dreadcrumbs

Fun with abstract thought

When on trips, my wife and I will occasionally play a game that has no real name, but which I will call "Disturb-o-drome" here so as to cement its realism. The game starts by posing two relatively mundane words, objects, or concepts that fall together into some kind of category. The category, really, is what needs to be determined first, because as the game progresses, you mine the category for different concepts until you find the one thing in that category which is fundamentally the most disturbing.

As an example, let's say the category is "kitchen utensils." I would take two members of this category, something like a knife and a spoon. Often, both of you will immediately agree on the more disturbing of the two. If you disagree, you discuss the issue - try to convince the other that really, truly, the spoon is much more disturbing. Consensus is usually reached, as the conflict tends not to stem from the nature of the Things in question, but in the nature of what "disturbing" is. It's easy to slide from disturbing to creepy, and from creepy to scary, and from scary to dangerous (I know from personal experience). But those are all very different things.  For me, a knife is more dangerous. Maybe more scary, too. But disturbing? The spoon is more disturbing. 

Once you agree on "spoon," the other person suggests a new combatant, "fork." For me, this is a trickier contest, but in the absence of any rebuttal, I'd probably stick with spoon. This keeps going until you can't come up with any other viable contestants from the category, and you both end up pretty convinced that something like the slotted spatula is the most disturbing of all kitchen utensils. You probably wouldn't have come up with that initially, but group-think makes it so. 

It's possible that you have to be a certain kind of person to want to play this game, or to think it is any kind of fun, but it's my favorite travel activity. You'd probably want to change it up based on your players, though. If my kids were involved, I'd just make it "scary," instead of "disturbing." For the people at work, assuming a universe in which I would actually play a game with them, maybe "absurd." With the lady at the DMV, "kafkaesque." 

As in all things, your mileage may vary. It requires you actually talk to the people you're playing with, so, obviously, I haven't done much beta-testing.

Back at it...maybe

You know how sometimes you suddenly notice something small about someone, something, it turns out, that bugs you? You've maybe known the person for a few months, and just now notice the thing? Like they click their teeth every time they stop to consider something, smack their lips louder than seems warranted, wheeze ever-so-slightly when they breathe, or don't post to their blogs for months at a time? After you notice that thing, you can't stop noticing it, and it irritates you way more than it should. And you wonder how you got by all those months not noticing, not caring?

I don't really have a current example of this with people - after the first few times of it happening to me I started to develop a kind of applied ignorance, and have since erected so many blockades to social awareness that I rarely notice anybody.

But books, see, books, I haven't been able to do this with. Sometimes something creeps up in my reading that has probably been in literature forever, never troubling me, and then I notice. And I can't help but keep noticing. The general lack of believable female protagonists, evil clergymen, telling rather than showing...these are just a few I currently have difficulty not noticing. The book I'm reading now, though, has brought another to light. Fake language. Using words and names that have no basis in any recognizable linguistic structure. Especially for things that already have perfectly good culture-neutral terms in place. I don't know why this hasn't bugged me before. I've read science fiction, fantasy, and comic books for nigh on 30 years now, and those genres are replete with that kind of stuff. Tolkien has lots of weird words, but he was a linguist, and they sounded like they could actually exist. Maybe because they were modifications of real terms. Ancient terms, maybe, obsolete terms, perhaps, but they had the weight of human culture behind them to give meaning.

And I've nothing against created languages. I love them. I think they're awesome exercises in the analysis of language and human verbal communication. I even tried to learn Klingon at one point.  But using those languages, or more often, other author-invented languages with no actual structure or depth, is a retarded way to write a book. In my opinion. It seems like a cheap way to say "this is a different culture" without actually showing that it is a different culture. A little of this is forgivable, but unless it fuels the story, it cripples it. Let me give you an example. An "homage," if you will, to the book I'm reading:

Upper H'cloi Vesratta eyed her diblaf, Elcyr Hvish. He was short, even shorter than the average shem'cha from the mountains of Mebilia. His clan, Katruboi, was known for their elaborate kinsho, one of which Elcyr wore at his throat, a little too tightly. 

Elcyr bobbed his head. "You summoned me, my H'cloi?"  

"Yes, my diblaf," said Vesratta. "You are Katrub, no?"

Elcyr's hand unconsciously drifted to his bejeweled kinsho. "Yes, eminent H'cloi, of the unt'cla Aeiyul, and the sunt'cla Hvish." Elcyr said, trailing off. 

"Yes, well, that last bit I knew," Vesratta proclaimed. "The Hvish bit."

Now imagine 300 pages of this. There's actually some good story in the book, some ideas good enough to make me want to finish, but I'm having a hard time enjoying it. I'll have just come to terms with all the "diblaf"s when a "seiyjou" or a "Yjhoen" is thrown at me. And then I'll go to the author's online forum where another reader had difficulty determining from context what a "seiyjou" was, posted a question, and found out it was just an "Obterian tribesman's term for a 'club.'" Those struggling with just how to say the names aloud can also discover that "Yjhoen" is prounounced  "just as an Englishman might say 'John'." 

John. The dude's name is John. And s/he wrote it "Yjhoen." Come on.

No, you don't get to know the book or the author. I might meet he/she/it one day, and they might have been one of the four people to read this entry.