Decade of the Brain

First published in Column 8 on the 1^st June, 1994 

Somewhat to my chagrin, I discovered last weekend that we are four years on into the Decade of the Brain. How could I have missed it?

Worse is to come. While I’ve been careful to notice the Decade of Women, I find I’ve missed noting the Decade for Cultural Development (88-97), for the eradication of colonisation, for natural disaster reduction, and for international law – the last three all from 1990 to 1999. Hopefully some cultural developers, eradicators of colonisation, natural disaster reductionists, and international lawyers haven’t. Missed their decades, I mean.

Perhaps I’m not alone, especially as far as the Brain decade goes: I couldn’t find mention of it in either the Times of London, or New York Times indices for 1990. Were these erudite newspapers not impressed with President Bush proclaiming to the world at large that ‘all public officials and the people of the United States’ should ‘observe such decade with appropriate programmes and activities?’

My first image of a Decade of the Brain is that of some science-fiction head detached from its body, stuck in a jar full of scientific fluids, and wired up to the outside world by computer. From there it rules all who come within its neural sway.

I don’t think that’s what Mr Bush had in mind.

His proclamation has been interpreted, for one, as meaning that in this decade scientists should get on and accelerate their understanding of the workings of the brain. The European Community, for example, has launched major research initiatives in neuroscience since 1990, but run into trouble funding the initiatives.

Bioengineers, on the other hand, are predicting that they’ll soon be able to duplicate every part of the human anatomy – except the brain. That’s a relief.

In the States – where else? – brain saloons (or gyms) have begun to appear. These brain-wave synchronisation centres, the equivalent of a Les Mills for the mind, stimulate visual and aural parts of the brain. The intention is to be able to inspire anything from creativity to ‘a sort of neural Disneyland.’ Hmmm.

They’re supposed to enhance memory capacity and problem solving, to quicken decision-making and to sharpen the attention span. Sounds like we’d be better sending some of our politicians to one of these than off on their frequent fact-finding tours.

One gentleman, Glenn R Jones, has invested some $30 million in his Mind Extension University. On this cable TV you can be a couch potato earning credits for college.

Tony Buzan, president of the Brain Foundation, founder of the Brain Trust and co-founder of the Mind Sports Olympiad (wears you out just thinking about it), enthuses at length on the way in which the brain is coming into its own, at last.

The first Mental Olympic Games will be held this year – or, for all I’ve heard, may already have been held – but I don’t think they’ll make very good television.

Buzan predicts a future full of mentally literate individuals creating a mentally literate society. He quotes an inspired John Radar Platt: ‘Human beings would stand out like blazing suns of complexity, flashing bursts of meaning to each other through the dull night of the physical world between. We would hurt each other’s eyes.’ Cor!

If a cynical tone has crept into this column, ignore it. I think brains are great. I reckon all brains should get on and make some extra effort to improve themselves in this decade.

After all, no humans yet exist who can use all the potential of their brain. As Prof. P K Anokhin once said, ‘It is infinite!’

WOW! Lead me to the nearest Brain Club!

 

FMRI Brain Scan
Courtesy DrOONeil
(Does anyone else see what appears to be a baby climbing into the oval gap near the top?)

I suspect that once something has been given the chance to have a decade to itself, it forgets when to stop: we’re still dealing colonisation, and it’s worse; with natural disaster, and it’s worse; with international law, and…  I think Cultural Development may have gone out the window; now we seem more focused on Cultural Undevelopment.

Information on the Decade of the Brain project and its results can be found here.

I was quite a fan of Tony Buzan and his books at one point, until I found that the same information was regurgitated over and over in more than a few of his 80 published books.

There were four Decades for the Eradication of Colonisation.

Responsibility

First published in Column 8 on the 25^th May, 1994

I spoke about censorship last week, puzzled at some of the comments made by the chief censor. The problems with censorship in our generation, however, go further along the line than the people dealing with the end product; the problems go back to the creators of films, books and plays themselves.

The responsibility of the artist is a factor with which censors deal only by default. Much of our problem in the entertainment, literary and artistic world is the way in which artists appear to set no limits upon their own creativity. Worse, there always seems to be a producer or publisher or gallery owner willing to present material to the public that the artist has not self-censored.

The theory is they’re only giving the public what it wants. Like the spectators at the Roman gladiator displays. Like people who flocked to public hangings. Or now, to public executions on television.

We humans do have a taste for the nasty – as long as we’re not personally involved. There’s no doubt, given half the chance, we run towards evil. Civilised and all as we are, I don’t doubt that every one of us is capable of evil if we allow ourselves to go that way. Often it is merely a case of ‘there but for the grace of God, go I.’

But evil begets more evil; in the end, like the Nothing in the The Never-ending Story, it sucks it up.

Some artists appear to forget this. So sure are they of their own view of the world, they forget that not every reader of viewer sees things as ‘clearly’ as they do, or with an equal understanding of their worldview. What may be a serious attempt to portray evil on their part can turn into the destruction of someone else’s soul.

Furthermore, there are many artists who have no morality at all when it comes to portraying evil. Enjoying evil themselves, they delight in taking others down with them.

Our Chief Censor was quoted as saying last week that there was no right or wrong classification when it comes to movies. It was simply a ‘judgement call.’ For many artists it is not even a matter of classification; there’s no right or wrong when it comes to art, full stop.

Tolerance of any sort of behaviour or action or writing or artistic work is taken to the extreme, until finally the artists can rightly say: you let another one away with ‘murder,’ how can you judge what I’m doing?

When Moslems around the world rose up in anger at Salman Rushdie’s written blasphemies, his Western publishers, self-appointed critics, and artists of all kinds, cried out that artists should be allowed to write as they please. Such tolerance isn’t everyone’s view. Several people have died in connection with The Satanic Verses, and Rushdie is in ongoing exile.

What has he gained by writing as he pleased?

Complete toleration of the artist’s viewpoint has opened up such a can of worms that censors in the West don’t really know how to classify films anymore, television breaks through any restraining barriers as it sees fit, and magazines and newspapers compete with each other in the gossip of garbage.

In other societies and periods of history, artists have been condemned for speaking out or going beyond the bounds. Today, artists portray almost every conceivable blasphemy, immorality and evil in books, movies and on television while we puzzle over how to deal with it. Our tolerance level is so high society can no longer deal with its effects.

I don’t believe we want Western society to be subject to the kind of thinking that puts Salman Rushdie’s life at permanent risk. On the other hand, if artists will not take responsibility for the effect they themselves are having on society, we may finally have no other choice. 

 

Salman Rushdie
Photo courtesy of the Lannan Centre for Poetics and Social Practice,
Georgetown University

In the last couple of days a person on X (formerly Twitter) uploaded a lengthy video on some offensive art by Kiki Smith. She goes by the Twitter name The War on Beauty; her actual name is Julia James Davis. You may feel her reaction to the art is over the top, but in spite of her tears she has some worthwhile things to say.  

Rushdie, of course, is still basically in hiding, seldom seen in public. And on one occasion when he did speak publicly he was nearly murdered. The bounty on his head remains. An interesting and mostly very readable memoir entitled Joseph Anton is actually Rushdie’s autobiography; he writes as though he’s talking about a different person.

Hmmm

 First published in Column 8 on the 18^th May, 1994

Absurdities surrounding film censorship abounded in the news last week. The highlight was the refusal of one cinema to allow a mother to take her unweaned baby into the movies with her because the rating was R16.*

In the initial report there was concern regarding the effect the movie might have on one so young. Hmmm. Yet the present chief film censor in another report told us there was an awful lot of nonsense spoken about young people and censorship, and that what might frighten an adult may be funny to a teenager. Hmmm. (I’m not sure with what hilarity an unweaned baby might greet the average movie.)

According to Ms Wrightson, children are much more able to determine what they wanted to see in a mature way than they were ever given credit for. Hmmm.

I find the words ‘in a mature way’ a little difficult in the context.

Is the chief film censor really telling us that adults, because they’re that much older, and have had more experience in life, are therefore less mature when it comes to choosing to watch or not watch a movie? Is she claiming some hidden teenage maturity that most parents so far have had difficulty unearthing? Hmmm.

However, she also said, allegedly, that she felt the movie, Once Were Warriors, should have had an R16 rating instead of the R13 it was given. It is ‘a fine film, but deeply disturbing…I wept buckets.’ The violent scenes, though quite brief, were very realistic and contained some ‘pretty disturbing stuff.’ Hmmm.

The Terminator, Terminator 2 and Total Recall (to pluck three out of the hat) have frequent, nightmarish, violent scenes, yet all are readily available on video, for any age child to watch at home. The ‘mature’ kids who take them out of the video shops certainly don’t weep buckets about the graphic nastiness. And somehow I don’t think Mr Schwarzenegger is weeping too much at the effects the movies have on people (especially kids), or on his bank account.

And even if they don’t get the videos out, the television programmers will ensure they see the movies at some stage, anyway.

What I find, in years of struggling with the whole movie-video scene, is that over and over again, the kids don’t appreciate what they’re watching. Lack of maturity is the problem rather than the fact that they’re not given credit for some unsuspected maturity.

Murder and mayhem and vicious assaults and victims’ agonies pass them by because they have, for the most part, much less experience of the real pain and horror these scenes portray. They take in the visual aspects without understanding the physical damage behind each brutal beating. They sit in comfort watching people go through extreme pain without feeling a thing.

They say, ‘It’s only a movie, Dad.’ (I can remember, as a child, wondering where they found enough actors for films when they always killing them off. It’s a wonder there’s an actor left in Hollywood.)

Adults, on the other hand, who know that when you’re hit you’re hurt, or that when someone kills you, you stay dead, have a different emotion about watching such scenes. Unless, of course, their sensitivities are hardened by years of watching such horrors themselves.

Rather than kids being mature about such matters, I believe we’re making them more and more unable to react with sensitivity when we allow them to watch endless streams of violence.

I see in England that those who for years have cried out for less censorship have finally begun to reconsider. Nasty vicious movies and videos may have an impact on children after all. Recent horrific murders are forcing a change in liberal thinking. Hmmm.

I wonder if we’ll have to have children killing other children in this country before we start to think the same?

Hmmm?

*This has happened a number of times over the years, though I couldn't track the 1994 incident online. 

The tone of this piece is fairly light, although the main concern that seemed to be blithely put forward by Ms Wrightson was taken seriously enough. A history of censorship in NZ can be found here. This is well laid-out, very readable, and shows the changes over time, and the difficulties that occurred when videos became readily available, and later DVDs etc. There is now virtually no apparent censorship of what is streamed from companies like Netflix.  

Confession

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th May, 1994

I confess! I’m conservative, dogmatic and opinionated. I’m middle-aged, illiberal (un-liberal?, non-liberal?), and semi-quasi-fundamentalist. I’m a closet reactionary redneck and almost certainly an elderly old guard. I’m pig-and-bullheaded, cocksure, mulish and hard-nosed.

Worse, I don’t even know if I’m culturally safe – I don’t even know whether that means I’m suppose to be safe from culture or keep it safe from me.

PC propaganda is finally raising my consciousness, and what it says must be true. However, I’m having more trouble learning the nuances of How To Be Culturally Political than I am learning the peculiarities of the Russian alphabet.

I mean, how would I ever have guessed that I should be upset by a belch at the end of a Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisement? Yet supposedly a ‘significant section of the community’ were, according to the decision of the Advertising Standards Complaints Board. This belch was in extremely poor taste, we’re told, and the ad is banned.

Perhaps the belch affected the ozone layer, and repeated screenings were making the hole larger. Did the belch offend the greenies? How difficult these things are to understand when one is used to being imperious, obdurate and peremptory.

Phew! I think I’ve got hold of that – now let’s consider this: a naughty American lad in Singapore scrawled graffiti over cars in a vandalistic spree, and was caned for it.

But everyone knows we don’t cane anyone anymore. Caning causes us to become child abusers and to take it out on the next generation. If we stop caning the next generation, instead of damaging people, they’ll only go out and damage property. And this will have the useful effect of teaching the rich to ‘practice modesty in their show of wealth.’

So we must avoid any form of discipline, otherwise hidden addictions may appear in the younger generation.

And talking of addictions, I was dismayed to learn that a man in Maine who suffered a permanent mental disability of sexual addiction (I kid you not) lost his job as a teacher because he insisted on kissing his students (the female ones, anyway).

He says the school is illegally discriminating against his mental disability. Perhaps they’ve confused it with a disorder I seem to recall from my pre-PC days: I think it was called Lust, but I’m a bit confused myself.

However, in cases of confusion, there’s always plenty of PC material to learn from. Polytechnics, for example, are wonderful places to find out about how to live in a PC way.

Waikato Poly is having a little trouble with a couple of tutors who, I’m told, have been paid exceptionally well to keep their mouths closed about the way the nursing course is run. But are they satisfied with all that money? Not likely. One of the naughty fellows has begun to blow whistles – no wonder they didn’t want him on the course. Loud, noisy whistles are the last thing most patients want to hear when they’re sick.

And in Nelson Polytechnic there’s a very PC dispute over which colour one should be to go on a fishing course. That’s easy: I don’t have any colour, so I won’t be eligible. What a relief! I’d hate to pay for a course others get for free. It would make them feel so embarrassed, wouldn’t it, when I started flashing all my colourless money around.

How difficult it is to keep up with all the legal niceties of Correctness which is Political. I’m now beginning to appreciate how the Chinese felt when Mao-Tse Tung presented them with the Little Red Book.

 

Courtesy: ToonPool.com

 I haven’t been able to trace the KFC ad with the belch, although a link appears online that seems to go to it – but doesn’t.

A bit of achievement

First published in Column Eight on the 4^th May, 1994

As a family we don’t normally pay much attention to those long-winded advertising programmes on television, but one featuring a certain memory program did grab our attention. I ordered a copy – particularly as there was a 30-day money-back guarantee, and I’d been left a bit of money in my uncle’s will.

Three of us in the family have been working our way through the program and enjoying the effect it is having on improving the use of our memory. For once it is something that I’d recommend; if you’re interested in expanding your brain capacity give it a try.

Why should anyone want to improve their ability to use their memory? Firstly, I want to remember people’s names with greater ease, and not have to say to people I know perfectly well, ‘I can’t for the life of me remember who you are.’

I want to remember things that escape me so easily. I want to finish a book I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading, and be able to recall why I enjoyed it. I want to be introduce to some new ideas, and still be able to explain them within a day or so.

I want to be able to make my way around in the lunch hour without using a list, and I want to stop forgetting things that cause me frustration in the forgetting thereof…

I want to go and see an art exhibition, as I did the other day, and come away not only remembering the pictures, but who painted or drew them.

What’s the point, after all, of having the equivalent of a computer inside my head which is utterly superior to anything human beings are ever likely to able to invent, and only be able to use it at the most basic level? It’s like having the latest DOS on you IBM compatible, and finding that some things won’t work because you have insufficient RAM. Or buying some fancy new program and finding it eats up all available memory, and you can’t print your pretty pictures.

If it is true that we only use round 10% of our brain’s ability, I’d like to tap into a it more!

I don’t want to grow older and find I’m learning less when I could still learn far more. As Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.’

I’ve started trying to teach myself Russian, partly because I’m frustrated at not being able to greet the occasional Russian seamen who come into our shop, or understand when they say they want to buy a newspaper – a gazetta.

Learning Russian is different from learning the Romanised languages I’m more familiar with. There’s a new alphabet to tackle, I have to learn how to repronounce letters that look like some in the English alphabet but sound quite different. There are letters printed rather like various forms of gates or pillars, or like a pot-bellied stove, or someone slipping out of a window, half a dozen of these only differ by a slight tick. One of our English alphabet letters is written backwards. Some letters don’t have any sound at all. Phew.

At the end of the short time I can spare to deal with these matters, however, I come away feeling as though I’ve achieved at least some small thing. It may only be to appreciate that the Russian word for glad is similar in sound to our slang word, Rad!, or that the word for I is pronounced along the lines of Yah!. Yah rad!

And when I took my memory round that art gallery a couple of times, and found I could come away and tell you who all the artists were and give you some indication of what they’d painted, I began to sense I’d started upping the brain box usage to 11%.

Cover of the 1999 edition

The memory course was Kevin Trudeau’s Mega-Memory. It basically took a number of fairly well-known techniques and worked them into a system. It was certainly a good deal better than many things advertised in infomercials, and my wife, my older son and I got plenty from it. Like most things it required ongoing work to make the systems part of your system, and of course we always ran out of time to keep going on such things. But I’d had a lifelong fascination with memory and ways of remembering and I certainly enjoyed my introduction to techniques I hadn’t found on my own previously.

Over a number of years I’ve learned a bunch of poems by heart as well passages of Scripture, including around 30% of the Psalms. The things I learned about memory helped me to memorise these pieces, though it always required work. Which I don’t think Kevin Trudeau emphasised quite enough!

As for the Russian, it became one of those things left in the dust of experiments. I never got into it far enough to make use of it. Though when I was helping a Chilean with his English speaking, I learned that there are similarities between Russian and Spanish. In fact, he has learned Russian - enough to get himself around in that vast country, at least. Since I’m now learning Spanish, and make good progress with it, it might time to compare Russian and Spanish, and see if learning one helps learning the other.

Russian alphabet poster found on E-bay

Passporting

First published in Column 8 on the 20 April, 1994

As I had to write this column earlier than usual (for reasons which I’ll explain in a moment), I was glancing through the ODT in search of a stray thought when I came across an intriguing juxtaposition of headlines.

‘Lively and colourful tone to Haydn’s “The Creation”’ said one, followed on the same line by, ‘Police arrest 20.’

 Amazing how these old composer get ‘em going!

In the same paper a conservative Anglican group in England called Ecclesia accused the Movement for the Ordination of Women of ‘killing the church,’ and ‘dancing on the Church of England’s grave.’

Now surely one can only dance on the grave of something that’s already dead. And if the C of E is already dead, why are Ecclesia accusing the women of killing it?

As an institution the C of E has been dead for donkey’s years. We watched a video of Barchester Towers earlier this year – the behaviour of these 19^th century clerics was even then more political than spiritual.

If some old diehard Anglicans want to flog a dead horse, let them get on with it. They’ll die doing it. The Christian church, one section of which these women were being ordained into, is alive; it may be struggling with theology that works in the 20^th century, but it’s still forging ahead.

I think Jesus Christ would  have said to Ecclesia, ‘Get on with real life – let the dead bury the dead.’

The funniest part about all this Anglican kerfuffle is that some of their priests have ‘gone over to the Catholics,’ with some vague idea that the Catholics have remained as dead as they are. I think they may have a few thinks coming, as one of my grandparents used to say.

And why am I writing this column earlier than usual? Because I have to travel to Wellington to get a new passport.

‘What,’ you say, ‘travel to Wellington? To get a passport? Ain’t you a New Zealander? ‘Ave you been criticising our institootions and quirks all this time when you’re something else? you ain’t an…Aussie, are ya?’

Yes, I have to admit it. I’m a cuzzie from across the water, and I’ve had to make the choice of becoming a New Zealand citizen, at some cost to my pocket, or remaining an Aussie, at an equal cost to my pocket.

The curious fact is that my native government doesn’t trust my word on paper, nor my photo accompanying it, nor the affidavits of my legal mates. Without interviewing me face to face they don’t believe I am who I am. What my face will tell them I’m not sure.

Will my face convince them I’m not a drug dealer, or a terrorists, or that I’m not out to defraud them? As Michael Joseph Savage said, ‘Though I was born in the same district in which Ned Kelly did his bushranging, I did not inherit his methods.’

The Australian government’s rationale is that I only have to go Wellington once every ten years to renew my passport. I asked them if they were going to pay for the trip, particularly since I was standing by them in their hour of need and not changing my allegiance. No way. I have to pay my own fare.

Strangely enough, if I wanted to apply for my temporary twelve-months passport, I could get it without showing my face. Seems to me that a twelve-month period is ample time to do something fraudulent!

I’ve a good mind to write to the Australian government – my real government – and demand my money back, or insist they call me home.

When I see in the latest Metro that Australia’s got a worse unemployment problem than New Zealand, however, I think maybe that isn’t such a good idea.

 

Australian Passports galore
Photo courtesy of Citro

 

 

I was born in Australia, but at the time this column was written had only set foot in the place once (in the sixties, for a month) since leaving Melbourne in 1948 to come to Dunedin. My father was English-born and my mother was a Kiwi. I’m not sure that really qualifies me to be called an Australian at all, but up to this day – the 3^rd Nov, 2026 – I continue to be one, officially.

The last time I applied for a new passport, only a few years ago, the Australian Embassy was happily sending staff around the country to do the job with their face rather than mine, as it were. I met the staff member in the hotel that’s situated in the rear of the old Chief Post Office building, and we were as friendly as two Aussies can be on such short acquaintance. It was all done and dusted without fuss.

On the occasion written about in the column, when I went to Wellington for my ‘interview,’ I expected to be at their office for some time, and duly turned up for such an important occasion with sandwiches and a flask. (I’m kidding.) In fact, the interview consisted of a man behind the grill in some pokey office taking a look at me, asking some question that could have been asked over the phone – like ‘Who are you?’ - going off out of sight for a couple of minutes to pretend he was doing something important and coming back to say my passport would be in the post in a few days’ time.

Incidentally, I’m not sure why the ‘typical’ Kiwi who asks amazed questions in the middle of the column should have sounded more like someone who wasn’t sure what part of the English-speaking world he was from…

 And apparently there are great benefits in holding an Australian passport!

 

Prizegiving

First published in Column Eight on the 13^th April, 1994 [our twentieth wedding anniversary!] 

Golf (to quote Mark Twain) is a good walk spoiled. Wordsworth claimed it was a day spent in strenuous idleness.

I was interested, therefore, to consider last week’s reports of the wimpy prizes given to the girls participating in the PostBank Golf Tournament.

After an earlier report we were present on Saturday with a gloomy photograph of a young ladies’ quartet (accompanied by towels) expressing all the injustice of coming second in a ‘male’ world. There was no sign, however, of the jubilant males with their barbies (barbecues, that is, not Barbie dolls).

Everyone would agree that a set of towels appears to relate in no way value-wise to a barbie or a CD player. Towels do have the advantage, however, of not needing the additional purchase of a range of overpriced CDs or a couple of steaks before they can be of use.

Towels, in fact, could be seen as showing practical value, while CD players are frivolity. So maybe the boys were worse off than the girls, since the boys’ effort was undermined by frivolous prizes.

The young ladies, ever creative, suggested golf-orientated prizes would have been more sensible. Did they mean something appropriate like Tee-shirts? Or electric irons? Or lessons in how to make green tea using a caddy?

Ironically, this little sage of pathetic prizes brought an inequity of a different sort out into the open, the kind that rears its divot-shaped head not infrequently in relation to areas which have tended to be mostly the fairway of males.

In this particular case the inequity is in regard to the fees male golfers pay compared to those handed over by females.

The theory is that lower fees for females will encourage more women to participate in the sport. Thus we have a schoolgirl paying $22.50 at the Otago Golf Club while a boy pays $33. A female student pays only $56, however old she is. But 24-year-old male students, for example, pay anything from $66 to $420 a year.

Politically I am incorrect to speak of such things. But why the fuss on one hand, and not on the other? To be truly objective, we should have had a photo of a quartet of boys expressing bewilderment at being charged a higher rate of membership because they happen to have been born male.

I appreciated the comments made by Otago player, Shelley Duncan, who said she didn’t recall feeling the prizes were unfair when she attended national high school tournaments. Prizes, she said, have to  be kept in perspective. She added that women’s golf is now very strong.

If that’s the case, why are the gents still subsidising the ladies?

And talking of gentlemen, a couple or three came to the fore in this prize foray, two of them fathers who made up the lack of value in prizes through their own generosity. (I have to say something commendatory about this: one reads my column, and long ago we played Suzuki violin together with our youthful female prodigies. Whoops! Old Boys’ network.)

Isn’t it interesting that the spokesperson for the PostBank people was a woman who seemed to have little sympathy for the unfairness caused to her sex, while men, who were on the side of those getting the flak, came to the rescue?

Why should I wonder? Such generosity towards daughters is just normal for us blokes. (Ask my daughters. Ask Alan Duff!)         

 

Lydia Ko, top NZ golfer

 Alan Duff lives with his family and has three daughters (including pianist Katea Duff). In interviews discussing his viewpoints and social commentary, he has defended his appreciation for women's roles in society by explicitly stating, "I really care; I've got daughters." Commentators on his life have noted that despite his controversial public persona, he "walks the talk" in his personal life when it comes to showing profound respect and empathy toward the women in his family.

Plain reading

First published in Column 8 on the 6^th April, 1994

I’ve recently been looking into the area of accelerated education. One of the latest books on the New Zealand scene is The Learning Revolution, by New Zealander Gordon Dryden and American Dr Jeannette Vos.

Much of the book enthuses me for the whole idea of accelerated education, but I find one of their statements a little difficult to take on board. It goes as follows, ‘If you can read a newspaper in an hour, you already know how to read at least four books a day.’

Well, I can read some newspapers in a quarter of an hour – or less – and gain as much as I’m likely to, but other newspapers and magazines take a bit more of my time.

This isn’t because I’m any sluggard when it comes to reading. I believe it’s because some writers won’t write plain English.

Dryden and Vos do say in their book that much non-fiction writing is thick, cluttery and not user-friendly. They’re talking about medical jargon at that stage. Medical jargon hasn’t got this on its own; another field of writing is so jargon-filled you have to be in the know to decipher it.

I’m talking about computerese. Before I go on, let me say that some computer magazines make great efforts to be intelligible. Many don’t.

My discovery of the week came in a computer magazine which had a right-hand page headline boldly announcing, ‘Survey Results Call For Plain Speaking.’ Two paragraphs down the writer says, ‘The overwhelming finding was that large scale buyers of computer software have tired of buzzwords and glitzy marketing terminology.’

Never a truer word. But what do we find on the opposite page? (I’ve substituted Buzz for the real names, by the way.)

‘Buzz’s suite of client tools includes 3GLs (Buzz C++v4.0 and Buzz Pascal) for the most complex mission critical applications, to 4GLs (Buzz and Buzz) for business critical, departmental applications, to decision support tools (Buzz) for analysing data.’

This is plain speaking?

Further down we try to read, ‘Application modules will eventually break down into more manageable “function objects” which provide the flexibility to support rapidly changing process oriented and matrix organisations.’

Buzz embeds ‘OOP philosophy’ (should that be oops?). It upsizes ‘client/server and workgroup capabilities.’

Now I can figure that out if I want, but I could hardly speed-read it and make any sense of it.

This magazine wasn’t alone in its incomprehensibility. Try this piece of front page news: ‘An enhanced transmission control protocol/internet protocol stack will support technology for centrally configuring Buzz NT clients and server on enterprise networks and tracking their IP addresses.’

I know the saying, if you can’t stand the heat, don’t go in the kitchen. If I can’t read computerese, don’t buy the magazines. However, when it comes to words (at least), I’m ever willing to learn, and I do have a fair understanding of a variety of jargons. But why do I have to work so hard to makes sense of someone’s words?

In the book Kiwi Journalist Jim Tucker says journalists face the problem of dealing with complex communication styles, ‘from politicians, scientists, lawyers, bureaucrats, medics, academics and the literati’ – and the computerati. Journalists are supposed to be able to translate jargon, and ‘eliminate barriers to comprehension.’

Tucker goes on to say that journalists writing for the famed Wall Street Journal are supposed to ensure a child of eleven can read their news stories. Plainly – or should that be unplainly? – neither of the magazines I’ve quoted from have such rule of thumb.

In-house journals have a right, I suppose, to use in-house words. I believe, however, both these magazines are intended for a more general reader. And if this well-past-eleven general reader finds their writing difficult to manage, I think they’ve lost their public.

 

Jeannette Vos
Photo courtesy of LinkedIn

 This was one of those columns that started off in one corner and somehow wound up in another. Never mind.

It’s less difficult to read the computerese mentioned above now than it must have been in 1994. While I don’t immediately understand the quoted text I can get the gist of from the accumulated experience of the last thirty-plus years. Journalism, meanwhile, has gone well down the tubes. There are still journalists who can write, and write clearly. But many of those who write in newspapers these days appear to have been expected to produce stories at the speed of light – and consequently make a hash of them. Time after time in the ODT, to name just one paper, we have a news item that tells us the story, then repeats it again (sometimes word for word) a few paragraphs later, while the rest is filled with filler. A person related to the story suddenly appears out of nowhere with no introduction. And ‘quotes’ frequently now consist of words starting with f or c with a long dash behind them. The necessity for including swear words is beyond me. It adds nothing to the quote, except perhaps to say that the person being quoted said very little, and so a bit of ‘colour’ is included. And perhaps worse still are the quotes from ‘a witness who declined to give their name’ – usually these consist of little more than…’I heard a noise.’ Or, ‘This is a nice neighbourhood. These sorts of things don’t happen round here.’

Enough griping.  

Jeannette Vos is still going strong on accelerated education, under different names: high-performance learning method; accelerating our innate self-learning abilities, etc.

Jim Tucker is alive and well and writing news columns on his own blog.

I checked out the Wall Street Journal on behalf of its eleven-year-old readers. Yup, it’s certainly clearer than many magazines/papers, though I suspect most of the subject matter is above the interest level of an average eleven-year-old. Nevertheless the paper doesn’t dumb down its language either.

Modern gods

First published in Column 8 on the 30^th March, 1994

This Easter I was going to look at the weird and wonderful customs performed each year at Easter by the English. Many of these customs, however, mean little to New Zealanders, so I thought something related more to the spiritual aspect of Easter was required.

The senior pastor at our church said in his sermon a couple of weeks ago that this is the only century in which people have stopped believing in any sort of god at all.

I don’t think the pastor meant Western people have completely stopped worshipping gods; rather, they don’t believe in gods with any sort of personality. Modern gods exist, however, and are a pretty varied bunch in spite of their impersonality.

G K Chesterton once wrote: ‘When people stop believing in God, they do not start believing in nothing; they start believing in anything.’ People will turn anything into religion, whether it has spiritual value or not.

Many New Zealanders, along with millions in the Western world, make a god of money. And a right nasty piece of work this god is too – a driving taskmaster without compare. He has a sidekick named Gambling, a greedy, addictive god.

Many choose fitness as god, or health (must eat only the right foods), or recreation (worshipped 24 hours a day where possible). There’s the tubby tube-god, television; there’s the god called sport (whose praise has the biggest proportion of any newspaper); and the multiple-personality god/dess expressed as pop stars.

There’s the great god, materialism, a god who is never satisfied, even when you’ve bought all the furniture imaginable on HP (no deposit is his latest ploy), and are up to the eyeballs in weekly payments.

Many people now believe in themselves – not in some measure of improved self-esteem, but in claiming that they themselves are gods. A fairly ancient lie, and one that leads to considerable delusion, and disillusionment.

Atheists believe in atheism, which means not only don’t they believe in God, they believe in not believing in God. Humanists also don’t believe in God, but do believe in humanism, a philosophy that’s turned itself into a religion. And evolutionists proclaim their theory with the fervour of the most fervent evangelists.

Then there are people who ‘believe’ in God only as long as He fits into their little box.

What many Westerners no longer believe in is a God who knows us, cares about us, or even gives two hoots about us. Science (another one of the modern gods) is supposed to have done away with Him, but the battle still rages. If the followers of science give Him any place at all, it’s to say He wound up the universe like a clockwork toy, set it going, and went off on holiday.

Some think He might have been round at the Big Bang – that’s if they can agree that the Big Bang happened – but after that He left us to it. Whether He’ll make a repeat appearance when the universe finally turns in on itself, is seldom debated.

Meanwhile God Himself sits in His heaven and laughs, rather like a father laughing at his children’s inability and unwillingness to comprehend what He’s really like, or to listen to what He tells them about Himself.

The facts of God don’t change, like the facts about our parents, however much we may want to fit them to our own agenda.

Easter comes as a pertinent annual reminder of these facts, for those of us who’ve become so besotted with our petty gods we haven’t got time for the One who’ll make an eternal difference.

Easter gives us a chance to take a rest from the petty gods, to spend, perhaps, a bit of time in a pew, and check out those facts.

Living language

First published in Column 8 on the 23^rd March 1994

Being a person fascinated by the wonder of words, I’m amused at France’s futile efforts to preserve the so-called purity of their language.

Recent attempts to reverse the influx of Franglais into French include, among others, the formation of the Higher Council of the French Language (29 wise men and one undesignated woman). A Bill banning the use of foreign words in public announcements, work contracts, advertising, and on radio and television, is planned, and a suggestion that ‘language observers’ should be appointed to monitor television and radio in order to punish offenders.

Haven’t the French anything better to do? Haven’t they realised that the English are subtly getting their own back for the Norman invasion, when poor little Anglo-Saxons, already bamboozled by Danish, Latin and Gaelic, were forced to mouth that most easily mispronounced language, French?

Don’t they realise that English maintains its strength because it’s the most absorbent of languages?

Can you imagine a Higher Council of the English Language back in William the Conqueror’s time (with 30 good men and true – sorry, no women) struggling to retain the purity of ‘English?’ And the English Academy of the day refusing to allow people to eat eclairs, or the trumpet player to worry about his embouchure, or the cooks to glacé their cherries?

One of the most aptly appointed people in the French Higher Council is a comedian, Raymond Devos (a Belgian, incidentally); the whole thing smacks of farce. Perhaps Devos will break through the weighty Gallic seriousness, unlike Maurice Druon, the French Academy’s secretaire perpetual, who with earnestness thanked the Prime Minister in the name of the first and oldest body established to defend their language: the Academie Francaise.

What is it about the French that they need an Academy to protect their language? Is French dead? Perhaps it is, since living languages are pretty much able to look after themselves.

And anyway, if the Academy has attempted to preserve the purity of the French language since 1635 without success, I’d think the Eiffel (sorry, Ivory) Tower Academy might also be a bit of a dinosaur.

At the Expolangues Language Fair, another Francophile, Jean-Pierre Van Duth, regarded the maintenance of one’s own language and culture as a way to ensure peace. (Even though his EEC-type name belies it.) ‘If we think of European nations as natural friends,’ he said, ‘we are doomed to failure.’

He doesn’t begrudge the role of English as a common linguistic currency but claims it’s only good for shouting across borders – it doesn’t allow insight into other cultures.

This from the president of Expolangues, where computers last month displayed their remarkable abilities to teach people each other’s languages.

I sometimes feel the French have a bad case of sour grapes – a possibility, I suppose, considering one of their major industries. French is not one of the prime international languages and standing against the inroads of Franglais is typical French gall, about as arrogant an approach as testing nuclear weapons in someone else’s back yard.

In summary, I’d like to paraphrase: the nation that tries to preserve (or pickle) its language will lose it – the one the loosens it, will save it.

Raymond Devos, comedian, 
cover of book by Stephen Dupre