Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Month: August 2007
On Conspiracies and Confederacies
Posted on August 22, 2007 in Reflections
Real conspiracies happen, but I believe that they are rare. Confederacies look like conspiracies on the surface and they are quite common. In the article about crackpot, one flamer (who got deleted in the moderation queue) attempted to trump me by calling me a conspiracy theorist. It’s an old trick that people who don’t have anything substantive to say in rebuttal use.
I believe that somewhere, for some reason, one of the dictionary usage boards decided to remove the lunacy insinuations from the definition. Other dictionaries (have you noticed how their definitions often seem to sound nearly exactly alike?) looked over their shoulders and followed suit. “Well, the Zounders Dictionary changed the definition, so should we” is how the thinking must have gone. There was a general movement and that resulted in everyone doing it. Conspiracy? Did they all get together and agree to change the word? No, confederacy in that all the dogs began running in the same direction for pretty much the same reason.
It’s sad that some netizens don’t appear to want to put the work into understanding and making the distinction. But I guess I’ll chalk that up to insecurity.
On the Meaning of Crackpot
Posted on August 22, 2007 in Crosstalk Words
This article is meant to remove discussion about the meaning of the word “crackpot” from Bad Astronomy Blog.
I got into a discussion over on another blog recently about the nature of the word “crackpot”. Does it refer to a person who is mentally ill or not? I thought it did, but then I had a dictionary shoved into my face, to wit: a person who is eccentric, unrealistic, or fanatical..
I did a little more research on the components of the word. The American Heritage Dictionary (online) says that the word is a formation of crack(ed) and pot (meaning “skull”). I did a little more research and found that the term cracked — aside from its violent, breaking connotation and a few others — meant Informal. eccentric; mad; daffy. (Dictionary.com) Cracked also means to become mentally unstable as in “to crack up”. But dictionary after dictionary insisted that crackpot was not a term used to suggest mental illness.
In a departure from the mainline dictionaries, NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions gives us “A fake; a person with strange or crazy ideas.”
But I have a lot of dictionaries and one of them is a massive copy of the 1971 edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary. Here I found this definition:
one given to erratic, irrational, or lunatic ideas (p. 528)
The only place that I had to search deeper than that was my Oxford English Dictionary and, alas, since my edition its historical investigation in the 1920s, it did not contain the word “crackpot”. However it did have a few interesting definitions of “crack” including:
10. A flaw of the brain, a craze, an unsoundness of mind.
15. A crack-brain*, a crazy fellow.
To add a final note, my edition of Roget’s Thesaurus includes the word “crackpot” as a synonym for “lunatic”.
So what happened between 1971 and the present day? A social revolution that didn’t manage to excise the word completely, but attempted, instead, to alter its meaning. Let’s go back to crack + pot. A crack(ed) pot (skull) signifying someone who has been injured in the head. Brain-damaged or a person who wasn’t all there. The usage panel behind the 1971 dictionary had no problem with this slang usage. Then came a revolution which mandated that either the official definition be changed or those using it give it up.
Like the n-word, crackpot was one of those which possessed a certain perjorative snap to it. Evidence was mounting that the mentally ill did not lose all faculties nor were their ideas worthless. The rise of a new chemistry meant that many conditions were controllable. And with the settling down of many patients, we got a better look into how the unsound mind worked. Bipolar disorder, for example, turned out to be a matter of acceleration or deceleration of thought and impulse control. Intelligence tests showed that bipolar sufferers matched well against those who were not afflicted and in one type of intelligence — associational intelligence — smarter. You could make a case that the term crackpot as a synonym for mentally ill person was nothing but a crude pejorative and, as such, should be eliminated from the civil, thinking person’s language.
What’s more there was a constituency with supporters willing to speak out when it was being maligned by this [[slanguage]].
But the sharpness of those cees and those kays was just too much to let go. So a mean kind of political correctness sneaked in. Crackpot had long enjoyed use in political and scientific circles. Its users just couldn’t give it up. So somewhere between 1971 and the present, a revision took place in which all references to lunacy were excised. A whole history of usage was denied just to keep this bit of meanness in the English language.
A certain kind of disingenuousness is required, I think, to believe that this word has lost all its lunatic connotations. “Oh, we just mean eccentric” we’re told as if the term is completely void of antagonism. History has known many eccentrics, men and women with odd little hobbies that sometimes proved to be scientifically valid and sometimes were unrealistic: I would not call all of them crackpots. Nor would I call all eccentrics unrealistic. Occasionally, they caught on to reality better than the rest of us.
Crackpot is just a mean word used by mean people to put down others. And while some dictionaries have deleted references to insanity from their definitions, I believe that those who use it know damn well that the meaning is still there and understood. We don’t accept the argument that someone can use nigger because it is dialect and I don’t think we should accept that crackpot doesn’t mean insane person or nutcase because of the user’s alleged ignorance of its etymological history or the whitewash given it by contemporary lexicographers.
Vincent, Madness, and Me
Posted on August 21, 2007 in Biography Bipolar Disorder
[[Vincent Van Gogh|Vincent’s]] bipolar may have had nothing to do with his genius as an artist or at least that is what the editor of his letters to [[Emile Bernard]] believes. Van Gogh’s first major episode occurred in the form of a blowup against Paul Gaughin.
“It was the first deep crisis he got into,” Mr. [Leo] Jansen said. “It became clear that he was really a mental patient, and he knew that this would affect his abilities as an artist,” he continued. “Making art the way he did cost a lot of both physical and intellectual effort, and he felt he wouldn’t be able to work as well as he did before.”
From my own experience, I suggest that Van Gogh was [[hypomanic]] all along. But I decry the suggestion that his evocative whorls were the product of hallucination as the Van-Gogh-as-mad theory appears to posit. The groundwork for Van Gogh had already been done by the English painter [[J._M._W._Turner|Turner]]. [[Whistler]] was turning out similar products across the channel. Van Gogh began from where Turner left off and worked his paint brush in new, studied ways. Hypomania fed him as he ventured where no artist had gone before.
Jansen may be looking for the classic “laymen’s” signs of bipolar disorder — incoherence, inability to be creative. These are a myth. What I do relate to in Van Gogh’s experience is the feeling that a point can be reached where creativity is no longer possible, which is what happened after Vincent had his row with [[Paul Gaughin|Gaughin]]. Approximately a year ago, I had a serious fall, a breakthrough depression that left me doing nothing more than lying on the bed with my clothes on, listening to music. To help myself, I vowed that I would not give up either my writing or my photography. Since that promise, however, I have been dissatisfied with both. There’s a blockiness to my thought that leads me to devalue what I have written. My photos, for the most part, haven’t been as provocative. I feel a dull wedge driven into my brain and, though it gradually fades, I have my doubts that I will ever recover what I had.
[tags]bipolar disorder, bipolar, mania, depression, Vincent Van Gogh, Van Gogh, art, art and madness, biography[/tags]
The Hurdle
Posted on August 21, 2007 in Mania Sorrow & Regret
For me, it’s the forgetting of all the shames. Those irritate me more than the times when I was misunderstood and villified for no good cause, when I was made to take more than my share of the blame for a social conflagration. All the times when I shot my mouth off and bewildered people make me ache. My therapist reviews these with me and concludes that I hurt no one, but I continue to dread the feelings I left in other souls, the misapprehensions about my states of mind and motives. I have seen myself maligned and diabolized for things I said when I wasn’t in mania, so it seems natural to stand aghast of what dark fantasies the mind that is not mine can invent based on the confusions of my manias.
I have lived for nearly fifty years. For forty seven of those, I went undiagnosed. My conscience takes on many guilts, each engraved in lead.
[tags]bipolar disorder, mania, shame, guilt, sorrow & regret, sorrow, regret[/tags]
Problems with the Gist of Democracy
Posted on August 20, 2007 in Blogging Journalists & Pundits
Professor [[Michael Skube]] thinks that blogs are nothing more than a noise machine, that bloggers are not journalists. Thank you, Dr. Skube for seeing what most bloggers have known all along. We’re not part of the establishment.
Skube decries our failure to take risks (tell that to Majikthise and me for that matter). I countersuggest that this culture of risk-taking, of getting onto the battlefields, the survivalist camps, etc. may distort the true picture of the world. If you hang around all the places where violence is happening, you’re going to believe that the world is a uniformly violent place.
One thing that impressed me when I went to Croatia in 1992 was the large parts of the country that were not emeshed in the war. The same held true for Serbia. Farmers grew tobacco. Trollies ran on time. Put down in the right place you could buy into the proposition that the nation was at peace, that the distant booms of gunfire that you could only hear on the fringes were something else.
Think now of the United States which is embroiled in two wars. What have you seen of soldiers and civilians falling here? The war is playing out as entertainment for we safe ones. News coverage does not enhance our decision-making but plays us for rubes.
Journalists love wars for the adrenaline rush and the chance to tell an offbeat story that we’re hearing too much today. (No, not an offbeat story about how the war is a sham and the people of Iraq don’t deserve this treatment. An offbeat story about violence and alleged success swatting Iraqi cockroaches down served straight from the military spin machine.) Their obsession with getting in leads them to make devil’s bargains: we will not speak badly of the military lest they take away our press credentials.
I see bloggers as a necessary check from the place where the war is not happening. My friends and I who worry about the peacetime effects of war — [[post-traumatic stress disorder]] for example — don’t print out the words of the military spin machine (which is now telling us that PTSD is a [[personality disorder]] and therefore the fault of those who have it). Skube calls us guilty of manifesto because we don’t “weigh out both sides of the issue” (something which Skube himself does not do in his opinion piece.)
If I am to single out any problem with journalism that I find most debilitating it is its insistence that both sides be “weighed out” even though one side has been thoroughly discredited. A classic example of this is the creationism versus evolutionism “debate”. I believe that journalists have contributed a great deal to the legitimacy of creationists by treating their side as equal in weight and evidence to the evolutionist side. It has only been the miracle of a capable judiciary (a fact that could change thanks to Bush) and scientists willing to defend the scientific method that has prevented the tinpots from taking over. But to read the papers, the evolutionists have no more grounds for their view than the creationists do. The theory of evolution is falling apart, they echo the Creationists saying, which shows that those writing the stories have little or no understanding of scientific debate. A little appreciation of the scientific method would quickly reveal why this debate should not even be covered. It only brings in dollars that the Creationists can use to destroy education.
Manifestos dominate blogging because journalists have left us with the need to work overtime to counter their failure to investigate their stories deeply enough. The press may be the fourth estate, but I dare say that the public — manifest in bloggers — represents what could be called the Mega-Estate, the one that encloses the other four and keeps them in check. Unlike journalists, we’re not in it for the money, but for ourselves as taxpayers and human beings. If Skube doesn’t like this as a justification for blogging, then he has a problem with the gist of Democracy.
For another, perhaps better answer to Skube, click here.
In other news, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist asks us to forget about who has the most money and the biggest poll numbers: tell us what the ideas are. Echoing that could be a very good thing for bloggers to do.
[tags]journalism, journalists and pundits, journalists & pundits, blogging, blogs, punditry[/tags]
Look at that Jug
Posted on August 19, 2007 in Imagery
No, really, see how it was painted! Pretty cool, eh?
More here and stolen from the sometimes Good Astrology blog.
Missed Photo Opportunity
Posted on August 19, 2007 in Creatures Encounters
It was large, black, and walking in the road. The size, the bare head, and the wings pushed back like the long hair on an American colonist made me suspect a turkey at first. As we got closer, I spied the ragged bright red head that intimated that this was a [[turkey vulture]] picking at road kill. The bird didn’t fly when we passed it in our car, but walked to the side, like a street baseball player getting out of the way until we could get clear and it could play ball again.
[tags]vultures, vulture, turkey vulture, nature, birds, birdwatching, suburban encounters[/tags]
Two Plagues
Posted on August 19, 2007 in Weather Whines
Somewhere there’s got to be a science fiction story about a black planet just radiating heat. The natives paint white, yellow and blue stripes over the surface, then move their black-tired transport vehicles into alignments prefigured by these arrangements. The sentient life forms of this planet run from their transports into refrigerated warehouses and back again.
You can experience a virtual version of this at the corner of El Toro and Rockfield in Lake Forest. The temperatures approach those of Corona.
A fly problem took us to Home Depot today. Swarms of them waited outside our front door. A few of them darted past our door when we opened it and made way for the litter box far in back of the condo. I wanted a cure that meant death to the parents, abortion to the maggots.
When we got to the Foothill Ranch store, they were all out of non-nuclear indoor cures. They had those plastic bags and jugs that stank of carrion for sale, but we didn’t want these in our office. Half a dozen people stood around waiting for one of the customer service reps to supply them with anti-fly products — there seems to be a Moses somewhere wishing them down on Foothill Ranch and Portola Hills.
What we wanted was a No-Pest Strip, a poison-saturated rectangle that would put every [[Diptera|dipterid]] in our office to eternal rest. The customer service desk sent us to the El Toro store and — yes! — they had the killing slab. I hung it in the office and watched as the [[Calyptratae|caluptrataens]] succumbed, spiralling in drowsy dreams until they fell.
Now I wonder: when will the toads show, when will we be covered with boils?
Guest Map
Posted on August 19, 2007 in Gratitude Site News
If you haven’t done so, click on the Guest Map link in the left column and put a pin up. If you didn’t put a picture up the first time, I believe that you can still load one. Thanks to those who did.
From Our “Newspaper of Record”
Posted on August 19, 2007 in Journalists & Pundits
“Despite what you’ve heard about rodents and sinking ships, mice hate water.” – New York Times
Um, I think the phrase “rats desert a sinking ship” suggests that mice do hate water, not the opposite.
Figures that it was a sports reporter.
Fracturing Fraud
Posted on August 18, 2007 in Reading Scoundrels
In Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America, Ken Dornstein tells the story of
a husband-and-wife team who slipped and fell their way around the nation, amassing a small fortune in bogus claims. Their scheme was said to have been made possible by the wife’s rare bone condition, which rendered her limbs susceptible to breakage at the slightest blow. In 1870 the woman, who is referred to only by her maiden name Baker, married a man names James. G. Wheelright of Worcester, Massachusetts. The couple moved to Utica, New York, where Mr. Wheelright soon brought his wife down to the railway platform and had her break her leg on a broken plank. Wheelright then sued the railway company for $10,000. Ten days later he accepted $5,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Over the course of the next year, Mrs. Wheelright would break a leg in Pittsburgh and in Cincinnati, netting more than $20,000 for the two faked falls. Later in Chicago, the couple, operating under the name McGinniss, collected $8,000 for an alleged fall in a hotel courtyard. “By this time,” the Times reported, “Mrs. Wheelright was willing to retire from the business, but her husband had set his heart on making $50,000, and, like a good wife, she consented to break some more bones.”
After a failed attempt to collect money from the City of St. Louis in March, 1872, the couple planned a slip-and-fall stunt on the ice of a Canadian Railway platform in Detroit. Still $16,000 short of Mr. Wheelright’s goal, however, the couple hatched the idea that the fragile Mrs. Wheelright, now “Mrs. Wilkins,” would break both arms, netting $8,000 apiece, it was hoped. Early one morning Mr. Wheelright took his wife out and her fall on a patch of ice on Canadian Pacific property, where she successfully broke both arms. “Unfortunately, she fell more heavilly than was necessary,” it was later reported, “and, in addition to her arms, she broke her neck and instantly expired.” Unbowed by grief, Mr. Wheelright raised his demand on the Canadian Pacific to $25,000; he got all he asked for, exceeding by $9,000 his overall accident faking goal of $50,000. (pp. 61-62)
Medieval Tech Support
Posted on August 18, 2007 in Satire
If you haven’t seen this little piece, well, it’s about time.
