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Saturday, November 10, 2012

Not mean; but be.

There is a poem by Archibald MacLeish called Ars Poetica, usually translated as "The Art of Poetry,"* which ends in the couplet:

A poem should not mean
But be.

Assuming I understand it, I agree with it. In fact I extend it well beyond poetry. My primary concern is usually stories, and I would say the same thing, a story should not mean, but be.

This has had a tendency to get push back. "Haven't you heard about symbolism and allegory?" I have been asked. Yes, I have. But here's the thing: those are hard to do well.

Before I expand on that, let me say this: a poem will always mean. A story will always mean. People are meaning creating machines. We couldn't create something meaningless if we tried and even if we did the reader/hearer/viewer/player/experiencer would find their own meaning in it. But the poem "Ars Poetica" is not about poems but the art of poetry. It's addressed to the poets, and so I take the statement "A poem should", repeated six times in the full poem as a message to the poet about what their priorities should be.

I would expand that the the creators of all fiction, non-fiction as well but that should be obvious since to even be non-fiction it has to be about what actually happened, otherwise it's just fiction packaged as non-fiction.

So I take it to mean not that the result shouldn't have meaning, but the meaning shouldn't be the top priority, instead the being should be.

Which brings us back to symbolism and allegory.

In both the idea is that something stands in for something else. The stand-in is what's actually in the poem/work of fiction (and thus the being of the poem), the meaning is what it's standing in for. In a well crafted work with symbolism or allegory the stand in is chosen so well that, within the work itself, the stand-in and the thing it stands in for never conflict.

That is hard.

It is hard because the stand-in is not the thing it stands in for, that's what makes it symbolism or allegory, and so they will not be the same in all situations. Sometimes there will be a place where stand-in would do X and thing stood in for would do Y. They are different things and getting different things to act the same way isn't always easy.

To have well crafted symbolism/allegory you have to choose a stand-in that will act like the thing stood in for in every important situation that comes up in the whole of the work.

The same goes with deeper meaning that doesn't involve symbolism and allegory. Maybe you have a message you want to send, but to do it well you need to make sure that the stuff actually in the work, the work's being, doesn't conflict with that message. It can be hard to do.

And since it is hard to make the things line up, the result is that they often don't. Meaning goes one way, being goes the other. The creator has some options:
1) Give up in despair
2) Major rewrite so that when it reaches this point the meaning and the being don't conflict. You've got to change the being somehow, but in doing so you've got to look back at everything that came before to take into account how whatever change you made would have influenced that stuff and rewrite accordingly.
Say your allegory requires a character to make a certain decision, but what you've written before shows that that character isn't the sort of person who would make that decision. You'd have to change the character, which means changing how the character was portrayed before, every action, every interaction, has to be reconsidered, every result from either. The changes potentially cascade outward in ways that potentially change everything. It might be easier to to restart from scratch.
3) Keep what has come before unchanged, ignore the intended meaning, and follow from the story/poem/show/movie's being. Go with what's on the page, so to speak, and let it be what it will. The meaning will take care of itself, even if the result isn't the meaning you intended.
4) Keep what has come before unchanged, ignore what that tells you about where things are going, and tell the story that the meaning requires.

1) Doesn't result in a finished work, and need not be considered.
2) If done right, produces a finished product indistinguishable from something where meaning and being never conflicted in the first place.

Three and four are where I see the meaning being conflict. Three is what you do if you think things should be rather than mean, if you think what is on the page is more important than the intent behind it. The intended meaning may be mangled, but the story will be internally consistent. No one needs to act out of character, nothing needs to come out of left field, no established rules need to be broken, so on, so forth.

Four, in my opinion, does not work. Because it sacrifices what's already established in favor of what the creator wants to say and that always shows up. A character suddenly acts out of character, a situation is obviously contrived, a well established rule is broken, things make no sense in context. The difference between what was supposed to be symbolized and the thing used to symbolize it is such that what was supposed to be an ok relationship becomes an abusive one in the context of the work. Stuff like that.

But the result is more than just poor art.

The conflict between the meaning "This is just supposed to represent [whatever] so the fact it doesn't actually make sense when taken literally is ok," and the being, "Given the actual situation presented This Does Not Make Sense/Is Downright Evil Though You Call It Good," undermines the meaning. It makes you look at it and think, "Ok, so maybe it meant X, but given that they had to do [atrocious writing] to get there, why in the hell would I accept that their views on X have any value? They had to be dishonest with the reader/viewer to reach that point."

Choosing meaning over being undermines both. Choosing being over meaning risks producing a meaning never intended, but it produces better art and it means that whatever meaning is produced will be stronger for staying true to what has come before. A stronger being creates a stronger being.

Art will always mean and be but if forced to choose between the two as an artist, staying true to meaning, or staying true to being, then this is what you should keep in mind, "Art should not mean, but be."

[This could be considered the almost from scratch reincarnation of a comment at Ana Mardoll's.]

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* Technically if you want to be extremely literal it's closer to "the poetic art" because the way Latin formed the name of a given art form was "ars" plus adjective, where the translation "of poetry" implies a genitive noun which "Poetica," is not. The important thing is it's about the art form, not the result. It's about making poems, not poems, not reading poems.

Friday, November 9, 2012

So you've just been turned into a zombie

Posted by chris the cynic

Remember how I said everyone's crunch time hit at the same time? Remember how I said this would probably end up being a low post week? Well that applies to the yet to be started deconstruction round up as well. So instead I give you a hastily produced effort at looking at a traditional fictional convention from a different perspective.

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So you've just been turned into a zombie. You're slower, your fine motor skills are lacking, you can neither speak nor sign, your walk is a sort of shamble, but that doesn't bother you, does it? Because suddenly everything is so clear to you, finally, at last, you understand what this was all about all along.

The answers to questions that you never thought to ask when you were one them come so easily to you now. Before you took the next step in the evolution of the species did you ever ask why there was never any infighting amoung zombies? Did you ever ask why a lone zombie might be hiding in a darkened room or stay facing away from lower beings so that they couldn't see it's bloodstained mouth and would mistake it for one of them, yet while in a group no effort would me made at self preservation or subterfuge, only at making sure that some part of the swarm broke the line and delivered the "infection", such a small word for so wonderful a thing, to the other side?

You understand now, don't you? You're part of something larger than yourself. You have a higher purpose. In a group you realize that the survival of the group is more important than your own survival, but alone you have to carry the purpose on your own shoulders, and thus must take more precautions.

You understand why we have to stop them. They're not just a food item, would that it were that simple. They're a dangerous and unpredictable food item. In a fair fight they'd lose, so they don't fight fair. Guns and bombs and technologies thrown against us when we are content with what nature gave us.

Any attempt to uplift them, to give to them the purpose you have been given, is met with violence.

They wish to exterminate us, the genocidal maniacs, and so we must fight back. Convert them to our side or eat them, but make sure they're no longer a threat.

So wrapped up are they in their petty concerns that they never think of us as anything but something to be destroyed just because we're not like them. And we're not like them. We get things done, we work together. We would never ruin each others lives for bits of paper. We would never throw others of our kind to the curb to get ahead ourselves.

We are united by common purpose and absolute loyalty. Think back to before you changed. Remember the doubt and uncertainty, never being sure if you could trust those around you? Remember wondering what everyone's agenda was? Remember how limiting that was? Never being sure that your allies were really your allies? Never being sure that you were all on the same side.

Compare it to now. You know no other zombie will betray you. You know that we're all in this together. We are all equal, we are all one. United by our higher purpose, our next step toward a more perfect species.

For thousands of years humanity was forced to rely on technology to compensate for it's inherent weaknesses, but no longer. We've crossed a threshold where we no longer need anything but what our bodies provide. We are the future.

But also remember, also remember the revulsion you felt back when you were one of them. When your mind had yet to be expanded and you were hampered by a short shortsightedness of metaphorical vision greater than your current shortsightedness of physical vision. Remember how you saw us as monsters to be wiped out, disgusting and subhuman. Remember how racist you were then. How horribly opposed you were to change and how violent your urges against us were. Remember the unthinking murderous response to us.

Remember these things because they're what makes coexistence impossible. Some don't remember. They shamble up to or passed the lower humans and quickly learn that there is no possibility of truce. Unless the first shot lands in the head, then they don't have time to learn.

It is true that the first response of most zombies is to try to pass on the gift or, in rarer cases, to feed (the transformation tends to leave one feeling hungry) so there are definitely times when our side strikes first, so to speak, and the response to this gift, or attempted gift, is often a bullet to the brainpan, squish.

But more often the first shot is fired by the other side. Sometimes from such a distance the zombie never saw it coming. We don't have to threaten them to be attacked by them. They are threatened by our very existence. Their objective is to wipe us from the face of the earth.

After which they'll no doubt sink back into their petty infighting, class war, international war, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppressing whoever they can whenever they can.

But we will not go quietly into that night. We will fight their attempted genocide of us tooth and nail. And if we succeed then true egalitarian will reign supreme for all time. For in us there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for we are all equal, we are all one. Imagine no religion, no country, no possessions, nothing to kill or die for. You don't have to imagine, it's already here. But those who pervert nature with their technology are trying to destroy all that. They're trying to kill us all, and they make no secret of it.

Why? Because we no longer speak their language? A small price to pay for the gift. Because we look different? You'll never see a zombie judging someone by their looks. Because we're an acceptable target and they're always ready to lash out at one of those? Not good enough.

They fight us with a thousand slings and arrows, they fire bullets from far away, they use fire stolen from the gods against us, they stab and they slice, they bomb, perhaps even nuclear. We meet them with nothing but what nature gave to us.

We will not be destroyed. We will not be exterminated. We are not some pest to be wiped out.

So you've just been turned into a zombie, and now you understand. We all welcome you as one of us. We don't judge you, we don't create artificial divisions, we don't carry with us prejudice. We welcome you as our equal because we are all the same here. You are our equal, and we are yours, and united by common purpose we will defeat the genocidal maniacs who seek to wipe us out.

Welcome to the community of equals. Welcome to a place without prejudice. Welcome to a family that will never cast you out, never betray you, never present one face to you and another behind your back. Welcome to a place where the answer to, "Can't we all just get along," is a resounding, "Yes!"

Before you were given the gift you probably looked down on us. You looked at our slow speed, outside of short quick bursts, and found it comical. You looked at our poor coordination and found it limiting. You looked at our inability to speak or sign and found it a sign that nothing was going on in our minds. You probably saw us as subhuman.

But now that you're here, don't those things seem like such small prices to pay?

So you've just been turned into a zombie. Welcome to the new mother nature. No more petty bickering.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

"Don't Worry About Thinness, Just Eat Healthy Food and Exercise": A Righteous Smackdown

Posted by kisekileia

(Content warning: Discussion of weight, body image, and body shaming.)

The fat acceptance movement has made important steps towards changing society’s discourse about weight by insisting that health and beauty are not exclusive to thin people. However, in conversations about how to be healthy, I have frequently heard it said that while weight is not a choice, everyone can choose to eat nutritious food and be physically fit. This is not true, and is offensive to people such as me who lack the capacity to exercise and eat a “healthy” diet.

“Eat fewer animal products and eat more vegetables,” say health food advocates. For some people, that is workable advice. When you are allergic to all nuts and all legumes (legumes include peanuts, soy, beans, peas, lentils, and chickpeas), as am I, you do not have a choice about getting most of your protein from animal products. I was actually, seriously told by a vegan recently that it would be possible for me to be vegan, on the basis that there were various plant-based foods with between 10% and 20% calories from protein, and people only need 10% calories from protein to survive. Clearly he had limited math skills, because he apparently did not realize that in order to get at least 10% of my calories from protein, over half of my diet would have to be those few plant-based foods with over 10% protein. Someone less blinded by ideology would realize that this was not a workable possibility. Nonetheless, many people insist that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan.

Likewise, many people and medical authorities insist that a large proportion of everybody’s diet should be fruits and vegetables. Most of these people appear to be unaware that for people with sensory processing disorder, a condition that affects how the mind perceives sensory input, the tastes and textures of fruits and vegetables are often impossible to tolerate. I have sensory processing disorder. I cannot tolerate most fruit at all, and I can only tolerate most vegetables if they are well cooked, well seasoned, and mixed with other food. I need grains and animal products in a meal if I am to eat enough to satisfy my body.

The few healthy lifestyle advocates who would accept these points would likely protest that maybe not everybody can eat mostly “healthy” foods, but everyone can exercise and improve their physical fitness. This completely erases the existence of people with physical disabilities that reduce their ability to exercise.

While most people would accept that those with visible physical impairments have difficulty exercising, it is often unrecognized that people who look able-bodied may in fact not be able to exercise. There are people, such as myself, who have cardiovascular fitness that is abnormally poor for their level of exercise. For me, walking is aerobic exercise. I cannot move faster than a medium-paced walk and still readily carry on a conversation. I have been like this since childhood. Doctors blamed it on asthma then, but more recent testing has proven that whether or not I had asthma in childhood, I do not have it now.

It is only recently that I have tried to find a medical explanation for this problem. For years, I believed that it must be my fault I couldn't exercise like other people--that it must be because I don't try to exercise enough. As I have learned more about ableism and victim-blaming, I have come to realize that normal people do not have this much trouble exercising, even if they are completely sedentary, and I have stopped accepting blame for my lack of cardiovascular fitness.

If anyone is wondering, my adult weight has varied from the “underweight” BMI range to the low end of the “overweight” BMI range, which, at my height, still is not very large. There are people twice my weight whose fitness puts mine to shame, but my fitness is not something I can control.

Obviously, I take exception to the idea that physical activity and physical fitness are personal choices. Because I cannot get significant amounts of exercise without getting out of breath and exhausted, I do not have the option of doing regular cardiovascular exercise. If I haul groceries home for a 20-minute walk from the store, I don't have the energy to do laundry that day.

I also have developmental coordination disorder, which means that I am not physically coordinated enough to ride a bicycle (on most surfaces) or drive, let alone play sports. When I was a child, I was abused by my peers for my lack of physical ability, to the point where I have PTSD-like reactions to any sort of exercise class or any sort of frustration regarding exercise now. I was also continually gaslit by well-meaning gym teachers who told me I was doing fine in order to make me feel better, even though I and everyone else around me knew I wasn't. My parents insisted that I would do fine in gym class if I practiced the skills more. Needless to say, practice did not help.

(Note: This is directed to people in general, not any one person:) So, DO NOT FUCKING TELL ME A STEREOTYPICALLY NUTRITIOUS DIET, EXERCISE AND FITNESS ARE CHOICES. FOR ME THEY ARE NOT AN OPTION. I do strength-building exercises, which have helped tone my body. I get most of my protein from white meat, fish, and dairy. But salads and cardio fitness? No way. I cannot eat a standard “healthy” diet or be "physically fit", and IT IS NOT MY FAULT.

I know I am not alone in this regard. Some of my specific issues are more common than others, but the point remains: Eating and exercising the way our society says people are supposed to is not possible for everyone, and you cannot identify the people who are incapable of these things by looking at them. Condemning people who cannot do those things for not doing them is unfair and bigoted, as is condemning people who cannot lose weight.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Dosado and Promenade Your Own

Posted by EllieMurasaki

Stop reading and get up from the computer.

Okay, fine, read a little bit further, but I'm not joking. Up. Metaphorically, if you use a wheelchair or cane, but how you move doesn't matter as much as how fast. Find or make an empty space at least ten feet by ten feet, and put on some music. It doesn't much matter what music—this activity is traditionally associated with both kinds, country and western, but then there's "Build Me Up Buttercup" (1960s soul), "Moves Like Jagger" (2010s pop), "Mickey Mouse Club March" (1950s Disney), "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas"... (Okay, yes, and "Red Solo Cup"; nothing's perfect.) The only requirement is that there be a good beat to the music, a good danceable beat.

Rutgers Promenaders 2012 Feb 19 dance, static square

Envision^[1] yourself positioned (or, better, actually position yourself) in a square, two people per side. The person beside you is your partner, the person catty-corner to you is your corner. The person outside the square with the microphone is the caller, and if something goes wrong it is zir fault. The couple facing the caller and the couple facing that couple are the Heads, the other couples the Sides. Back to the caller? You're couple number 1. Caller to your left? Couple number 2. Continue counterclockwise to couples 3 and 4. The place you're standing now is Home. Oriented? Good.

visual aid for above paragraph

Join hands and Circle Left. Now Circle Right. Now Up to the Middle and Back.

Welcome to square dancing.

To successfully navigate a square dance tip, you need to remember a few things. Which hand is your left, and which your right? (My father has badges that say "Left" and "Other Left". Just to help people remember. He switches which side he wears them on.) To which number couple do you belong, and does that make you a Head or a Side? Did you start out on the left side of the couple, or the right?

That last is very important to remember; most calls are directed at half the square, though many of them have instructions for both halves, and which half gets the directions varies: Heads or Sides, Centers or Ends, Leaders or Trailers, Left or Right of the couples of the moment, on the left or the right side of Home.

It is typically easier to remember that, when everybody is Home or in normal couples, Boys are on the left and Girls are on the right.

The gender binary pervades square dancing. Genderqueer? Tough; pick one. You can change at the end of the tip, or in the middle if you're dancing with people who don't mind doing two Trades where one was called and possibly confusing the caller and the rest of the square. But there's no 'bigender' or 'agender' or 'third gender' in square dancing. There's boys and there's girls, and every dancer is one or the other.

Rutgers Promenaders 2012 Mar 04 dance, out-facing lines

Note the couple in teal in the foreground. The man is wearing slacks and a Western-cut shirt; the woman, a dress with a circular skirt and a crinoline underneath, and you know they're dancing together because they're wearing the exact same shade of teal. This is traditional square dance attire. A blouse and circle skirt is acceptable in place of a circle-skirted dress, as is a blouse and a prairie skirt. If the dance hasn't been specified to be traditional attire only, no one will bat an eye at a girl showing up in jeans as the redhead on the left did, but if the dance has been so specified, a girl not in a skirt is Frowned Upon. A boy in a skirt is Frowned Upon regardless, but that's not a square-dancing-specific issue.

There's also singing calls. In contrast to patter, where the music is instrumental and the calls are spoken, the calls are sung and so are select lines from the original songs. For instance, in Charlie Daniels's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", the line "Johnny rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard" is followed by the line "'Cause hell's broke loose in Georgia and the devil deals the cards". In this singing call version of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", "play your fiddle hard' is followed by 'Dosado^[2], go once around, now Promenade your pard'" (square dancers like rhyme), and then while the dancers are Promenading, the caller sings "If you win you get this shiny fiddle made of gold", which follows "devil deals the cards" in the original. The other relevant point distinguishing singing calls from patter is that in every patter figure, everyone ends up Home. In every singing call figure, the boys go Home while the girls rotate. Because reasons.

Then there's the calls that simply cannot be done in same-sex couples. Swing: like in ballroom dancing, girl's left hand in boy's right, girl's right hand on boy's shoulder, boy's right hand on girl's waist, and rotate clockwise. Star Thru: girl's left hand palm to palm with boy's right, girl steps forward and turns a quarter left to the inside as boy steps forward and turns a quarter right to the outside. Even the calls that don't have gender in the definition are often gendered: to Courtesy Turn, the right-hand side of the couple walks forward and the left-hand side backward in a semicircle so that they end up in each other's footsteps facing the opposite direction. Well, that and some work with the hands. There's no mention in the definition of gender at all. But it is rarely called from same-sex or arky (girl on the left, boy on the right) couples. This is probably because of the hands part of the call: right-hand dancer's left hand in left-hand dancer's left hand, right-hand dancer's right hand on the small of zir back or working her skirt, left-hand dancer's right hand on right-hand dancer's right hand or the small of her back to guide her through her forward motion. For some reason, if it's a girl on the left and/or a boy on the right, people find this awkward.

Courtesy Turn is also an example of one of those things CALLERLAB, the organization that maintains the definitions of all square dance calls, prefers to pretend doesn't happen. In Courtesy Turn from normal couples, he's courtesy-turning her, not the other way around. In California Twirl, he's twirling her. Swing Your Lady is called more often than Swing Your Partner, even though they're the same damn thing. Walk Around Your Corner is exactly what it sounds like: you face your corner and walk around same (distinct from a Dosado Your Corner in that you stay right shoulder to right shoulder the whole move, rather than staying facing a particular wall the whole move), but it's often called as Walk Around the Left-Hand Lady. See Saw, Walk Around Your Corner's counterpart move, is often called as See Saw Your Taw, because square dancers really like rhyme; 'taw' is a word I have never seen outside a square dance context, and it's supposed to mean 'wife'. (Wiktionary says 'spouse' or 'dance partner'; good for Wiktionary. Every time I've been to square dance lessons when See Saw is being taught, I've heard that 'taw' means 'wife', and calling 'See Saw Your Pretty Little Taw' emphasizes that reading. In gender essentialism, men are neither pretty nor little.) In Run, the directed dancers do a half circle into the adjacent inactive dancer's starting position while the inactive dancer steps sideways into the active dancer's starting position, and it can be called as Boys Run, Girls Run, Ends Run, or Centers Run. Of Ends Run and Centers Run, I've noticed that callers don't tend to prefer one over the other, but of Boys Run and Girls Run, guess which one gets called more often?

That's right, it's Boys Run. Little as CALLERLAB likes it, square dancing tends to give the direction to the boys and expect the girls to puzzle out their steps. That's not true of the Ladies Chain family of calls, or of Teacup Chain, but I have never heard Men Chain and rarely Men Teacup Chain, and if the girls are active on those calls then the boys get the easy part. Also rare is Beer Mug Chain, but that is not an official call (not up to Plus level, anyway; I know nothing of Advanced or Challenge) and invariably breaks all the squares. Also notice how, apparently, only girls drink tea and only boys beer.

Boys typically get the easy part with choreography, too. Calls are meant to flow one into another. The call Roll, for example, is meaningless when starting from a static position instead of partway through another call; whichever direction you're turning at the end of the call before Roll, you keep turning that direction another quarter turn. Or Wheel and Deal, then Zoom; in Wheel and Deal, both members of a couple are moving the same direction at the end of the call, and in Zoom, the first part of the call for the leading couple is turn your back on your partner. The boy keeps going in the same direction he was going, while the girl has to halt and reverse direction. This combination is called fairly frequently, generally but not always by male callers who are unfamiliar with dancing the girl's part.

There's also setting up and breaking down the dance hall (moving tables and chairs, etc) and providing the food. Guess which gender, in my experience, typically does which task?

Square dancing isn't all rigid-gender-role doom and gloom. Girls do wear jeans to casual dances, after all.

Square dancers skew female, so to maximize the number of squares on the floor in any given tip, many female dancers dance the male part. And of course dancers who know both parts can switch genders as many times during the night as they like. Not I, if I can avoid it—I find it breaks my brain too badly to be raising the left hand to Star Thru in one tip and the right hand to Star Thru in the next—but my mother and my sisters can dance boy with ease, as can quite a few of the female dancers I know. (My mother, in fact, has made sashes in magenta fleece and sky blue in order to faciliate people changing gender between tips, because she's sick of a tip pausing for the caller to point at one of the seven female-presenting people in the square and ask whether that person's a girl or a boy.) Girls consequently usually win Battle of the Sexes tips, wherein half the squares are all women and the other half all men and the goal is to be in a square that doesn't break down due to somebody doing the wrong half of Star Thru or whatever. On the other hand, when you get the caller interrupting the steady flow of patter to say "[Mama Murasaki], you're a man", you know something's gone wrong.

Then there are LGBT clubs such as Philadelphia's Independence Squares and Washington DC's Lambda Squares. When the expectation that couples in the Home position will be boy to the left girl to the right collides with the expectation that couples in the Home position will be people who arrived together, the latter usually wins.

Dance-By-Definition clubs also exist. CALLERLAB wishes to emphasize (in the introduction to the Basic/Mainstream Definitions file) that "most of the calls are defined without reference to gender", and DBD clubs cheerfully upend the gendered expectations about how these nongendered calls are done. It's in these clubs that you'll hear Courtesy Turn called from same-sex or arky couples, or Teacup Chain called immediately after Half Sashay (which moves couples from normal to arky). It's also members of these clubs who have the least trouble dancing the opposite of their assigned gender.

Rutgers Promenaders 2012 Feb 19 dance, Dive Thru

I love square dancing. I do. One of my local clubs is closing, and I think that's a tragedy. But as I understand it, this was one of the clubs that insisted on traditional attire and mixed-sex couples. Square dancing is changing to match a changing world: casual-dress clubs, LGBT clubs, DBD clubs, and clubs that skew young instead of middle-aged and elderly are proof of that. But I worry that square dancing isn't adapting fast enough, that it can't fully adapt to a world without the gender binary at all, and if square dancing can't fit into a world with no gender binary, then this thing I love deserves to die.

^[1]All images, except the static square diagram which I made myself, are from recent Rutgers Promenaders dances and are used with permission.

^[2] 'Do-si-do' is an oatmeal sandwich cookie containing peanut butter, most commonly sold by Girl Scouts. 'Dosado' is a square dance call. Please do not confuse the two.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Remembrance

Posted by AnaMardoll

Content Note: Disability, Infertility

Possibly my favorite two posts at Shakesville is Liss' two-part series on disability and remembering. (Here and here.) Liss discusses something that I'm not sure I've ever seen discussed elsewhere: that part of being an ally to the disabled means remembering that they are disabled. That part of loving a disabled friend or family member means not forcing them to repeat, over and over, that they are disabled.

Failing to remember, thus obliging someone to repeatedly disclose a disability, also risks making that person feel like they're "talking too much" about hir disability, or "complaining." Many people with disabilities have experienced criticism for talking about their disabilities, or have been on the receiving end of exasperation expressed by someone who doesn't want to hear about it, [...] We often struggle to strike a balance between making sure people around us are aware of our disabilities and not playing into perceptions of attention-seeking, and "forgetting" makes finding that balance all the more difficult.

I know that this isn't always easy. I know that there's a big difference between living with a disability and knowing someone with a disability. I don't expect people who are able-bodied to instinctively grok every facet of disability or to understand instantly and immediately every thing that a person with a specific disability can and cannot do. Disabilities infiltrate our lives in strange and unexpected ways, and I recognize that the ripple-effect is not something that can always be instinctively intuited. This is not a post about "grr, able-bodied people who are not psychic". That is not this post.

But this is a post about life as a disabled person surrounded by people with able-bodies. People who sometimes fail to remember, and who perhaps sometimes don't even try to remember. (If nothing else, consider this fodder for that disabled character you've always thought about including in your NaNoWriMo novel.)

Being disabled means that people who know that walking hurts you will still turn around and opine that you should walk more often because that's what their health magazines recommend.

Being disabled means that people who know you cry at commercials with babies in them will still call to tell you that they bumped into your childhood friend at the mall and she had newborn infant twins.

Being disabled means that people who know that you have a handicap parking permit will still park at the back of the lot because it's "less crowded" back there and everyone "needs the exercise" anyway.

Being disabled means that people who know you are infertile will still rush to tell you that they're pregnant and will expect you to shriek with joy and ask All The Details because of course you must care.

Being disabled means that people who know you can't easily sleep in hotel beds will still apply strong emotional pressure for you to come visit them because they haven't seen you in so long.

Being disabled means that people who know you can't walk long distances will still plan family vacations at enormous national parks with no public transportation options or handicap paths for wheelchairs.

Being disabled means that people who know you can't have children will still expect you to listen to stories about their children and react with enthusiasm and happiness for them.

Being disabled means that people familiar with your lifetime of difficult and painful experiences with dozens of unsympathetic doctors will still insist that you just need to keep looking for the "right" one.

Being disabled means that people who know that an activity hurts you will still forget, and ask for an explanation again each time, for why it hurts you even if you do it just so as they suggest.

Being disabled means that people who know you are disabled will favorably compare you to all the other awful disabled people who aren't really disabled, but just lazy and unhealthy.

Being disabled means that people who know you are disabled will express sympathy that you are disabled while still making it clear that you really need to stop talking about it "so much".

Being disabled means that people who know you are disabled will explain to you why disability accommodations are bad for businesses and reflect inappropriate entitled attitudes.

Being disabled means that people who know you are disabled will tell you that your experiences and opinions are wrong because they know other disabled people who feel differently.

Most of all, being disabled means that usually when any of the above happens, it happens from someone you liked or loved or trusted. It's family members, lovers, and friends who often drop an unthinking, unremembering sentence into the conversation, about how you should like cute babies more, or travel more often, or walk a little more for your "health". It's the people you trust who haul out platitudes about how wonderful the medical establishment is, despite being blissfully free of your own experiences with it. It's the people you care about who get several months into planning that family vacation to hike up Mt. Everest before you have to remind them -- gently, haltingly, tentatively -- that thank you but, ummm, you won't be able to attend. You have that whole disability thing, remember? And, no, you can't just shake it off for the sake of seeing the whole group, even if everyone really was so looking forward to seeing you again. Sorry!

Being disabled doesn't just mean missing out on dozens if not hundreds of fun things in the course of a single month. Being disabled doesn't just mean counting and hoarding spoons, and having to consider things like "if I walk to the cafeteria with the rest of the group, will I have the ability to get back to my desk afterward?" Being disabled also means having to explain that thought process and the need behind it over and over and over again to people who are otherwise remarkably intelligent and possessed of strong memories. Being disabled means apologizing -- profusely and obsessively -- for not just having the disability, but also for having to remind people of it.

Being disabled means, more often than not, feeling terribly alone. Not because the people around you don't care about your disability, but because they're so unaffected by it that they have the ability to repeatedly forget about it.

If you are an able-bodied person, and if you really care about the disabled persons in your life, please try to remember that they are disabled. Create an opening for them to talk about it in ways that makes them feel like they're not ruining your day by bringing it up. "I'd like to plan a group hike, but does that mean you won't be able to come?" reminds them that you know about their disability and that they have a space to safely talk about it. "Would it help if I didn't talk about cute babies for awhile?" gives them the space to say that, yeah, maybe that would help. "I'm sorry to have forgotten, but are you capable of doing this activity?" at least clarifies that you do remember their disability, even if you don't remember every aspect of it. (And then when they tell you yes/no, don't grill them about why or suggest alternative ways that they should try to approach the situation. Try to remember that living with a disability means that they've put hundreds more hours of thought into the problem than you have.)

Being an ally to people with disabilities means remembering that those disabilities don't stop existing whenever you're not looking.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

The Other Side Wants To Know Too

Posted by chris the cynic

I don't remember where it came up. It might have been talking about religion; it might have been talking about Fox Mulder's “I want to believe” poster.

Someone brought up the famous Carl Sagan-attributed quotation: “I don't want to believe; I want to know.” And that stuck with me because, though the person didn't do this and in fact used it well, I've seen the quotation used as a stick to intellectually bludgeon theists with at least since high school, probably longer.

And so while the quotation lingered in my mind for days on end, I flashed back to too many arguments to number, or at least too many arguments to remember the number, and what seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding at the core of all of them.

There are people who want to believe. There are people who want desperately to believe. But there's also a lot of people who want to know, and the idea of “I don't want to believe; I want to know” being some sort of magic argument that could convince people to abandon theism (thinking on high school now) or even being something anti-theistic at all (which includes a much wider swath than just high school) seems to miss a fundamental point:

The other side wants to know too.

In fact, I think that desire for knowledge over belief can reinforce the very kinds of theism that those trotting out the quote as if it were an argument would most oppose. Specifically extreme science-opposed fundamentalism.

Consider this obviously intended to be funny comparison of “science” and “faith”:

This image is described in the footnote linked immediately hereafter.

[A written description of the image is at the end of the article.]

Now there are a lot of things that we can point out as wrong or misleading about it. For example it supports the idea that one cannot have faith and science both. The symbols around the “ignore contradicting evidence” section of the faith flow chart include: a crescent for Islam, the religion of Ibn al-Haytham and various other figures critical to the development of the scientific method; a cross for Christianity, the religion of such notable figures as alchemist and Bible code fanatic Issac Newton who provided calculus and our basic understanding of the universe until Einstein brought us General Relativity; a Star of David representing Einstein's Jewish identity, though (it should be noted) ~~not his faith which is difficult to pin down but definitely not Jewish.~~ possibly not his faith which is difficult to pin down and doesn't resemble the forms of Judaism I'm most familiar with but may well be Jewish. (See the comments for the source of the correction.)

But after spending that paragraph pointing out that the dichotomy presented is misleading at best and intentionally hurtful at worst, I'm going to be going with that dichotomy. I've pointed out one problem with it, and there are many more, but let's overlook that because I want to focus on the people for whom that picture is largely accurate.

The fundamentalists trapped by their own efforts, urged on by those around them, in a bubble that keeps out or shoots down all contradicting evidence.

Put yourself in their shoes. Assume that they don't want to believe, they want to know.

Point to the part on the science side where they reach the point of knowing instead of believing.

That's a trick, of course. There is no such point. The flow chart never ends. Any theory can be overturned, any belief can be shattered on the rocks; all it takes is some conflicting evidence. Either you have to modify the theory to accommodate it, or you have to abandon the the theory. Either way, it turns out what you believed before was wrong. You didn't know.

That's part of what accepting science is. It's accepting that nothing can be known for sure. That, for what it's worth, happens to be true. But it also means that you never know, and if you're honest with yourself you never get to say “I know”. Because in two minutes someone might stumble over a piece of evidence that disproves the theory you believed and send you back to square one.

Now point to the part in the “Faith” side where you get to say “I know”.

Pretty much any place you want will work. So long as you stay in the “Ignore conflicting evidence” bubble you get to keep the idea forever and never have to say that what you thought you knew was wrong.

If you want to know, rather than believe, the fundamentalist model seems more appealing. Preacher tells you, it's settled, you know, and nothing can change that. Of course you could be wrong. But you never know that you're wrong. Because you never allow for the possibility that you might be wrong. How could you be? You don't believe, you know.

From that point of view the inherent instability of science could seem downright frightening. You never reach the point where you get to stop. There is no end. You never reach the point where you can say “I know this”, only the point where you can say “Given the available evidence, this theory fits best and has loads of support, but the possibility still exists that it could be overturned.”

Thus a desire to know seems to reinforce fundamentalists' isolationism and fight against science. They want it to be simple. “They said it in church, it's true, done.” We see this in people who say, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it”, or “I don't believe Jesus is the savior, I know he is.” The desire to know, the desire for certainty, seems to push people to cling to things that don't get changed, or don't seem to get changed.

Consider this quote from Men In Black: “Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”

It's a picture of change. It's a picture of not knowing. It's revealing that the world is full of uncertainty.

Now compare that with someone who says that they're the purveyor of a religious tradition that remains true to the words of someone who lived two thousand years ago. It doesn't matter if it's not true, because the picture presented is one of certainty and lack of change: this was true then and it is true now. You can know.

Of course, there is an instability in the whole fundamentalist side of things. That is that science marches on. As early as Plato, we see religion incorporating what was then the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. The trouble is that now, that very same stuff seems absurdly unscientific. So if you start a religion right now, accepting all of the scientific theories accepted right now, and then don't change, eventually you're going to be believing things that science left by the wayside because it never stops changing. It never stops improving.

And those improvements can sometimes break through the bubble, and when they do... disaster.

At this point I direct your attention to Fred Clark; some excerpts are here but read the whole thing:

From the sound of what your aunt described, that's going to be the really tricky part for you, because she says you were always taught that everything must be accepted unconditionally — that it mustn't be tested and that it all, every bit of it, must be held on to forever. All of it or none of it.
[...]
And, based on what I heard from your aunt, you were always told that the whole concoction was inseparable — an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it deal. Instead of being encouraged, or commanded, to test everything and hold on to the good, you were told that you must either hold on to everything or abandon it all. And you were told that these were your only possible choices.
[…]
The all-or-nothing bill of goods she sold you when you were younger really is evil. It invites a crisis of its own making. It batters a child with a series of cruel non-sequiturs: If the earth is more than 6,000 years old, it says, then Jesus doesn't love you. If there weren't dinosaurs in Noah's flood, it says, then life is meaningless. If Isaiah was anything other than a carnival fortune-teller, whispering secrets to be decoded millennia later by the magic formula, then all hope is illusion.

This all-or-nothing mixture of sense and nonsense is a house built on sand. Eventually, it will be tested and it will fail the test. And it will fall with a great crash.

When one knows, then one doesn't need to test. That's what knowing is. And when one is trying to sell something as the Honest to God (emphasis on “God”) known truth, then one can't let doubt seep in anywhere. Thus instead of “Test everything, hold on to the good”, which is a statement from (Christian) faith that I think is pretty well compatible with the scientific method, the seller teaches “Test nothing. You already know. I said so.”

This puts everything on the same level. Everything is known and thus untested. Everything has to be untested because doubt could undermine the whole game. “If my pastor was wrong about X, could he also be wrong about Y?” And if I'm right that a desire to know, a desire for certainty, plays a role in the embrace of fundamentalism, that's the kind of question a fundamentalist doesn't want to answer or ask.

And so the whole thing can come crashing down.

We know this because it has happened. There is evidence. But those within the bubble ignore conflicting evidence, so they don't necessarily know this. They may have been taught the all or nothing approach to keep conflicting evidence of any kind out, but what should that worry them? They know all these things are true. They have certainty.

I think that's the problem with those who use the “I don't want to believe; I want to know” quote against religion. The fundamentalists are there beckoning, “We already know, come inside and you can know too,” where science offers only “We don't know for certain, but we can offer increasingly close approximations of the truth.” If you want to know now, fundamentalist religion seems to have the better offer because they claim to know already, where as scientists are still working on it with no end in the flowchart. Certainly no end in sight.

I want to close by saying that while the (forgotten) recent usage of “I don't want to believe; I want to know” was what got the phrase stuck in my head and eventually led to the post, it was not one of the seemingly endless times I've seen it used against religion. It was used appropriately and well, it just set off memories of it being used badly.

---

[Back to the image]

The image contains two flow charts. The first, labeled “Science”, goes like this:

1) Start. Go to 2).
2) Get an idea. Go to 3).
3) Preform an experiment. Go to 4).
4) Does the evidence support the idea? Yes = Go to 5). No = Go to a).
5) Theory created. Go to 6)
6) Use theory to better understand the universe. Go to 7). (This box is surrounded in yellow border with yellow stars.)
7) Discover new evidence. Go to 8)
8) Can theory be modified to explain the new evidence. No = Go to b). Yes = Go to 9)
9) Improve theory. Go to 6).

a) Bad idea. Go to 2).
b) Revolution! Go to 2).

-

The second, labeled “Faith”, goes like this:

1) Start. Go to 2)
2) Get an idea. Go to 3)
3) Ignore contradicting evidence. Go to 4) (This box is surrounded by a red border and religious symbols.)
4) Keep idea forever. Go to 5).
5) End.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The Dark Divinity of Passivity

Posted by Froborr

Which of these three sentences makes you saddest?

Your favorite show has been canceled.
Your favorite show has been canceled by Republicans.
Republicans canceled your favorite show.

Which makes you angriest?

Behold the power of the divine passive. Let's talk about its abuse.

Before we get there, though, let's run quickly through what the divine passive is. Most of us learn two grammatical voices in school: active and passive. Consider these sentences:

The dog bites the person.

"Dog" is the grammatical subject (that is, the sentence is constructed to be about the dog) and "person" is the grammatical object (that is, the target of the verb). "Dog" is also the agent--the entity that causes the action of the verb--while "person" is the patient--the entity that is acted upon. A sentence where the agent is also the subject is said to use the active voice--it is a sentence about agents doing things, essentially.

The person is bitten by the dog.

In this case, even though the sentence describes the same action, and therefore the agent and patient are the same, "person" is now the subject. The agent, "dog," has moved to a prepositional phrase. This sentence is in the passive voice--it is a sentence about things happening to a patient, incidentally caused by an agent.

The person is bitten.

I said "incidentally" because, grammatically speaking, "by the dog" in the second sentence was optional. You can drop it without rendering the sentence ungrammatical, and the result is the divine passive: the agent vanishes entirely. We are now in a world where things happen to passive patients, not because some agent causes them to, but because that is the nature of existence.

I hate the divine passive. Oh, sometimes it's okay--I used it myself to define "patient" a couple of paragraphs ago--but it should be used very sparingly. The passive voice is for when you want to focus attention on the patient, but the divine passive erases the agent entirely. Thus, it should only be used when the agent is truly irrelevant, which is pretty rare.

Why does this matter? "Mistakes were made," that's why it matters.

The divine passive allows the speaker to erase the agents that cause action, and thereby erase responsibility. It encourages passivity by asserting that events are the result of impersonal cosmic forces so vast they can't even be named, as opposed to the actions of agents.

Compare another pair of sentences:

One in ten people is unemployed.
Companies are not employing one in ten people.

Starting to see how it's possible for the right to blame unemployment on laziness?

One in seven Americans is denied health care.
We deny one in seven Americans health care.

And so on. It's amazing how many issues get much harder to do nothing about when you restate them in active voice.

And of course, let's not forget the single most evil phrase in the English language, which derives its power entirely from the divine passive: "supposed to." We're so used to that particular instant of the divine passive that most of us never stop to ask, to quote the endlessly brilliant web comic Triangle and Robert, "Who is doing the supposing and what are their qualifications for doing so?"

Consider the vast difference in norm-setting power between these sentences:

Girls are supposed to like shopping.
I suppose girls like shopping.

How much vastly better a place would the world be for, well, everyone if we replaced all instances of "X are supposed to Y" with "I suppose X Y?"

Down with the divine passive!

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Because I was (never) a slave in Egypt

Posted by Froborr

I skipped Passover this year. There was a lot going on--Anime Boston was that weekend, and my food processor was broken so I couldn't make the sauce for the lamb, and so on--and I didn't think I would miss it. After all, it's an empty, meaningless ritual dedicated to the worship of a being that doesn't exist, commemorating events that never happened. Except, of course, that it's an empty, meaningless ritual I've participated in every year of my life except this one.

Oh, and except that it's not empty or meaningless at all.

Passover is the only time I say prayers. Sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in English--depends on who I'm celebrating with--every year, I ask call God the King of the Universe and ask hir to bless the matzo and the wine. I sing about how any one of the miracles God performed in the course of freeing the Jews from Egyptian bondage would have been enough, but zie kept on performing more.

The rest of the year, if I find myself somewhere that people are praying (a religious wedding or funeral, say), I keep my head down and my mouth shut. I don't join in, because that would be dishonest. But on Passover I say the prayers and sing the songs, because that is what you do on Passover.

The prayers and songs, considered in isolation, are meaningless. But they are part of the package of Passover for me, and that package is deeply meaningful, because of its central theme, which as far as I am concerned is the central theme of Judaism: Because I was a slave in Egypt.

I wasn't, of course. No Jews ever were; the story is just that--a story, not history.

But when I was a kid, my parents used to tell me about their participation in the civil rights movement. Stories of my mother fighting apartheid in her native South Africa, my father hitchhiking thousands of miles from Arizona to join the March on Washington. They did this, they told me, because "never again" means "never again to anyone." They taught me that, because of the Holocaust, because of pogroms, because of the Inquisition--because of all the times and places in which Jews were persecuted--Jews have a special responsibility to aid other persecuted peoples.

This is a pretty problematic attitude, of course. Everyone has a responsibility to help the victims of persecution, especially if you yourself are among the privileged. But still, there's something worth pursuing there.

You see, I've never been persecuted for being Jewish. Oh, there was apparently some time in elementary school when I came home crying because some other kids accused me of killing Jesus, and there was a nasty kid a few years later who broke one of our windows, but these are isolated incidents. There was no pervasive pattern of intolerance; I've never felt less-than because of being Jewish, or missed out on a job opportunity, and I've certainly never been put in a labor camp or chased out of my home. Why, then, should I feel any sort of kinship with the victims of persecution?

Because I was a slave in Egypt...

You see, every year at Passover, we recite the story of Passover. There's a bit in there where it says you are supposed to tell the story as if it happened to us--not our ancestors, fictional or otherwise, but to us. It doesn't matter that the Egyptian bondage never happened to me--I am still to take the lessons of it to heart. I am still to open my doors to any in need.

"Never again" means never again to anyone.

I don't recall my parents ever explicitly drawing the connection, but it's clear to me. So the Exodus never happened? Well, the Holocaust didn't happen to me, either. My family left Europe decades before the Holocaust began. As far as my own experience is concerned, both events are equally just stories.

But not meaningless. Because I was a slave in Egypt, I support gay marriage and immigration amnesty. Because "never again" means never again to anyone, I oppose the mistreatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government.

Of course there are excellent secular reasons to do those things. I like to think that, if I weren't Jewish, I would still do those things for the secular reasons. But as it is, I do them for the Jewish reasons: Because I was (never) a slave in Egypt.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

"Long live the- wait. Why is it 'live'?" --- Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the subjunctive

Posted by chris the cynic

So at this point some of you might be thinking, “'The board is frozen; long live the board' – but why is it 'live'?” We know, on a level that feels almost instinctual but is in fact a result of long ingrained language acquisition, that it's live. We've heard often enough, “The king is dead; long live the king.” We know, “Live long and prosper,” and we know that these things are correct, but not all of us necessarily know why.

At first glance, something seems off. It feels right, and indeed it is right, but why is it “Live”? Live is present tense. It's what the doctor, who looks surprisingly like Willy Wonka, yells at his creation, “Live, damn you. Live! Why won't you live?” “Why won't you live?” refers to an instant in time. Why, right here, right now, will you not live?

But “long live the king” and “live long and prosper” are both talking about the future. Not the present. And the future is, “Will live.” “He will live a long time,” “She will live a good life,” “Ze will live a life of prosperity.”

Yet you don't say, “long will live the king,” though you probably could under a different set of circumstances involving augury or time travel, and you would never say, “Will live long and will prosper,” the way one says, “Live long and prosper,” it would be an awkward and improper platitude.

And the reason is a question of mood. You see sometimes there are good moods, and sometimes there are bad moods, and sometimes there are up moods, and sometimes there are down moods, and … wrong kind of mood.

I mean grammatical mood.

Verbs have tense, voice, mood, person, number, aspect, and other things as well.

Tense is when something happened.

Voice is about who was doing the action:

I hit it. Active. The subject is doing the action.

I was hit by it. Passive. The subject is acted upon.

When the action goes in a loop and so ends where it began (I steadied myself / I was steadied by myself) it's middle in languages that have it, but English doesn't so we're moving on.

Mood is what this article is about, so we'll get back to it.

Person is the whole first second third person thing you've doubtless heard about:

I am. First person.

You are. Second person

He/she/it is. Third person.

“Am”, “are”, and “is” are all versions of the same verb, but which one you use depends on whether the subject is first second or third person, in the case of this particular verb it also depends on number.

I am. Singular.

We are. Plural.

Aspect is about how long something takes/whether it's complete, sort of.

I stood there. Perfect.

I was standing there. Imperfect.

A lot more could be written on aspect, especially if we delve into ancient Greek because the aorist is … well the aorist. But right now we're blowing through this stuff to get back to mood. Which is why, “and other things as well” from above isn't even going to be covered.

So, mood.

English has three moods: Happy, Sad and... I'm not funny, am I?

English has three moods: Indicative, Imperative, and Subjunctive.

Most of what we say is in the indicative mood:

He went to the store.

She saved the world.

It does that a lot.

Alot is the name of a species of large cute animals.

The indicative is about the way things are. When you say, “It did happen,” you mean that it really happened in the real world. When you say, “It is happening,” you mean it is really happening in reality. When you say, “It will happen,” then (barring time machines and the like) you're saying that you believe it will actually happen.

The indicative is not hypothetical. It is about the way things are. Even when you don't know the way things are, it's still about that. When you ask, “Did it happen?” you're asking for information about the non-hypothetical land of reality.

It's not wishes or counterfactuals or hopes. It's what was, what is, and what will be, to the best of the knowledge of the speaker. (Unless the speaker is lying.)

Imperative is how we give orders. I used it above.

“Live, damn you. Live!” is doctor Frankenstein ordering his creation to come to life.

“Go to the store.” Is an order that you go to the store.

“Go to Hell.” Is a command that you go the place where Nicolae Carpathia will one day be doomed to reside.

The same phrases, in different contexts, can be different moods. For example, “Will you go to the store?” is an indicative question. It's not, technically at least, ordering the person to go to the store. It's asking them for information on whether or not the person will do something in the real world in the future.

We could do the same thing with another of the phrases, “I did go to Hell,” contains the same words in the same order as the last example I gave of an imperative command, but it is instead a dubious claim about reality. Thus indicative.

And now, finally, we come to “Live long and prosper.”

We're about to talk about the subjunctive mood. Use it wisely; use it well.

Wikipedia has a page on the subjunctive mood in general, and the version of it that exists in English-

Right here, right as I was getting to the point of the article, I had to stop writing and move on to something else. Then life hit me with the worst weekend ever. There's no need to get into that here, I've talked about it elsewhere, but I do want to apologize if there's an abrupt change in tone or anything.

Wikipedia has a page on the subjunctive mood in general, and the version of it that exists in English; they're reasonable places to go if you find me confusing or would just like another source. There are other languages with more moods than English, which means that English generally has to cram the same amount of meaning into a smaller number of slots, and that can make the subjunctive seem somewhat overloaded at some times, so let's start from a simple place:

“Long live the King” expresses a wish. It's not saying that the king will live long, we don't know that, merely that we wish him to. “Live long and prosper,” likewise is a language of wishing or hoping. It's talking about something that may or may not come to be, but the speaker hopes will.

These are not talking about this world, but the world that we hope this world will come to be. They're talking about hypotheticals and, in pretty much all cases, that's what the subjunctive does.

When you look at the world and see it not just as it is, but also as it ought to be, you're in a subjunctive frame of mind.

But it's not all about hopes and dreams, it's also about other ways things might have gone, it's about possibility and counterfactuals and fears and stuff. It's even about orders.

And before I can talk about any of that, I have to talk about tense lest we be confused.

The subjunctive tenses are, by convention, named stupidly. They're named for what they resemble, not when they happen. A “present subjunctive” isn't a subjunctive verb referring to the present tense, it's a subjunctive verb that looks vaguely like it belongs in the present tense to people who don't know about the subjunctive. As I said, they're named stupidly.

So, consider, “Live long and prosper,” it's talking about the future. It is hoping that your future life will be both long and prosperous. Is it called a future subjunctive? No. Of course not. That would be too easy. It's called a “present subjunctive” because “live” looks like present tense and “prosper” looks like present tense, well, to me they look like imperatives which generally don't have tense, but that's another story. They can also be considered bare infinitives (to live, to prosper, but without the “to”.)

So here we are calling something present when it's talking about the future, and we'll call something past when it's talking about the present, and pluperfect when it's talking about the past. As I said, it's badly named. I said it three times, it must be true.

OK, so let's get to talking about some stuff.

If I was there...

If I were there...

These mean very different things. The first one, which is indicative, indicates that I may well have been there. It might be the start of the sentence, “If I was there why don't I remember?” There is uncertainty about the past.

The second one means that I am not there, but I'm about to talk about the hypothetical world in which, at this present moment, I am there. “If I were there I'd feel a lot better than I do being stuck here,” would be a completely legitimate sentence to start that way.

But what if I wanted to be in the same actual tense (as opposed to grammatical tense) as the first one? What if I wanted to talk about the past instead of the present? Well then I'd need to push the apparent tense back one notch:

If I had been there...

Say someone says I did something somewhere last night, if I respond with:
“If I was there I wouldn't have done that,”

I'm leaving open the possibility that I really was there. If I instead respond with:

“If I had been there I wouldn't have done that,”

I'm indicating that I was not there in the first place.

If, on the other hand, I say:

“If I were there I wouldn't have done that,”

I'm confusing my tenses all to hell, because I'm indicating that if I were at that place now, I wouldn't have done something in the past. That only makes sense coming from a time traveler because the causality is backwards. Present events are being said to influence past outcomes.

So, hopefully at this point you know how to wish someone a long and prosperous life and how to deny even being somewhere while still claiming that even had you been you wouldn't have done the thing you're accused of doing, and you understand why the song is, “If I were a rich man” (emphasis added.)

There's also something named the “future subjunctive” which, oddly enough considering the names of the other subjunctive tenses, is about things taking place in the future. “If we were to go to the four O'clock showing we wouldn't get out until six.” We are not currently going, we have not previously gone, so the possibility really is in the future.

Of course, I can also say, “If we go to the four O'clock showing, we won't get out until six.” The difference is that the future subjunctive is used of things deemed unlikely by the speaker. “If I were to go outside I'd get wet, so I will stay inside.” The person “were to”ing isn't expecting it to happen.

When one says “If you were to go through with this plan the result would be disaster,” the expectation is that the person being spoken to will be talked out of it.

Now that we've talked about the future, let's talk about the past. Remember when I said, “lest we be confused,” above? That's passive (“be confused” instead of “confuse”) and subjunctive. Just as, “Lest we forget” is subjunctive. Why is it subjunctive? Well because lest and subjunctive go together really well. “Lest” indicates that the speaker is trying to stop something from happening, that is they're trying to make the thing that follows the “lest” remain hypothetical and not become actual. And hypothetical is what the subjunctive is all about.

Now that we've talked about things people don't want to happen with “lest”, let's talk about things that people do want to happen. There's a thing called the jussive subjunctive, which I always mispronounce so don't ask me how to say it. It's like the imperative but not. It can be used to express orders, and requests and stuff.

Screamed at the top of one's lungs, “Get out now!” - Imperative.

Low voice, menacing in its lack of emotion, “I recommend you get out now.” Subjunctive.

“I insist that the revolution be televised.” - Subjunctive.

“Televise the revolution.” - Imperative.

You might notice that the subjunctive here has more words, it lets you chose a verb of order/requesting where the imperative just spits out the order. That's accurate. Using the imperative is basically using a bare order, so it doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance amoung order/insist/recommend/request/so on. That's not to say that you need the subjunctive to get it, you can pull it off without the subjunctive it's just a bit more awkward. Consider:

“Get out now. I recommend it.” Imperative, indicative.

“Allow me to recommend something. Get out now.” Imperative, Imperative. (The recommend is an infinitive functioning as an object.)

“Televise the revolution. I insist.” Imperative. Indicative.

So you can still get that, but it becomes more awkward.

OK, I'm just going to close on using the subjunctive to get rid of “If” by fiddling with the word order.

“If I were a rich man...” Perfectly good subjunctive usage

“Were I a rich man...” Means the exact same thing as the above.

“If I had been there I'd've smacked that dragon.” Bad for the stacking of contractions and the unnecessary violence toward dragons, but otherwise fine use of the subjunctive to express a contrary to fact conditional in the past.

“Had I been there I'd've smacked that dragon.” Means exactly the same thing.

So, anyway, hopefully someone learned something. I'd like this to make everyone start paying more attention and using the subjunctive correctly because when I hear it used wrong, or not used at all, it just rings wrong. Sometimes I don't catch that it was screwing up the subjunctive; I'm just left with this lingering sense of wrongness.

So I'd like this to solve all grammar problems. Would that it were that simple.

Some notes:

One of my proofreaders noted that I never actually used the word “confounded” until it appeared in a parenthetical where I treated it as if I had already used it in place of the word I had actually used. That's true. It has been corrected. But “confounded” is a fun word and as soon as I took it out I wanted to work it back in somehow. Now I have.
There are some things I have done above grammatically that will make some people pull out their hair for their wrongness, yet I think them right. Such is the way of things. The way of the force.
An argument can be made that there are more than three moods in English.
I mentioned the aorist. In ancient Greek (I know nothing of modern Greek) the aorist has tense and aspect. Sometimes it's all about tense, sometimes it's all about aspect, a lot of the time it's about both. Tense is when something happened. Aspect is how long it took/takes/will take.

So, for example, you would never have a past tense indicative because, barring time travel, you can't order something to have already done something. (Even if you could, it would be in their personal future.) You can have an imperative aorist. In that case it is entirely about aspect. It's about how long it takes. “Close the door (quickly)” would be an aorist imperative. “Close the door (slowly over a period of hours)” would not be an aorist imperative because the aspect is different.

It's more complicated than that, it usually is, but the basic thing is that aspect is about duration.

I like to think of it as ancient Greek allowing you to say, “Leave me alone!” and have the listener know whether you mean, “Leave me alone right now,” or, “Leave me alone forever,” but that too oversimplifies because most things with longer-than-aorist duration don't last forever.
I was going to add asterisks and have this be a footnote, but since I have an entire notes section anyway I am going to just put it here. I used the word “hopefully” above in a way that is fairly fraught. I knew it when I did it, but I didn't make any note about it. Hopefully is an adverb and thus generally expected to modify something, usually the verb. Yet, I use it apparently modifying nothing.

I see it as modifying the sense of the sentence. Consider, “Hopefully it will happen.” It is not saying that the happening will be filled with hope, rather that the speaking of the sentence is filled with hope. The speaker is full of hope that it will happen.

The online Merriam Webster dictionary notes other adverbs that are used by the speaker/writer to comment directly to the hearer/reader on the sentence to which the adverbs are attached listing a few examples (those being: interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, and unfortunately) in the process. Why was I at the online Merriam Webster dictionary? To check that the definition of “fraught” can be stretched to mean what I wanted it to mean two paragraphs ago.

Anyway all of this is to say that while I defend this usage of hopefully, at least one of my proofreaders finds it ugly. These disagreements happen.

By special request I shall now address “may” and “might”. The will/shall dichotomy, on the other hand, I'm not even going to touch. Anyone who does not like how I used “shall” above, please pretend I used “will”.

These examples courtesy of the requester:

“He wasn't wearing a helmet, which might have saved his life.” He died. If he had been wearing a helmet it is possible that he would have lived. (That's probably what it means, I leave a bit of wiggle room.)

“He wasn't wearing a helmet, which may have saved his life.” He lived. If he had been wearing a helmet it is possible that he would have died.

As you can see, these two things mean the exact opposite of one another, so confusing them is a bad idea.

Both refer in some way to what could have been had things been different, but they do it in different ways. The difference here is actually tense "may" is in the present here, "might" is in the past. So when we say that something may have been the cause of X where X is a past event, we know that X already happened. Because if X didn't happen, then it didn't have causes, which means that nothing may have been the cause of X.

In the examples we're talking about “saved his life” a past event. So if it's, “may have saved his life,” then his life definitely was saved. (Or the person writing/speaking doesn't understand English.)

Might is a little trickier. If you're reading a headline you can probably assume he died. But the fact is that might is the past tense of may, so it can theoretically mean the same thing provided we're speaking entirely in past tense which, in spite of my best attempts, I have been unable to do in a way that doesn't sound completely awkward and painful and unnatural.

Maybe it can be done with sequence of tenses.

“He wasn't wearing a helmet, which might have saved his life, and so from that day forth he was an anti-helmet crusader.” But it still doesn't really work. You just don't talk that way and it still reads as if he died and was an anti-helmet crusader as a zombie.

In fact, the only way I can see to do it is to take the usages they have in the future, and yank them back into the past while adding words to flesh out what I'm saying.

If X is in the future, then may and might become different. “You may have caused X” and “You might have caused X” both mean that X could happen. Not will happen, not won't happen, just could happen. The difference is in likelihood. When discussing future events "may" is more likely than "might". So, “The test results are in and the world might end tomorrow,” is a much better thing to hear than, “The test results are in and the world may end tomorrow.”

So now, let me try to drag that into the past and see if I can use "might" to save the guy's life.

“He wasn't wearing a helmet. That might have been what saved his life, or it may have had something to do with the wizard casting a protection spell on him.”

I think that works. But I had to explicitly state that his life was indeed saved to do it.

“He wasn't wearing a helmet. That might have saved his life.”

I don't know. It's still ambiguous as to whether the “that” refers to not wearing a helmet, or wearing a helmet.

Regardless, the big deal is this:

“Might” is the past tense of “may”.

In the future tense both words mean something has the potential to happen, but might means it's less likely than may.

Both words are about uncertainty. If the uncertainty is in the past tense then you use “might”:

“They searched the plane because they thought it might contain dinosaurs.” Correct.

“They searched the plane because they thought it may contain dinosaurs.” Incorrect.

That's the reason for the whole helmet thing above:

“He wasn't wearing a helmet, which might have saved his life.” Since might is past tense it's bringing us back to the event, it means we're talking about what could possibly have been if things were different in the past. But things weren't different, so we know he died. (Again, maybe. There's potential for wiggle room, even if I haven't found it.)

“He wasn't wearing a helmet, which may have saved his life.” Since may is present tense (certainly not future and it is never past tense) it means that we're talking about present uncertainty. Which means that the uncertainty isn't about what may have happened if things had been different in the past (except in rather indirect ways.) It is clearly not about what could possibly have been if he had been wearing a helmet in the past. It can only mean that we're talking about present uncertainty about the reason his life was saved. He definitely lived.

In the future tense, they're about different levels of uncertainty.

“We may go to the movies.” There is a certain possibility that we will go to the movies.

“We might go to the movies.” There is a certain possibility that we will go to the movies, but it's definitely a smaller possibility than in the above sentence.

So finally I leave you with this one simple observation:

If you use “might” when you should have used “may”, you can probably make some kind of argument that it was legitimate. It might not be a good argument, but the argument can probably made.

If you use “may” when you should have used “might” in any tense other than future, you're screwed. There's no defense you can offer.

It's probably better to err on the side of “might”.