictions of the future.

The tech revolution (if you want to call it that) doesn’t work that way, though. It takes place on a physically small scale—smallness being one of the revolution’s chief tenets. But within that small scale, buried in chips and code, are abstract concepts that dwarf even some of our greatest industrial achievements. Our cities may look nearly the same, but our lives are very different.

It’s possible our technological advancement will continue down this path—becoming  smaller and less visible, yet changing our lives even more. If that’s the case, films depicting the future will probably get to be even further off the mark.      

      

Olives in all of their glory

I've been co-oping again. Page 7.