Consider the sardine

More co-op scribbling: http://www.communityfood.coop/coop/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/May12-NL.pdf. Page 6.

Capitalization punishment

Working with words is a dangerous business. I don’t mean working with words in the sense of writing amateur essays or poetry or the like (though that can be fun). I mean working with words in the sense of a 9-to-5 job, where words are business. If you’re a natural linguistic nitpicker (like me) a job working with words will probably only amplify that shameful part of your personality. 

You find yourself internalizing house style standards and applying them to everything you see. Every publication (or publishing house) worthy of the name has some sort of house style guide. Some of these might be extremely long. Some houses might follow Chicago to the letter. Others might be shorter and less formal. But even blogs (the professional ones, anyway), have made choices concerning fonts, line breaks, jump breaks, spacing, margins, and other basic formatting. They do it because they want their readers (who are, after all, customers) to know what aesthetic to expect when they visit their site. It’s like McDonald’s.

Working within a defined style standard for a long time trains your eye to catch minor discrepancies as though they were nickel-sized blotches of ink spilled on the page. I can  now tell the difference between an en dash and an em dash faster than most people can tell the difference between a Great Dane and a Shih Tzu. I know where each respective dash is supposed to be used, and when I see one in the wrong place I find it—well, appalling. Conventions for line breaks, closing up, and ampersands I’ve taken to heart as well.

But the rule I’ve internalized more than any other is one for capitalization. A convention within the niche I work in (technical publishing) is to list all titles of papers in sentence case (e.g. “A compact hyperspectral imaging spectrometer for spaceborne . . .”), with only the first letter capitalized. When I was introduced to this style standard, I thought it looked odd. I had spent my entire academic life writing papers with titles like “Regressive Transcendence and Subversion: An Analysis of Postantimodernism in the Novels of . . .” where you gave a cap to pretty much everything other than a preposition or an article. 

Taking a title down to sentence case seemed almost like a deliberate humiliation to the author. “Your paper’s title is no longer a capital-t Title, it is simply a sentence that happens to be on the top line.” It felt like we were intentionally announcing to the world that these papers were not important enough to warrant capital letters.

It wasn’t until I had been employing this standard for a while that I realized that this demotion is, in a sense, the point. We apply this standard to proceedings papers, which are just reflections of presentations given at conferences. They aren’t peer-reviewed, and they don’t make or break careers. They’re typically a snapshot of work in progress. The idea behind them is that of sharing information. From that perspective—sharing—a title in sentence case makes sense. You’re just saying, “Hey, this is what my team and I did—see if you find it interesting.” You’re not trying to impress anyone with a big show.

The standard works. It makes the papers appear less pompous. If you care to see how fully I’ve internalized this style, just take a look at the title of every post on this blog. If I gave these blog posts title-case titles, each one would become “a piece,” as in, “That piece I wrote on x.” And I don’t consider a single one of them to be that. They are, at best, snapshots of ideas in progress. 

Some writing—the long stuff, the very thorough stuff, the painstakingly crafted stuff—does deserve a title in caps. But much doesn’t, and it’s actually better to admit it. Take a look at The Economist. They use sentence-case titles (though they cap the first word after a colon, which I dislike). Now take a look at Time, capped up to the gills. Which of the two looks smarter? 

Lately I’ve noticed odd capitalization all over the place. I got thinking about this from something I saw in the dentist’s office today. They had on the wall a wooden placard in the foofy, curlicue style of those “Home is Where the Heart Is” things your mom or grandma probably has in the kitchen. It read thus:

We Always

Make room for your

Friends

and Referrals

I won’t even bother commenting on the extremely strange choice of line breaks (though you could probably write an essay on that, too). I’ll confine myself to the capitalization. The first baffler is the inconsistency. Why are “room” and “your” lower-case in a sea of caps? But that almost seems like a typographical mistake. 

Let’s say they were capped like the rest. It would still be an odd thing to read: “We Always Make Room for Your Friends and Referrals.” I hope it’s oddness is especially apparent when written in-line without special breaks. The oddness is that it’s a damn sentence! It’s not a title or non-sentence phrase like “Home Sweet Home.” It’s a diagrammable, textbook sentence with subject, predicate, preposition, and objects of preposition. So why the caps? Make it sentence-case and give it a period. It would look like an actual statement.

Just below this in the rack was a magazine called Trailer Life (god only knows what is found in those pages or who the hell bothers to find it). They listed a feature on the top line of the cover: “Improve Truck Handling With One Simple Add-On.” Man, they even capped the prepositions in this one, and yet this too is precisely a sentence—of the imperative variety, with the implied subject and modal verb of “you can” or “you shall” (the latter being definitely the funnier). 

So what’s with the loud caps? Is this a “piece” that trailer enthusiasts are going to cherish for its wisdom and pass on to friends and family? Or is it just some mildly informative throwaway content that readers will forget as soon as it’s no longer useful to them? Turn it into the sentence that it is. Give it no more than its due. Stop yelling at us with titles too big for their britches. 

Anyway, my hypercritical perspective.

When no news is good news

I’ve been abstaining from the news lately. Not that I’ve ever been a news junkie, but for the past week or so I haven’t read or watched any at all. I’d found myself tired of it—the repetitiveness, the irrelevance—and then I read an essay by Rolf Dobelli that convinced me to try giving it up altogether (at least for a while, as an experiment). The guy makes a cogent argument against the Standard American News Diet—one of the key points being that nearly everything you read in the news has no discernible effect on your life. After all, if the effect was discernible, you wouldn’t need the news to tell you about it. 

My news-abstinence became significant early yesterday morning, though. There was a fire at the marina, clearly visible from my apartment, about a mile away across the water. It was only 6:30, and still twilight. I watched the flames and the rising black smoke while I brushed my teeth and buttoned my shirt. It looked like the fire was pretty big.

As I drove in to work I thought about the fire and its relation to my news-abstinence. Obviously, this was a newsworthy event. In only a few minutes I would be at my computer, where I could look up some local “BREAKING NEWS” site and surely get a preliminary, on-the-scene report. And I kind of wanted to. I was curious.

But of course my curiosity had no basis. I don’t sail or own a sailboat, nor do any of my friends/family, nor do I even think very highly of sailing as a pastime (very cliquish, it seems). I knew (as Dobelli’s essay predicts) there was almost certainly nothing in that fire that would affect me. My curiosity was morbid, voyeuristic, and transitory.

So I decided to maintain my celibacy and not look it up online. I decided instead to conduct an observational study. I was the first person in my little work area to arrive that morning, so I figured my two workmates, when they got in half an hour later, wouldn’t know about the fire (not everyone’s home has a kick-ass bay view like mine, heh heh). I wanted to see how they’d react when I brought it up. I know neither one of them sails, and that they’d have as little reason as I did to imagine they’d be affected by the fire.

Only a few minutes after they’d each sat down, I said (nonchalantly), “Hey, did you guys see or hear about the fire at the marina.” One said she’d noticed smoke on her commute, the other wasn’t aware at all. Obviously, since I had only seen it from a distance and hadn’t read about it, I had nothing to offer by way of explanation. “Yeah, I could see it from my apartment, and it looked kind of big,” I think I said.

They immediately wheeled around to their respective computers—in unison, and as if in a deliberate effort to confirm my expectations—and looked it up online. I couldn’t help cracking a wry smile behind their backs. They each found it on a different site, too. The fire—still burning—had made not only local but also regional news. My, the speed of the internet in spreading tidings of disaster.

They shared aloud some of details, and sure enough there was nothing meaningful to any of us. A boathouse had gone up. No one knew why. If anyone was hurt or dead, they didn’t know who. It was still rather hot at the moment. 

So the whole checking-it-out-online, gathering-of-information thing had been a waste of time and attention. Not a huge waste, obviously, but a waste just the same. Imagine how that interaction might have gone if we didn’t have the internet (or other rapid-delivery news channels). The fire is the type of thing I probably would bring up anyway, even if I wasn’t conducting an observational study, just in case my workmates had friends or family they might need to be concerned about. Here’s how I see the web-free version:

Me: “Did you see/hear about the fire?”

Workmates: “No.”

Me: “Looked kinda big.”

Workmates: “Oh. I hope no one’s hurt.” (Maybe get on phones to call loved ones.)

I’m not trying to deride my workmates for turning around to their computers the way they did. Turning to a computer (or pulling out a smartphone) is the instinctual 21st-century response to hearing about anything. Can’t blame anyone for it. But the nature of that response should by itself indicate to us that what we’re responding to isn’t terribly relevant to our lives.

How would you respond if someone told you something that seemed like it might be a cause for your personal concern? If a coworker came in and said there had just been an explosion at the tire factory, and you knew your son/husband/brother was supposed to have just started his shift at the tire factory, would you turn to your computer and try to find a news story about it? Far more likely is that you’d be getting on the phone and/or running out to your car.

My guess is that many people around town turned to their computers over word of this marina fire. And my guess is that it was for them as irrelevant as it was for my workmates and me. It’s funny, since you would expect that if any news were to be relevant, it would be the local news. The truth, though, is that most of the things that genuinely affect us are either mundanities that don’t make the news, or they are emergencies so personally critical that our knowledge of them bypasses news streams altogether. 

I’ve only been avoiding the news for a matter of days, so I can’t confirm if a news-free life is truly better. There may in the future be something seriously important that I—in my book-reading, semi-unplugged world—totally miss out on. Maybe I’ll miss the opportunity to work for some hot new company because I didn’t read about it in a Time magazine profile. Or maybe I’ll lose all my money when I don’t read the CNN Money article about fears of my bank’s becoming insolvent. Or maybe my mother will be shot in the face by a terrorist and I won’t hear about it until she’s already buried.

I’ll be sure to let you know.   

Reading the signs

Now that I’ve spent a decent potion of my life working in a place where I hear about marketing campaigns, branding, web copy, etc. and where I know some of the people directly responsible for those things, I’ve started giving a lot more thought to the specific words that businesses use to attract customers. 

Along those lines, I noticed something yesterday that made me chuckle. I was riding my bike through an area of fairly cheap-looking suburban apartment complexes—the kind that cater to college students and people who started families way too young. One of these places had a sign that looked like this:

NEWPORT

an apartment community

If you had asked me beforehand, I would have said “apartment community” is an oxymoron. Apartment complexes are collections of transient strangers. Usually the feeling between apartment neighbors is one of mutual apathy—and sometimes antipathy.

And sure enough, this Newport place didn’t exhibit outward signs of being any more a community than the apartment complexes surrounding it. When I think of community, I think of people planting a garden together, or lots of kids roughhousing good-naturedly, or—I don’t know—music and dancing or something. Newport had drawn shades and a few cars parked in front.

So I thought the sign was maybe misleading. If this place is a community, I’d hate to see what a non-community looks like.

I had to wonder if any customers are actually influenced by the use of the word “community” here. Are there people who see it and find themselves (consciously or unconsciously) more inclined to consider living there? Do the existing residents drive by that sign and feel reassured in their choice to call Newport home? It seems hard to believe. 

So that leads to the corollary question: who do the proprietors of the complex imagine they’re reaching with this sign? The sign obviously cost some time and money, so I’m sure they gave a bit of thought to how they were going to brand the place. They probably drafted several other slogans, and the choice of “community” was most likely not careless.

They would do better to keep the sign purely factual (e.g., “Newport Apartments”) and spend their time instead just perfecting the design. That more than manipulative word-spinning, I think, is the way to make a sale. 

We all know from our experiences online how important design is in forming customer relationships. We’re unlikely to buy from poorly designed websites. They look like they might be scams. Bad design affects other decisions, too. Would you apply for a job at a company with a really cheap-looking website? I’d be hesitant.

Good design builds customer trust. I trusted Dropbox when I signed up for it six months ago not only because my friends told me about it, but also because the site just looks professional. And although Dropbox does have a slogan (“Simplify your life”), they don’t put it front-and-center on their homepage. The design is the more important part.

So the point is that this Newport place really should have just gone for broke on fonts, spacing, color schemes, and the like. It’s obvious from their use of “community” that they’re trying to set themselves apart from the other apartment complexes. Design would have been the better way to do that, especially since slogans and marketing copy, when so patently false, can backfire. I’m less likely to want to live there, because I find their sign insulting to my intelligence.

If the sign had just looked really, really nice, I might have given them a second thought.

Myths of social plenitude

Sometimes I hear people say they want to move to a bigger city because there would be more people to meet. A town of 80,000 or even 200,000 just isn’t a large enough pool to draw friends from. They want to go somewhere big where they can choose from a wide array of people.

It sounds like a no-brainer. If you have x% chance of meeting your soulmate or your BFF in a town of 100,000, then surely that percentage increases considerably by moving to a city of one million. And even further by moving to a city of 10 million. 

It’s true, of course, that the probability of your soulmate’s existing in a group of 10 million people is 100 times greater than that of their existing in a group of 100,000 people. But that says nothing about your chances of meeting that person.

The populations of modern cities are beyond our practical comprehension. Human beings evolved in bands and tribes, and that’s the group size we’re instinctively accustomed to. More than a couple hundred is tough for us to engage with on a personal level.

Take my relatively small city of 80,000. There is no way I will ever know 80,000 people, even if I dedicated my life to it. Suppose I started tomorrow going door-to-door meeting everyone in my town, writing down their names, taking notes on their lives, making every possible mental exertion to know who these people are. By the time I got to the end (how many years would I have to spend?) I would have forgotten the people I started with, and a substantial portion of the population would have turned over with residents’ comings and goings.

So no matter where you go, the percentage of the total population you meet (and actually remember) is going to remain quite small. That’s just a constraint of our psychology. The people you meet are also probably going to be a fairly narrow demographic slice. Your friends and lovers will probably be focused around some particular location, vocation, or leisure interest. They will be your neighbors, your colleagues, or your fellow yoga class attendees. A big city will mean seeing more faces on the street, but I can’t remember the last time I made a friend doing that.

I learned something about this when I first left home for college. I was excited about the social opportunities that would inevitably come with going to a school of 12,000 people, as opposed to my high school of 2,000. Imagine being able to hand-pick your friends out of such a large group!

I spent my freshman year in a dorm complex of about 600 people living in 12 separate four-story stacks. At the end of that year, I had four real friends. Two of them lived in the same stack as me, one floor down, and the other two lived just a couple stacks over. What an incredible coincidence that out of the entire university population, the four people best-suited to be my friends all happened to live within 90 seconds’ walking distance of me.

I realized that the pool from which I was drawing friends was actually just as small as it had been in high school. The people who lived on the other side of campus, or who didn’t know someone I knew, or with whom I didn’t have any classes—they might as well have not existed. 

It’s a bit different in adult life, since we have more choice about where we live and how we spend our days, but it’s still true that the major commonality of all our relationships is proximity. We make friends with the people who happen to be there. And the people who are “there,” in any real sense, are not going to come from too wide of an area. Uptowners generally don’t meet many downtowners.

There are definitely some towns so small that your social life would benefit from going someplace bigger. The people I’ve known who complain about their small towns don’t live in towns that small, though.

You can test whether your town is truly small by the Grocery Store Test, which works like this: if you moved to the entirely opposite side of your town, would you still shop at the same grocery store?

I use grocery stores in this test because they are a place where everyone goes, and to which few people have a sentimental attachment. If you moved to the opposite side of town, you might still go to the same bar or shop at the same bookstore, because those are “your places.” Most of us don’t care what exact grocery store we go to, though. In my town, the south side co-op is the same as the north side co-op.

So if you move from one side of town to the other and still shop at the same exact store, that means your town is so small it only has one grocery store (or at least only one store good enough to patronize). More to the point, your town is so small that moving to a different part of it doesn’t mean seeing different people.

There are a handful of semi-familiar faces at my grocery store—people who I recognize because they also are regular shoppers at the store. But if I moved out to the north side of town, it’s entirely possible I would never see these semi-familiar faces again. I wouldn’t be shopping there anymore, and the people shopping at my new store may well be people I’ve never seen before. 

A broader way to apply the Grocery Store Test is to consider whether there are many things in your town that can be called “the only one in town.” Even in my smallish city, if you were to ask about yoga classes, golf courses, dance studios, or yacht clubs, the answers would be: more than one, more than one, more than one, more than one. 

And once you have more than one group devoted to a certain interest, you begin approaching the limit of how many people an individual can even consider as potential friends. If you were super devoted to meeting other yoga-ers, you might alternate each week between the west side class and the east side class. But if you tried to alternate among three or four classes, or if those two classes happened to have 50 people each instead of 25, would you really have an easier time meeting people?

One thing that does affect your chances of meeting people in a new city is the type of person who lives there. A certain type of person will find it easier to make friends in San Francisco than in Nashville, and vice versa. Finding a place with a relatively high percentage of people with values similar to your own could make you a lot happier. But the overall size of that place is pretty meaningless as a determiner for how happy you’ll be with the people you actually meet there. 

You get to choose between a city of 100,000 like-minded people and a city of 1,000,000 like-minded people. As far as relationships go, is one really different from the other? 

Machines that think they know everything

My company just got some shiny new microwaves for a couple of our break areas. They’re gigantic and stainless steel and programmable and very 21st-century. They have I suppose as many bells and whistles as a microwave can conceivably have. How’s this for fancy: when the timer runs out and the beep goes off, the little LCD screen says, “Enjoy your meal.” 

Enjoy my meal? My meal, you say? How does this microwave presume to know that I just microwaved a meal? How does it know I didn’t just heat up a snack? Or a beverage? Or how about a plate of bite-size hors d’oeuvres to share with my coworkers—what kind of meal is that, I ask you?

Maybe I microwaved one of those rice-in-a-pouch hot packs that I’m going to use to ease my lumbar pain. I’m not going to be enjoying that meal very much, am I?

Maybe I microwaved a CD to see those weird crack lines develop. Maybe I microwaved a tin can to see if mini lightning bolts would strike. Maybe I’m a disturbed sadist and I microwaved a small live animal. Maybe I microwaved a smaller microwave (these new ones are honestly that big) just to see what would happen.

None of these things are meals.

Maybe I did indeed microwave a plate full of food—roast beef, mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli—but I did it only to have the pleasure of throwing that hot food out the window. In what sense, then, is that a meal? Maybe I microwaved a frozen Lean Cuisine thing. That shit doesn’t even count as food. Maybe I turned the microwave on with nothing at all inside it, just because I like the sound it makes.

No matter what, it still tells me to enjoy my meal.

Pff. 

Smart-ass microwave.

Pretensions of world domination

I’m going to write once again about something I saw on a minivan around town. I’m not consciously trying to make a theme out of this. It just sort of happened.

What I saw was a bumper sticker saying “Get involved. The world is run by people who show up.” For a moment it seemed to me like a decent sentiment. It’s similar to Woody Allen saying “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” You’ve gotta participate if you’re gonna make it.

There’s a difference between the two, though, if you look closer. The Allen quote is humble and general—it seems to come from his own experience and observations. All he’s talking about is success. The word “success” means many different things to people, and it can be applied to pretty much any activity. No doubt Woody Allen has achieved his fair bit of success, seen other people achieve it, and seen plenty of others fail to achieve it.

Now read the bumper sticker slogan again. “The world is run . . .” it says. When I read this the other day, I had to do a double take to gather the context of this bold statement. The sticker was on the back of a tan minivan parked next to the YMCA in insignificant little Bellingham, WA. 

I had not realized that the people running the world were driving ten-year-old minivans and taking their kids to swim at the Y on Saturday mornings in rainy hamlets of the Pacific Northwest.

Nor do I think the people actually running the world feel much need to advertise their running of the world with clever slogans. They know they’re running the world, and other people know they’re running the world. They probably don’t care much if the guy stopped behind them at the light is or isn’t motivated to greatness by what he reads or doesn’t read on their bumper.

I wondered about the guy who owns that van. (We’ll just assume it’s a guy. It really makes no difference.) It’s certainly possible he’s achieved some kind of Northwest-style success. Maybe he’s the director of an organic farmers cooperative. Maybe he owns his own artisan coffee roasting business. Maybe he works from home as a marketer for sustainable energy initiatives. 

Any one of these is possible, and he may well have achieved his success by “getting involved” and “showing up.” But his ride and its location sure didn’t make me think he’s one of the people running the world. I didn’t get the impression he was even on his way up to running the world or that he’s even acquainted with any people who run the world. So where does he get the idea that he knows what traits world-runners possess, or that he can tell us how to emulate them?

I think it’s a natural human tendency to take the truths we find in our own little corners of life and extrapolate them into world-governing axioms. We’re all guilty of it to some degree. We want to believe that when we succeed it’s because we are following some universal principle of greatness. One guy gets ahead by knocking on doors, and suddenly the world is run by those who show up. Another guy climbs the ladder by keeping his mouth shut, and the world is run by the quiet ones. Yet another guy makes his bread by connecting the right groups of investors and entrepreneurs, and the world is run by the communicators. There’s no end to the grandiose claims we like to make about our knowledge of the world and how it works.

Just don’t put it on a damn sticker.