Round and Round

Over at Vulture, Molly Young writes about "garbage language," or the horrendous outpouring of nonsense phrases, acronyms, repurposed words and whatnot that afflict people who try to work in businesses and offices.

Part of Young's purpose is to try to find out why this kind of language has become the kudzu of the workplace. Even when communications consultants or advisers come in and -- often using their own special cache of garbage language -- point out how this sort of stuff makes it harder to be understood than easier, it persists. If by some miracle it's killed, it rises like an unstaked vampire and feeds until the problem is as bad or worse than before. I've always thought that some of the fuel for this kind of lexical fog was similar to that found in academia: If I hit a sufficient percentage of obscurancy in my communication you have to keep me around because you don't know what I'm talking about and you don't want to have to do my job yourself.

According to Young, one of the reasons people deploy garbage language is also part of its greatest problem: It confirms, she says, that delusion is an asset in the modern workplace. The speakers of garbage language convince themselves that their verbal deformations are actually better than the plain brown wrapper of the basic grammar textbook. They are being more precise, more descriptive, more efficient! One or another of them who might have read an avant-garde stylist like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson might even believe they are being more creative. Lord knows Wolfe could press a word into service for which it did not seem fit, until after he did it, and they believe they might just tread that path too.

But they don't. As Young says, it's a delusion. For most everyone who tries to do a job, the best memo is not exciting or zingy or cutting edge in its vocabulary. It's the one that spells out what the job is, how it needs to be done, who should be doing it and when it should be finished. In the course of my working life I have run across a couple of supervisors who understood that. May their tribe ever increase.

Learn Something New

We're coming up on the 40th anniversary of one of sports' great moments, in which the United States Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union Olympic hockey team in what is called, thanks to Al Michaels' joyous question, "The Miracle on Ice." Sports writer Joe Posnanski put together a sidebar list of "10 Interesting Facts You May Not Know About the Miracle on Ice" for his Sports Illustrated article.

The one fact that anyone who remembers the game knows, of course, is that the commies lost. But then again, they've made a practice of doing that everywhere but the faculty lounge, so I suppose it's not that interesting.

Another Man

The well-known picture of four neatly-dressed African American young men sitting at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, is one of the iconic images of the Civil Rights movement. It was taken in February, 1960, on the second day that the men sat there, waiting to be served but denied because of evil of segregation and the color of their skin.

There is a fifth man in the picture, who is sometimes not noticed as much because he is working. Charles Bess was a busboy at Woolworth's and he was working behind the counter as he often did during that time in his life. In this story at Bitter Southerner, Sayaka Matsuoka reports on some of his impressions of the day and of its long term impact. She notes that when Woolworth's finally desegregated its lunch counter later that year, Bess and the other African-American employees were invited by the counter manager to be the first ones served. They changed out of their work gear into their street clothes and had a meal, right in the middle of the shift.

I'm always impressed with the people who led so many of the drives for desegregation. Their very mannered, respectful and calm demeanor made liars out of the segregationists who talked about riots and outside agitators and the like. It helped bring many people to their cause, even some who might be a little iffy about other matters concerning racial equality, because they could see these plain, ordinary working American folks being harassed, threatened, beaten and worse just because they wanted what were their rights as American citizens to travel, live, eat, drink, vote and go to school wherever they desired.

And every now and again we get to uncover the story of one of the people who wasn't on the front lines but who got to stand taller, hold a head up higher and live like a full and free citizen because of what the front line folks did. And that's pretty good too.

Color Me Impressed

Synesthsia is a condition in which a person's senses don't operate the way that they do for the majority of people. Music may affect their sense of smell, for example, or looking at a painting may produce feelings of taste. It can be tough for people to handle until they become more comfortable with their differences and perhaps establish workarounds in order to have sensible conversations with other people about what goes on in a regular day.

Bernadette Sheridan, an artist, sees letters and numbers as colors. This is called grapheme-color synesthsia, and she says it usually happens with names. Although she hears the sounds of the names, her brain is working to translate those sounds into letters and then into colors. In this article at Medium, she shows how this process can leave her not remembering a name so much as a sequence of colors, something like the old signal flags that ships used for communication before radio. If the name has a pretty common grouping of letters, she might mistake it for a similar name with many of the same colors. And once she knows how to spell a name, she says she associates it with color blocks for all of the letters, even ones that are silent or are sound differently depending on their surrounding letters.

Sheridan created a website called synesthesia.me in order to try to illustrate how she sees the letters and colors connect. And for the specific tendency she has to assign them for names, she added a section that lets a user type in a name and see the colors that Sheridan assigns to the letters. She points out that even someone else with grapheme-color synesthesia might not see the same colors, so it's not a universal guide.

And being an American in the 21st century, Sheridan found a way to make a little bank off her different view. You can buy prints of one, two or three names from her at Etsy.

Internet Justifies Existence

For most of my adult life, I held it as an iron rule that nobody but Ray Charles should be allowed to play the song he'd made a hit, 1959's "What'd I Say."

Then, during one of the random playlists I cued up while working this afternoon, YouTube offered this:



I stand corrected.

Out of Gas

Illinois State Rep. Camille Lilly took some lumps over the last few days about legislation she introduced which would have prevented people living in Illinois from pumping their own gas. Currently, New Jersey is the only state which prohibits self-serve gas stations. Oregon used to, but then tweaked its law so that in its more rural areas, gas stations could offer self-service if they wanted to. Portland residents were still considered not bright enough to properly operate a gas pump, and, well, my mockery just ran aground on the shoals of All Too Plausibility.

In any event, Rep. Lilly has backed off the outright ban it seemed that her proposed legislation would have enacted. She now says that the proposal "had some verbiage that was not my intent at all." She only intended to address safety and convenience issues at gas stations and said that she intended to start a conversation about those issues and others related to the overwhelming prevalence of self-serve stations in relationship to full-service ones.

As I have no direct knowledge of Rep. Lilly, I believe I should take her at her word unless some reason appears to tell me to do otherwise. I have no problem believing she proposed legislation she had not fully read without any intention of it becoming a law that people had to obey. And I have no problem believing this because lawmakers do it all of the time. Just recently this space noted an Oklahoma lawmaker who wanted to prevent companies that make things like "soy milk" from calling it soy milk and making them call it "soy extract."

I have no problem believing that legislators want to "start conversations" and "begin discussions" and whatnot, since the majority of them at the state and federal level rarely seem to want to do the work that people voted them in to do and pay them to do, which is craft and pass legislation in order to help maintain an orderly and just society insofar as is humanly possible.

Certainly there's an alternative explanation. It's possible, of course, that Rep. Lilly proposed something dumb that she didn't realize would make people angry. She could admit that and withdraw the legislation, or she might even say something like, "Well, this law may make people angry and if we pass it I may lose my legislative seat, but this is important enough that I'll pay that price." But now we've entered the realm of science fiction, a strange world where legislators legislate, people start their own conversations and folks who live in Portland are smart enough to pump their own gas.

A Century

A hundred years ago today, representatives from eight clubs met at the YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, to organize what would become known as the Negro National League. The first regulated group of baseball teams for African American players excluded from major league baseball, it would last until the beginning of the Great Depression.

Other leagues would follow, some of them formed around the teams that survived the NNL's demise. A Negro American League began in 1937 and ran until desegregation and economic realities forced its disbanding in 1962. A successor Negro National League formed in 1933 and played until 1948, when surviving teams joined the NAL.

The history of the teams, leagues, champions, statistics, stars and such is complicated. Had the most powerful owners banded together in the years prior to Jackie Robinson's signing by the Brooklyn Dodgers, could they have forced better terms from the major league teams and created an arrangement in which some of the storied franchises like the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, Newark Eagles and Indianapolis Clowns continued to exist? Could a more visionary major league owner demonstrated the folly of excluding gifted players and a devoted fandom by recruiting legends such as Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell or Satchel Paige?

Perhaps. History proceeded as it did, though, and we can't know what the "what-ifs?" might have meant for Negro League baseball teams and their stars, we can only know what was real. Which will be enough, because the teams were real, the players were real, and the example of human beings refusing to accept the idea that they were "second class" in any way was real as well.

Should your travels, O Tolerant Reader, ever take you through Kansas City, Missouri, and should you have the time, you could do worse than visit the Negro League Museum and perhaps see for yourselves what those players knew and tried to say: Sure, it's about baseball. But it's always about more than baseball.