The Meridian Post

Speaking of language, there is a faux pas that has long made me cringe, but which reached its apotheosis in a voicemail message I received yesterday from Comcast.

You see, one of the ignorant things people do with English is that they talk (and usually write) about scheduling some event at 12 a.m. or 12 p.m.  Now, this is wrong on two counts.  First, what they don’t understand is that “a.m.” and “p.m.” are abbreviations for two terms in Latin, ante meridian and post meridian.  Meridian means noon, ante means before, and post means after.  The problem with this is that when people say “12 p.m,” they are saying that the time specified is 12 hours after noon, and since what they usually want to say is “noon,” they are wrong by 12 hours.  Noon can be neither 12 hours before or after itself.  Midnight can be either.

Which brings us to the other problem.  There already exist two easy, common words for these times:  noon and midnight.  If one wishes to refer to the time in the middle of the day, all one need do is say “noon” or “12 noon” (which is redundant but acceptable) or write “12 N.”  For the time at the middle of the night, the formulations would be “midnight,” “12 midnight,” or “12 M.”  Easy, n’est pas?

I’ve become more forgiving concerning the evolution of our language as I’ve grown old and weary.  I used to be against the use of “hopefully” in place of “I hope” and still try to maintain that standard personally, but have come to realize that the battle is lost.  Usage has won out over the strict adherence to what are, ultimately, arbitrary rules.  People hear “hopefully” and understand “I hope” without missing a step, and English is more than elastic enough to absorb it.

And one of the problems with “12 a.m.” and “12 p.m.” is that there lurks in them a small element of confusion.  Which is which again?  I’ve seen uses of both for both noon and midnight.  Sure, it is generally the case that people will use “12 a.m.” for midnight and “12 p.m.” for noon, but isn’t there always a moment in reading such a thing in which you stop and ask yourself, quickly, silently, which is which?  This is never the case with noon and midnight.  They are clear, easy, and unpretentious.

And what brought this confusion into final focus for me, what has turned this more into a cause than simply an irritation was the message I got from Comcast.  The recorded lady very helpfully wanted me to know that Comcast was upgrading the lines in our area and that this would improve our service.  Good enough.  I couldn’t be happier.  However, she went on to inform me that these improvements would happen sometime after “12 a.m. midnight.”  And while I did get a good laugh out of how idiotic this formulation was, I knew also, in my soul, that it was time for action.

I’m not sure yet what sort of action this should be.  I’m a proponent of both nonviolence and basic manners, so slapping offenders across the face and saying “Don’t be stupid; it’s midnight” doesn’t seem like the proper way forward.  I would love to hear some useful suggestions.

In the meantime, I would appreciate it if anyone who reads this post would make a small effort to use “noon” and “midnight” when they have the chance and if they would also spread the word.  You just might end up saving some bureaucrat at Comcast a packet of embarrassment.

What the H?

The President’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has raised one issue that I hope all of us–Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, apostate and true believer–can agree on.  There is no reason to use the article “an” before every word that begins with the letter H.

Traditionally, politicians and pretentious people everywhere have been in the habit of proclaiming everything from the invasion of a country to the crossing of a street as being “an historic event.”  But it isn’t.  And even on those rare occasions when it is historic, it is “a historic event,” not “an.”   And now, thanks to Judge Sotomayor being a Latina, we are being pelted with the usage “an Hispanic,” which seems to me to be fairly new.  “A Hispanic” was always good enough when we were talking about illegal immigration.  Now that someone whose forebears spoke Spanish and lived in the New World (I think that is the working definition of Hispanic) has been called to serve at the highest level of our judiciary, the unconscious decision has been made to elevate her ethnicity to the level of an “an.”

The rule for whether we use “a” or “an” before the word it modifies is guided by sound, not letter.  It is a function of speech, not print.  Typically, this choice is easy.  If the word starts with a consonant sound, use “a.”  If it starts with a vowel sound, use “an.”  Not hard.

Except with H.  Because H comes to us in two states:  aspirated and unaspirated.  That means that sometime you pronounce it and sometimes you don’t.  Therefore, while it would be correct to say “an hour,” it is instead correct to say “a historic,” “a Hispanic,” “a hard time,” “a hermit,” “a harangue.”

People get confused over this because, in the 18th century, the common usage was “an historic.”  This was because, at the time, history was pronounced ‘istory, the way that a modern Cockney might.  Now, however, we pronouce the H, and pretentious people, who have a tendency to think that just because something is old, it must be right, get confused because they are unsure of themselves.  And so, they err on the side of hypercorrectness.  (That would be “a hypercorrectness,” by the way.)

Let the nomination of Judge Sotomayor move forward as it may.  I actually have no opinion about it one way or the other.  But please, let it go forward as a historic nomination of a Hispanic woman.  She and the language deserve no less.

The Dan Brown Conspiracy

With the release of the film Angels & Demons, the time has come again for op-ed pages all over the movie-going world to ask the burning question of the 21st century:  “Why does Dan Brown sell so many more books than I do?”  Many theories are posited, from Mr. Brown’s alleged proselytizing for some sort of suburban demi-Christianity to, I suppose, mass hypnosis.  The deeper sort of reader is puzzled by the enduring allure of drivel, and the more mercantile sort drips with envy over money being generated so easily and quickly by someone who is obviously no more talented, clever, or intelligent than they.  And yet, I think none of this explains the implausible popularity of  Angels & Demons or, more especially, The Da Vinci Code.

For many people, of course, it is simply a matter of–to use an old comedy nostrum–”buy the premise, buy the bit.”  It seems unlikely to me, though, that there’s 100 million copies-worth of the suspension of disbelief available in any one century.  If that is true, another explanation must apply.

Being a modern, frantic, beleaguered American, my mind leaps immediately to the conspiracy theory.  It’s not so much that I think that there is some hidden international conspiracy that is trying to sell Mr. Brown’s books–although that would explain a lot–it is that, I think, the appeal of The Da Vinci Code and its lesser brethren, all of which invent huge, unseen conspiracies, comes from a widespread need for the conspiracy theory as a way of understanding reality.  I would contend that, in a dizzyingly complicated and existentially fragmented world, a world in which most people feel themselves to be the victims of their lives rather than the heroes, the finding, keeping, and maintaining of conspiracy theories is a lifeline that people latch on to in an attempt to keep themselves functional, to keep themselves sane.

There’s a paradox in using something that is fundamentally paranoid and insane as a defense of one’s sanity, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  And the proof of the usefulness of conspiracy theories is in their very ubiquity:  Off the top of my head, I can come up with a great pile of popular conspiracy theories.  There is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the alleged conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.  There’s the idea that someone besides William Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems.  There is a whole slew of them having to do with the Tri-Lateral Commission.  There are the ideas of the left-wing media, the mainstream media, and the vast conspiracy that uses right-wing radio as its mouthpiece.  There are conspiracy theories about 9/11, various recent elections, the Moon landing, Israel, Jews in general, the Queen of England, and a number of Popes.  There are conspiracy theories involving the Mormons, freemasons, Democrats, Republicans, Communists, and Fascists.  That’s the problem with conspiracy theories:  They’re everywhere if only you look hard enough.

We are taught to be rational.  In fact, one of the hallmarks of Western civilization has been its championing of the rational mind.  And rationality has led to many boons and wonders.  Unfortunately we live in an irrational universe, and when we are confronted with something that challenges the order that our rational minds have imprinted on the world–such as that a deluded loser can kill a President, that 3000 people can die in a lunatic’s idea of a publicity stunt, that a middle-class burgher in the Midlands of England can have the greatest ear for language and feel for character of any writer in English–we feel that we have to explain it in terms other than the obvious.  If the prejudices and biases we use to defend ourselves are wrong in this, how else are they wrong?  Without the shield of these biases, we are Lear on the heath and the world is a madness.

One of the lies of the conspiracy theory is that conspiracies are cloaked in an impenetrable secrecy.  The Bush Administration, to use a recent example, has shown us that this is not true.  They operated mostly openly, behind only a thin veneer of secrecy.  As the recent release of the so-called torture memos makes clear, they colluded and conspired and–most importantly–rationalized their way around and past laws both national and international.  They hid their intentions and lied to our faces to start a war on terror and a war in Iraq that they thought would combat–wait for it–a vast international conspiracy.  Perhaps it was a case of “it takes one to know one,” but I think it was just another collective delusion.

And so Dan Brown sells books.  It’s comforting to think that a rational explanation is readily available for something–the divinity of Jesus, for example–that doesn’t seem rational, that challenges our prejudices, that tests our biases.  If only Mr. Brown’s books were rational.  Or readable.  But I guess the appearance of rationality is better than no rationality at all.

David Mitchell

I just came across a video on YouTube featuring the British comedian and writer David Mitchell.  Watch it.  It will be good for you.

The Swine Flu

After watching a pair of Swine Flu PSAs made in 1976, I couldn’t help but think of Tom Lehrer and his song “I Got It from Agnes.”  Here he is on the British chat show Parkinson in 1980 giving a rendition of it: