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On euphemisms

The nature of our language is essentially bovine. Herd words and phrases reign supreme, sweeping before them all meaning and significance. But if our commitment to euphemistic language is disquieting, society's obsession with nonsensical and often deceptive modifiers is positively frightening. Consider the idea of alternative medicine. The presence of a modifier, by definition, means that the thing being described must be something different from medicine. Put another way, alternative medicine could be anything but medicine. If it were medicine, it wouldn't need the modifier.

A more egregious example is the notion of social justice. The term is often employed to induce guilt among the privileged and justify reparations from the wealthy. But the same logic applies: social justice cannot be justice because if it were, the modifier would be superfluous. In practice there can be no greater good than justice. It is the cornerstone of civilized society, the lofty summit of our collective achievement. The wild proliferation — and serious use — of terms like social justice implies a departure from the current path. And if justice is no longer our goal, what is?

On the crimes of Lenin and Stalin

This from Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties:

But the most important consideration remains the mere extent of the Terror. In the First World War the killing was on a scale wholly disproportionate to any military or political objective attainable by either side — to the degree, indeed, that our whole civilization was badly shaken, and almost ruined. This has long been widely understood. The Great Purge in Russia (and the previous killings of the collectivization period) are a similar case, but one which has perhaps not yet been grasped so clearly. Even leaving aside the question of whether the ends involved were good ones, the casualties were too great for any attainable political or social objective.

Put another way, this time in Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter in this book.

The book, as Martin Amis points out in Koba the Dread, is 411 pages long.

What will survive of us is love

This from “The Larkin puzzle,” a new essay from Martin Amis:

Then, too, there are the lines that everyone knows and everyone automatically memorises. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three”, “Never such innocence again”, “And age, and then the only end of age”, “What will survive of us is love”. This is a voice that is part of our language.

My taste for poetry is limited, strangled by a succession of ambivalent teachers and a curriculum that can only be described as moribund. Shabby and unimaginative teaching can be crippling. Had even one pedagogue, eyes flashing, introduced me to Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” everything would have been alright. Alas, it was not to be. But rather than get lost picking at the scab that is our education system, I would rather spend my time emphasizing — indeed, overemphasizing — the simple fact that all is not lost. Poetry need not be abstruse, obfuscating, alienating. It is, at the most basic level, part of our language. Larkin understood this, and that is why his poetry is such a joy to read.

Amis also points out Larkin’s contempt for anyone willing to lead “a life / Reprehensibly perfect”. The idea is simple: only the work matters. This is an intriguing idea, and not just because it runs counter to our love of invasion, of voyeurism, of vicarious living. Larkin’s intuition, perhaps unsurprisingly, also happens to be correct.

Britain beats the blitz — again

Just as I have avoided letting this website become a dumping ground for music videos and other ephemera, so too have I refrained from mentioning Christopher Hitchens. No longer.

This from “Britons have been violent and cruel for generations,” Hitchens’ latest column for Slate, an online magazine of news, politics, and highbrow cultural commentary:

I realized that the collapse of British society into a Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation and despair was still some distance off when I caught two little straws in the wind. The first was a well-framed photograph of a badly scorched bit of London, taken on the morning after a night of riots and vandalism. Apart from heavily accoutered cops, the only human figures on the scene consisted of a forest of sleeveless forearms, all brandishing the long handles of mops and heavy-duty scrubbing brushes. The ordinary working day had scarcely begun, but the process of digging out and cleaning up, inaugurated by the volunteer locals, was already under way. Of course, I thought to myself. Inflict a physical disaster on any British city, but especially on London, and the inhabitants seem to know, without any previous training for the role, that they have been cast in a remake of Britain Beats the Blitz.

Good people everywhere should stand up as the mortal enemy of stupidity and foolishness. Great and noble nations need not be undone by thugs and hooligans. Hitchens is a controversial writer — his views are frequently dismissed as fringe-dwelling, his opinions derided as the utterances of a pathologically egotistical loudmouth — but he gets it right here: petty violence cloaked in shabby excuses is a stain on our society. It must be stopped.

Swine before pearls.

Gene Weingarten won the Pulizter Prize for Feature Writing in 2008 and 2010. Both stories were written for the Washington Post, where Weingarten works as a staff writer. The first story, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” concerns an experiment. The Post persuaded Joshua Bell, one of the best classical violinists in the world, to busk in the Washington Metro. The results were astonishing — and ran counter to the expectations of nearly everyone involved. Implicit throughout is the notion that we, citizens of the great western democracies, spend much of our time in the sweet embrace of oblivion. We simply don’t notice things that are happening around us. Bell’s performance, Weingarten writes, proved no exception:

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Typography 101

Arial and Helvetica are two common typefaces that are, superficially at least, very similar. In fact, they are indistinguishable to most people. This is, as even a cursory examination will reveal, clearly not the case. Matthew Butterick, author of Typography for Lawyers, an excellent introduction to the basic tenets of typographic style, writes: “As a system font, Arial has achieved ubiquity akin to Times New Roman. And like Times New Roman, Arial is permanently associated with the work of people who will never care about typography.” This might seem like unjustified obloquy — after all, doesn’t everyone use Arial? — but Butterick is fundamentally correct. Arial is a terrible font:

...to typographers, Arial contains none of the consistency and balance that makes Helvetica successful. For instance, the ends of the lowercase a, c, e, g, s, and t in Helvetica are exactly horizontal. In Arial, those ends are sloped arbitrarily. Reading Arial is like trying to have dinner on a tippy restaurant table.

Keeping this in mind, Ironic Sans has composed a simple test. Can you separate the wheat from the chaff?