Look at that: last week I posted about avoiding the word “maybe”, among others. Then I used it in my very next post. I think maybe I’ll take “maybe” off the list of banned words. It’s too useful.
Category Archives: Communication
Banned words
As of today, I am experimenting with being assured and unambiguous in my writing style. Here is a list of words which are henceforth banned:
Almost
Maybe
Possibly
Probably
Could
Might
If you spot me using any of them or their derivatives, please issue a sharp admonishment.
What does a product manager do?
People quite often ask me what my job involves. This is the best explanation I’ve found yet.
Friday videos
These are my two favourite videos this week. The first is long but worth it; the second is just a song I like a lot.
(Working at a radio station has forced me to listen to music I didn’t choose, and it turns out some of it’s really good!)
More words
Here is another blog post, with words in it. You can read it and decide what you think it means, but what it means for you won’t be the same as what it meant for me, because words aren’t thoughts or things but ways of describing thoughts and things – and however carefully we use them, we can only ever hope to make an approximate match with what goes on inside another person’s head.
At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. And I wasn’t alone: the sentiment has been expressed more eloquently many times by more original thinkers than me, including but not limited to Benjamin Franklin (“Words may show a man’s wit, but actions his meaning”), George Bernard Shaw (“Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap”), Voltaire (“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts”) and Albert Einstein (“I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.”).
We all use words to hide our thoughts. Of course we do. If I’m asked a difficult question, or made to think about something that makes me uncomfortable, my instinctive response is to come up with an articulate, beautifully-composed answer that communicates precisely nothing at all, but has a joke at the end so I get away with it, at least for now.
So if language hides our thoughts, what is the use of, say, talking cures? Aren’t we just dancing around the reality of our existential angst when we sit on a sofa and pour out a stream of words to another person?
Well, maybe. But I had a conversation with a psychiatrist recently (not as part of a medical consultation), and he told me that for psychotic people, language is what shapes their whole world. All the confabulations, all the paranoid convictions that form the basis of the psychotic’s experience, are built from words. That’s why mad people talk to themselves, or hear voices: their alternate worldview doesn’t have its location in thoughts or actions or feelings or things, but in words. Isn’t that interesting, if it’s true, which it sounds like it should be? And the corollary of that is that words are more important than I think they are: that words can change the shape of our thoughts, rather than just inadequately expressing them. And if they can change the shape of our thoughts, they can change the shape of us.
All of this coalesced in my mind when I read a tweet by Dan the other day. He’d come up with a breautiful thought overnight, but couldn’t quite remember it:
And I thought yes, that’s exactly how it works. Language is much, much more powerful than my reductive analysis gives it credit for. My words may not express me, but they can change me. And they can change you – just not in ways that I can predict.
(I think that’s why poetry can be so powerful. The act of choosing the exact, the only, words that express your idea make misinterpretation more likely, but that in turn allows the reader to infer a meaning that is personal to them. Poetry is the most pared-down way of using words that there is, and sometimes the fewer words you use, the more you say. Which brings us back to where we came in, but via an interesting diversion.)
Close Calls
Via David Schneider comes this extraordinary collection of potentially fatal encounters averted at the last minute:
It’s thrilling to see the speed at which people can react when threatened with sudden danger, and how calm they can be whilst making a split-second life or death decision.
(Less edifying are the nutters who throw themselves out of the paths of oncoming trains, apparently for fun. Bad enough for their families; even worse – and unforgivable, whatever the outcome – for the poor train drivers.)
Lovecraft
I’ve just read a book of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, because his was the first name that came back when I took the I Write Like test, and because I am generally in favour of well-written horror stories.
Well, I’m not sure that these are either of those things. The writing’s not bad, exactly, but it’s fairly impenetrable in places. I’ve chosen an extreme example, but I have limited patience for paragraphs like this, from The Lurking Fear (unedited; ellipses his):
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky… formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion… insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation…
I mean, what?
Where the stories work best is where there’s less fervid description and something is actually happening. The Dunwich Horror is really good up until the moment when the genuinely frightening half-human creature quietly disappears, at which point it becomes too abstract to retain my interest.
Maybe this is my fault: maybe I don’t have a brain that’s equipped to loosen itself from the bounds of mundane experience and appreciate a fantasy world where nothing bears any relation to anything. But these stories are fantasy, or maybe science fiction, not horror. To my mind, real horror arises from the creeping realisation that something that feels familiar is not what it seems. There are writers who can rouse me to night-time terrors – Mary Shelley, Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe – but for me there’s not enough of real life in Lovecraft’s stories to make them truly frightening.
That said, the guy himself is pretty frickin’ scary:
So that’s something.
Green Grow the Rushes
I’ve had this song in my head for a week. We used to sing it around the campfire at the Russian church camps I went to as a teenager, and I loved the words, which are a mixture of obvious Christian references (“ten for the ten commandments”) and lines so obscure that nobody has ever worked out what they mean (“two, two, the lilywhite boys, clothèd all in green ho ho”).
It’s also terrific fun to sing, and can last the full length of a shower or even quite a hefty round of washing up. This video gives you the guitar chords for added activity value.
NB: he has some of the words wrong. In addition to the lilywhite boys, who in his version are “all dressed up” in green ho ho (much less poetic), he seems to sing “five for the simples at your door”, which is charming but incorrect. It’s symbols. Here are the complete lyrics, should you want to sing along (this is just the last verse, but you can extrapolate):
I’ll sing you twelve ho
Green grow the rushes ho
What is your twelve ho?
Twelve for the twelve apostles
Eleven for the eleven that went to heaven
And ten for the ten commandments
Nine for the nine bright shiners
And eight for the April rainers
Seven for the seven stars in the sky
And six for the six proud walkers
Five for the symbols at your door
And four for the gospel makers
Three, three, the rivals
Two, two, the lilywhite boys, clothèd all in green ho ho
One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so
Inspect a gadget
I think I need a new gadget. At the moment, I carry around:
- A Samsung SGH-F480 phone, which I will happily go on the record as calling a terrible piece of crap, which cuts me off in the middle of phonecalls, has a baffling logic to its predictive text function and randomly switches itself off from time to time, but which has a good camera
- A 4GB iPod Nano, which I like a lot but which is full
- A Sansa clip, which has 8GB of space and a memory card slot which allows me to add more, as well as an FM radio and much better sound quality than the iPod, but which doesn’t work with iTunes and isn’t easily managed from my music library
What I want instead of all of those is something which
- Plays music with iTunes and has at least 16GB of storage
- Takes photos
- Goes online
- Lets me read ebooks and watch movies and TV
- Makes phonecalls and sends and receives text messages
- Has a radio
An iPhone is nearly the answer, but I don’t much like iPhones. I don’t mind getting two gadgets, as long as they both work, so maybe I need an Android phone and a separate music player and ebook reader. Would that work? Or maybe I need to make an Android phone work with iTunes, and then I can get a dedicated ebook reader. But is it worth getting an ebook reader now, before the market has settled down? I don’t want to end up with the Betamax of ebook readers.
Also, whatever I get must be small, and pretty.
Hmm.
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