Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps — thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn’t really seen enough specimens to generalize.
David berreby, “Quelle Différence?” slate, SEPT 11, 1996
I like looking at data. One thing I like is trends of names over time. Why? Because if you’re writing something, it makes sense the name of your character should match their age.
I like the Babynames.com site. It shows trends since 1910. (Though be careful. Enter names in the gray field right by the graph, not the darker one higher up the page — that way you’ll get results.) Here’s an example, using Jennifer, made famous for this kind of thing by the book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.
All right, but that’s not the only source. What about Social Security’s web site? (Go down to the “Popularity of a Name” box, and fill it in.) They’re using actual birth records as they come in.
The Social Security site shows a decline, just like Baby Names… but it’s much less sharp. What’s going on?
I had to think a while, and squint at the graphs, but I figured it out. In 1985, when the Social Security site tells us Jennifer was the 5th most popular name, the US birth rate (yes, it’s there, although not on the easiest site) was 15.461 births per 1000 people. In 2021, the most recent year listed, Jennifer was the 493rd most popular name, and the birth rate fell to 12.001 per thousand people — a drop of 22.4%.
Why is this important? Well, the Babynames chart is showing how many kids get a name. The Social Security chart shows the rank of the name among all others.
So while Jennifer was becoming less popular among names, people were having fewer babies in the first place.
Double-whammy. And that’s why the graph looks so much more spiky.
Yes, probably few people care. But it was a fun puzzle for me.
This comes from a sub-section of the original BBC Radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a bit intricate, so here’s the whole thing:
“May (or may not)…” pops up all over in my lexicon.
“Some of you may (or may not) remember the story I told…”
Although on re-hearing it, I admit a fondness for “Representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons.” Let alone, “(W)e demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert A. Heinlein, time enough for love
Lexicon. Used more by Ulrika than myself. Example:
“Stop trying to use logic with these guys. They’re bureaucrats, who probably just have a script they can work from. You’re annoying the pig.”
From a long-time favorite novel, Steven Minkin’s A No Doubt Mad Idea:
“On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer’s Salons, call them, franchise chain.”
So.
So I haven’t really been talking much about my health, as this site has mainly been an escape for me. But I want to write this down (and probably different health issues, in future posts), because I have a new image, one I think can convey how certain things feel to me.
I have multiple sclerosis, or MS. It’s a shibboleth of the tribe that everyone’s course of MS is different. The main way MS presents in me has the unwieldy name of trigeminal neuralgia (TN). I call it my “MS pain” to folks I don’t want to put off with medical Latin. It’s a very sharp pain in my lower right jaw. I’ve likened it to two electrical wires, sparking. Or a metal pick, stabbing me.
When it’s affecting me, I tend to go “Ow!” a lot, and I seem to twitch. The medical aides and nurses, seeing this for the first time, get very concerned and scared. It’s tough for me to tell them what’s going on, because I hurt, and speech has been known to be a trigger. As has swallowing. Or chewing. Or licking my lips. Or touching my skin in that area. Or drinking. Not all at the same time — every time is different.
I’ve had people ask if the body movements are spasms, or seizures. Today I realized I had a better image: I’m flinching, or wincing. I’m trying to get away from an intermittent pain source. But, being in the nerve, I can’t. Doesn’t stop me from trying, though. But I offer as a hypothetical — if I was repeatedly sticking a needle into your jaw, would you move?
This is why when the pain lasts a bit longer, I won’t move as much. I get used to the pain as a constant (though I still cry out from it — as both Ulrika and our dog Kaylee can attest, from an incident a few years ago). But when it really is off and on — bzzt! bzzt! bzzt! — I flinch each time. Which is probably why it looks so strange. I’m wincing from something no one can see. (Note: in an earlier era, it might have been off to Bedlam for me. It’s interesting to speculate how many inmates were experiencing something we’d diagnose differently today.)
Anyway… I thought it better described how I feel, and was worth documenting.
Lexicon. Derived from this bit in Steve Martin’s 1991 movie, L.A. Story:
L’Idiot is the hot restaurant of the moment, and pronounced as if French (as one might expect from the apostrophe). The phrase is generally used when someone is being a dick.
“I see Congress has cut Medicaid spending.”
“Part of the New Cruelty?”
Interestingly, the New Cruelty also shows up with lightning speed in this deleted scene that featured John Lithgow:
“And that’s what’s wrong with publishing today.”
Lexicon. Mild reworking of a bit William Goldman has in his foreword to Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride:
WHEN I WAS twenty-six, my first novel, The Temple of Gold, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Which is now part of Random House which is now part of R.C.A. which is just part of what’s wrong with publishing in America today which is not part of this story.)
Usually used to illustrate something being overly intricate:
”That restaurant is run by Fussmucker, but it’s owned by Muckenfuss, which is really a part of Gilded Octopus, LLC.”
”And that’s what’s wrong with publishing today.”
This video is 30 minutes long, but worth it. The text version is here. I first read it long ago, either in Co-Evolution Quarterly, or in one of the editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. I had an idea of establishing a fund at Midland to do something similar over all of campus, but like many of my ideas, nothing came of it.
Lexicon. From the movie Titanic:
“(Captain Smith) figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big, with too small a rudder… it can’t corner worth shit. Everything he knows is wrong.”
Not so much a misquote, as a paraphrase. “Your rudder is too small,” means you don’t have enough resources for the task at hand. Thus:
“I really think I can learn general relativity from this Mandarin textbook in six weeks.”
”Your rudder is too small.”