Musing on muses

I contracted a muse today, or possibly earlier this year. This in an effort to propel my writing through the National Novel Writer's Month. We shall see if I have the ability or the energy.

Being who I am, I cannot avoid analyzing words and phrases for their full meaning.

Consider "contracting a muse."

Taking the last sub-phrase "a muse" first, this is simple. To wit:

• (in Greek and Roman mythology) each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who preside over the arts and sciences.
• a woman, or a force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.

I think that is pretty clear. Of course, I could compress the sub-phrase "a muse" into "amuse", but that would take us down unnecessary tangents.

The first word "contract" is altogether more tricksy though:

noun

• 1. a written or spoken agreement, especially one concerning employment, sales, or tenancy, that is intended to be enforceable by law.
• informal: an arrangement for someone to be killed by a hired assassin.
• BRIDGE: the declarer's undertaking to win the number of tricks bid with a stated suit as trumps.
• dated: a formal agreement to  marry.

verb

• 1. decrease in size, number, or range
• 2. enter into a formal and legally binding agreement.
• 3. catch or develop (a disease or infectious agent).
• 4. become liable to pay (a debt).

Such a plethora of meaning wrapped into a single word.

Of course one could argue from a modern romantic sense that all the above are meant to apply to modern relationship, but I would disagree.

The point I was trying to make though is that I have now contracted (entered into an agreement with) a muse that I am fortunate enough to have previously contracted (been infected by).

Hopefully I will not be contracted [liable to pay (emotionally  or otherwise)] to, or contracted  [decreased in size, number, or range] by, said muse. I doubt it, I have heard she is lazy with the karmic paperwork.

So go the thoughts that hum through my head on a Tuesday evening.

Quick thoughts: Honey and 1066

Hammering out long complex philosophical thoughts is something I do as well as beavers build freeways.

So let me try something simple.

I was "helping" my daughter with her project on bees this evening (due tomorrow, some things never change) when I came across this wonderfully familiar fact:

Origins of words:

Bee: Old English bēo, of Germanic origin

Hive: Old English hȳf, of Germanic origin.

Honey: Old English hunig, of Germanic origin

What does this have to do with 1066?
For hundreds of years, England was conquered by Celts, Franks, Romans, Vikings, and, most importantly for this story, German speaking Anglo-Saxons in 450 AD. Then they stopped being conquered for a bit and a language called Old English was created, mostly from German with some words from the languages of the previous conquerors.
In 1066 a French guy called William conquered England and gave all the important positions in the kingdom to his French buddies.
Over the centuries these foreigners introduced all of their fancy foreign words into English to create a new language called middle English. Being fancy folk with foreign ways, those words only described the kind of things they bothered with.

This eventually developed into modern English which was created by everyone being really lazy with pronunciation. Then about 100 years ago someone created a language called American which was even lazier, if you can believe it.
Eventually my children's generation created something which is allegedly language which I can't even.

So now we have an English language where most of the hard working bits come from German and all the fancy stuff comes from French. The really dumb bits come from Miley Cyrus and Stephen Hawking.

For example:
Work: from the German "Werk"
Managing Director: from Latin "manage" & [Anglo-Norman] French "directour"
Sheep: from the German "Schaf"
Civilian (Human sheep): from Old French "civilien"
Football: German
Tennis: French
Boss: from Dutch "baas" [via South Africa]
Apartheid: from Afrikaans [via South Africa]

BFF: Origin unknown

String theory: Two words that each make sense but taken together start talking about "one dimension[al] objects"... OK, boy bands and I really, really can't even.

So I am writing in a language that has three parts.

A German part which I use if I want to get work done.

A French part which one should certainly use to seduce the mademoiselles.

And a modern part which make you hip to the jive of the new lingo, y'all.

Comprende?

On Truth Diggers and Trolls

A few interesting ideas in my head today made me want to write about the truth-diggers and trolls in our world.
For the sake of convenience and so as not to refer to them specifically again, trolls are everything from hate posters to ISIS decapitators to colonial war mongers to Nazis. The difference between them is merely a question of degrees, after all. Shitty shit shits.

Let me define more carefully what I mean by truth-diggers. These are people who believe that THE TRUTH is important.
Yes, I know: about 93.2% of you are already adding qualifications to that statement in your minds. All those ifs and buts just mean you are not the people I am referring to. You, like me, fit into that interstitial group of "normals."

Truth-diggers are not "truthers" or conspiracy theorists. A truth-digger will call you out for factual inaccuracies, logical fallacies and grammatical errors even when you are trying to support them.

Truth-diggers are not attention whores. They will write an essay in defense of a simple point of decency and then ignore an ad hominem attack as if it never happened.

Truth-diggers are batshit crazy. Hope that you are never ruled by one.

BUT

Truth diggers are the conscience of our society. And they are winning.

Before I get into that winning, let me first list some of the ideas that provoked these thoughts:

• A heart-rending post from Kathy Sierra (aka SeriousPony) about trolls and women. Read it. Seriously, forget the rest of this post and read it. It is thoughtful, honest, shocking. For me it was emphasized by the hosts of This Week in Google talking about their, and their families, suffering from harassment. The life of an even nominally well known woman on the internet is so much different and more awful to mine. This was complicated for me because Kathy's main antagonist wrote an empathetic post that I 100% agreed with about a hero of mine, Richard Stallman. Life is complicated.
• Jennifer Lawrence "refusing to apologize" for the naked selfies, instead saying: "'you should cower with shame' for viewing my nudes." I haven't viewed your nudes Jennifer, tempted as I may be. (Hat-tip to Georgie) 
• An instructive twitter conversation with two of my favorite tweeps about the solution to trolls. I, of course, am in favor of a Roman solution. Let's force everyone to share everything they ever write with their mothers. They questioned me. Yeah it creeps me out too, but it's the only way.
• A fleeting fancy of creating a female social media persona for myself (40-something soccer mom, married [sorry guys], into yoga and blogging) so as to experience the hatred first hand.
• A private conversation with a truth-digger (a hat-tip to you too) and
• As always, a discussion with my wife. Touching on Ada Lovelace, Jean Jennings-Bartik and Frances Bilas et al; my eldest daughter; trolls; said private conversation; and psychology. [Is the oxford semi-colon a thing?]

So why do I think think the truth-diggers are winning?

Stephen Pinker wrote a book called "The bettter angels of our nature: Why violence has declined."  showing that we are living in the most peaceful era of human history. He measures this by the decline in pro-rata violent deaths over the centuries. He does not declare victory for peace or suggest that we should stop peacing for final victory. But he does say that the numbers are in.

WWI, II, Korea, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Vietnam, Congo,  Ethiopia, Lebbanon, Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, Iraq 1 & 2, Afghanistan 103, 104 & 105, Syria, killer cops, Marikana, drone strikes, etc, etc, etc aside, we are living in the most peaceful era of human history.

How can that be? It sure doesn't feel like it. How do we reconcile our immediate experience with that idea.

Let me propose some possibilities.

• Most cynically, people have found better ways of killing each other. I am not sure if Biafra, Somalia, the Chinese famines, the Western Sarhara and other acts of starvation-as-genocide feature in Mr Pinker's calculations of violent death. I would hope so. [I really should read that book before basing an entire blogpost on it, shouldn't I?]
• Inequality of excess. The nastiness of this world is not distributed as evenly as it was in the past. The European savages could wipe out more of the world [pro-rata] in a decade that ISIS could manage in a century but ISIS is operating in a smaller area. Deaths from the Israeli occupation of Gaza is small potatoes compared to the Irish famine of the 19th century perpetrated on a similarly sized area. (Godawful and nasty pun, I know.)
• Good fun as war. As uncomfortable as this may be, we have to acknowledge that many of the young men who would have served in the Roman legions, Sassanid cataphracts or Turkish bombardiers are now shuttered in their parents basements. The evil they sometimes do is still evil, but we do not count it as "spoils of war." Is it impossible to imagine that the young male still calls out for blood, be he ever so far from the rape and pillage of the battlefield?
• Better communications. The world is in my face like an anteaters tongue in an ant's antechamber right now. From St. Louis shenanigans to Hong Kong Gung Ho [it didn't mean what you think it meant], I cannot turn on Twitter without learning of some terrible tragedy or lamentable last stand. Where are the walls that should protect me from the horror? They are gone, shelled and shattered in the wastelands of the Somme, Verdun, Auschwitz, Stalingrad, Srebrenitsa, Somaliland, St Louis. Peepholes have been pried in the ruins with Facebook and Google. We are too much with the world. "We are the world," is an ominous threat.
• More wealth equals more caring. Compassion is a luxury. Telling a homeless man about the travails in the Ukraine or Syrian refugees is callous. His personal concerns about the next 24 hours are far more important than anything, anywhere, ever. You have to have a certain amount of security and possibly insouciance to really care. Of course there are those of you who don't and still do and that is why you hurt yourselves so bad.
• Because capitalism or communism. Nah, just kidding. Those tired old ideas mean nothing.

So the world may be less violent and deadly than it was in the past but there is still much evil around. The trolls are not only still with us, but they are now unionized. They have their fellowship of the interrupt-ring. Terrible things, personal and public, still happen every day.

This is because the war is not won and may never be. But the truth-diggers, the bleeding hearts and artists, the decent folk, are on the ascent. One battle at a time. One word at a time. One hug, one cent, one cure, one peace deal at a time.

It will not be yours to see a final victory, but only to know that you stood your ground.

Melancholy happiness really.