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From: iayork@panix.com (Ian A. York)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Why is this newsgroup so uptight?
Date: 11 Jul 1996 11:31:27 -0400

In article <31e2f14b.109285018@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, Karen <deckers@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> You're welcome to your opinion. And if you truly speak the
>way you wrote that message, then I'm sorry I even expected you to
>understand my point.

In fact I do talk a lot like that in conversation, and so do you and so does everybody else you know. If you don't believe me, tape some people in a conversation without their knowledge (warning: may be illegal) and make an exact transcription of that conversation.

What you'll see will look something like this:

P: The grand jury thing has its, uh, uh, uh - view of this they might, uh. Suppose we have a grand jury proceeding. Would that, would that, what would that do to the Ervin thing? Would it go right ahead anyway? D: Probably.
P: But then on that score, though, we have - let me just, uh, run by that, that - You do that on a grand jury, we could then have a much better cause in terms of saying, "Look, this is a grand jury, in which, uh, the prosecutor -" How about a special prosecutor? We could use Petersen, or use another one. You see he is probably suspect. Would you call in another prosector?

That was a typical section of Nixon's Watergate tapes; I took it from Stephen Pinker's book _The Language Instinct_ (William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, 1994; ISBN 0-688-12141-1). Pinker used this to illustrate that

conversation out of context is virtually opaque. ... even when transcribed perfectly, conversation is hard to interpret. People often speak in fragments, interrupting themselves in midsentence to reformulate the thought or change the subject ...

I could make some disparaging remark about your ability to observe, but that wouldn't be fair. The great majority of people are unaware of what conversations really are like, and most probably believe that they sound something like interviews as reported in newspapers - let's call that "conventional written conversational." Of course, reporters have long known that the easiest way to make somebody sound stupid is to quote her word for word in exact transcription. Pinker again:

Not everyone was shocked by the unintelligibility of transcribed speech. Journalists know all about it, and it is a routine practice to edit quotations and interviews heaviliy before they are published. For many years the tempermental Boston Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens complained bitterly that the press misquoted him. The _Boston Herald_, in what they must have known was a cruel trick, responded by running a daily feature in which his post-game comments were reproduced word for word.

I presume that what you really had in mind was not actually using 'real' spoken English, but using "conventional written conversational". I suspect that anyone who solely uses that format in actual conversation has neurologic problems; for an example of this, I refer you to Oliver Sacks's _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (Harper & Row, New York, 1987; ISBN 0-06-097079-0), in particular the case of "Emily D." who had a glioma in her right temporal lobe:

She could less and less follow loose speech or slang - speech of an allusive or emotional kind - and more and more required of her interlocuters that they speak *prose* - 'proper words in proper places'.

This begs the question, of course, as to why one particular convention (that used in newspapers) should be used over any other convention. Maddy and others have pointed out that the conventions used in discussing a field are not necessarily those used in the field itself: "Pediatricians don't write papers in baby talk." One person wrote to me and suggested that I could have said for myself, "I study viruses which are spread by sexual contact; but when I'm at a conference with my colleagues, mostly we just talk."

Of course, that person was obviously not present at the 19th International Herpesvirus Workshop in Vancouver, which was held within spitting distance of the nude beaches.

I still wake up screaming some nights.

Though I must say, it was both entertaining and educational to watch the effects of unexpected sunburns on dignified international virologists; I was interested to watch Dr. James R. Smiley (the head of my research group at the time) carefully planning out his moves in advance to minimize stress and strain on the afflicted areas.

Actually, the word "dignified" probably isn't appropriate for the herpesvirologists, when one remembers, for example, the conference in Scotland some years ago. Early risers were treated to the sight of distinguished senior virologists unconcious on the grounds, like a trail of bread crumbs leading to the previous night's conference rooms. But I digress.

And that digression is another illustration of why conversational or spoken English is less appropriate for this group. Although thread drift is notorious here, it seems reasonable to me that I keep my posts to one subject, more or less. That doesn't happen in conversation.

To my mind, the more apt comparison is to my professional presentations. When I give a review, or present my data, to ten people at the neighbouring lab or to one thousand sunburnt virologists, I have some kind of structure to my talk. I don't write it down, or even rehearse it; but I know where I'm going and how I'm going to get there. If you transcribed those talks, you'd find them completely different than my conversational style, and much closer to my written style - if less discursive and less sarcastic, as a rule. Though when my laser pointer died half way through a talk, and I finished up using a "Twizzler" glow-in-the-dark light stick tied to a stick, I did make a few comments in passing.

AFU is read by something like 200,000 people, and every one of them is my very best mate - no, really, I mean it, I luurve you all. You're worth at least 1/200 the trouble I take in preparing for a talk.

There's a corollary to this. When one of my colleagues gets up to give a talk, and he is unprepared and disorganized and his talk is unstructured, there's a pretty good chance the data he's talking about are worthless. The same may apply to AFU posts. If you have something worth saying, it's probably worth spending a moment thinking through the post you're going to make.

Zen stories are often followed by and encapsulated in koans. Someone wishing to contemplate the Zen of AFU (AFU GmbH's motto: "Enlightenment guaranteed or double your Buddha nature back!") may consider this:

Sunburnt naughty bits
make Jim move more thoughtfully.
One more Smiley flamed.

Ian "my cow orkers say 'Mu'" York

--

      Ian York   (iayork@panix.com)  <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
      "-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
       very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England