Such Language... !

I’ve noticed that what were once considered obscenities are ordinary conversation on line today. I wonder if I’m missing the boat, not sprinkling a little billingsgate through this blog.

What I mean, for example, is the opportunity to use a pithier word where I use “stuff.” You hardly ever see “stuff happens” quoted on the Internet. There’s also the adjective/adverb and sometime, when not in the gerund, interjection that's transcended its original meaning and is now part of intercourse on line generally.

The unimaginativeness of it is depressing, especially when you think of what’s been lost over the ages. The English had some terrific expressions.

“Zounds!” Now there was an interjection you could get some attention with. Looking for colorful adjectives? Try “scurvy” -- anachronous in a day when you can buy oranges at any corner supermarket, but you're immediately established as a salty character with your audience. 

“Odious” is a two-fer: the denotation is “hateful,” but the connotation adds “for a disagreeable or offensive quality,” so you have a cultivated way of saying your opponent’s program is bad and smells that way. Follow up with “fetid” or "miasmic" and the listener can’t help but envision your adversary’s plan emerging, slime-covered, from some swamp-like recess of his/her mind.  

But for pure poetry in the service of argument -- has anyone ever equalled Oliver Cromwell’s 1650 invitation to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland to give their decision a re-think?  “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken…” Lay that alongside “Your argument sucks” in the “comment” section of any Internet post. No contest.

If you’re going to comment online, maybe go to a thesaurus before you submit; get something imaginative. Want to get snarky about someone’s physical appearance but still sound cultured?  Read Cyrano de Bergerac for a lesson in creative ways to insult someone with too much nose. 

It’s a great language; there are many ways to express a thought. My thesaurus lists something like 180 different ways to say you think something is bad, with a whole paragraph of slang terms, some of which you might not have thought of before. (And on the off chance that you’re really discussing copulation, there are almost 50 other ways to say that.)

The thing to remember, if it’s emphasis you’re after: when obscenities become commonplace, you need to find new words to put some jazz into your writing. 

(F)lying With Statistics -2

This will make more sense if you start back at the October 12 post...

"Passenger-miles" is the main sleight-of-hand trick the airlines use to work their statistical magic, but it isn't the only gimmick in use; this from an air travel industry Internet page:

"The number of U.S. highway deaths in a typical six-month period -- about 21,000 -- roughly equals all commercial jet air travel fatalities worldwide since the dawn of jet aviation decades ago. In fact, fewer people have died in commercial air travel accidents in America over the past 60 years than are killed in auto accidents in a typical three-month period."

Here we momentarily drop the "passenger-miles" device in favor of what seem like a couple of straight numbers-to- numbers comparisons; but on examination these, too, turn out to be impressive-sounding yet uninformative factoids. Maybe more people travel on highways every six months today than traveled by air in all those decades ("since the dawn..."). Maybe there are more automobile trips every three months now than there have been commercial air travel flights over the past 60 or 70 years. We don't get real numbers. (Note also the language: people die in air travel accidents but they're killed in their cars.)

But it's the passenger-miles gambit that provides the basis for the most competitive comparisons the air travel industry makes. Here's another quote from that Internet page:

"In the United States, it's 22 times safer flying in commercial air travel than driving in a car, according to 1993-95 study by the U.S. National Safety Council comparing accident fatalities per million passenger- miles traveled."

Why "passenger-miles"? Seen any 200-seat cars on the road? No, the automobile figures are compiled at -- what? -- maybe two or three passengers per mile? as compared to the airlines' hundreds? Think how many more individual trips highway travelers took -- the vastly greater number of opportunities for accidents they exposed themselves to -- to rack up the same millions of miles. How many air travel passengers would have died (or been killed) in that number of trips?

But even if you accept passenger-miles as a concept, there's still the question of scorekeeping. One hundred passengers fly 1,000 miles, at which point the plane crashes. Sixty passengers die. Does the airline get 40,000 passenger-miles credit for the survivors?

No, "passenger-miles" may help the airlines figure their ROI or decide on what type of equipment to buy next, but as backup for safety claims -- that ain't getting me out of my car. Let me know, better, when they develop a jetliner that can coast over to the side of that highway in the sky if its engines cut out, so you can ring up the aero club at the emergency callbox. You can improve your chances of surviving an auto accident by wearing a seat belt. What will your seat belt do for you if the view out the front window of your plane becomes cornfield?

                          #                #            #

I had referred to airline industry web pages as the source, but I’m reminded now that it was primarily these newspaper articles, although some websites figured into it later. 

I can also now cite the names of the experts who published the statistics I refute so decisively. They were H.W. Lewis, a Physics professor, and Richard H. Wood, a professor of Safety Science.    I believe it was a coincidence that both articles appeared the same day, as there doesn’t appear to have been a special section on safety in that issue of The Times.  I had written a letter to the editor in 1980 that went nowhere, but the impetus to actually pursue the subject came by way of the late Times columnist, Jack Smith, who touched on it in a column five years later.

Maybe the subject’s been debated someplace, but I’ve never seen it done – a surprise to me considering the prevalence of bright minds much better at mathematics and statistics than mine. That raises the possibility that I could be talking through my hat, something I’ve been known to do – but I don’t think so this time. 

(F)lying With Statistics -1

Another discovery arising from the previously reported packrat environment in which I live has been the source material for an article/essay I’ve been nursing for 29 years.

I now know it’s 29 years because I’ve found the yellowing clippings from The Los Angeles Times that started it all, and they’re dated September 1, 1985.  Finding them puts me in a position to make some corrections, which I’ll append to this post, but I’ll have to break the post into two parts; no one is going to read a 1200-word blog post, or not one of mine, anyway.  

“(F)lying With Statistics” is a damning expose of the commercial airlines’ shameless use of “passenger-miles” to reassure us of how safe it is to fly. (The “fractured-flyer miles” part of the article is my contribution.) With a bit of statistical counterpunching and an appeal to logic, I leave the airlines’ argument bleeding on the tarmac. I’ve refrained from going public with the material until now because it could cause panic amongst the traveling public – the next Y2K, maybe, and we know how that turned out. (If we don’t, we can go back to the July 27 post on this blog.)

Over its near-three-decades the piece has seen use as an essay, a tongue-in-cheek SEO article, and one installment of a “Private Eye” series. The blog seems the logical final resting place for it.


        Statistically, Flying Is the Safest Way to Travel

         -- but do you really want to be an air travel statistic?

I think it was Shelley Berman, in one of his comedy routines, who commented that the airlines could always prove that "flying is the safest way to fly."

It's the old "passenger-miles" ploy that does it.

The strategy is obvious, isn't it? With commercial airliners seating hundreds and distances in thousands, you multiply "passengers" by "miles" and one successful trip adds a couple of hundred thousand markers in the "win" column.

The argument goes, “The record of America’s scheduled airlines has averaged out to about one fatality per billion passenger-miles.” That statistic is then translated into a 1 in 10,000 chance of being killed. (Odds of being mutilated, disfigured, or maimed aren’t posted.)

So, are less successful flights reported in fractured-flyer miles? (To the airlines' advantage, the numbers would be smaller, since these people didn't get to finish the trip.)

No, one accident is one accident. Accident statistics -- the bad numbers -- are reported in terms of individual events. I've seen it argued by an air safety expert that except for the people involved, keeping score in terms of people killed is “a meaningless statistic. What counts is the number of individual accidents,” number of people on board being random.

Fair enough; but let's apply the same standard to the safety statistics -- the good numbers. If "people on board" is irrelevant in reporting accidents, why does it become significant when reporting on safety? The fair comparison to "number of individual accidents" is "number of individual flights without accidents." Tell me how many flights touched the ground only when and where they were supposed to. But that would bring the safety numbers down out of those reassuring billions.

Next post: Part 2, and I rest my case.

Let Me Count the Ways…

It’s an old principle of copywriting that putting a number in the headline is a good way to attract readers’ attention  prior to trying to sell them whatever you're selling. It suggests there’s going to be substance and specifics in what follows.

It can be positive ("3 Ways To Turn Your Catbox Waste Into Dollars") but negative works, too ("6 Things You Should Never Do While Riding A Bicycle").

People on LinkedIn have taken the technique `a outrance. You’ll find dozens if not hundreds of posts in that pattern, some less reasonable than my examples above.

Since the delivery is by its nature authoritative, presumably each is written by an authority on that subject.

Is that likely? If all those people know all those secrets and are kind enough share them with everyone else, there should hardly be any problems left in the world. We’d all know how to manipulate employees, cozzen our bosses, write perfect “content,” and Avoid These Five Mistakes When Quitting our Job. Everyone would be making money in a corner office / at home / in their pajamas / sitting at the beach, by writing / teaching (anything) / telephoning / composting... Surprising that we still have high unemployment and poverty.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems scattered around in the mulch, but it takes a lot of reading, or at least sampling, to sift them out. Most of the time I ignore them, but some will intrigue me with what seems like a particularly pertinent line and I’ll go for it. 

Most of those times I find lists of things I already know, particularly if the subject is writing. I think any seasoned writer would have the same reaction. There are just so many principles, tips, and tricks you can read before you realize you've seen it all before. Maybe you learned it under a different title; a lot of old ideas have been recycled for the new market. 

And one of them is the numbers game, so I’m thinking about getting into it myself. First post will be "10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read on LinkedIn," subhead "5 will get you 8 probably 90 percent of it is old news."

Let Me Count the Ways...

Let Me Count the Ways…

It’s an old principle of copywriting that putting a number in the headline is a good way to attract readers’ attention  prior to trying to sell them whatever you're selling. It suggests there’s going to be substance and specifics in what follows.

It can be positive ("3 Ways To Turn Your Catbox Waste Into Dollars") but negative works, too ("6 Things You Should Never Do While Riding A Bicycle").

People on LinkedIn have taken the technique `a outrance. You’ll find dozens if not hundreds of posts in that pattern, some less reasonable than my examples above.

Since the delivery is by its nature authoritative, presumably each is written by an authority on that subject.

Is that likely? If all those people know all those secrets and are kind enough share them with everyone else, there should hardly be any problems left in the world. We’d all know how to manipulate employees, cozzen our bosses, write perfect “content,” and Avoid These Five Mistakes When Quitting our Job. Everyone would be making money in a corner office / at home / in their pajamas / sitting at the beach, by writing / teaching (anything) / telephoning / composting... Surprising that we still have high unemployment and poverty.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems scattered around in the mulch, but it takes a lot of reading, or at least sampling, to sift them out. Most of the time I ignore them, but some will intrigue me with what seems like a particularly pertinent line and I’ll go for it. 

Most of those times I find lists of things I already know, particularly if the subject is writing. I think any seasoned writer would have the same reaction. There are just so many principles, tips, and tricks you can read before you realize you've seen it all before. Maybe you learned it under a different title; a lot of old ideas have been recycled for the new market. 

And one of them is the numbers game, so I’m thinking about getting into it myself. First post will be "10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read on LinkedIn," subhead "5 will get you 8 probably 90 percent of it is old news."

Let Me Count the Ways...