Mike Schryver's Open Salon Blog

How to sound old

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:08:31 -0400

The meanings of words are in constant flux. I assume this is a common idea in linguistics, but I first encountered it in Edwin Newman's popular books on language from some years ago.

(Tip #1: Referring to Edwin Newman makes you sound old.)

A few years ago, a CBS news executive, describing how baffled he was by the changes in popular attitudes toward news, said "Send me a telegram so I can get it." I think telegrams were still available at that time, but if you're questioning why you don't understand current tastes, the fact that you use the word "telegram" should be your first clue.

Of course, these things come and go. I'm trying to figure out why we still refer to "dialing" a phone, when phones haven't had dials for years. (Same goes for TVs - "Don't touch that dial!") Maybe it's phone calls themselves that are becoming archaic; everybody "texts" these days, don't they?

We all know that using the word "record", as in the old vinyl discs, is a sign of your age (although I understand they're making a comeback). However, have you considered the word "album", which many of us use in its place? It's been a long time since I bought an entire collection of songs by one artist marketed as an album, since I've been buying music on iTunes for some years now. I don't even play music that way anymore - it's all shuffled. That usage of "album" may also be on its way out.

And what about "column", as in "Have you read Frank Rich's latest column?" Who besides old codgers reads newspapers anymore? Yes, web pages have columns, but we don't talk about them that way. Even referring to news stories that way may reveal your age, such as saying that something's been "in the papers". I do think that paper itself is going to be with us for a while, so we're probably safe with other uses of the word.

For how much longer will we be using "film"? It won't be long before movies aren't shot on film at all, and photo film is already a dinosaur. Kodak stopped making film a few years ago, and Polaroid recently stopped making theirs.

(Tip #2: Referring to Polaroid makes you sound old. Doubly so if you mention Land.)

I'm not sure I know how to talk to young people anymore. Maybe I should just shut up.

A hot time at the ballpark

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:08:55 -0400

Portland is not a hot place. Summer is beautiful here (shhh, don't tell anyone), but it's only really hot for maybe a week.
One of those hot days was last Friday, when the temperature got up to 102.

I had tickets for the baseball game that night (our AAA Beavers), and had to decide whether to go. Around here, the high temperature comes at 5:00, so it would still be hot during the game.

I eventually said, what the heck, it's going to be just as hot anywhere else. I'll go. (My friend KC had the other ticket, but couldn't go that night.)

In 95 degree heat, a crowd of maybe 1,000 people cheered on the Beavers. The game was quick - nearly every pitch was called a strike, and a lot of first pitches were swung at. That was to be expected on such a hot night, and I don't think anybody minded.

Looking around the park, it struck me that these were the hardcore fans. If you're willing to sweat like that just to watch a ball game (just think what the players were going through), you're devoted.

There's talk every now and then about a big league team moving to Portland. I hope it never happens. I've been to a lot of major league parks, and minor league ball is far more charming. The players seem to be trying harder, everything's on a smaller, more approachable scale, and the tickets are cheaper.

If you're a real baseball fan at heart, the game itself is the real attraction, not the teams or the league. Now, if we could just get rid of the designated hitter rule...

Replacing the Jersey clump

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:08:35 -0400

Before I moved to Portland and sold my car, I used to drive everywhere, just like most people do. Being the sort of person I am, I developed a bunch of pet peeves about driving. I don't remember many of them now, but one that leaps to mind is the Jersey Clump.
When I lived on the East Coast, it would always bother me when I was on a highway, and another car would catch up to me at a faster speed, and then pull in front of me and slow down. This happened a lot. Even worse, when I pulled around that car so that I could continue at the speed I was going, that car would speed up again.
It was as if the driver's goal was to stay as close to my car as possible. My Driver's Ed training taught me to keep as much distance between myself and other cars as possible, so this was incredibly frustrating.
Sometimes, a bunch of cars would get together and keep doing this to each other. The effect of their behavior was to draw other, innocent drivers into their group, because they would speed up and surround any car that tried to go faster than the group. I noticed that when this happened, most of the cars had New Jersey license plates; I began calling this phenomenon a Jersey Clump.

Now that I don't own a car, I've lost all my old pet peeves. Being the sort of person I am, I started casting about for new ones.
One that developed quickly has to do with the building I work in. I work on the 29th floor. The bank of elevators I use to get to work stops on floors 18-30. The 30th floor is a restaurant, and no one goes there early in the morning, so I effectively work on the top floor that our elevator bank serves.
When I arrive in the morning, no one else is ever waiting for the elevator. Invariably, three or four people (who mostly were standing around the lobby) enter the elevator foyer after I do, and of course, they all get off on lower floors. This is very suspicious. If there were always going to be three or four people on the elevator with me, the law of averages would dictate that some of them would enter the elevator foyer before me, and some after. But this never happens. They always enter after I do. A more paranoid person would conclude that this couldn't possibly happen by chance, and someone must be engineering this situation on purpose. Thankfully, I'm not that paranoid. However, I can't think of another explanation. I'm still trying to find one.

A less sinister pet peeve came about when I began walking to most places around Portland. It's a wonderful city to walk around, and a lot of people do it. The sidewalks are all built so that the curb at the intersection is curved - the corner isn't sharp. So, one edge of the sidewalk always juts out into the intersection more than the other.
No matter whether it's the left side or the right that juts out farther into the intersection, pedestrians congregate toward that side. The funny thing is that people will often walk to the inside edge of the crosswalk even if they have to walk back to the outside part to continue where they were going once they cross the street. It's hard to convey this without a picture, but what you end up with is people walking a few feet out of their way on both sides of the street because they think they're getting farther into the intersection before crossing, even though it costs them steps in the long run.
If they thought about what they were doing, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do it. This makes it perfect fodder for one of my pet peeves.

The frustrating thing is that I have to work a lot harder to find pet peeves, since I don't drive anymore, and the ones I'm developing are much lamer than when I was driving.
Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. I've never encountered an Oregon Clump.

Could global warming be worse than we think?

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:08:26 -0400

I've talked to my friends about climate change, but I don't think I've ever really explained what convinced me that we need to take action.
Most people are coming around to that view by a kind of mass culture osmosis, but it kicked into high gear for me a couple of years ago, when Al Gore came to Portland.

Like everyone, I'd been aware that climate change was expected to become a problem, but I hadn't really internalized the fact that it's a problem right now.

That night, I was working the Oregon Bus Project table at the line to get in to Mr. Gore's presentation, and once it was about to start, we went in to see it. It was funny and terrifying at the same time. The one thing that I really took away from there was the graph showing the correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration. They march in lockstep with each other for eons, and then CO2 goes off the scale in the last few decades. It's hard to look at that graph and not be afraid that temperatures may rise quite a bit.

There are people who will argue that none of this means the Earth is warming. They make various assumptions to get from here to there, but their basic argument seems to be, "You aren't 100% certain that the rise in CO2 will cause warming, therefore it won't."
Looking at that graph gives me an idea which way to bet, though.
The best argument I've seen that this may not occur is in Skeptic magazine, where there's an article stating that the uncertainties about the future direction of temperature are greater than the certainties, leading to the conclusion that we can't reliably predict what's going to happen. In the same issue, though, there's a very convincing point-by-point breakdown of why we should expect warming to happen.

The main reason I expect it to occur, sooner and to a greater degree than is predicted, doesn't really have anything to do with those arguments. It has to do with the news.
It certainly seems that warming is happening right now. Every so often, there's an article about another ice shelf breaking off, or another species abandoning its habitat because of the change, or how the permafrost is melting.
Think about that: a region that people saw fit to name "permafrost", presumably because no one could remember a time when it wasn't frozen, is melting. I take that as a piece of evidence.

There's something else about those news stories, though. The scientists who are interviewed are always shocked by how quickly the event happened. There's always a statement about how this wasn't expected for another 20 years, or something similar.
This leads me to believe that one of two things is true. Either the scientists aren't adjusting their predictions by the increased rate of warming, in which case they're pretty incompetent, and warming is happening quicker that they're predicting. Or, they are adjusting their predictions for the acceleration in warming, and it's still happening even faster.
Neither of those possibilities is pleasant.

So, even though it isn't 100% certain that our spewing of CO2 is causing all this, I think there's enough reason to bet on it. And since we have the ability to cut our carbon footprint, we should do it. Now.