– In which Dorn contemplates the virtues of blog brevity.
Maybe you’ve noticed that I often put headers on paragraphs in my blog posts. I used to do this with my work emails too. You might think this is evidence of how organized I am, but you’d be wrong–it’s an indication of how I can get so wordy that if I don’t introduce some kind of organization into my message, the whole meaning can get lost.
To counter the trend for my posts to get ever longer, today I’ll write about, and try to epitomize, the concept of using the fewest words to completely convey the message I want to send.
Message content, of course, is measured in C-units, short for communication units, according to Prof. Alfred Valdez of New Mexico University: “Communication units are defined as ‘an independent clause and its modifiers’. A communication unit is an utterance that cannot be further divided without the disappearance of its essential meaning…”*
You know what, please mentally strike that last paragraph. You can tell a communication unit when you see one, even if you don’t call it that. That will shorten this post by two paragraphs (counting this one)!
I learned to respect, if not practice, brevity from that old standby, Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I hope they are still using this in schools, it’s great. And very short–only 43 pages!
E. B. White is perhaps best known for Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. William Strunk isn’t better known for anything, to my knowledge. I include here a picture of the cover of Charlotte’s Web, so that when I link this to Facebook there will be a nice picture on display.
Strunk and White said of brevity,
Please do not confuse Elements of Style with Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen’s book, Elements of F*cking Style, which addresses many of the same C-units of Strunk and White’s work, but also includes significant raunchy subtext (I’d be interested in figuring out how to measure the C-unit value of subtext).
I won’t repeat Mark Twain’s famous quip excusing the length of his writing, nor quote Cicero comparing overlong discourse to liquid overfilling the brainpan of one’s listener. I’ve already written more than I envisioned when my whole plan was to be pithy, so I’ll just say thanks!
I have a lot of memories Piscataway Park’s Marshall Hall site, former site of an amusement park and Southern Maryland gambling mecca, and also the current site of burned out historical mansion. I remember going there as a child in the amusement park days and once accidently wandering into a slot machine building where no one under sixteen was allowed. My husband worked the toy helicopters there as a teenager so that may have been our real first meeting, although I don’t actually remember riding the toy helicopters. I liked the mini-roller coaster better. My son was married there in an outdoor winter wedding where it was only about 10 degrees F outside. My late mother-in-law was born there in a long-gone house where she remembered as a baby sleeping in a room with snow blowing in through the cracks in the siding. There are still old amusement park rides rusting in the woods. I got the chromium for my element collection from an old rusting truck where the chrome trim was practically the only thing left. I remember riding my bike down to the site in 1981, when the mansion caught fire, with baby Piri in the rear bike seat, arriving in time to watch it smolder.
There is now a rutted old dirt road remaining that winds past the Marshall family cemetery and really doesn’t go anywhere. At the end of this road, I painted the scene of some trees overlooking the Potomac.
– In which Dorn free associates on condiments and cleansers, rock musicals and the psychology of morality.
Coconut Liquid Aminos. How come in all my years I never came across Coconut Liquid Aminos? The fact that I know of it now is merest serendipity. Kathleen herself doesn’t know what whim prompted her to pick up a bottle of “Bragg Coconut Liquid Aminos” at the local deli with our olives and Italian sausage.
The first ingredient in Bragg Aminos (the nice lady on the Bragg customer service line told me it’s pronounced Ah-MEE-noze, named after amino acids), “organic coconut blossom nectar”, is intriguing–I thought only bees turned flower nectar into human food. But the “Coconut Secret” brand of coconut aminos says that theirs is made from coconut tree sap. Is that a different product? Sap and nectar are two completely different plant substances, at least according to the Lehigh Valley (PA) sports page. But from the Coconut Secret website, the process that collects the coconut plant liquid used in aminos seems to have elements of both sap and nectar extraction. So I don’t know.
Coconut Liquid Aminos is brown and slippery with a tangy, fermenty bouquet reminiscent of soy sauce, so I tried it on things one might put soy sauce on, like meat, and salad, and rice. It’s really good! It’s salty, but not as salty as soy sauce, and is sweeter, with light teriyaki notes. Pert, I would say, but not impertinent. And it’s gluten-free!
Paul Bragg. The information about the Bragg Healthy Lifestyle on the label and on their website is as interesting as the flavor. The product seems to be part of a health food dynastic family that stretches back, well, to the dawn of health food dynasties. It says Paul Bragg created the first health food store, introduced pineapple juice and tomato juice to America, and his message of health and fitness was credited with “getting women out of bloomers and into shorts, and men into bathing trunks”.
Jack LaLanne, a fitness guru from the fifties (sort of the Richard Simmons or, I don’t know, Jillian Michaels of his time) credits Paul Bragg with his success. He’s quoted as saying “Bragg saved my life at age 15 when I attended the Bragg Crusade in Oakland, California”.
The message laid out on the bottle and website is compelling, and sometimes a bit weird, being based partially on health theories that went out of vogue a half a century ago or more (like germs and viruses aren’t attacking youwhen you’re sick, they are scavenging the detritus left in your body after incomplete cleansing). Bragg’s healthy living promised a vital life to the ripe age of 120, a figure taken from Genesis 6:3. Paul Bragg himself died of a heart attack at age 81–but to be fair, my sources suggest that this may have been a complication following a surfing accident a few days before.
Dr Bonner. The blend of sciencey-sounding theory, humanist philosophy, religion and a bit of occult surrounding Bragg’s Coconut Liquid Aminos brought to mind a product I remember well from my youth: Dr Bonner’s “Magic” 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap. The product is still available, and as near as I can tell, the message on this label hasn’t changed in the more than 50 years since I first saw it. The label spares a little space for required information like ingredients and a bar code (that must be new), but most is still devoted to the main message of “Dr Bonner’s Magic All-One-God-Faith”*.
The “message” comes in the form of a hundred or so small mini-sermons squeezed onto the label, sometimes so abbreviated as to lose all sentence structure–but the spirit of the messages shines brightly through.
My hippy youth. Dr Bonner’s is known as “the soap of campers and hippies everywhere”. I can’t claim to be a hippy, but I certainly knew about them in my formative years–I was 10, and paying attention, during the “summer of love”. Our house had Dr Bonner’s soap on the shelf (in my parents’ defense, we were also avid campers), a Whole Earth Catalog on the coffee table, Foxfire Books on our bookcase, and an LP of the soundtrack to the musical Hair in our record cabinet.
(An “LP” is a non-digital music recording medium shaped rather like an oversized DVD, for those of you old enough to remember DVDs.) I remember some of the lyrics from Hair better than I remember passwords I composed today. One was called “My Conviction”, and I think it stuck as one of the building blocks of my adult philosophy of life:
Do no harm. Interestingly (I sure hope!), I read a fascinating book recently about about “do no harm” as a basis of morality. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt proposed that all human morality includes do no harm as one of its very few standard building blocks, along with (2) be fair, (3) respect authority, (4) be loyal to one’s group, and (5) recognize and respect the sacred.
The book also theorized why liberals and conservatives can’t ever seem to agree: liberals (like me!) make their moral decisions relying heavily on the do no harm and fairness building blocks, and less so on the other blocks. Conservatives, he posited, make heavier use of the other three blocks, in addition to do no harm and fairness. Each side sees the other as not living up to moral standards, but really their standards are built to different specifications.
Science and politics. Jonathan Haidt has a related project I stumbled on: a website called the Heterodox Academy. On this site he posts research results addressing political bias by academic community in the way they treat research results. I think he might be right.
Try this little thought experiment about bias: read the following two sentences, and think about how you feel about the research that Jonathan Haidt is posting on the Heterodox Academy website:
Jonathan Haidt, a politically liberal psychologist, posts research showing that academia is biased against conservative researchers and conservative research findings.
Jonathan Haidt, a politically conservative psychologist, posts research showing that academia is biased against conservative researchers and conservative research findings.
The above sentences differ by only one word, and I don’t know which is true. Knowing nothing about Haidt’s research other than what was in the two sentences, did you feel differently about whether you would trust that research? If so, are you biased?
Someday I’d like to explore how I, and other scientists, ex-scientists, and non-scientists feel about science, alternative science, scientists, and scientism, but this post has dragged on even longer than the last one, so I’ll quit. Thanks!
One thing being in ‘The Third Age’ does is give you plenty of opportunity to store up trivia. That’s pretty much what’s up there! That’s why when my ex-daughter-in-law, Chrissy, asked me to be on her team for trivia night I enthusiastically said ‘yes’. (That, and, I am trying to do new things – and it’s not always easy to figure out what the ‘new things’ are so this was a readymade ‘new thing’ for me.) It turned out to be a lot of fun and our team had just the right amount of thirty-somethings, fifty and sixty-somethings, and ninety-somethings (I brought Pops, too!) to not do too badly. Of course, you always want to WIN – maybe next time!
Side Note: I hope readers were excited to notice that my brother, Dorn, is now sharing the ThirdAgeThoughts blog. Dorn followed me into the world by 13 months but somehow managed to precede me in retirement by five months! Check out his first post on writing, below. I’m hoping he will find it fun to keep contributing whatever he wants to write about!
One thing sixty-somethings seem to talk about when they get together is what they are doing that is good for the brain. Or if they don’t talk about it, they should! I started trying to play my mandolin after learning that music is the best brain activity! I have a beautiful mandolin made by luthier, Wilber Arce, that has mostly been languishing in the case in the years since I’ve had it. But now I am motivated to play it although attaining some level of musical proficiency has always been a kind of a struggle for me. But…I have great hopes that the amount of aptitude of the musician for music is inversely proportional to the amount of benefit the brain derives by trying to master it!
