language use

Word associations and inappropriate musical choices

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Watching on Al Jazeera a show about Colombian pilots flying perilous routes in rickety old DC3 aircraft through the Amazon  (apparently with clear and present danger of crashing and never being found again once the jungle overtakes the wreckage), I am struck by the background music choice, which seems entirely too whimsical and Calypso to be appropriate. As a narrator explains that the pilot/captain Raul must calculate his fuel needs precisely or else crash, there is this playful carnival music going in the background. Yes, nothing like frolicsome music to evoke the “fun” of a possible fiery crash whose remains we would never find. (Al Jazeera has a whole bunch of these “daredevil” shows where people are doing the craziest stuff to make a living. A few weeks ago I saw some Pakistani lunatics driving on narrow, twisting mountain passes in giant, ornate trucks. And I think my commute is a bad one.)

“You took off like a jet girl…”

Jet girl… jet ski! I had a hilarious conversation last night before leaving for work in which I was reminded that there was probably a cigarette ad that included idiots on a jet ski. I had my doubts, but my dear firewall was absolutely right.

Idiots advertising cigarettes on a jet ski

Idiots advertising cigarettes on a jet ski

Jet ski! … “Après ski”! ”This kind of evening could be life enhancing…” “She gets what she wants but still she ends up losing”

When I am not overdosing on sad movies or documentaries, I overdose on news. And this leads me to two thoughts – Ratko Mladic acting like a spoiled idiot child at Radovan Karadzic’s war crimes trial – refusing to take part in the “devil’s proceedings” and demanding that a guard bring him his dentures apparently (which makes me wonder why he went to court without dentures in the first place)? Second, the crazy urge for news outlets to be first with any news. I read somewhere that the news of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death was reported – not just by tabloids but by the Wall Street Journal – without any concern for whether his family had even been informed (never mind confirming the veracity of the claims).

Oh well I am too tired to analyze. Instead considering Donna Summer’s roles in alternate universes and hoping for just one day when the cars outside my office window will not honk. Since they built new tramlines and stoplights right outside, not a day passes without a lot of impatient honking (especially for Sweden).

When hell freezes over – cocaine-fueled sex-dog behavior or a happy Christmas?

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Sometimes you write headlines and titles more for shock value than for any relation to reality. Tonight, considering the downhill trajectory of this entire year, I can only imagine and hope that I am at the bottom of the hill. Not that I want the challenge of climbing uphill. But at least its complications are activity, working toward something – climbing, ascending. Going up is better than going down or remaining stagnant at the bottom of a hill.

“Now this man down at the used car lot
Tried to sell me four wheels and a trunk,
I said, ‘But man there ain’t no engine!’
He said, ‘The engine’s just a bunch of junk,

you don’t need no engine to go downhill
and I can plainly see
that’s the direction you’re headed in’
and he handed me the keys.”
“No Deal” – Townes van Zandt

The most unlikely activities – things that would happen when hell freezes over – are more likely than having a happy Christmas this year. Not that it will be an unhappy Christmas. It’s just going to be nothingness. All the television shows – swinging between the extremes of depressing, serious documentaries on abortion to TV comedies – gotta balance it all out somehow.

Striving for balance.

Balanced, measured behavior makes the most sense but there are always the temptations to quit one’s job, citing the need to go play with baby tigers as the reason, or attending management seminars, and responding quite soberly, “Sex dog” when asked (possibly in thick French accent), “What is your inner animal?” Haha.

Perhaps if I decided it was time to throw in the corporate towel and, for example, run away to Detroit to become a full-time writer (and take on home ownership in a slum-ghetto), I would feel comfortable saying whatever came to mind. I push to the edges with my writing but still color within the lines. Unleashing creativity might be an uphill push, actually, because I am so deeply conditioned by corporate life. Going into the coming year, the best way to make the climb will also be to go out on a limb.

Christmas cookie memories

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thumbprint cookies and a lot of dangerous tinfoil!

thumbprint cookies and a lot of dangerous tinfoil!

Long ago and far away when I lived in the enchanted land that is Iceland, full of bitchilized public workers/office clerks and the kind of otherworldly strong wind that could knock you on your ass (or face), I baked at least as much as I do now. I used to “entertain” (yes, the quotes are intentional and meaningful. I am not just putting quotation marks around a word the way I see people gratuitously do these days. That is, for example, in this case, if one put quotation marks around “entertain” you would assume that it is meant as a tongue-in-cheek, perhaps euphemistic term that really means something else. That’s how I mean it. But I often see people putting quotes around words when they do actually mean exactly what they are writing. And don’t get me started on the air quotes!) more back then – I was more centrally located and invited people over with relative frequency. I experimented a lot with cookie recipes, making candy and with ingredients in general (since I was taking many stabs in the dark at substituting materials and ingredients I could not find that figured heavily into my recipes). I experimented a lot in general. I suppose if my company were not sweet enough for people, they could turn to all the sugar-laced goods I put on offer.

a big table of baked stuff - long ago, holidays in Oslo

a big table of baked stuff – long ago, holidays in Oslo

In baking, the “grunt work” (although all the work that goes into baking could be referred to as grunt work) is the part I really don’t like. What I mean by this is the rolling out dough, choosing cookie cutters and cutting and decorating the cookies. It’s for these reasons that I almost never make things like sugar cookies or anything else that requires rolling and cutting. But back in the old days (ha) in Iceland, I had a trusty assistant in my friend Sarah, who used to come over and do the grunt work and always produced something that was elevated to beauty thanks to her decorating efforts. I recently saw some photos of her decorating cookies with her daughter, and it made all these memories come flooding back.

And it was more than ten years ago! My time in Seltjarnarnes was fairly brief – between 2001 and 2003, and there were so many characters who passed through at that time. Most not particularly important or memorable but some who stick in my mind and heart even now despite the fact that, like most non-Icelanders who live in Iceland, they flew to the four winds – because most non-Icelanders don’t seem to plant permanent roots there. It certainly does make me reflect on the people who do, for whatever reason, cross our paths – how very random it can be, and yet sometimes so full of unexpected coincidences.

Mistrust

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I cannot trust the weather. I dress for the mess rather than dress for success.

I also think some barriers must be built and caution exerted any time someone announces (verbatim) that he is “not an asshole” and is “not insensitive”. If you’ve got to explicitly announce it, could it possibly have much meaning?

Thirdly, I propose that we all mistrust anything called an “email blast”. Generally these email blast marketing campaigns are … well, a specific kind of activity – but who announces that it is a “blast” externally? I received an email that was literally titled “Monthly Job Blast” or something similar, and by “blast”, we can be sure they were not referring to an explosion or a party. I don’t even like it when the dubious “email blast” is referred to in the workplace when we’re planning such a thing – so why on earth would I want people trying to market to me to do so?

Random rambling – pumpkin curry soup

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I have remarked that my writing is stream-of-consciousness uncontrollable vomit lately. I made a lot of comments the other day to a variety of people that could be classified as harsh generalizations. I excused myself, though – I was in a broad-strokes mood. Yesterday my visiting friend and I were discussing the concept of making generalizations about Icelanders and the Icelandic population. It is possible – you can easily get a representative sample of such of small population. Of course I am not sure I would want to in the way/manner we were discussing it, but at least we can acknowledge that it’s possible if desired.

This is a stream-of-consciousness ramble as well. Tying up the loose ends of all the recipes and things from the last few days.

The Lia Ices album Grown Unknown is a piece of perfection. I forget how much I love it every time I stop listening to it for a while. Lately I have been wrapped up in compiling the year-end mix (going out next week along with new copies of the fouled-up 2013 Halloween mix).

A couple of other hated words since I enjoy chronicling (bitching about) meaningless corporate language so much: “stakeholder” (the more I think about it, most so-called stakeholders don’t really hold any stakes. They are involved, results are relevant to them – but stakes? No, not so much) and “funnel” as in “marketing funnel”. Not terribly fond of “silos” either, even if the word makes sense. I like to keep silos in the farmyard for grain since I have become like an old-hand farmer, dealing with dead mice and such, I know about these things.

Paramour

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“Your need a paramour/someone to pluck your eyebrows for…”
-Cinerama,  “Heels”

Years ago (my god, how many of my stories start that way?) my ex-boyfriend (a French guy) was reading a book – I don’t remember what the book title was nor what it was about but suspect it had something to do with language misunderstandings/misheard words and expressions. He came to me with the following quote, “Meanwhile, Richard Parker Bowles, brother of Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew, said that from the beginning Camilla approved of Charles marrying Diana while she remained his power mower. (Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, Jan. 1995)” and could not understand what “power mower” was meant to be. It was “paramour”. I still laugh about this sometimes.

I need a power mower!

Would perhaps the understanding of this word have been different depending on the accent of the speaker? I have said it before and will keep saying it – I could listen to a nice Scottish accent every day and love every second of it. Different accents, voices, languages have the power to do something to us, affecting us on a chemical, physiological level, it seems. I suppose this explains why I want to tell people to shut up so often. Haha. Sometimes it is definitely just the sound. I don’t understand more than five words of Hungarian, but I could listen to and not understand any of it and still want to listen to it all day. I love the rhythm and sound of the unfamiliar words strung together melodiously. (It is not always the case that the language we do not understand is heartwarming. The same aforementioned French guy had no love for the incomprehensible Scottish accents we encountered on holiday in Scotland. I had to act as interpreter although he would politely stand there nodding in a reassuring way as B&B hosts told us stories as we got settled in. Only later did he tell me he had feigned understanding and needed translation (truer to say that he demanded, “What in the hell was she talking about?”).

No value added: Corporate tongues run amok

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“…With rational syllables
I’m trying to clear the occult mind
and promiscuous violence.
My linguistic protest
has no power.
The enemy is illiterate.”
from “Vowel” – Nina Cassian (Romania)

Earlier today it felt as though the word “value” had jumped up and slapped me in the face. Thinking of all the overused applications of “value” (particularly “value chain” and “value proposition”), it has lost all meaning. And, once I posted something on Twitter about banishing this word from my vocabulary, someone else pointed out that there is no value added by value-added tax. Not for the one paying it, anyway. “How can we add value?” This question, triggering such irritation, is packed with no meaning. What do these things even mean anymore?

“Managers” (so appointed but not necessarily qualified) seem to be among the worst communicators I know. On a very surface level, I deal frequently with managers and directors who are non-native English speakers; there is some awkwardness to be expected then. Fine. What gets dicey though is how all managers of all nationalities turn into corporate cheerleader automatons – newspeak anyone? – in all the same ways. Incessant talk about value chains, low-hanging fruit and a lot of the lingo that has trickled down in large part from the management consulting industry triggers something in me. Hearing it, it immediately makes me think the person doing the talking has no idea what he is talking about. He needs these mutually understood (in this business community) BS words and expressions to obscure the fact that he really has nothing at all to say. Everyone must know it but everyone accepts it. To go outside of the confines of newspeak, to say in plain language exactly what is going on, would be a thought crime.

This wholesale adoption of meaningless language lacks precision.  All this “marketingspeak” could be reduced to just a few simple words that everyone could understand… simplify. Yet, these manager types (in fairness, not all of them are on this sinking ship) would lose some kind of self-importance and peer credibility if they suddenly started speaking straight English. In one previous job, a manager reviewed a paper I had written and had no problems with it but tried to get me to add in a list of his most beloved expressions because he felt sure it would help get other people to take it more seriously. Yes, adding “tipping point” and “crossing the chasm” and other such absurdity (he literally included a list of six or seven “additions”, which I ignored) will bolster the integrity of a data-driven case study?

I don’t know what it says about me, but it seems that I can only find real meaning in words like “value” and “strategy” in direct applications, such as “strategy” as it pertains to the a military operation and “value” as it pertains to something tangible like a “high-value asset” in the intelligence community. It is clear exactly what a strategy is in the military. It is not this vague, unclear, half-baked idea (well, it might be, actually, considering how modern militaries and warfare are going) – but in theory, it makes total sense. And value in a recruited intelligence asset is equally clear – you want information that the asset is in a unique position to obtain. End of story. In a business setting, especially when you unleash a whole unruly homeless dog shelter on it and let the mutts tinker with “strategy” and determine “value”, you are asking for it.

Layers of fluff and meaninglessness are my biggest conflicts with corporate life. I will not obfuscate the facts to comfort people who cannot let go of the pretense and poppycock of devaluing real language.

Handlingsfrihet – invented freedom and voice

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“and let the pleasure we invent together

be one more sign of freedom”

-Julio Cortázar – “A Love Letter”

(“y que el placer que juntos inventamos
sea otro signo de la libertad.”)

When he told me I had complete “handlingsfrihet”, I was exhilarated. At least for that brief moment. With him, I knew it was just fantasy and would never come to pass. Total liberty and freedom to do whatever I wanted was possible only in our shared imagination in those very limited moments.

In reality, the only place I have complete control, artistic license, the freedom to choose and speak is in using my voice. I could hear my true voice somewhere inside but never really pushed it into the world with any degree of authenticity. As soon as I consciously decided to write something (other than a letter, a school paper), all kinds of artifice and “trying to make things sound good” clouded the basic premise of the writing and the core idea of what I wanted to express. Still, the voice was there. It was just muffled under layers of my own doubt.

Even when I was young, teachers and influential adults around me told me I would be a writer. Teachers in whose classes I was never a student even referred to me this way. I don’t know where the reputation came from nor how it spread. By the time I was a confused adolescent, I had convinced myself that all these adults were praising my writing only as a means to bolster my self-confidence, not because there was any truth to it. I felt cheated, mistrustful and misled. In my own dorky academic way, I rebelled – I could not live up to the expectations they had created (I thought) and did not want to be told what I was. I took language classes but steered clear of explicitly writing-focused courses (journalism, creative writing, etc.) and never looked back. My life ever since has still been all about writing – academic, corporate or what have you. But the practice of writing a short story every day, as I had done effortlessly when I was 13, was and is long gone.

These days I think a lot about writing and freedom and how, for me, they are intertwined. I can only escape from the unhealthy misery I feel right now if I embrace writing as a rope with which to climb out of the space I am increasingly feeling trapped in.

Handlingsfrihet will be mine, one way or another. (Baking and recipe posts coming soon.)

Be careful where you stick it – Words change meaning

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Watching television news and pseudo-news à la The Daily Show, I hear a lot of misplaced modifiers. I also see them in print:

  • the former lesbian tennis star
  • the former French president
  • seeking a junior Chinese copywriter

These bother me because they change the intended meaning. I am fairly sure the former tennis star is still a lesbian; the former president is still French and the junior copywriter sought is still capable of using Chinese (what would a “junior Chinese” be, exactly?).

I’m fussy, but clarity is meaningful.

Worry overtakes

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I had one of those days recently that just made everything seem so hopeless. Such days happen. I want to give them a name. Like “Snickerdoodle Days” – harkening back to the days when all I had to think about was passing my driver’s licensing test, school and listening to new music with friends. And baking snickerdoodles every weekend, of course. Back in the end of the 1980s or the early 1990s. Listening to “Harold and Joe” in the tail-end of the goodness of The Cure’s musical career. I reminisce clearly about this song, playing on a mix tape from my friend Gary as I crossed the field from the main campus to the “vocational building” for my ill-fated drafting class. Or just, in general, “…it was acceptable in the 80s… it was acceptable at the time…” (Calvin Harris).

Sometimes, if I have a drink – since I don’t drink – I become quite emotional. Feelings wash over me in a way that convinces me that I would be one of those “sad drunks”.

I am thinking of the verb “to miss” – against the term “to be missing”. I read something that stated “I am just missing Bob in Skype”, which was unclear. We’re back to the challenge of how to phrase it when you want to state that you miss someone versus what you should state when you want to say that something is missing/not there/lacking. Does “I am just missing Bob in Skype” mean that he is not signed in (and you miss talking to him)? Or is this missing him in the sense that he is missing, e.g. he never subscribed to Skype and you are missing him from your contact list? Like a missing child, a missing puzzle piece – something that is not there versus something that you have a sentimental sense of loss for. The sense of loss and the idea of losing people and of murder – I recently published the recipe for some vanilla cupcakes filled with cherry “blood” filling and some candy knives as decoration – this rushes to mind. All the loss, untimely and senseless, as described below, or the ideas of murder – e.g, a former colleague who was accused of murdering a neighbor in their common parking garage. I don’t ultimately know what happened there, but it is still the loss of a life – both the victim and potentially that of the former colleague.

I have recently moved my blog to a new platform (the brilliant WordPress). I had been using MyOpera because it was handy – I worked at Opera for so long, it seemed like a smart idea to just use the community blog… but I always had the nagging feeling in my mind that it would one day meet its demise. Like most things – it was too altruistic an effort – and a real effort – to maintain such a community – for a company that is increasingly profit obsessed. I moved the whole thing over, but I don’t know that I love the layout/theme I chose. But it will do for now. Ideally I would get the whole thing set up and designed for my own domains, but I am just time-challenged. MyOpera was never ideal – quite ugly and no one had ever heard of it. My new choice is still a wee bit ugly, but at least WordPress is hardly going to collapse. Either way, my choice is a little bit ugly. Not unlike the whole Wolf Eel idea.

This year has been such an empty, gray space. It started with major change, but has just felt like a daily grind, churning through the abyss of dull daily life with the accompanying annoyances – but they have been frequent. Since the start of the year, there have been so many deaths, illnesses, big changes – so much unexpected and unpleasant change. I go through so much of my own completely ON my own – and then become so completely overwhelmed by the issues affecting other people – the suicide of a young former colleague (a new mother), the death of a friend’s young wife, the death of a former colleague’s young child – and then the catastrophic illness of another former colleague and an accident that nearly took the life of a family friend (he fell off a ladder when he was home alone). Or the murder accusation about the former colleague, mentioned in an earlier post about cupcakes. “Murder Tonight in the Trailer Park” by the Cowboy Junkies springs to mind, only it’s murder tonight in the parking lot, not trailer park, in this case. And then I think further on loss – not personal but to the artistic community – the recent death of Lou Reed. And I think then of how much of an impact Lou Reed and his creativity had, how much they contributed. Stream of consciousness.

Not to add the upcoming, somewhat sudden, voluntary deployment abroad of my brother – military. Worry.

The nature of worry springs to mind. Worry overtakes me so easily.