I Can't Draw, volume 1

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Sorry this comes in a few days late for Christmas. I have been a bit distracted.

Girlfriend Trouble is Inspiring

Last year, Everything2.com (the site where I publish most of my writing) conducted a poetry contest. Now, in my entire time on this earth, I'd only written about five pieces of poetry that I would dare share with another person, but I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Using my relationships of the last ten years (my so-called 'grown-up relationships') as inspiration, I found I was able to work up four pieces. If I say so myself, I think they were pretty good.

In order to set this one up, I must digress briefly into the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics. There's a famous imaginary model physicists use to explain one of the picky points of quantum physics---it is called Schrödinger's Cat, after physicist Erwin Schrödinger*.

Without delving too deeply into unnecessary esoterica, Schrödinger imagined a strange situation wherein a cat would be in box, hidden from view. There is exactly a 50% chance that the kitty in question has been killed (remember, this is imaginary, no actual felines were harmed in the making of this thought experiment). Now, in the 'real' world, it would either be a living cat or one who was pushing up daisies, but in the twilight realm of the quantum, it's actually 50% alive and 50% dead until someone opens the box and looks at the cat. Then it becomes 100% alive or 100% flown off to join the kitty choir invisible.

Clear enough? Okay, good.

Quantum Physics is full of this sort of wacky uncertainty---which makes sense because it is about tiny particles interacting in bizarre and nebulous ways. One of the most famous axioms is Dr Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It's a science of grey areas and strangeness.

So, back to poetry: at the time of the noted competition, I was in a situation where I felt approximately 50% as though I was a part of a happy relationship, and 50% like we'd be going our separate ways at any moment, pending her say-so. It was kind of confusing and disquieting. One morning, as I lay in bed pondering my strange and uncertain romance I said "it's like she's Schrödinger's Girlfriend." And, well, how are you gonna resist that?

So that's where the poem came from.

Schrödinger's Girlfriend by me

          Back in the old days
         Folks were so certain
        Predestination
         A path of God's choosing

        Along came the men
         With their proofs
        And their theorems
         All of it got just a bit more confusing.


I really would like to create the equations
   Define our relations
   With one derivation
Here is my question on many occasions,
   "What does she want me to do?"

It would be great if life weren't so complex
   We'd make an index
   Find a value for x
How can I calculate all the effects
   of simply my being with you?


        Newton defined things
         In terms of equations
        Took Aristotle and
         Swept him away,

        Einstein took Newton's work
         Made alterations
        And everything changed
         In a relative way.


Part of me wants you to make up your mind
   To tell me you're mine
   Or leave me behind
Sometimes it feels just a little unkind
   Never to know where I stand.

Sometimes I think that I'm asking too much
   My questions are such:
   Am I just a crutch?
I really can't tell if you're missing my touch
   And nothing quite goes as we'd planned.


        A teacher named Erwin
         A cat in a box
        Alive and yet dead
         Til observing reveals

        A genius named Werner
         Was always uncertain
        And sometimes I think
         That I know how that feels.

The poem got one of the highest reputations in the contest (the highest, not counting the little awards we call "chings"). Hey, quantum mechanics and relationships, these are two things we nerds like to think about.

*To pronounce this surname correctly, one has to do something like a zombie noise there in the middle. I encourage the reader, unless s/he is a fluent speaker of German (meaning, you could order a meal at a fancy Berlin restaurant without getting more that one or two eyerolls from the picky German waiter), to anglicize the pronunciation of this to shro-ding-urr. Otherwise one runs the risk of sounding really ridiculous, not to mention pretentious.

Recite, relearn, record...

Back in High School, I took a poetry appreciation class. About 30 years ago, in case you are keeping track. Anyway, the for the final project in this class, we each had to memorize a piece of poetry. I had a real thing for Edgar Allan Poe, so I set out to memorize the Raven.

I realized, even at the time, that this was gonna be a dreadfully big thing to learn, but it is such a cool piece--plus, there's the whole 'challenge' factor. So I worked...hard. I think my classmates thought me quite eccentric, as I jogged down to the park reciting "...this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore, meant in croaking 'Nevermore.'" Of course, they always knew I was a little different.

Anyway, I managed to do it, and recited it for my final. The notoriously hard-to-impress teacher (Mr. Bickel) gave me an ovation. I felt pretty good about it.

After that, I just felt like learning more poetry. I learned some Robert Frost and some Shakespeare, and some Carroll and a few more by Poe. By the way, did you know that people "with taste" don't admit to liking Poe? He's supposed to be sort of 'pedestrian' or something. I'm often glad I'm not cursed with 'taste' and I can just like whatever I enjoy. But I have digressed.

So anyway, I also learned the song where Tom Lehrer puts the Periodic Table to music and the one where the Animaniacs sing the names of the nations of the world (more or less). I also learned the rather off-colour one by the new wave band the Nails, where the guy sings about the 44 women who have been in his life.

Roughly every other year, I'd go on a frenzy and see if I could remember all the pieces. I'd recite them in my car on the way to work (or doing deliveries for Dining In), and I even studied a few new ones. I learned Ozymandias by Shelley and a few pieces of drama (by Shakespeare...I think people with 'taste' are kind of divided on Billy the Bard too...but I think the old dude put some magic into the English language).

Occasionally, I'd record myself reciting them and challenge myself to see if I could get 90-95% of the poem perfectly...not missing or flubbing more than one or two words in 20. I discovered I remembered most of these pretty well.

In November, I decided I'd take the challenge once again. The idea was to go through each piece six times to my satisfaction, then record myself doing it, to make sure I knew it as well as I thought. It took a couple of months, but I not only did all of the ones I knew, I re-learned the opening soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet and learned more of Hamlet's exchanges with the gravedigger, so I know something like two pages of Hamlet by heart. Not a lot compared to what there is, but it's fun anyway.

So, by way of bragging, I present to you the list of stuff in my head, appropriately titled

LONG, COMPLEX, or just COOL THINGS I KNOW BY HEART
(in approximate order of when I learned them)
Poe -- The Raven
Poe -- El Dorado
Carroll -- Jabberwocky
Shakespeare -- Sonnet 18
Poe -- Annibel Lee
Blake -- The Tyger
Frost -- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Shakespeare -- “If We Shadows Have Offended...” (closing soliloquy from A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Poe -- Lines on Ale
Carroll -- the Walrus and the Carpenter
the Nails -- 88 Lines About 44 Women
Poe -- Conqueror Worm
Frost -- Fire and Ice
Animaniacs-- Nations of the World
Lehrer -- The Elements
Shakespeare -- “Alas, poor Yorick ...” (graveside exchange from Hamlet, between the gravedigger, Hamlet, and Horatio--about 16 pieces of dialogue including the famous whopper that Hamlet says)
Shelley -- Ozymandias
Shakespeare --- Romeo & Juliet (Prologue --- "Two households, both alike in dignity")


That's about it. Next year maybe I'll finally get through The Bells by Poe. Don't tell the people with taste though.

Grammatical Goofiness: Plural Puzzlers!

In High School (quite a few years gone now), I studied Latin, Greek, and Human Anatomy. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that only one of those courses was actually offered at the tiny, private school I attended. The Latin and Greek were strictly self-study, and I prided myself on knowing the correct Latin plurals for the muscles, bones, and other parts of the body.

It was not too long before I hit a snag in my linguistic snobbery. Some of the names of body parts can not be correctly pluralized in Latin. Well, there’s a work-around, using something called the Terminologia Anatomica, but, if you are a purist for that system, you will refer to the pituitary gland as the glandula pituitaria. And we’re trying not to sound like a doofus here.

Not sounding like a doofus is precisely what it comes down to—accuracy is important, but not sounding ridiculous is also a big priority. By way of example, we often hear very educated people refer to stadia as the plural of stadium, but how far should we take that? These same educated people may sometimes say that the plural of museum is musea (although Answers.com says, succinctly, “No, the plural in English is museums.”) but with that plural, we run merrily up to the bounds of silliness and perhaps beyond.

The danger increases with the less familiar, more bizarre plurals, such as those purists who insist on pluralizing index as indices. The urge to point and laugh becomes almost impossibly high when someone uses irregular plurals like that. As a snarky joke, a friend used to pluralize “Kleenex” (registered trade mark) as “Kleenices” and “Xerox” (also registered trade mark) as “Xeroces.” Of course, if Kleenex were Latin, I think it would pluralize as Kleeneges or something…but it has been almost three decades since I cracked the Latin books.

Some other hilarious plurals exist in the anatomy world: femur becomes femora, sternum becomes sterna, mandible’s plural is sometimes given as mandibula (I’m serious…although even the stodgiest medical dictionaries seem to have mandibles nowadays), larynx becomes larynges, and one of the all-time craziest, the male reproductive organ called the epididymus pluralizes out as epididymides. There are also people who insist on pluralizing the word penis as penes (pronounced PEE-neez), which is also screamingly funny to anyone who was ever a Junior High School student.

One very educated friend suggested that if something is a Latin word, it should get a Latin plural. Here, we can run into trouble too. Camera is in the Latin dictionary. But you will never catch me saying “We have three digital camerae in our house” … again, not to sound like a doofus is a priority here.

This begs the question: why should it only apply to Latin? I know there are some very smart folks who use chateaux as the plural of chateau, so should all words of French origin be pluralized exactly as they would be in the native language? Of course, most French words use –s or –es to make their plurals, but it’s a highly irregular language. By some accounts English derives as much as 30% of our vocabulary from French, we would have to use a few zany plurals.

If we are going to use Latin and French plurals, we really should probably show some love to Greek as well. Then you would have to say “The centauroi were the half-man, half-horse creatures of legend.” This also implies that the plural of hippopotamus would not be “hippopatomi” as many wags suggest, but “hippopotomia” (or something very like that) … try THAT one at your next gathering of Very Smart People and see who takes you seriously after that. (“Dinosaurs” comes from Greek too, so I guess you could say “the Natural History Museum has many dinosaures (said ‘dino-SAU-reez’)”…you know, if you are feeling like doing so.)*

German is practically one of our parent tongues, so we certainly need to be accurate there as well. So next time you are gonna get some sausages at the deli, make sure to order a few bratwürster for dinner.

Many Italian food names are plural. But please, in your quest for accuracy, we implore you not to say “We left no spaghetto uneaten.” Seriously…

Hebrew often takes the –im form when pluralizing. That said, I suspect that any non-Hebrew speaker who says something like “there were two Rabbanim at that synagogue today” is likely to be sound like aforementioned silly person

Speaking of derivations from that language, while researching this article, I came across a wonderful piece about the plural of the word bagel. Two people were arguing over whether the plural should be “bagels” or “bagel” (as it would be in Yiddish) … the authority responds:

“I might say, as the rest of us who say “bagels” when speaking English — is right. Simply stated, the rule is this: When a word borrowed from a foreign language has become domesticated in the borrowing language…it obeys all the borrowing language’s grammatical rules, including those governing the formation of plurals.”

English is a language of exceptions, and of course there are some words that will always take irregular, foreign-y plurals. I’m not going to start saying “criterions” or “crisises,” for example. I’m just saying that it’s good to think before you pluralize. We must be careful not to sound like doofuses. Erm…doofi? No, doofuses…definitely doofuses.

*The delightful Miss Annie tells me that the Danish word for dinosaur is “dinosaurus” which pluralizes in Danish to “dinosaurusser.” Rather than spitting out that mess of a word, most Danes elect to say “dinosaurs.”