One hundred and four pages. Ninety-three articles, poems and sketches. Two hundred in-jokes. Literally countless phone calls, emails, swear words and high-fives. Three all-night formatting sessions. Twenty litres of Coke. One day before end-semester exams. One imminent and cataclysmic drop in CGPA. But worth it. Worth every goddamn moment.
In this post, I will raise two issues of grave concern, issues that have implications for our daily lives and our common future. I call them, Stressing the ‘I’, and The Space at the Start.
There was a recent xkcd about the problem of how to end a parenthetical statement with an emoticon in an IM. Poor Randall is clearly a beginner at the game, else he’d have known that the solution is, of course, to use square brackets.
But there are at least two other problems, at least with my favoured IM client Gtalk, which require the immediate attention of linguists and software developers.
1. Stressing the ‘I’
How do you stress ‘I’ (the first person singular pronoun, not the letter) in an IM? The usual convention, which is to use uppercase letters, does not get us anywhere because the ‘I’ is anyway uppercase. You might think that people who otherwise don’t capitalize the ‘I’ (and commit all manner of other punctuation heresies) in IMs can still use an uppercase I for emphasis. But in practice – and I speak after careful study and empirical analysis – the average reader is so primed to seeing the uppercase I that the attempted emphasis passes unnoticed.
If I want to emphasize acronyms, I usually put them in italics. As in, “Your CGPA is more important than our relationship?” Not that I have ever said that to anyone. But even italicization does not work with the ‘I’ because in Arial, the Gtalk default font, the italicized uppercase I, italicized lowercase L and forward slash all look pretty much the same.
I l /
See?
2. The Space at the Start
It is possible to envisage a number of circumstances where it’s imperative to insert a space at the start of a line. The following (actual) conversation is an example. I was trying to give Darshana directions to my place.
me: __
O|
|
Darshana: Thought of half a million witty things to say to this, but hafta settle for...heh, what?
me: i was trying to draw you a map. vertical line being eastbound main road, circle being pond, horizontal line being my street. it failed for two reasons
Darshana: Namely?
me: a) i failed to compensate for the rightward shift in the first line caused by my name appearing on the chat window
Darshana: and b) I'm an imbecile.
me: no. b) i did not know that gtalk does not recognise spaces at the beginning of a line
i will now prove to you i am not in fact an imbecile by circumventing these seemingly insurmountable problems
Darshana: *resigns herself*
(several attempts later)
me:
____
O....|
.......|
.......|
(bows)
ignore the full stops, and there you have it!
Darshana: *wild applause and wolf whistles*
Folks (here I address the linguists and software programmers): set aside the trivial stuff that usually occupies you. Just for once, open your eyes to things more important than discovering Universal Grammar and solving the P=NP problem,* and address some problems that really matter. The world needs you.
* Hat tip to Tommy for giving me that example.
You’ll rarely catch me admitting it, but I do odd things sometimes.
Do not go by the ever-pessimistic BBC weather forecast and cancel your walk. Ours was planned for a Sunday. On Thursday, the forecast for Sunday said Cloudy Skies with Sunny Spells. On Friday, they changed it to Heavy Rain. On Saturday, they upgraded it further to Heavy Rain with Hail. On Sunday morning, we popped our heads out of the window and saw the sun beaming down from a cloudless blue sky. We didn’t check, but the BBC was probably predicting Apocalypse.
If you are in a hurry to get to the starting point of your hike, do not trust the printed travel itinerary given to you by the friendly lady at London Victoria Station enquiries. The route is as follows: train from Victoria to Leatherhead, connecting train from Leatherhead to Boxhill & Westhumble. Rather simple, you would think. But the computer that generates these itineraries has strange views about human nature. It thinks that passengers prefer not to reach their destination by the quickest routes and the fastest trains possible. The itinerary, therefore, involves deliberately missing the first three available trains that would take you to Leatherhead, and catching the fourth. Consequently, when you arrive at Leatherhead, you will find you’ve missed the earliest connecting train you could have taken and have to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. Of course, the itinerary will blithely advise to miss this one too and catch the one after, but by this time you will have learnt not to trust it.
Wear walking shoes if possible. My Adidas trainers are eminently suited to running on asphalt, but are not at their best when tackling steep slopes mushy from last night’s shower. They tend to slip.
If, like us, you are using the Time Out Book of Country Walks as your guidebook, be prepared for the occasional indecipherable instruction. “Fifty metres onwards from the multi-branched oak, bear right from the kissing gate towards Ashurst Rough (so marked on the OS Map), your direction 239 degrees.” As botany-illiterate men of the tropics, we couldn’t identify an oak tree if our lives depended on it. We had never seen a kissing gate. And we carried neither an Ordinance Survey Map nor a compass. We got lost a couple of times and took long detours.
Be prepared also for instructions that you cannot possibly follow. The suggested route required us at one point to take a path that was submerged under the River Mole, swollen by the recent rains. We needed a dangerous and borderline illegal detour to cross the river and get back on track.
Learn to tell the subtle differences between a bridleway, a footpath and a dirt track. If you can distinguish one from the other, you won’t get lost in the woods and meet a middle-aged commercial illustrator with a wonderful sense of humour who is out walking his dog.
In case you do meet said commercial illustrator, accept that he is a hardcore hiker and can stride up steep-ass White Hill without breaking sweat. Refrain from trying to do the same. Swallow your pride and fake an injury or something. We tried to match him step for step, we eventually did make it to the top at the same time as he did, but not before the strain had taken us to the verge of collapse.
Finally, pack more than two ham-and-lettuce sandwiches per person. Walking makes you hungry. You will pass a few pubs on your walk, but they are fiendishly expensive. The fact that they have log fires and the smell of grilled steak wafting out of their windows does not help either.
That is all the advice I can think of for now. Follow these, and your hike will go off more smoothly (if somewhat less eventfully) than ours.
Of course, it is probably better to not catch the hiking bug in the first place and take up some nice, non-taxing hobby like watching TV. Better still, you can nip the problem in the bud and never make friends with Rahul Saha. But no one warned me five years back.
I went for an Andy Warhol exhibition this week. Among the many interesting things at the exhibition was a huge wall with several large mirrors, each of which had an Andy Warhol quotation. There was a crew from a television channel interviewing random people who had come to see the exhibition. The first person I saw being interviewed was a graphic designer from Norway. She was on air, responding to questions like “What do you like about Andy Warhol?” and “How much would you pay to have an original Warhol in your living room?” On the mirror behind her was the line, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Saha had gone for the same exhibition a few weeks back. He told me how he saw an absolutely gorgeous lady standing in front of the wall that had the mirrors. Apparently, this lady clearly saw Saha checking her out in the mirror, and very deliberately (and very sexily) adjusted her hair. The quotation on the mirror read, “I am a deeply superficial person.”
I love Warhol.
