Shorthand for Nothing

I noticed recently that I co-opt words and phrases all the time for my own personal use. It’s pretty much always ironic, but the specific reason varies. Sometimes I self-consciously use words like “whatevs” and “obvs” in an ironic attempt to look like I’m not the kind of person who co-opts words like “whatevs” in order to appear less self-conscious about my word choice. I add phrases like “in my experience” or “in my opinion” with a wry inflection to the end of a story to indicate jokingly that I am pretty sure that this is more or less universal.

I’m sure I could find a few people who disagree with me, but our language defines us. The words that we use, or don’t use, shape the way we think and look at the world. If I don’t know the words to describe something, I’m stuck with some imprecise words to describe it. I think I can even fully grasp the concept of it if I don’t know the words. There’s a reason so much of education is just learning the words for something, learning the jargon of the field.

Maybe it’s the power of words that attracts me to writing so much, or maybe it’s my predilection towards wordplay that makes me appreciate their power so much.But words define us, both in who we are, how others perceive us, and how we perceive others. (Have you ever refused to use certain words to describe someone, or just refused to use a whole class of words and phrases for someone?)

But lately I’ve been thinking of the power of ironic words. I use them casually, but it ultimately has the effect of  destroying a word’s meaning, or at least changing it to the point where it is nearly unrecognizable. When it becomes natural to use or hear it in a completely new context that word is effectively subverted. You can use these words to forever change the way someone thinks of something–you can change the words someone else uses, or at the very least change the way they think of those words.

And I’m thinking of words like “coffee,” which have so many connotations. I’m thinking of how I always thought of coffee as something my dad drinks when I was a kid, how it always meant my family sitting around the dinner table after dessert just talking. How boring it was. I’m thinking of how coffee soon became the word for going to Shari’s late at night and never actually drinking coffee. I think I usually ordered a milkshake. And I never noticed how “coffee” just meant me and my friends sitting around talking after dinner. And I’m thinking of how “do you want to get coffee sometime?” is just a way of asking someone out on a date without using those words. And I’m thinking of how I started making increasingly bizarre “I like my women like I like my coffee” jokes (the latest one goes “diluted with foreign substances”), and now when someone talks about coffee or when I drink coffee I think of that, too. It’s a word which defines so many of our rituals.

There’s a line in Harvey Danger’s song Cold Snap which goes like this: “We will be lazy with our language and comfortable with our clothes off / We will say just what we have in mind.” Then there’s a line in Harvey Danger’s song Big Wide Empty which goes like this: “We could leap off of the infrastructure / Choose our words less carefully.” Sean Nelson is a lyricist who understands the nature of words too well; the difference between proclivity and predilection, or how to make words mean different things or multiple things. There is something playful and, yes, ironic behind it all.

And yet.

He returns twice to this wistful idea of not having to care about our words, which presumably involves dropping all of these ironic affectations and certainly means not thinking about the perfect word for the situation. It’s not just about not wanting to try, but about no longer having to worry about how you’re defining yourself. It’s about freedom, because no matter how skilled you are with it, language is a prison.

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Just a heads up to all you Rob Mason fans, I have started a tumblog, which is called Objectively Right, and it is here. It will probably be mostly about songs and videos and other things that don’t merit the full Rob Mason treatment (which is to say things that I cannot ramble about at Considerable Length, or things I can write about in like five minutes).

GO. READ.

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Faced with a looming deadline and an inadequate script, I have been forced to radically revise the script of Let My Sting Be Fatal. Here it is for your viewing pleasure. (more…)

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Hello! It is time for another edition of Rob Mason Tells You What To Listen To! In this edition we will explore The Long Winters’ discography. They are making a new album so now is the time to catch up on all their stuff and pretend you know all about the Seattle music scene!

The Long Winters are pretty appropriately named. There are songs about the first sign of winter and songs about waiting all winter and songs about springtime. It always feels like there is a long winter involved, is what I’m saying. Fronted by endearingly crazed mountain man John Roderick, the lyrics are frequently clever, often whimsical, and always pretty. There are five tracks to be downloaded and loved right here.

The Worst You Can Do Is Harm
Their first album is called The Worst You Can Do Is Harm. If you click the clicky you will see it is described it as being “full of ghosts and shipwrecked relationships.” It is an album about being well-meaning, about having a place to call home, about running away, and about making mistakes. It is not very optimistic: it’s a record full of disasters, and sometimes you can’t pick up the pieces.

There are some gems on this album. I really enjoy “Carparts,” “Unsalted Butter,” and “Scent of Lime”–the last of which features some beautiful harmony vocals from Sean Nelson. There is not a track I don’t enjoy, though the opener, “Give Me A Moment,” can drag some. Yet this is probably the weakest Long Winters album. It feels uncertain. There is a definite sound but it’s not quite sure where it’s going. It’s like the first few weeks of winter, when it’s warm one day and snowing the next and you’re just not sure what to make of it.

I remember reading an interview with John Roderick (I do not remember where, but it was really good) about the meaning of the title. It’s kind of an answer to the question “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?”–the worst that could happen is you could seriously ruin something forever. The title appears in the song “Scent of Lime:” “The worst you can do is harm / Waiting for the other shoe to fall / And shouting from your car at an empty road.”

There’s lots of little moments like that on the album, but mostly it’s rough. It’s worth having, but check out the others first, unless you really like listening in chronological order. This is definitely a debut album.

When I Pretend To Fall
When I Pretend To Fall is definitely the most upbeat of the three albums, and undeniably fun. This is an album which has at its emotional core the idea of spring coming at the end of a long winter, and an album which has probably the best description of anything that I have read, anywhere. No, seriously:

This is our new record. It’s made of downtown right as the sun comes out after it’s been raining and a little bit of three a.m. city bus in from the airport. There are several big fights between people who love each other that end with both people breaking into song and someone in a tee-shirt with rolled-up sleeves playing a sax solo. Also, there are friends coming to the rescue and there are other friends who don’t want to be rescued and there are a few friends that do want to be rescued but don’t want to have to ask.

I can’t do better than that.

The heart of this album is “Cinnamon,” which is a really beautiful and happy song. It’s just so hopeful, and it is made all the more poignant by being followed by “Bride and Bridle,” a song that is about how sometimes time isn’t long enough to put the past behind you. And then later on there’s “It’ll Be A Breeze” which is about absence. Then there’s an important moment in the song “Stupid,” where the title is sung: “She laughs when I pretend to fall.” It’s about doing stupid things for love, but in a hopeful way, which certainly captures the soul of this album pretty nicely.

It closes on a slightly darker note with “Nora,” which tells a story of different expectations coming into conflict. It’s a perfect note for closing the album, to make it all seem a little uneasy in retrospect, the way a conclusion ought to do.

This album is really good. If you like your music upbeat and irrepressibly cheerful without being credulous, this is a perfect album. If you like albums that feel like seeing green grass finally growing through the snow, you should probably order it as soon as possible.

Putting the Days to Bed
Putting the Days to Bed is the newest album and it is also the sleepiest. Appropriately so! This is an album which is about trying to come to terms with regret. Some things weren’t meant to last; some things were meant to last but don’t; some things weren’t meant to last no matter how much you think they were. It’s not entirely depressing but it is certainly resigned, but wistful. Perhaps nostalgic is the best word.

So to keep with this wintry theme, this is an album that takes place in the dead of winter–as the song “Fire Island, AK” says, “the ice has come”–and you know it’s going to be months before spring. This doesn’t mean you can’t warm yourself by the fire and think of the happier times or wish really hard for warmer times and poetic autumns. There are two songs I consider the emotional core of this album: “Hindsight,” which is a song about the end of something beautiful, and “Ultimatum,” which is a song about wishing that it didn’t have to end this way and doing what you have to do. And it closes on a strong note with “Seven,” which seems to accept the departure, though not without a strong sense of regret.

The title is a line from “Hindsight:” “Did you say what you wanted said / Or are you just putting the days to bed?” and captures the feel of the album nicely: it is an album about leaving things unsaid, about just putting it all behind you without getting the chance to actually do anything about it. (Of course, since when does saying everything you wanted to say actually make anything better?)

This is my personal favorite album, because nostalgia and regret are emotions I find particularly powerful, but it is a quiet album with a lot of acoustic guitar, perfect for putting the days to bed, and for those nights when you wish things had ended differently. Or if you just want to listen to an album with the line “If you’re my anchor, then I’m throwing you over the side.” It has that line in it. But you probably shouldn’t expect something upbeat.

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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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From Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, which I previously reviewed:

It’s Joey, not Joe or Joseph. My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother’s name for me, but I have always been Joey. I worry sometimes that it’s a childish name. Would a “Joe” tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice? It seems unlikely. The names we choose for ourselves aren’t meaningless. They’re self-fulfilling prophecies.

When I was a kid, my mother called me Robby. It was just the name I went by, and I was fine with it for a while. Then at some point I decided I didn’t like that, and I told her that my name was Robert, and that I would like to be called Robert, if it’s all the same to her.

I remember feeling that Robby was a silly name, and that I wanted to be taken seriously, so I would wear a serious name. My grandfather was Bob, and that was fine for him, but I would be Robert. There’s still a chair at my dad’s house that has “Robby” written on the back. It bothered me when I was a kid.

Sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake.

In late high school my name stopped really mattering. Maybe before then, but by then everyone was calling me Mason and it didn’t bother me. I had no preference. I even preferred it to Robert sometimes. Robert is a name I never liked seeing typed. So when I made a Myspace profile, back when that was a thing that you did, I put my name as Rob. I didn’t figure it would matter.

But then a few people called me Rob, and suddenly I had a new name. I used it in a few other places. It suited me: it didn’t speak to me of anything in particular. So, with the exception of my family, I was now either Rob or Mason. There were distinct groups which stuck with one or the other, and they mostly stuck with their own. It was here that I started letting other people introduce me, so there would be no confusion.

Then I moved to Boston and there were no more distinct groups, and I had to do the introducing myself. People never quite knew what to call me. Sometimes an introduction required explanation.

I keep going back to the time when I was a kid, though. I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old. I decided then I wanted to be taken seriously, and I gave myself a name that would be taken seriously. Would I have been different if I was Robby?

I can’t bring it back. You can’t just change your name. It’s an organic process. But I wonder.

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I had a dream tonight.

I was living in a house (I think it may have been the old house in Medford) with some people, and the girl who lived there had brought home some of these little pocket black holes. I don’t know what their actual intended purpose was, but she was proposing we use them to help clean up some of the garbage around the house. They were kept in these little white packets that were sort of like those silica gel packets, or maybe like moist towelette packets. Something like that. Anyway, I went up to my room to collect some of my trash. I assumed she was going to use them outside, because they are hazardous. Then suddenly she was in my room and threw up one of these portable black holes. It made a sort of ominous noise but not too loud. She hadn’t used one before, so it very nearly destroyed the house, but she managed to keep hold of it.

She started throwing some garbage in, and I shrugged and started doing so myself. But the pocket black holes only lasted so long, so it went away before I was done. Then someone else was talking about everyone chipping in three bucks or something for more, and I said “look, I can just use one of mine.” Apparently I had like six of them in my pocket. I’m not sure why. I had apparently never used one before, however, and when I set it down it started drifting to the ceiling. I managed to contain it, and when she glared at me I said, “Hey, you almost did it, too.”

We finished cleaning up, sending our garbage to be devoured by these little micro black holes. Finally, an environmentally friendly way to get rid of garbage!

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I’ve been reading through House of Leaves again recently. It benefits from being the type of book you can read through several times, at least in part due to the fact that it is fragmented and convoluted, to say nothing of being nightmarish. It’s the sort of book with encoded messages and obscure references, some of which are pointed out in the footnotes. It has footnotes. The footnotes have footnotes.

I’ve just reached the labyrinth chapter. For the first part of the book the typesetting, at the very least, is relatively normal. There’s nothing too weird going on typographically; sure, the story is a bit strange, but it’s simple. It’s straightforward. Then there’s the SOS chapter, where the paragraphs get broken up into Morse code. At the point of the Labyrinth, it starts coming unhinged. It’s difficult to describe, but there is an image online of one of the pages here. It is these pages I show people when explaining the book.

From there on the book fades in and out of lucidity. Some parts seem almost normal, others are still bizarre. There’s a chapter which concludes with a page which contains nothing but a single, enormous full stop. And I haven’t really even gotten into the contents of the book yet. The house is the sort of thing it is best to explore for oneself. (Highly recommended. Go read.)

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It is probably not accurate to say I learned a new trick, because I’m sure I’ve always done it. But recently I was talking about magazines with someone and I wanted to express how perfectly they capture the moment in which they were published, in a way that things like newspapers don’t do very well, and I paused and said, “I guess they really capture the zeitgeist, if you want to be the type of person who uses that word.”

This does nothing to prevent the impression that I am a self-conscious linguaphile with heavy affectations in everything that I do, but it does make it seem like at least I’m not the sort of person who uses the word zeitgeist! It’s a great trick. Like scare quotes, it distances you from the word, but it goes further than that. It says “you and I both know what this word means and I, at least, dislike its connotations, but nevertheless, there it is.” It is another self-conscious affectation that people can politely laugh at, or maybe even sincerely laugh at. For all I know other people hear certain words and phrases and sit there thinking “he just used ‘zeitgeist’ unironically–to think I liked that guy!”

In which case I may just be hilarious.

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I never feel like I’m very good at reviews. I feel like I don’t do it right. What I want is to capture the feel of something. I want you to read what I write and say “that sounds fun, I’m going to pick that up.” And I want you to pick up Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, so I hope this review is okay.

Maybe nobody else does this, but sometimes, when I’m writing papers, when I’m frustrated, I’ll finish one of the sentences with something that is generally inappropriate. I delete it, of course, but sometimes I’m not interested in finishing a sentence which begins “Realist theory holds that” with a description of realist theory. Sometimes I want to say “Realist theory holds that the world is fucked, and they’re right. We’re lying to ourselves every day.”

Overqualified is like that–but instead of deleting it, of ignoring that impulse, Joey Comeau decides to run with it. It is a story told in cover letters where something has cracked. They are cover letters which end with things like, “Live for today, you retarded little shit, the end is near.” It sounds like it could be really gimmicky, too formulaic, when you describe it like that. It sounds like with each cover letter you’ll be thinking, “Man, how is Joey going to make this one wacky?” and it’s really not. It works, and it’s funny and poignant and shocking and sad, usually all at the same time. They’re about how amazing and frustrating and stupid it is to be human, and how amazing and frustrating and stupid humans can be. They’re about regret and longing and loss.

And there’s a story, which is kind of like putting together your favorite mug after someone knocked it off the counter. There are pieces missing. Some of the pieces just don’t fit. And maybe you’re not a sentimental person but that was yours, and you had some fun times with it, and you never realized how much you appreciated it, and now it’s gone forever. Except it’s better than that. I’d normally say it’s a cohesive narrative, but part of the fun is that it’s all fragmented.

I guess what I am saying is you should read it.

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