Tag Archives: people

That isn’t what irony means

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The words “irony” and “ironic” get thrown around a lot in places that they shouldn’t.

This is not a pedantic rant asserting that words can only be used in the way prescribed in my favorite dictionary, or that the meanings of words never change. Words change over time as people use them in new and different ways. And what’s most important is whether or not the listeners understood what was meant, rather than whether a particular utterance followed someone’s notions about proper grammar and usage.

We will talk some other time about usage and the misuse of language (and about people who think they are correcting other people’s misuse when, in fact, they are the ones who don’t understand usage). No, today I want to talk about the abuse of the word irony.

My biggest dictionary with the magnifier
Checking with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a post by me if it weren’t at least a bit pedantic: the very oldest instance of the use of irony in the English language, according to the Oxford Dictionary, was in the year 1502. In that instance, it was describing a debate tactic by which a person pretended to believe one thing in order to engage a person in conversation and argue him around to the opposite belief. This is sometimes called Socratic Irony because it resembles a method Socrates used to teach and persuade.

Through the five hundred and eleven years since, irony’s meaning has expanded to include any situation in which someone says or acts the exact opposite of what is actually meant or expected. Similar to sarcasm, though sarcasm more often has a malicious intent. In a play or other work of fiction when the audience is made to see an incongruity between the situation and the words or actions of the characters and the characters are unaware of the incongruity we call that dramatic irony. Irony is usually poignant, rather than mocking.

In the last few decades the types of incongruences that have been described as ironic have become broader, to the point where virtually any incongruity at all gets called ironic.

But there have to be lines. Otherwise why do we need the word irony at all? I believe, in order for an action to be ironic that the incongruity has to have something to do with either the intention of the person performing the act or the expectation of the people who will see it. Preferably both.

So while it might be ironic to name an enormous dog Tiny, it is not ironic for someone who considers themself a sophisticated intellectual to name their dog Cat. One can argue the second one a couple of ways, but the main reason it isn’t ironic is that anyone who literally thinks of oneself as a sophisticated intellectual is exactly the sort of pretentious prat to do something like name a dog Cat and think he’s being clever.

A beard can’t be ironic. No matter how much that pretentious young man you met at the coffee shop insists that it is. His facial hair can be sexy, ugly, well-trimmed, embarrassing, or a number of other adjectives, but it can’t be ironic. People don’t have sufficiently specific expectations about the facial hair of strangers for any beard incongruity to qualify as ironic.

If you’re talking about something, and then that thing happens, that is not ironic. It’s a coincidence, which is a form of congruity. Irony is about incongruities, not congruities.

If you say something stupidly offensive and then:

  • people react with more hostility and scorn than you expected, you insist that you were right,
  • but then when that doesn’t work you insist you were misquoted,
  • but evidence to the contrary arrives, so you insist you were joking,
  • then when no one finds it funny but rather even more scorn you for it,

…you can’t claim that you were being ironic. Sorry, if you had originally meant the opposite of your actual words, that would have been your first excuse, not your fourth.

Finally, if you are an entertainer who does that, and then your career takes a nosedive? That’s not irony. That’s called just desserts. And we’re not talking about pie and ice cream

I’ve known…

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On the subject of coming out to one’s parents, I’ve always remembered the story one acquaintance told: “When I finally came out to my mom, she said, ‘I’ve known you were gay since you were two.’ And I thought, ‘Gee, thanks, Mom, why didn’t you tell me? It would have made my teens a lot less confusing!'”

Growing up gay, particularly before the 90s, the best you could hope for if your parents learned you were gay was a reaction like his mother’s. Truth be told, since we had no positive role models, and what little we knew about the family members of gay people were that they were all ashamed or hostile to their gay child, we didn’t even hope for that.

In my early teens I recall whispers about someone’s cousins being kicked out by his parents, for instance. In my later teens I knew one classmate who was accused of being gay whose parents sent him to “reform school.” Another who was actually caught having sex with another guy was kicked out by his parents and wound up living with relatives in another city (how the quarterback of the football team who he was having sex with was able, somehow, to convince everyone in authority that the much smaller, skinnier kid had somehow forced him into the situation is a tale for another post).

When I did come out to my own parents in the early nineties (I was a gainfully employed adult living in my own place in another city, by then), their reaction could best be characterized as, “I never had any clue, I don’t accept it, and someone must have done something to you to make you think this way.”

Even today, we are surprised to hear of anything as loving and accepting from a parent as this letter that a teen-ager in Michigan received this week from his Dad:

Michigan dad put his son's fears about coming out to rest with this loving letter.
Michigan dad put his son’s fears about coming out to rest with this loving letter.

You can read the story of a teen named Nate, from Michigan, and the note from his Dad in this story.

Note: since apparently I wasn’t being clear: I am not Nate. That isn’t my letter. My father’s reaction was, as noted above, pretty much the opposite of this in every way.

Things I never believed I would see

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A lot of gay news blogs are sharing the video below this week. And to most people it probably just seems like a kind of silly video with these two guys talking.

But to folks like me? Gay men who no longer can be described as “young” by any definition? It’s amazing. I literally never believed I would see the day when someone would so casually create a show about them self that included the phrase “Your Favorite Gay Marine.”

The fact that Russ and Matt are just two adorable young guys in love, who just happen to both be in the Marines, and happen to be in love with each other, and how matter-of-fact they can be in this very public way is just mind-boggling for an old fart like me:

Public notions

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My old bus route was replaced recently with a so-called Bus Rapid Transit. I say “so-called” because it’s still in with the rest of the traffic, which means it is not true rapid transit. It is merely slightly more rapid bus.

They achieve the faster trips through several clever tricks, one of which is having pay stations at several of the bus stop (it’s supposed to be at every bus stop, but they haven’t gotten them all installed yet), so people who have bus passes can just board through any of the three doors on the bus without waiting in line behind the people paying cash. It really does make loading the bus go much faster.

As I was taking a seat on one bus recently, a lady in a nearby seat was ranting to the guy next to her about how the new buses must be rampant with cheating. “Us honest folks are paying for the other riders! Look! Look! How can they tell which people have actually paid before getting on! It’s such a waste!”

Since I could hear her clearly through my headphones, I knew she was talking very loudly, so I didn’t feel that this counted as a private conversation. I leaned forward and said, “Random fare inspections.”

She looked utterly shocked that a stranger would actually talk to her, though the guy next to her just grinned and said, “See, he’s got your answer.”

She blinked and said, “What?”

“They have guys that come on board with a scanner and ask to see everyone’s card or transfer. I’ve had it happen several times. They can scan your card and verify that you paid. So cheaters get caught.”

She nodded. Then she said, “Wow. Don’t you think Seattle is getting too Big Brother? I mean, scanning your card…”

Just a second before she was angry because she thought people were taking advantage of the public transit she was paying for. But rather than get into an argument with a stranger (I really had just been trying to be informative), I said, “Oh, no! Not at all!” And pulled my headphones back up onto my ears.

She shook her head, said, “You don’t?” Then turned to the guy and went back to talking. But I couldn’t help but notice that she’d switched to an indoor voice. So I guess my attempt to enlighten had at least made her think about how loudly she was talking.

I understand that relying on an honor system means that some people will cheat. On the other hand, I have seen Fare Officers remove someone who hadn’t paid from the bus. I know that when they do that they write you a ticket and it’s handled like a traffic fine. So there is a penalty that cheaters risk facing.

I’m sure some cheating still happens, but similar systems in other transit systems collect an awful lot of fees matching fairly closely to ridership numbers gathered other ways, so the honor system isn’t a failure. And mathematic models have shown that the savings from the shorter trip times more than make up for the theoretical revenues lost through uncaught cheaters.

And in what way is verifying that passengers on the bus have paid through random sweeps “being Big Brother”? She had just been angrily ranting about how “they” have instituted a system that she thought wasted tax dollars because “they” weren’t making absolutely certain that each and every passenger had paid. “They” should do better!

It’s like the people who scream about “guv’ment regulations” hindering business, who then scream “how can they let people sell that?” if there is a salmonella outbreak and their favorite food is being recalled.

Confirming that someone has paid for the bus ride they are currently taking hardly counts as “Big Brother.” And if you think it does, I shudder to think what sort of aneurism you’ll have if I explain to you precisely how cellphone companies figure out which signals are coming from authorized phones. Or how quickly your position can be pinpointed, even on old, cheap phones that know nothing about GPS. Hint: In order to get your 9-1-1 call to a local emergency operator, they have to be able to figure out your position before you hear their first ring.

March Forth!

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It was spring of my first year in college. I walked into the Math Lab, where I worked, and the administrative assistant looked at me and declared, “March forth!”

“What?”

“It’s the only date on the calendar that is also a command,” she said. “March forth!”

Puns have never really been my thing. I find some of them cute—occasionally even clever—but I almost never think of them on my own. So the joke had never occurred to me. She was flabbergasted that I’d never heard the pun before.

That “March forth!” is an imperative was moderately amusing. I tried in subsequent years to think of something to do with it. Because just pointing out that the day sounds like a command lacks something. And truth be told, about half the time I don’t remember the joke at all until March fifth, by which time it’s too late.

I don’t remember anyone that I ever told the pun too having ever heard it before I mentioned it.

A few years ago, at my previous employer, I wound up on a committee charged with setting up some parties and other fun activities to prop up morale in the work place. Right after someone suggested some activity involving people wearing the shirts of their favorite football team, another co-worker suggested Combat Boot Day. None of us knew what it was.

“When I was in college there was this other girl in my dorm who got us all to wear boots—like Doc Martins or something that could pass for combat boots—on March the fourth. Because it’s March Forth Day. And you March in groups to classes together. And at the end of the day we had a party back in the dorm.”

I had to tell about the admin assistant at my college job who had first told me the March Forth pun and had acted surprised when I didn’t know about the day. But she also hadn’t told me anything to actually do to observe it.

The co-worker said her dorm-mate said it had been an annual thing at her high school. “It was weird, but kind of fun to march around and have people be confused. But now that I say it, I don’t know how we make that an office activity.”

Then I read this rather heartbreaking article: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home. And I thought, “Okay, here’s something I can do.”

So, this March Forth, I would like to urge everyone to go donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

This time it’s (not so) personal

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When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic conflicts which have gone on for generations as a counterexample. I had almost talked about that in the original post, but decided that might be one digression too many.

It’s certainly true that such conflicts have raged on for many generations, sometimes spanning centuries. The key here, I think, is that word “spanning.” People aren’t just holding a grudge about the injustice visited upon an ancestor 11 centuries ago, they are holding a grudge about indignities and atrocities they have witnessed themselves (or experienced the aftereffects of themselves), which they perceive to be a continuation of hundreds of other injustices going all of the way back to that original one.

For instance, a young man may grow up hearing tales from a very young age about how his father was killed by those evil Freedonians when he was just a babe, just as a couple of uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, and so on where unjustly arrested, or tortured, or raped, or killed previously. The Freedonians have always hated the Sylvanians, he is told. Since he is a Sylvanian, they must hate him, too. Everything bad that happens to him in his life, he blames on the Freedonians, either directly because a Freedonian is present, or indirectly because he believes his hardships would be fewer if they hadn’t taken his father from him.

The historical narrative of the many past conflicts between Freedonia and Sylvania provide a context to his personal frustrations and disappointments. Tales of particularly egregious atrocities from the past serve as a rationalization for any actions against Freedonians he takes. Or excuses for any atrocities that others may point out Sylvania inflicted upon Freedonia.

There is also a sort of compound-interest effect. The young man was raised by people who had internalized their own victimization until it metastasized. People brimming over with hatred are not very good at nurturing. The more generations in a row this happens, the less likely each new generation is going to be to empathize with people they perceive as “other.”

The problem is that anyone who has not been raised in the same culture, has not witnessed similar injustices, has not experienced first hand the animosity between the two groups, has a very hard time understanding what the fuss is all about. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard someone ask about troubles in the Middle East, or Subsaharan Africa, or Eastern Europe, “Why can’t they just come to a reasonable settlement?”

Which gets us back to the author’s difficulty.

In order to make a reader care as much about the injustices inflicted by the Freedonians as your Sylvanian protagonist, you have to put the reader in your protagonist’s shoes. It’s not enough to have one of your characters lecture another, “As you know, Bob, the Freedonians are a merciless, hateful people.” You have to show them being merciless. You have to show your protagonist suffering at their hands.

That requires telling the story of how these sorts of age-old hatred are perpetuated because they are renewed again and again with each new generation. Even then, most readers are going to see all those past actions as abstractions. They may sympathize with your protagonist, but they’ll also wonder why he can’t see how odd it is to hold a person living now responsible for actions that took place hundreds of years before that person was born.

Which is a good question to raise. There’s a lot of good drama you can wring out of that sort of situation. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, go for it! But that means going all in. No half-measures. No long expository dump where one character lectures another about the 1200 year history of mutual failed (but not for lack of trying) genocide between Freedonia and Sylvania.

Show it, don’t tell it.

Not according to the script

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One of the best times I ever had as a panelist at a sci fi con was a few years ago at Foolscap when I was sitting between Peter David and Jay Lake discussing Archetypes and Stock Characters (Quick side note: one of the things I love about the sci fi con community in general and Foolscap in particular is that extremely small-time writers like myself get to work with award-winning authors like Peter and Jay).

I had been on panels with Jay before. He was great at pulling the audience into the conversation. He always seemed to know obscure but interesting information about the topic at hand. And he always made you laugh.

I had seen Peter on panels. His enthusiasm and insanely fast wit were invigorating.

Being on a panel with both of them? It was as if one moment I was attending my favorite relaxicon, then I blinked and found myself waterskiing in the middle of the ocean, except it wasn’t a boat pulling me, it was a pair of fighter jets.

Fortunately it was a topic I was passionate about, so I jumped in and tried to keep up. And as I said, it was one of my favorite hours ever at a con.

Unfortunately, currently, both Peter and Jay are struggling against serious medical conditions.

Jay has been fighting cancer for nearly five years. He’s survived multiple surgeries and is undergoing his fourth round of chemotherapy. Doctors have nearly exhausted all conventional treatment options, and now Jay’s only hope of living long enough to see his daughter graduate from high school is an experimental one. Click here for details about the experimental procedure. You may also donate to help with Jay’s medical treatment at that page.

Peter suffered a stroke in December while on vacation with his family. While he has medical insurance, there are always co-pays and other uncovered expenses. His family is not asking for donations, but rather suggest that people who want to help can purchase some of his (very reasonably priced) ebooks. Read this post for more information on how to help.

Happy endings are never guaranteed, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try for them.

The cooing of turtledoves fills the air

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Reporter Marissa Bodnar took this video of the first same-sex couple to be married in Maine stepping out of city hall a bit after midnight:

Crowds greet first same-sex married couple

That was a big crowd to be standing outside at midnight on a snowy night, waiting for a few hours to congratulate some of their fellow citizens. News reports indicated two protestors standing some distance away, singing religious songs. Apparently they kept fleeing the reporters and cameras. One talked briefly to a print reporter and said, “This is a wicked thing,” but wouldn’t say anything more.

I would be the first to defend the right of the protestors to make their beliefs known in a public space. But if you are going to do that, have enough strength of your convictions to stand up for those beliefs. If you don’t have the courage to be photographed protesting in public, why bother? It must be a very, very fragile world you live in if the thought of two women being in love will utterly destroy it. If two middle-aged men (who have been building such a life together for nine years) showing up at city hall (with their four grown children to cheer them on) to get a marriage certificate threatens your whole belief system, it can’t be a very robust faith. No wonder they’re so afraid of everything!

When people find love and build a life together, living and working within their community, that’s a good thing. Accepting your neighbors for who they are strengthens society, it doesn’t weaken it.

Shared fear erodes all that is good in us. Shared joy uplifts and strengthens.

So, share the joy.

Milking it (Not just for eight maids)

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When I was a teenager, the local community college upgraded the lights for its baseball field. After the first night game, a relatively well-to-do widow who lived next to the field called to complain that the lights kept her awake. They were so bright, her curtains couldn’t keep the light out.

So a school official met with her. At her request, he came back during a game and let her show him how much of her house was impacted by the lights. The school brought in some experts to look things over.

Fairly quickly, the school offered to pay to install new windows and blinds, and to investigate whether trees could be planted on school property to shade her house, or whether a tall barrier would work better. She responded with a letter from her lawyer, explaining that the only acceptable solution was the complete and permanent removal of the lights. The letter also asserted that the additional heat from the lights made the house unbearable as summer came on.

The college countered with an offer of more remediation steps, including paying for a central cooling system. She answered by filing a lawsuit against the school and several state agencies.

Thus began a back and forth of offers and rejections. Various state officials became involved. More accomodations were offered. She countered by adding the names of specific officials to the lawsuit, and recruiting various cranks (who would all be part of the Teabagger movement if they were around today) to stage protests, storm board of trustees meetings, and so on.

When the school offered to buy her house for a specific percentage above assessed value and to pay to move her to her new home, her lawyer suggested she take it. She fired the lawyer and hired a new one, and filed more motions to the court. The state attorney general’s office recommended, with all the time and money already sunk into an attempt to get a settlement, that they not risk the expense of all the suits going to trial. They recommended the school moved to condemn her property for the construction of new facilities (they had been buying up property nearby and building new buildings, already).

The process for condemning land when needed for essential services (which, thanks to the original framers of the state constitution, includes education) is much quicker than any lawsuit. The appeals process is more limited, and the standards for filing a suit to stop condemnation are much higher than that to file an ordinary suit.

By the time I was a student at the college, and Editor of the student paper, the final appeal of the condemnation was in the works. She suddenly changed her tune. Those same cranks who had mobbed meetings and staged protests, insisting that none of the offers the school had made were an acceptable solution, now demanded that the school stop the condemnation process, buy her the new blinds, and plant a line of trees to shade her property from the field lights.

Though the drama seemed to be nearly over, I thought it might be worth a story or two. One of the other student reporters was very keen to interview the widow, so I assigned the story to him. A couple days before deadline, he told me the interview had been awkward, but he would have the story in.

The threatening phone calls started before I’d even seen the story, and long before we printed anything. I’d been a student journalist in high school before coming to college, and I’d gotten threats and harassment before. But they had been mostly from other students. This was, I think, the first time that nearly all the threatening phone calls, messages, and notes had been coming from adults outside the school. And some were very vicious, though, to be fair, none were death threats; we usually only got those in relationship to abortion and art show reviews—yes, art show reviews!

I attended the board of trustees meeting where the last opportunity for the school to back out of the condemnation proceeding took place. Dozens of people showed up to speak on the widow’s behalf. But she wasn’t there. She had never attended any of the meetings. She wasn’t incapable of leaving her house. She had hosted several strategy dinners at a restaurant just outside of town to arrange that crowd at the meeting, for instance.

Every single person who spoke on her behalf mentioned again, and again, how she was such a helpless little old lady. And they repeated the appeal for the school to do the very things they had offered to do many times before starting condemnation procedures.

One of the reasons I believe she never showed up at any public meeting was because in person she didn’t come across as a helpless old lady. The student reporter who had interviewed her said that at first she was very sweet and charming, but he must have said the wrong thing at one point, because she became hostile—not in a screaming or insulting way, he said. Her eyes went from twinkly to glaring like a predator. She made several veiled threats indicating she might be able to cause him some trouble if his story didn’t treat her fairly.

Difficult to play the helpless victim when you’re threatening people, particularly in that cold, quiet, and calculating manner.

Even if I hadn’t know that, the personality type was clear by her legal findings. Every compromise that was offered simply spawned more threats, until finally the bluff is called, and suddenly she was all for compromise. It’s classic bully behavior.

Just like Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle, who spent the summer and fall issuing statements that the passage of the Marriage Equality Referendum on the ballot would force his priests and churches to perform same-sex marriages, and urging all religious people to oppose it for that reason. And now that it has passed, he’s issued a set of instructions to the churches in his archdiocese, quoting the portion of the same law that explicitly exempts churches and ministers from performing same.

Classic bully behavior.

Pipers must be paid

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I have issues with wish lists. I have said and written some stupid things about them.

Those things had more to do with my own baggage than anything else. Of course, you might ask, “How can someone have emotional baggage over the notion of wish lists?” The answer is: emotions are, by definition, non-rational. What seems trivial to you may be very painful for someone else.

My issues with wish lists are not that serious. I have this very unrealistic notion that if I care about someone enough to want to buy them a present, that I ought to know them well enough to pick something on my own. Never mind all the times I found myself at a loss for a good gift for my mom. Or something great for my husband. I know that the notion is unrealistic. I know that some of us are very hard to shop for. But whenever I go to browse someone else’s wish list, I feel guilty that I couldn’t come up with something on my own.

Other people have far more serious issues with things that many of us find innocuous. I’ve seen people driven into an uncontrollable rage—face red, unable to sit still, hands shaking with fury—over a particular novelty song, because it triggers memories of bad situations they were in where they felt endangered by another person. Or more accurately, because the song is making a joke out of a not uncommon situation where (sometimes) people suffer real harm.

Telling someone to “get over it” or “get a sense of humor” doesn’t solve anything. When we survive a bad situation, it leaves an impression. Stress causes physical changes in one’s brain which persist long after the stressor is removed. The more severe the situation, the greater the effect. When later situations trigger the memory—whether we are simply reminded of it or believe we may be in an identical situation—the brain reacts. Neurochemicals and hormones are released, and our bodies react.

You might as well tell a person going into anaphylactic shock due to a severe food allergy to “get over it.”

This isn’t to say we can’t undo any of the changes the stress has caused. Good experiences also make changes to the brain, and the right kind of reinforcement can help someone who has a severe reaction to certain triggers moderate the reaction. But it takes time and understanding.

As I said, not all issues are equal. My pointless wish list guilt isn’t debilitating, just annoying. I don’t know what causes it, precisely. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a child, I had a bad experience picking out a gift for one of the more abusive/vindictive adults in my life back then. I don’t remember, all that remains is the feeling. If I have to resort to consulting someone’s wish list, I feel very guilty, with a vague sense of failure or inadequacy.

The crazy part is, when I am drawing a complete blank on someone, and then I discover that they have a wish list, I feel a great sense of relief. Reading such a list, I always discover things the person is interested in that I didn’t know before. And often it gives me ideas of things to get them in the future. So it’s a win all around!

Abuse, whether physical, emotional, verbal, or otherwise, always has consequences. Someone must pay the piper, as the old saying goes. Unfortunately, in these cases, the person who has to pay the piper isn’t the person who called the tune.