Archive of November 2008
Softwares, teyl tsvey
A while ago, I wrote a blog post called Softwares, where I laid out my basic workflows for a lot of different applications and why I liked them. I figured I’d revisit that topic now, more than three years later.
Sadly, looking over that post, it seems like very few of the apps mentioned there have any staying power. Most of them might remain on my hard drive, and I might keep an eye out for updates, but many of them have nevertheless been superseded. One thing that remains true is that I do use applications for these; Jesse Wolf commented on my last one that he uses a web browser for almost all this stuff, but I still do vastly prefer the OS integration, the responsive, native UI, and the deep functionality of a proper Cocoa (in most cases) app to the convenience and universality of a web app. The cloud, however, has definitely made a big appearance in my life since that post was written.
4 Years
In the spring of 2004, Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Evanston, Illinois, told me a funny story about startling President Bush during a visit to the White House. She was wearing a big, blue “OBAMA” button. This was in the early days of Barack Obama’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Bush “jumped back, almost literally,” Schakowsky said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’”
Everything else has already been said and will continue to be said. So I will say merely this: four years.
Missing Ws
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he aimed to make a clean break from all things Clinton. The acrimony, much of it stemming from the 2000 Florida recount and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, apparently went both ways. Reports of office vandalism and thievery made their way into the press soon after the Bush team moved in.
An initial 2001 General Services Administration audit found little to the story, other than wear and tear when “tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy.” But GeorgiaRep. Bob Barr pressed the matter, and the General Accounting Office began a deeper probe. A year later, the GAO released a report that found between $13,000 and $14,000 worth of damage. The vandalism included missing items like doorknobs, a presidential seal and “W” keys from nearly 60 computer keyboards. The 215-page report said the damage amounted to a “criminal act” but didn’t specifically blame anyone. Clinton spokesmen acknowledged that there may have been pranks done in jest, but attributed the majority of the damage to normal wear and tear. In the end both sides claimed vindication, but the bitterness was a symbol of the entire 2000 election.
Stephen Fry, it is well to hear it.
I won’t lie; for all his delightful erudition it has sometimes been a slight pain for me that Stephen Fry has tended to evince a somewhat snobbish attitude towards language. The sword of diction cuts both ways, of course; the schoolboy pleasure with which he (and I as well) explains etymologies to his slightly less intellectual fellows on QI and chews through the pronunciation of foreign words is accompanied by a sort of persnicketiness and, well, Trussian superciliousness towards the same when they commit some travesty of misuse—or, and I know this well from my own schooling days—when they take some aggressively anti-intellectual stance, and on a quiz panel show, no less!
Anyway. Fry now, on a slightly unfocused but still quite enjoyable essay on language on his blog, takes direct aim at the self-appointed language mavens and usage experts about whom I have here bitched in the past, and it’s gratifying. It does seem that these folk are more prominent and more influential in England. I guess that ironic, dry, intellectual culture that we Americans love so much to delineate also bears within it a greater proportion of cranky, humorless, obnoxious people. Fry says, among many other things, this:
For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.” Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?
