Shorthand for Nothing

If you’ve been following the media in the past five years or so, you’ve read dozens of trend pieces about the so-called “Millennial” generation. If you have cultural awareness greater than that of a sea urchin, you’re aware that these stories are all so much meaningless tripe–the efforts of a dying industry to become relevant, or the backlash against those who are rendering them useless. And you probably dismissed these trend pieces and lost interest.

Apparently TechCrunch writer Paul Carr missed the memo, and wrote a lengthy and vitriolic screed denouncing the evils of the Millennial generation, without a trace of irony. He expresses nothing but derision for everyone aged 30 or under, and reacts with horror to stories he found by “spend[ing] a few minutes Googling.” Apparently Mr. Carr believes the plural of anecdote is data.

He concludes his little hate speech with a morality lesson where he feels that the moral of the story in the film Social Network is that hard work and dedication pays off.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so bothered by such blatant and baseless discrimination against an enormous demographic, fueled mostly by bile and impotent rage, but there it is. Ignoring the fact that these trend pieces he bases his story on are completely empty and describe, at best, a small subset of the under-30 population, this article is nothing more than hatred of those who are different. Not people who are doing anything wrong, merely people who view the world through a different lens, because they were raised in a different culture.

Because culture changes, Mr. Carr. Just because the world doesn’t work the way you were taught it should doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. You’ll live a much more fulfilling life if you actually learn to accept things, instead of writing hateful screeds about people who are different than you. You might even learn something.

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This Saturday was the occasion of Mobius Cycle‘s Core Whore 2010 alleycat race. It consisted of seven checkpoints, scattered throughout Seattle’s downtown core, and a die rolled at each stop. That die told you where you were going next, and represented how many Core Whore Dollars you received for that particular run. The race ran for three hours, from 5 pm to 8 pm. It was my first alleycat race.

As the poster describes it, “Everyone starts together, but a roll of the dice insures you ride alone.” It’s an apt description of the way the race ended up. Somewhere between twenty and thirty racers left Mobius, each heading for one of the six other stops. It started with a sprint through heavy traffic. We were a small group of three, large architectural plans sticking from our messenger bags, sprinting for the Virginia Inn on 1st.

On arrival we each got our money for the first delivery and rolled the die to see where we were going next, and we went our separate ways. And most of the rest of the race was alone: though I would see and salute the other racers, and sometimes follow them on their routes for a time, mostly the only interactions took place at the stops. They were fleeting at best, as none of us had the time for leisure. There was, after all, a race on.

I knew I would be pretty outclassed, in terms of talent, going in. I’ve been in the saddle since early to mid summer, and working on a bike for something like a month. To contrast, in the race were the first ever North American to win the messenger world championships, as well as other messengers who have been on the job for years. I am, in short, new to this. (It is worth noting that the second place finisher and the returning King of the Core is a dishwasher.)

Which is fine. At my last stop, after everyone had started smoking their cigarettes and drinking the last remnants of their water, Jon, the mechanic who got my road bike on the road, asked how I thought I did. I said that I thought I’d done reasonably well, then I stopped and added, “Of course, I really have nothing against which to compare myself.” Someone else asked if it was my first alleycat. I nodded, and Jon said, “Well, hey, personal best!” in a wryly optimistic sort of way.

It’s a good way to look at it.

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I finally got around to reading Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography yesterday. It is a pretty quick read, and the whole thing is online as a PDF at the link there.

He describes it as a “genderqueer adventure story,” and that is probably the best description I can think of for it. You wouldn’t expect a book about LGBT (as people or as a movement) to be light-hearted and fun, and I think that’s a lot of its charm. It’s fun without being mindless. It asks good questions and makes you think, and while it has some parts which are kind of bleak, it’s not too serious and it doesn’t moralize. It made me think about “the movement” and about gender and sexuality, both generally and specifically. It has some refreshing perspective.

It’s a pretty fun read overall. In places it definitely feels like a first draft or a first novel or something: not quite finished, a little sloppy. But it was a nice way to spend the evening and I feel like I’ve gained something from reading, which doesn’t happen often enough anymore.

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If you are like me, you have encountered a lot of people who will try to use a dictionary definition to support an argument or claim they are making. Unfortunately, people generally do it wrong. So I present to you a helpful and pretentious guide on how to use a dictionary.

The first and most important thing you can realize is that a word is more than its dictionary definition. Every word has connotations, which are usually not captured in a dictionary. This is probably the most elusive quantity of a given word. You can try looking at the thesaurus for connotative properties of a word, but this is often insufficient. Other helpful tools for connotations include urbandictionary.com, and looking at the word in the contexts in which it is generally used. Or you can just ask someone. But always keep in mind: the dictionary will never tell you everything. (A dictionary with good illustrative quotes is helpful but probably still not sufficient.)

So, with that in mind, let’s move on to what the dictionary can tell us! Remember it is seldom a good idea to simply pick a single definition without considering the rest of them. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how this is done. Instead, look at all of the definitions. dictionary.com has lots of dictionaries, and each usually provides a slightly different picture of the word. Try them all out and get them all out in the open. (You can safely curtail definitions that are clearly irrelevant, but sometimes these can be informative, as well.)

Next, remember that there are terms of art in any given field. It is possible that a particular word to a particular field has a particular meaning. You can’t have a conversation with someone if you keep insisting that they are using a word wrong. Be willing to accept that the definition you use may not be the definition you find in a dictionary at all.

This brings me to another important point: the purpose of a dictionary and a definition is not to prove someone wrong; it is to facilitate communication and encourage logical consistency. On the former point, therefore, it is important that you can agree on a definition with your conversational partners. (If you’re writing and you think there is a question, go ahead and define the word.) On the latter point, it is important not to equivocate. Pick a definition and stick with it.

Picking a definition can be tricky. Often, multiple definitions seem to fit what you are going for. Picking the best fit, therefore, sometimes requires putting your definition in other contexts. Generally you don’t want a definition which is so broad as to be useless, nor one which is so narrow it only applies to the context in question. So pick something precise enough that there is no room for confusion, but not so narrow that it makes the word useless outside of the context in which you are using it.

Generally, the most useful tool for understanding a word’s definition is to replace the word with the definition. Sometimes this requires some inventive reshuffling of the sentence or is otherwise impractical, but by and large it is the best way to see if it fits.

Really, though, proper use of a dictionary is simple so long as you keep in mind that it is at its best when it is illustrative, not prescriptive. Recall that the English language is gaining new words every day, that words change, and that the OED was first compiled in a descriptive fashion by men who looked at words and then wrote out what they were used to mean. Recall that in many fields definitions more precise than common use are required, and that these may not be in a dictionary. Recall that there are many connotations and confounds, so that the idea of a “correct” definition departs. The only correct definition is the one that is most useful for your conversation or writing to be as clear, concise, and consistent as possible.

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