On comma ground: Where the US English team stands firm

@wwaycorrigan

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For native English speakers of the Old World, namely inhabitants of Britain and (whisper it) Ireland, it can be hard to accept that our New World ancestors have better language conventions than us. For some things, that is.

USA: Home of the brave. And home of the useful Oxford comma, too.

It comes down to providing consistency and clarity and there are at least two areas where US/American English trumps British.

Team of us

In terms of consistency, the British English tendency to use plurals when referring to a team is difficult if not impossible to defend grammatically.

Taking the current English Premier League champions as an example, Manchester City is a team. Yet, we English speakers in Britain and Ireland almost always refer to the team using are, as in 'Manchester City are the champions of Europe.' It sounds weird to us to say 'Manchester City is the champion of Europe.' (I am aware that for those who favour the red half of Manchester, neither form is acceptable. What's more, as I write this blog, City's Champions League defence has come a cropper.)

I recall reading US newspapers, particularly the sports sections, during my first visit to the States, aged 15, and feeling that there was something amiss. The use of the singular for a team didn't seem right for somebody brought up on plural constructions for such an entity. It felt a bit cold and impersonal. A team is made up of people, after all.

It is, however, the Yanks who are on firmer ground if one strictly adheres to grammar rules. The team-is-made-up-of-people defence is understandable yet the idea of a team is that it works as a unit. (As the rather goody-two-shoes remark goes, 'There's no 'I' in team'. The equally inane retort is, 'But there is a me.')

Were 'Is a team' to go up against 'Are a team' in a grammar court, the former would surely win out. But hey, one doesn't tend to have much fun in court.

Clarity contest

In a clarity context, nay contest, US English tends to favour the use of the Oxford/serial comma.

In my school days, I was repeatedly told that it was wrong to place a comma before the 'and' in a sentence containing a list of items of three or more things. England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales — correct. England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales — incorrect.

One could say such a rule is rather insignificant. It matters little whether the comma is there or not. And for the minimalists amongst us, as I am, excluding it makes more sense. Fewer commas means less ink required in printing. Every little helps.

'Rather than being doctrinaire against the use of the Oxford comma, those of us brought up to obediently omit it should be open to its vital value.'

However, the Oxford comma is not a case of Yankee extravagance. It does serve an important purpose. Its omission can lead to much confusion.

To take from Steven Pinker's impressive and witty The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, consider the following:
'This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.'
'Highlights of Peter Ustinov’s global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.'

The lack of a comma before the 'and' in those sentences can lead to confusion (even in speech, with that absent comma, one may be inclined to leave out a helpful pause between the last two items). Thus, Nelson Mandela had a more colourful, far-reaching past, than most of us had realised. And the author of the book referred to has some powerful parents — or at least one of them is omnipotent.

So rather than being doctrinaire against the use of the Oxford comma, those of us brought up to obediently omit it should be open to its vital value.

Period pain

While we're on comma ground, one US convention — in academia in any case — that doesn't seem to have much logic behind it is the inclusion of a comma after 'i.e.'. What clarity does it provide? (I find some of American English's quotation-mark punctuation guidelines rather illogical, too.)

It's the same for Americans' use of full stops, or periods as they say, after each letter in an initialism. Why not USA rather than U.S.A.? It's superfluous punctuation, particularly when the actual words must be said together to make proper sense.

Sticking with period punctuation, I prefer the style choice more common in British English where there's no full stop placed after an abbreviation that starts with the abbreviated word's first letter and ends with its last. So it's Mr and Mrs for me, full-stop free.

However, abbreviations that don't end with the final letter of the word get a full stop. For example, co. for company (or county) and inc. for incorporation.

Most of these differences are matters of style. My general approach is if a certain rule serves no obvious, helpful purpose, then there's no need to use it, particularly when there's a viable, comprehensible alternative.

As we've seen with the Oxford comma, though, opting for less punctuation isn't always the best strategy. Nonetheless, old habits die hard. I still feel like I'm committing a violation if I use it.

When it comes to using plural forms for a team, its everyday use in British English has led to its acceptance. Through dedication and repetition, Team GB have won the right to say it makes sense.
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Without the pain, the pleasures are plain (and enslaving)

@wwaycorrigan

[For an audio/vlog version of this story, click here.]

No pain, no gain. The meaning of that proverb needs little explanation, expressed in various guises as it has been throughout the ages.

I can't think of any success of note I've had — yes, I've had one or two — that didn't come without some pain in one form or another, save for the odd win in gambling.

Seeking out some pain makes many feel more alive. 

I must also state that the pain part in some of my bad romances came after I had savoured the initial success. Thus, I question the belief that 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' I would have happily forgone the pleasure to avoid the resultant pain. A more apt expression in such scenarios is, 'Easy come, easy go.'

Of course, another way to look at my relationship woes is that I wasn't willing to put up with some constant pain for, perhaps, an overall gain in happiness. It depends on how one views such, um, affairs; this blog has analysed them from an array of angles over the years. One place to start is with Everlasting love and work your way back through the hyperlinks.

Pleb pain

On a broader scale, as any self-help guru keeping it real will tell you, life is suffering. Or, putting it in less depressing words, life is but a sea of melancholy, warmed up only sporadically by the odd drop of delight.

However, the modern conveniences and state-hung financial safety nets to which some people in certain parts of the world can rely on mean that the suffering in merely existing has been diluted to an extent.

Great that, isn't it? Who wouldn't want less suffering in the world?

The issue here is that as a species, like any other, suffering and pain are meant to be part of living. It's a default setting.

'Outside of activism of abnegation, others find their wholesome pain in feats of physical and mental endurance.'

What some self-styled social democracies are trying to move towards is a citizenry devoid of everyday concerns. No real short-term financial issues, no hunger of note, everything made simple and safe.

'Placate the plebs to the point where they won't notice nor care that they've no real control over their affairs', that's the direction of travel. Impotent but content.

Think of us plebs as being well-fed domesticated dogs as opposed to the wiry wild ones roaming the African plains.

Yet, all the dog treats in the world won't sate that desire to live on the wild side. It's innate.

In rudimentary health

It's why, although we may be more controlled than ever, some in our comfortable classes who haven't yet become utterly disillusioned or been subdued completely seek out what I term wholesome pain to feel alive again.

Insofar as I can put myself into the comfortable-class cohort, my constant, somewhat self-inflicted pain is my attempt to maintain a minimalist lifestyle. I say somewhat self-inflicted because as things currently stand, and particularly in terms of high-income-nation living, without a steady income I have to be more minimalist than profligate anyway.

What's more, I can't say it's that painful for me. I don't mind shunning what I view as conveniences that others may think of as essentials to get by.

In fact, if we all had to take a more rudimentary approach to life — e.g. walk or cycle to get around, prepare our own meals from scratch, no home heating at the touch of a button, that kind of stuff — then few would have the time, means or even desire for a lot of the wilder, extreme pursuits we see today. Anyone up for the next Marathon des Sables?

These days, though, we don't have to worry about the fundamentals of survival to the same extent as those who came before us.

Yes, I sound a bit like Steven Pinker here but in terms of health and wealth — happiness is much more debatable — the average adult human in this century is in a better position than his counterpart who lived just three or four generations ago.

Cold comforts

Hence the search for some pain to make us feel more deserving of the many low-hanging pleasures; pain to stoke the flames of a fire of life that normally just quietly smoulders away.

The more radical climate-crisis activists appear to want a universal return to the aforementioned rudimentary way of living. Pain to all mankind (I'm not sure about the non-binaries). The difference between most of them and me is that I try to do what I say, they preach, cause disruption and in the process anger others whilst doing little good.

Outside of this activism of abnegation, others find their wholesome pain in feats of physical and mental endurance, as alluded to earlier. A particularly popular one these days appears to be cold-water dipping (studies suggest it does have health benefits, up to a point in any case.)

So while our freedom is steadily disappearing in this surveillance society, we can still, within reason, pick our own pain for some sort of personal gain. Indeed, these days, freedom is pain. Freedom is suffering.
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Hold tight, the worst is yet to come

@wwaycorrigan

[Listen to an audio version of this blog entry here.]

If you've ever listened to and/or read the work of Canadian cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular-science author, Steven Pinker, you'll know that he's been at pains to tell us, replete with facts and figures, that as a species we've never had it so good.

In countries such as Colombia, a post-pandemic boom is hard to envisage.

Wild West

Life expectancy is up across the globe, child mortality levels have never been lower, there are fewer devastating wars, the list of positive indicators, when looked at over time, is practically endless.

Indeed, even the millions, nay billions, who have been spooked into believing that covid-19 — that is to say the infection caused by the coronavirus, not the highly questionable, damaging measures introduced to curtail contagion — is an 'unprecedented threat' need only look back at history to realise that as pandemics go, we've got off lightly.

In fact, as many high-income nations marvel at the rapid rollout of their vaccination programmes and with it a decline in hospitalisations/deaths linked to covid-19 — cause-and-effect questions aside — talk is shifting in some quarters to a roaring twenties for the 21st century, akin to what some countries experienced in the 1920s after World War One ended and the Spanish flu petered out.

Yes, it is true that practically everyone has been disrupted in some form due to lockdowns and a halting of what was once called "normal life". 

However, it would appear many in the comfortable classes who have been able to continue working and earning throughout the pandemic largely as before — a prolonged home office being the main change — have boosted their cash reserves. And now, green light pending, they're ready to splurge.

It is also true that most countries have increased their debt burden in order to keep their economies ticking over after having shut down a host of finance-generating activities. (That debt does have to be paid back, doesn't it? Or is it just numbers on a page? Or a stick to continuously beat the masses with? 'Time to tighten your belts again, guys.')

Whatever the case, hope exists that with post-pandemic elation, we'll spend our way into a boom.

That's the optimistic take. Yet, as hard as Steven Pinker et al. try to convince us otherwise, the age-old human tendency to believe that the current epoch is the worst, that the apocalypse is nigh, is unlikely to lessen in intensity.

On the contrary, the indicators are that the opposite will happen.

I say this because of a vociferous, activist and, importantly, influential group of largely affluent people from the global West that sees virtually everything associated with Western values and its way of life as the root of all our problems. 

The fact that their own comfortable existence, nay their existence at all, is thanks to the West's achievements doesn't seem to register.

Now, I must state that I'm all for correcting what we recognise as bad practices. Materialism and its disposable, waste-heavy living tend to bring out the worst in human behaviour. Finding truly sustainable, reliable energy sources to continue to drive positive advancements is not just worthwhile, it's essential.

However, those West-is-evil virtue signallers tend to be spectacular hypocrites. 'Everything must change, except us.' 

They thrive off an alarmist agenda, convince themselves that they're doing their bit to save humanity/the planet, safe in the knowledge that they'll never have to face the real consequences of finding that delicate balance between progress and sustainability, between life and death.

'It very much feels like a rather open, liberal period is giving way to one that is quite the opposite.'

That the worst is yet to come is due to what I see as the pursuing of a regressive agenda, one that if implemented would actually deepen the divide between the haves and have nots. A case of, 'everything's been built on false premises, tear it all down and start again.'

To give such an approach its due, the argument can be made that there would indeed be a temporary decline while we readjust to new ways but we'd soon power on again, cleaner, greener and leaner.

Changing times

Staying largely positive, take the following observation from the epilogue of J.M. Roberts' mammoth The Penguin History of the World, 1997 reprint:

'There are still no reasons to believe that the ways of discovering techniques to meet problems in the past cannot again be brought to bear successfully. We have no grounds either logical or empirical for thinking that the steady accretion of control over nature which has marked all history until now will not continue. All that is different is that change is quite simply more sweeping and faster than ever before. But this applies to the search for solutions as well as to the emergence of problems.

We know of nothing in the nature of the problems now facing the human race which in principle renders them incapable of solution. They may be more urgent and potentially more damaging, but this is only to say that their solution may require more urgent and radical methods, more drastic political and social change, not that they are insoluble.

We may have to decide to live in a different way, but we need not assume mankind will be extinguished ... We have plenty of evidence of human adaptability in the past. The only clear warning which does stand out is that, whatever we do, we are likely to be gravely misled about the future if we simply extrapolate present trends. We must prepare for discontinuity as well as continuity.'

How continuity and discontinuity manifest themselves will be the key to success. Or failure. For me, the signs are not good.

It very much feels like a rather open, liberal period is giving way to one that is quite the opposite.

This brings to mind the remarks of Steppenwolf in Herman Hesse's classic novel of the same name, worthy of being reprinted in full here:

'Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation.

Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche's had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.'

It certainly appears that some people seem intent on ensuring that suffering is a widespread constant. In an Orwellian sense, suffering is joy. Indeed.
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Wake up to Pinker's wonderful world

"The world has never been better and very few of us know it." That was the hook for a talk given by the 'celebrity' cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in Bogotá recently. It's also the thrust of his latest book, Enlightenment Now.

No one can really argue with the various statistics that he rhymes off as to why the human race has never had it so good. 

We're living longer, peace rather than war is the norm, global poverty levels have dramatically fallen while the world's calorie intake has increased. What's more, it's not that it's just that oft-vilified top one per cent reaping the benefits. Everyone is.

Steven Pinker in Bogotá: 'Never mind the future, things are bright now.'

So, compared to the not-too-distant past, current challenges notwithstanding and acknowledged (climate change, populism and suchlike), it's all positive, it's progress.

Malignant media

To be honest, it surprises me somewhat that very few people, according to Pinker anyway, know this. These health & safety and material advancements are obvious, aren't they?

Of course, from a news media perspective, one could be forgiven for thinking the opposite was true. Pinker, with good reason, does lay an amount of the blame at the media's door for all the negativity swirling around the planet.

"That we are statistically on Easy Street these days matters little at the individual level."

Indeed, I recall my late sister and her husband taking a decision a few years back not to read, watch or listen to the news because it just depressed them. We can easily lose sight of the good when we're consuming a large, unhealthy dose of the bad.

So we're agreed, at a macro level, there's never been a better time to be alive.

Yet, that's the crux of it for me — the macro level. From the individual viewpoint, this zoomed-out approach very often doesn't hit home, quite literally. While we're more connected than ever and can converse and share experiences with people on the other side of the planet in an instant, virtually albeit, we still have to live out our lives, tackle the trials and tribulations that we personally face, on a daily basis.

The fact that we are statistically on Easy Street compared to our ancestors matters little in the here and now. It's all relative.

What's it all about?

As that other celebrity Canadian speaker and psychologist, Jordan Peterson, puts it, "Life is suffering."

For the majority of our species born just 100 years ago or so — or even more recently — the initial challenge was simply to stay alive. If they dodged an infant death, managed to find some sort of income or whatever was needed to get sufficient food and shelter, the next goal was to reproduce. After that, exiting stage left was usually the least-worst option. In such a scenario, it was all purely about survival.

These days, for those of us lucky enough to beat the exceptionally long odds of actually being born, the chances of us then living to an age of 60 plus are very high, as the statistically astute Pinker is well aware. Therefore, basic life and death issues don't tend to constantly come into play.

"In the secular world, finding meaning becomes our 'cross to bear'."

For many, these are replaced by questions of "What's it all about?" and the like. Deeper concerns about meaning, or what some might term spirituality, are what fill this space.

Added to this is the fact that we're now smarter. Not only have global literacy levels increased but so have our IQs, as highlighted by Pinker.

Thus, it can be argued, in our search for more concrete truths about existence as a greater number of us leave behind old 'comforting' beliefs in this secular liberal democratic world to which both Pinker and I espouse, the meaning of life becomes our 'cross to bear' so to put it. We're here, going through the motions, 'working for the system' or what have you, for what?

You would be right in thinking that I'm writing this from the point of view of a single, childless man who isn't exactly 'loving' his principal job right now. I'm not alone. And it would appear we're on the rise, thanks in no small part to a lack of wars to check our numbers.

It's not just men who are at risk from this, although we are more likely to end things prematurely compared to women. 

Listening to Pinker in relation to technological advancements and artificial intelligence, I couldn't help but think of an episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets a new well-paid job and moves with the family to an ultra-modern house, replete with all sorts of gadgets to do the housework. With very little to do, wife Marge takes to the wine. There's always alcohol to fill the void, isn't there?

Believe in better

Of course, this isn't to say that technology and the accompanied 'softer living' are killing us, um, softly (although, in some spheres, this might very well be the case). That same human ingenuity that has made our lives easier can also come good to ensure we remain strong and feel fulfilled.

That being said, that our lives in this world have never been better could be put into the 'lies, damned lies and statistics' category. 

One way to view it is like a football team that has had the lion's share of possession, the most shots on target, the most corners, etc. and goes on to win the game as expected. However, for the players, it seems like a defeat. It should have been much better. They think more about what they did poorly rather than what they did well.

That's human nature really. It's what keeps us striving for better and it is where we can find meaning. This is where Pinker and I agree, the ability of mankind (can I use that word in these politically correct days?), collectively, to keep on improving. The problem is that some don't feel part of the game at all. Or at least they feel like they only have a very minor, insignificant part in it.

So yes, the world has never been better for the masses when we crunch all the numbers. Yet, we can't experience the lives of those in the past to appreciate just how good we have it now. 

Also, the stats usually count for very little. Pinker can publish all the graphs he wants to show how such a wonderful world it currently is. It's how we perceive things to be going, though, this is what generally matters most.
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