Whose Word Crimes?

Yesterday, "Weird Al" Yankovic released a video for his song "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines". Since a lot of people I know are language folks of one sort or another, I saw it flow and re-flow through various streams of social media. But I had qualms.

I love Weird Al, and he's been a formative influence on my life, since I started listening to him when I was a kid. (My entire sense of humor could be described by three childhood influences: Weird Al, the Marx Brothers, and Monty Python.) I also think the detestable "Blurred Lines" is ripe for ridicule and attack. And I like words.

But how are we to understand the speaker in "Word Crimes"?

Most people I saw who shared the video seemed to identify with the speaker. This is not as disturbing as people identifying with the rapey speaker of "Blurred Lines", but it reveals a certain cruelty in the feelings of people who want to be identified as linguistically superior to other people. A tinge of cruel superiority is essential to grammar pedants, and "Word Crimes" reveals that again and again in how it characterizes people who commit such "crimes". On his Facebook page, Jay Smooth listed these characterizations:

"raised in a sewer"
"Don't be a moron"
"You dumb mouthbreather"
"Smack a crowbar upside your stupid head"
"you write like a spastic"
["spastic"?]
"Go back to preschool"
"Get out of the gene pool"
"Try your best to not drool"

Hyperbole in service of comedy? Or your (not so) secret inner feelings?

It's interesting to follow the comments on that Facebook post as well as on the Grammar Girl post that Jay Smooth linked to. Various interpretations and arguments come up, including the common complaint that it's just comedy and you shouldn't take it seriously (a pernicious attitude, I think). I don't know exactly what Weird Al intended with the song, nor do I particularly care (it's a clever song, with fun animation in the video) — it's more interesting as a kind of Rorschach test: Do you identify with the speaker in the song? Do you enjoy the cruelty and want to replicate it?

Words to Live By

Usually the comment spam that comes in here is pretty boring. But this was too oddly lovely not to save:

VIBRATION AND SOUND ARE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PARAMETERS FOR MONITORING THE MACHINE HEALTH. REGULAR LOGGING OF THESE TWO PARAMETERS PROVIDES EARLY WARNING OF BREAKDOWN

"Why We Oppose Pockets for Women"

Here's a fabulous article by Lili Loofbourow from The Hairpin that presents excerpts from a book she discovered on Project Gutenberg, Are Women People? It's full of awesomeness, but the Delany-ologist in me particularly liked this bit about pockets:

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women
by Alice Duer Miller

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

How to Respond to a Critic

Posting will be light-to-nonexistent here until after the new year, but I want to put this up before I forget it.

I've been bingeing on Tim Minchin over the holidays, mostly because I've been very busy with grading, writing, wrapping, cleaning, etc. and needed something amusing and profane in the background of these activities. Minchin's "Song for Phil Daoust" is a heartfelt, soul-searching, and genuinely touching example of something artists should really never, ever do, despite the temptation: respond to a negative review. (Note: despite being heartfelt, soul-searching, and genuinely touching, this is not a song you will want to play anywhere where colorful words might singe sensitive sensibilities.)

An Outtake

My latest Strange Horizons column was posted at the beginning of the week; the subject this time is Joanna Russ.

One thing I thought about including, but couldn't figure out how to fit in, was that Russ's marvelous story "The Clichés from Outer Space" predicted one of the elements of Bryan Vaughn's comic Y: The Last Man (a series that I must admit I only read the first 3 collections of, its virtues utterly lost on me). In the comic, the Daughters of the Amazon are a bunch of evil, man-hating lesbians who cut off one of their breasts to be able to shoot arrows better or something, which is what some folks have  said the actual Amazons did back in the day (the myths are contradictory). It's possible that this noxious stereotype is ironized and deconstructed later in the series; I didn't stick with it long enough to find out.

The relevant passage from Russ's story is one I quoted only a sentence of in the column. It's from the section called "The Turnabout Story, or, I Always Knew What They Wanted to Do to Me Because I've Been Doing It to Them for Years, Especially in the Movies":

Four ravaging, man-hating, vicious, hulking, Lesbian, sadistic, fetishistic Women's Libbers motorcycled down the highway to where George was hiding behind a bush. Each was dressed in black leather, spike-heeled boots and carried both a tommygun and a whip, as well as knives between their teeth. Some had cut off their breasts. Their names were Dirty Sandra, Hairy Harriet, Vicious Vivian, and Positively Ruthless Ruth. They dragged George (a little sandy-haired fellow with spectacles but with a keen mind and an iron will) from behind the bush he was hiding in. Then they beat him. Then they reduced him to flinders. Then they squashed the flinders to slime. Then they jumped up and down on the slime.

"Women are better than men!" cried Dirty Sandra.

"Lick my boots!" cried Hairy Harriet.

"Drop your pants; I'm going to rape you!" cried Vicious Vivian in her gravelly bass voice.

Etc. It's great stuff. A first version of the story was published in the April Fool's Day issue of The Witch and the Chameleon in 1975; an expanded version appeared in Women's Studies International Forum in 1984, and then was collected in The Hidden Side of the Moon in 1987. Y: The Last Man began publication in 2002.

New Hampshire to Become Rap Mecca

In an attempt to promote racial, ethnic, generational, and aesthetic diversity in a state best known for its rock, the New Hampshire Department of Cultural Resources is devoting $7.50 (half its budget) to an effort that encourages the Granite State's citizens to create what Governor John Lynch called, "That hipping-hopping music, so popular with the young folks nowadays."

Because the indigenous music of New Hampshire is something akin to sea shanties played on kazoos and small accordions, there will be a steep learning curve. But the state's commitment is strong. Van McLeod, Commissioner of Cultural Resources, said, "In honor of the great strides New Hampshire is making toward becoming one of the big playas, I'm officially changing my name to MC Loud, at least for today."

The first product of the state's new initiative takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys:

Tom Lehrer Video Archives

As far as I know, there is very little video footage of Tom Lehrer performing his marvelous songs, but on a whim, and desiring some whimsy, I popped his name into YouTube tonight and discovered some wonderful vintage footage from, I would guess, a television broadcast in the '60s (probably in Europe) as well as some footage of a 1997 performance at the 80th birthday celebration for the mathematician Irving Kaplansky (the entire video of which is available here).

A simple search for "Tom Lehrer" brings up a lot; if you're looking for some entry points, here are a few:

• Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
  
• The Vatican Rag
  
• The Masochism Tango
  
• Send the Marines
  
• National Brotherhood Week
  
• I Got it from Agnes (from a British broadcast in 1980; a song that was supposedly too risque for Lehrer's original records)
  
• Various songs about math (from the 1997 Kaplansky event)
  
• A song about sociology (from the 1997 Kaplansky event)

Glowing Reviews

Ed Champion linked to this, and I'm passing it on, because the customer reviews on this product are the funniest things I've read all week.

Rules for Writing

If you use adjectives in your prose, do not use nouns. If you use nouns, you must not use verbs. If you use verbs, try to avoid verbs that specify a particular city.

When specifying particular cities in fiction, do not use cities that have been specified in poems. Poems have so few things left of their own anymore that we should let them have their own cities.

When writing poems, use many different points of view. Poems without multiple points of view are too strident. Prose is allowed to be strident on certain political holidays, but poems that are strident tend to resemble over-ripe fruit, and nobody likes that.

Bad writing is usually caused by over-ripe fruit, but often enough there is too little rain during the season, and that isn't any good, either. More good writing is produced by rain than by drought.

Do not write about the thing that annoyed your brother the last time you wrote about it, because he's bigger than you and he's got a mean streak and there are plenty of other things to write about, like the weather.

If you write about the weather, use as many adjectives as you can, or else your nouns will wilt and become adverbs.

Some coaches insist adverbs are stronger than nouns, but an independent panel of statisticians has proved otherwise. Despite appearances, though, statisticians don't like nouns so much as they adore conjunctions.

If you use foreign phrases in your writing, be careful to use the correct pronunciation.

There are really only three plots: the queen cried because the city became a piece of over-ripe fruit; the king killed himself because the political holiday was ruined by the weather; and the thing that annoyed your brother caused him to hate nouns.

If you write a play, call it a poem, because otherwise everyone will assume it's a blog post, and trust me, you don't want that.