Cockeyed Optimist

The last couple of days I have been rather frustrated because my internet service provider, with whom I have no quarrels at all, has been limiting my connection speed to the equivalent of dial-up.

They do this when you exceed your monthly download allowance (20 Gigs in my case - sounds a lot!), instead of charging you a premium for the excess usage. When you have become used to cable speeds (modest though they may be here in Australia), dial-up speeds seem impossibly slow.

And then I thought back to the time (1979) when I got my first computer, an Apple ][, and started using Compuserve (now that’s another bit of mixed nostalgia for you!). What I connected with then was an acoustic coupler that fitted onto my telephone handset; it ran at 300 baud, would you believe?

(I know I’m beginning to sound like Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen:

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: House! You were lucky to live in a house!
We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor
was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Eh, you were lucky to have a room!
We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor!
Would ha' been a  palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip.
We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground
covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground;
we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky to have a lake!
There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank.
We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag,
eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day,
week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home
our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

I think you get the idea!)

Back to my actual on-line experiences.

Connecting to an overseas system like Compuserve meant that I had to get an account with Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission, which was quite expensive and charged by volume. (I was recently divorced, so I was a bit insane anyway.)

I remember typing out a huge Pascal word-processor program (it had a similar approach to Runoff, and was called Prose), which I copied out of a UCSD Pascal newsletter because it would have cost an arm and a leg to download.

This ran on the UCSD Pascal system on my Apple, which was so immense that you had to expand the original 48K of memory to a mind-blowing 64K by installing a special card (yes, I do mean Kilobytes!).

If you’re not careful, I shall start telling you about my former colleague’s experiences at the University of New South Wales with the English Electric Deuce, which used mercury delay lines for memory!

So, enough nostalgia; tomorrow is another month, so I shall be back up to a decent speed!

Any similar reminiscences you would like to share here? Feel free!

Following a suggestion in Daniel Scocco’s ‘Daily Blog Tips’, I’m inviting everyone to use this post as an opportunity to talk, hold forth, whinge or just comment on anything you like.

Maybe you would like to pick up on something on this blog, maybe on some completely unrelated topic.

I’ll try and put up a post like this every week.

So, don’t be shy — let’s hear from you!

On the excellent Blog ‘Daily Writing Tips’ for August 27, Maeve Maddox, one of the gurus behind this enterprise, gives a useful summary of Strunk and White’s ‘Elements of Style’, which has been a helpful guide for writers since 1918.

As an editor, I have my own copy, of course; not the most recent edition, but that hardly matters. The English language evolves, but this evolution is mainly seen in its effect on vocabulary and usage, while Strunk and White has broader concerns.

The reason I’m posting about it today is not to describe what’s in the book — Maeve Maddox has done this thoroughly. What I wanted to do is point out that it is very important to approach this guide with caution. You shouldn’t think of it as a set of laws or binding rules, or you could find yourself becoming rigid in your writing.

Here is a quotation from Geoffrey K. Pullum, writing at one of my favourite blogs, Language Log,

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs” says E. B. White in the chapter he added in making the new 1957 edition of Strunk’s odious booklet The Elements of Style, most of which was written some time before the First World War. Ridiculous advice, which nobody follows — not White himself, for example, as I pointed out in my earlier post “Those who take the adjectives from the table.” Everybody uses adjectives. Anybody who wants to say they are not useful has a real problem: useful is an adjective, so how are they going to express the claim?

We have already seen something very closely related: the case of the student I met who had been told by a Los Angeles teacher of English that everything that is optional is forbidden: again the basis for this nonsense comes from Strunk and White (and from Strunk’s original version, in fact): the “Omit needless words” mantra. The student quoted above appears to think that all adjectives are needless (you can get your point across without them) and that is why they are and ought to be, by Strunk’s principles and not just White’s, forbidden. For if adjectives are needless, then if you use them you must be using them too much, by a factor of infinity, and as Arnold Zwicky has pointed out, a guiding principle of prescriptivism seems to be that If they do it too much, they should be told not to do it at all.

This poor student has apparently been told by some other professor to purchase Strunk and White (sometimes parents give their children copies of Strunk and White to take off to college, a practice I believe constitutes child abuse), and she has read it, and has believed the things it says.

Now, maybe Geoffrey Pullum is going overboard a bit here, but nevertheless his point is absolutely apposite. As in many another sphere of life, those who slavishly follow a set of rules are doomed to have them, sooner or later, turn round and bite them.

So, go ahead and use Strunk and White; especially if you are a student — but take what it says as a guide, not as a strict prescription. If you want to end a sentence with a preposition, you should be allowed to. If you want to purposely split an infinitive, go ahead. But if you want to find out about the elementary rules of usage or composition, then by all means read Strunk and White.

As Maeve Maddox tells us, you can find an on-line version at Bartleby.com

As I have been progressively posting my continuing series here — ‘My Story’, the fairytale ‘Kit and the Beeman’, as well as my tutorials on word processing — it has occurred to me from time to time that I might eventually turn some or all of them into books.

Whether I would aim for a printed book or an e-book is something I can decide later; whatever the format, I would use the posts as a starting-point, but would aim for a much more ‘professional’ and finished work.

Apart from my doctoral thesis and some academic papers, over the years I have published a few modest-sized technical books; and I have a lot of experience of editing, of both student work and serious texts, so I’m confident I have the necessary skills.

If any of you out there could give some views on this, on both the practicality of the process, and the potential audience for each of them, I would be very pleased to hear from you. And maybe, if you have gone through this sort of exercise yourself, you could point out what precautions need to be taken, and what pitfalls I must watch out for.

So, please leave comments below; if I get a sufficient volume of feedback I will summarize it here.

Unless you live in Australia and/or watch Australia’s SBS tv network, this topic will be only of limited interest. But underlying the events of this case are some important principles and some questions that have far wider implications.

Mary Kostakidis has been, until recently, the main newsreader for SBS Television.

Background on Australian Television

So, what is SBS? It is a public broadcaster originally set up to serve the particular interests of the large proportion of Australians who have come here from other countries - especially, I should say, from countries whose native language is not English. Radio broadcasting started in 1978, followed by television in 1980.

Most of its programming is in English, but it makes a point of presenting news reports in other languages, and shows movies from European and Asian countries. When SBS television started up, in 1980, my wife and I would watch soaps from places like Slovenia and Argentina, which were a wonderful contrast to the hum-drum British and American series, with a few local Australian shows, that dominated tv.

And SBS was the only channel where you could regularly watch French, German, Italian, Mandarin or Hindi movies and series.

Before cable came we had four other channels: the ABC, which was and still remains a government funded channel with no advertising, plus three commercial channels. And SBS was also government supported, but after a few years, was allowed a limited amount of commercial advertising (but strictly between, not during, programs).

Here is an overview and officlal description of SBS.

And Mary Kostakidis has been, for almost 20 years, the most prominent newsreading personality, who not only appeals to the large community with a Greek background and culture, but to Australians of all ethnicities. There are also other newsreaders and presenters, from, for instance, Chinese-speaking countries, Thailand, India, South Africa, and from indigenous communities within Australia.

She has a well-deserved reputation for her engaging personality, and for her competence and professionalism; and in this latter, perhaps, lies the source of her recent disenchantment with SBS, which has now led to a possible parting of the ways.

Recent Changes

As I mentioned, SBS has always been allowed to advertise, but to a limited extent and only between programs, not during them. The 30-minute evening news bulletin has also provided a refreshing contrast with similar programs put out by the ABC and the commercial channels. Sometimes, it would almost appear that there was little overlap between them. If you wished to know about world events, and were less interested in local news and sports results, the SBS news was the one to watch.

Recently, however, among many changes of style brought about by management changes, the news broadcast was extended to an hour. Consequently, additional newsreaders were brought on board. And the strong impression has been created in many minds, including mine, that Mary has been gradually squeezed out. It is not for me to say who has been responsible for this, but it has been increasingly apparent.

So, a couple of days ago, Mary Kostakidis seemed to decide that enough was enough, and left. There have been conflicting reports in the press about all this; some say she will sue SBS for breach of contract, others say she is simply on sick leave. The elements could include her dislike of commercial breaks within programs, and it has also been claimed that she felt she was being overshadowed by newcomers to the news broadcasts.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this all - it is still working through stages.

All I know is that it will be a great pity if Mary feels she has to leave; I shall miss her if that happens, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

What do you think? Let us know, below.

Like many others, I like to try writing fiction and even poetry. You can see some of my efforts on this blog - my Fairy Story and my life story, as well as one or two poems, like this one on a real tragedy.

But before I started blogging, I joined a site, on June 3 this year, called Helium, which publishes on the web and what’s more pays you for your articles and stories if they become popular.

You can see some of my efforts on Helium here. So far I have earned $1.61 for my work, $1.34 of that for a group of haiku - payments are based on popularity, and these poems were rated (by contributors) as No. 3 out of 106 entries.

If you join up you can vote for my articles and increase my massive earnings, as well as possibly becoming a winner yourself.

And you can browse the whole site and its literally thousands of articles and stories, starting on the home page.

Go ahead, there’s nothing to lose!