Some of Us Got in This Business Because of Fairies

It turns out that Ann Arbor, Michigan, harbors a number of Fairy Doors in buildings to accommodate the Urban Fairies of the city. You can see the entire collection of Fairy Doors online thanks to the efforts of Jonathan B. Wright.

Since fairy stories were among my first literary experiences, I'm glad to see fairies are so honored in Ann Arbor.

The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. --The Great Gatsby, Chap. 2

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, the spectral eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg look out from a billboard over a wasteland. Some interpreters say they are a symbol of God's eyes; others focus on the "TJ" and think of the failed agrarian vision of Thomas Jefferson. In any case, those eyes are spooky and seem to pass judgment upon the careless behavior they witness in the novel.

As it turns out, Fitzgerald was on to something.

The BBC reports that a pair of big brother eyes looking out from a poster boosts people's honesty. A study from Newcastle University monitored how much money people deposited in a coffee canteen's honesty system. When the poster with prices featured flowers, people paid only a third of what they paid when the poster featured a picture of human eyes.

One of the researchers concluded "the eyes on the poster may affect people's perception that they are being watched by other people." She continued, "It does raise the possibility that you could get people to behave more co-operatively or pro-socially by putting up pictures of eyes. . . . It would work particularly in instances where people have to make a choice between whether to behave well or badly."

I don't know . . . people still behaved pretty badly in The Great Gatsby.

40 Greatest Magazine Covers

In October of 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors picked their top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years. According to the ASME press release,

A judging panel of 52 magazine editors, design directors, art directors and photography editors was charged with picking the 40 top covers from a pool of 444 images representing 136 magazines. The contest was open to all consumer magazines published in the United States. Magazines were invited to submit up to four entries from their respective publications. Entrants were also encouraged to nominate covers of magazines that were not published by their company or were no longer being published.

The ASME never spells out its criteria for a great cover, but the results speak for themselves. Regardless of the topic, they are all arresting. Here are a few of our favorites, along with their respective rankings:

#4 The March 29, 1976 New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg offers a New Yorker's slightly biased view of America. Those of us in the west always suspected as much.







# 7 The National Lampoon's 1973 cover read "If you don't buy this magazine we'll kill this dog." The dog's eyes say it all.








#23 The November 13, 2000 issue of The Nation was published while the results of the 2000 election were still pending and focused on what a George W. Bush administration might be like. Note the subtle resemblance to another one of our heros, Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Newman.





For a complete listing of the winners, (and you really want to know which one came in as #1, don't you?) as well as background information on each of the winning covers, see ASME's Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years.

The Queen-Mother of Dirty Words

The movie: A Christmas Story
The scene: Ralphie helping his dad change a tire
The event: Ralphie spills the hub cap and the lug nuts go flying into the snow.

Ralphie: Oooh fuuudge!
Ralphie as Adult: Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!
Mr. Parker: What did you say?
Ralphie: Uh, um...
Mr. Parker: That's... what I thought you said. Get in the car. Go on!
Ralphie as Adult: It was all over - I was dead. What would it be? The guillotine? Hanging? The chair? The rack? The Chinese water torture? Hmmph. Mere child's play compared to what surely awaited me.

Switch to Ralphie, a bar of soap in his mouth, being grilled by his mother:

Mother: Alright. Now, are you ready to tell me where you heard that word?
Ralphie as Adult: Now, I had heard that word at least ten times a day from my old man. He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master. But, I chickened out and said the first name that came to mind.
Ralphie: Schwartz! (Link)

Alas for poor Schwartz when his mother heard the news. And yet, in spite of the valiant efforts of mothers in English speaking countries around the world, it is a word which just won't go away.
Our previous entry, "No Frakkin'Way!", focused on current standards and usage of swear words. For a more in depth treatment of the etymology, history, and legal implication of the use of the F-word, the "gold-standard" of profanity, see Christopher Fairman's excellent article "Fuck."

In his abstract, Fairman, a faculty member at the Ohio State Moritz College of Law who waited until after he was awarded tenure to write this article, says

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education.

Make no mistake: this is a scholarly treatment of our most taboo word (although some linguists argue that it has slipped to third in the taboo word rankings).

Of particular interest to teachers--both high school and college-- is Fairman's review of legal precedent surrounding dismissal of teachers who have used the term in class. It is an area of some confusion, with some courts holding that the teacher's right to free speech does not apply in the classroom, while others have held that there are legitimate curricular reasons for the use of taboo words in a classroom.

Here are a few additional links:
"The Big One" -- from the Boston Globe
The F-Word -- Lexicon of current usage

No Frakkin' Way!

This spring, we've been following Language Log's discussion of swear words in print. The linguists at Language Log have no patience with publications such as The New York Times which choose cloying coyness over taboo words. They much prefer the approach of the Guardian and the Economist, both of which will use a swearword judiciously. As the Guardian's online Style Guide says,

We are more liberal than any other newspaper, using words such as cunt and fuck that most of our competitors would not use.

The editor's guidelines are straightforward:

First, remember the reader, and respect demands that we should not casually use words that are likely to offend.

Second, use such words only when absolutely necessary to the facts of a piece, or to portray a character in an article; there is almost never a case in which we need to use a swearword outside direct quotes.

Third, the stronger the swearword, the harder we ought to think about using it.

Finally, never use asterisks, which are just a copout, or as Charlotte Bronte elegantly put it: "The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it spares - what horror it conceals."

The Language Log discussion covers a number of techniques media and subcultures use to avoid taboo words, including off-word substitutions (such as flip) or coded obscenities (such as Battlestar Gallactica's use of frak) as well as invented swearwords (such as Science Fiction writer Larry Niven's tanj, derived from "there ain't no justice") and avoidance characters (such as f**k or @#$!).

For more reading, see

• Fake Cuss Words wiki
• Language Log's Words That Can't Be Printed in the New York Times and Goram Motherfrakkers!
  
• Diacritiques's Avoiding the asterisks . . . of avoidance
• "Thinking specifically about the F-word . . ." which discusses an AP poll on the use of profanity in public discourse (also from Language Log)
  

Gallery of Regrettable Food

Every once and awhile we run across a web site so special it is as if its very existence justifies the internet.

James Lileks' web site falls into this category. Lileks.com (Humiliating Defenseless Ephemera Since 1996) presents wonderful photos, advertisements, and other stuff (it's really rather hard to categorize) from the 30's, 40's, and 50's--mostly.

Doubtless we will dip into Lilek's site in future postings, but to start with we were taken with the Gallery of Regrettable Food, which highlights a variety of special recipe collections. Stroll back through memory lane (at least for some of us) and sample

• Cookout Champion BBQ Tricks
• Knudson Recipes for Greater Food Value
• More Fun with Coffee
• Better Homes and Gardens Meat Cook Book
• Knox On-Camera Recipes (Gelatin as seen on TV!)
• Cookin with Dr. Pepper
• and many, many more!

Our personal favorite is Good Housekeeping's Ten PM Cook Book. We confess we are rarely up that late, but if we were we would certainly like to try out some of these offerings. The Benedictish Frankwiches look particularly tasty, even though they are aimed at a teen audience.

If you are in need of a coffee table book to impress the company, the Gallery of Regrettable Food is available in hard copy, also suitable for propping by the stove while you whip up a tasty gelatin mold with Dr. Pepper and green olives.

Plagiarism in the real world

Our previous post focused on plagiarism in the academic world, but we don’t wish to give the impression that plagiarism is limited to wayward students. Indeed, the list of the rich and the famous who have been accused of plagiarism, accusations supported by evidence which is at times undeniable, includes some surprising names.

For example, Martin Luther King plagiarized significant portions of his thesis and enough material in his other writings and speeches that it created significant problems for the editors of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project and resulted in a national argument on race and politics and scholarship. (Google Martin Luther King and plagiarism for a sense of the scope of this discussion.)

FamousPlagiarists.com has compiled a lengthy list of accused plagiarists which includes such luminaries as H. G. Wells, Joe Biden, Helen Keller, Bruno Bettelheim, T.S. Eliot (there’s more than allusion in the Waste Land), Stephen Ambrose, Dan Brown, Coldplay, Vladimir Putin, and on and on and on.

Sometimes the plagiarism is obvious, as in the recent case of Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, which was pulled from the shelves by Little, Brown & Co. after a number of “parallels” to novels by Megan McCafferty were identified. The Harvard Crimson reproduced some of these “parallels.”

Mafferty: “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart. Guess which one I got. You’ll see where it’s gotten me.”
Viswanathan: “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty. I had long resigned myself to category one, and as long as it got me to Harvard, I was happy. Except, it hadn’t gotten me to Harvard. Clearly, it was time to switch to category two.”

However, it is worth keeping in mind an observation made in the Library Journal Review: “Fine lines separate unconscious influence, adaptation, paraphrase, and downright theft by writers.” For example, we know that Shakespeare based many of his plays on Holinshed’s Chronicles of England Scotland, and Ireland, (and wasn’t above lifting a few lines here and there) although we refer to that usage not as Shakespeare’s plagiarism but as his use of sources.

Perhaps that is why T. S. Eliot wrote “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” (Link)

Most discussions of plagiarism, of course, do not even touch upon the common practices of speech writing and ghost writing. Few expect politicians to write their own speeches, and few of the famous and powerful have time or skill to actually write–which, as we all know, can be a difficult and time-consuming process. It appears that Profiles in Courage was actually written by Theodore Sorenson, though John Kennedy contributed some notes and ideas.

Furthermore, in the academic world, it is not unusual for a senior faculty member to be listed as a co-author of a work written by graduate students but overseen by the professor. The Chronicle of Higher Education even offers the advice that “Most graduate students who publish do so as co-authors on articles with more senior researchers and faculty members. This is fine. Be open to sharing credit with others, even if you feel you have made a disproportionate contribution to the research.” (Link)

In the end, it seems to us that the increasing interest in plagiarism parallels the rising concern with the protection of intellectual property rights. The internet has made it possible for intellectual property–be it text or sound or image–to be freely copied without payment to the writer or creator or company which holds the rights. The issue is not morality, but commerce, not art, but the ability to profit from a work.

You need look no further than the Eiffel Tower for a compelling example. Its nighttime display of lights has been copyrighted, so that it is now illegal to reproduce a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night. The copyrighting of that which was once seen as residing squarely in the public domain raises a host of interesting issues, but that is the subject of another post.

Tips for the Plagiarist

Plagiarism has long been the bane of faculty in the academic world, and from our perspective here at nHumanities student plagiarism is increasing. The internet makes it so easy, and it is such a temptation to cut and paste without fussing with citations.

Alex Halavais, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo, has put together a tongue-in-cheek guide for plagiarists entitled "How to Cheat Good." Of course, Halavais would prefer students not cheat at all, but like most teachers he felt compelled to offer suggestions on how to improve the final product--even when that product is an ineptly plagiarized essay.

My personal favorite:

When you copy things from the web into Word . . . don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.

Here's the link to "How to Cheat Good." (Be sure to read a few of the 225 comments -- as of this posting -- to his article.)

We're back

It was a hard end of the semester for nHumanities. We apologize for the down time, but now that our batteries have had a chance to recharge, we will be posting our usual mix of eclectica--the serious and not so serious that happens to catch our attention.