puzzling.org

2006 update: Mark Liberman addresses the source of the [adjective] of a [noun] construction in the Language Log.

Is “big of a deal” as in “it’s not that big of a deal” a US usage, or am I just missing out on a trend?

I say “it’s not that big a deal”, “I don’t want to make that big a deal”, but not “it’s not that big of a deal” or “I don’t want to make that big of a deal”, but it seems like some of my correspondents do.

And does anyone else have those moments where you’ve been looking at words too long and they don’t look right any more? For a second, I thought “big” and “deal” weren’t even words…

It’s not actually true that I liked high school, I’m just wearing a mask. If I was going to recap high school in a paragraph, I would say that it was intellectually and socially frustrating. Interestingly the social frustration of a gifted student, which teachers worry endlessly about, proved to be relatively transient. Most people grow up, grow out and become adults. There is a limited correlation with high school social success. My own intellectual frustration was much nastier, because the ease with which I slid through high school caused several minor crashes at university, some of which I may never recover from.

Actually, I loathed high school. My reaction to leaving was very uncomplicated: I was thrilled to get out. And I still am thrilled to be out. Every time I meet a “you know, it’s true what they say, you don’t believe it at the time, but it really is the best time of your life” person I feel like the conversation’s over. I was miserable most of the time.

I haven’t tried to systematically understand why I had so much trouble with high school, but that’s been OK up until now because Paul Graham has been doing it for me. Except now, he’s getting it wrong.

So here’s a secret: I hated high school, but I loved English class.

Paul Graham’s social essays tend to start from a simplified premise which you can pick up easily from his The Age of Essays article: he’s writing for people like himself. He hated English class and likes writing essays. He wants to explain to you why you hated English class and why you’d like writing essays. He doesn’t make many concessions to readers who are different from him (and he probably sees this as a virtue). If you were a clever bored iconoclast busting to get out into the world and do some stuff, then Graham’s talking to you. If you liked pulling Dickens to pieces, then you were part of the problem that held Graham’s audience back all these years.

I suppose we cogs in the aging machinery can console ourselves safe in the knowledge that for once literature nerds are part of the big boring mainstream holding the world back, rather than a little shallow sidestream holding the mainstream back.

I feel the need to respond to Graham though, precisely because I agree with so much of his article, and yet don’t fit inside it. The essay art form is only tied to the study of literature by academic accident, although probably not exactly of the sort he describes. (There seems to be an unexplained gulf between his uncritical dismissal of the study of modern literature and his uncritical acceptance of the core place history has as part of the ideal intellectual toolkit.) The essay is a useful tool outside that realm. And the essay in particular, and writing in general, is a good way to draw interesting conclusions from a solid set of premises.

And now that I’ve had this explained to me, I’m meant to understand why I didn’t like English class. Except that I did. Oh, the cognitive dissonance.

The answer lies in Graham’s essay too, oddly. It’s possible to build an interesting ediface out of a lot of things, he points out. The art of the essay is in some sense that of being able to sketch the structure, and also that of shining a torch from an unexpected angle while doing so. Well, you can do this with programming techniques, or ice cream sales, or you can do it with literature.

And the connection between literature and composition is not merely that they both have to do with writing, and composition teachers might as well write about literature since the mathematicians have already cornered geometry, it is that literature too is a complex enough structure that we can build it up in our minds into something solid enough to have an inside.

I liked English class because I liked taking novels apart and putting them back together. I like essay writing more generally because I like taking other things apart and putting them back together. I like doing this to some things more than others, so I can even understand why some potential essay writers don’t like English class. But I don’t think Graham understands why they might like it.

Moving in geek circles has been an interesting experience for me in this respect. In person my friends’ view of school varies widely: some liked it; some hated it; some would have hated it except for their friends, their teachers, or their drama club. But the party line says that we ought to have hated it, and not only hated it, but found it beneath us. (OK, that’s unfair, the slashdot line is indiscriminate: everything is beneath us.)

I care about this mainly because I’m tired of feeling defensive about my intellectual hoover: I find a lot of stuff interesting. I even found stuff in the high school curriculum interesting. It made me happy. So why am I part of the problem?

It’s a shame Graham’s essay pushes the line that “everything is potentially interesting, except for the stuff that the system teaches you, that stuff is crap.” I think everything’s potentially interesting. I’d love to persuade more people of that, but convincing them that the entire world except for themselves is trying to kill interest off is not exactly the right way to make the point.

Part seventeen million approximately of how not to bug Mary: understand how anaphora are used.

Anaphora are the shorthand words that you use in sentences rather than naming something in an identifiable way. The obvious examples are pronouns: “she” and “you” and whatnot. There are plenty of less obvious examples: “one” in “I hate the tall woman and like the short one” is an anaphor. (I wrote my undergraduate thesis on “one” in the anaphoric usage and it was exactly as weird a computing thesis as that might lead you to believe.) Respectable noun phrases, particularly definite ones like “the idea” in “I like the idea, don’t you?” can also be anaphoric. An anaphor is, loosely, a reference to something that you need some fairly immediate context (not always verbal, you could, say, be pointing at something and calling it “that”) to be able to work out.

So far so good. Which is why I don’t understand how people use them on the Internet. I’ve had people use “it” to refer to an idea they discussed with someone else several hours previously, and judging from their profuse apologies, have genuinely actually forgotten that it might no longer be foremost in anyone’s mind.

More generally, text mediated communication seems to reduce everyone’s capacity to actually model what other people might know. Mostly they assume too much of their audience. “Which idea? The idea I discussed with someone you’ve never heard of who lives on the other side of the world in a lead box, of course. That idea. Hello? Duh.” Some assume too little. “You want to change your tyre? OK, let’s back off a step. A wheel is a round object that, together with an axle, allows low friction in motion by rolling… [thanks Wikipedia].”

In the ultimate failure to model one’s audience, the other day I sent a mail about the Google thing. I got a reply from someone I don’t know reading, in its entirety, “women engineers?????????????????????? And me?” It was tempting to reply “Lookit, cannibals!” or something. Instead I politely replied that I hadn’t understood the question, and my correspondent has failed to enlighten me.

Paul Graham is hoping to teach nerds (who have the advantage of being iconoclasts and thus ripe for the message) that moral ideas have fashions, and that it’s worth questioning them. He writes that:

We’re looking for things we can’t say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open.

He explicitly mentions sexism, but doesn’t himself decide on what question it is that the sexism taboos are forcing us to hide. OK, that one’s got some fire in it. But I couldn’t help myself. What is it? What is it that we’re worried might be true about women, or men that we don’t want people to say?

Interestingly I can’t come up with a single question that calling a statement “sexist” hides from us. Perhaps there are many:

• Is gender so important that it is sensible to generalise about someone’s economic worth based on their gender?
• Is gender so important that it is sensible to generalise about someone’s social worth based on their gender?
• Is gender so important that it is sensible to generalise about someone’s moral worth based on their gender?
• Is gender so important that it is sensible to generalise about someone’s intellectual worth based on their gender?

Maybe there’s something in this one:

• Is it inherently better to be a man than it is to be a woman?

I’m occasionally asked what it’s like being a "woman in Linux". It’s not such an easy question for me to answer: what’s it like being a man doing the shopping? what’s it like being an elderly person drinking Scotch? You can say lots of things about the shopping and the Scotch, but not a lot about the maleness or agedness of the experience.

I suspect most of my "woman in Linux" (in the user sense, I’m not a developer) experiences are pretty subtle: some of my unease in combative situations is undoubtedly socialised, and some of that socialisation is probably related to being a woman. But which bits? How much? Who knows. Questions about being a woman in Linux always leave me floundering.

Raven, a "woman in security", has an answer though. For her, the "woman in X" question is all about being hit on. Relentlessly.

I don’t get hit on relentlessly. I get hit on about as much as most men seem to: hardly ever. If I was going to draw parallels with Raven’s experience, I would draw them not with experiences of fending off the horny masses, but of fending off the hordes of people who’ve never met a woman as tall as I am.

At 190cm, I’m willing to believe I’m one of, if not the, tallest woman most people have seen, or at least spoken to. (I have, in the course of my life, seen about four women who are taller than I am, and I keep an eye out, trust me.) And I hear about it a lot. I’ve heard all the jokes. I’ve heard all the compliments. And I’d like to think I’ve heard all the insults, but I have my doubts.

I’ve even well and truly had enough of the empathetic tongue-in-cheek responses ("I bet people say that all the time, hey?") but I try to take them in the spirit they were meant: more empathy is more better, as a general principle. I don’t want to discourage people from walking a mile in someone’s shoes, especially if they’re someone who stocks shoe stores and can order in size 11s for once.

But there are a number of parallels with being hit on, and one of them is that not everyone is a well-meaning bumbling fool with a propensity to innocently hit on women or call tall women "lanky bitches" if they run into them around a corner. (I have never heard the word lanky unattached to bitch. What quirk of humanity spawned that meme?) A number of people dealing out this stuff are out to hurt people. In fact, a solid majority of people commenting on my height are complete strangers commenting with the intention of hurting or embarrassing me.

One of the most common responses to "I get hit on all the time&quot rants, after "wow cool what the hell is wrong with you, whinger?" anyway, is "I can see how that’s a little annoying, but you know, they mean well. It’s a compliment. Whinger."

That’s crap. Sure, some of them mean well, in so far as wanting to have sex with someone is meaning well (I think it’s neither a virtue nor a vice in and of itself, but some of the people who want to gift Raven with the spawn of their geek genes prove that Stephen Pinker’s gentle "good for your genes isn’t the same thing as morally good" warnings could be hammered into his books with a chisel and they wouldn’t be clear enough). But the reason people who get hit on a lot find it creepy isn’t because they’re weirdly hostile to the compliment of someone’s flattering and harmless attraction, but because being hit on can be genuinely creepy. And is. A lot of the time, it is.

A lot of the sexual attention I get is decidedly negative: it’s more or less suggestions of sexual violence from passing strangers (usually driving past, but occasionally they’re brave enough to mutter threats as they pass me on foot). I didn’t count that in the "I don’t get hit on" count: if I counted people who yell "suck my cock, lanky bitch" out of cars, I get hit on any time I’m out walking after dark.

I won’t pretend to speak for all women here: some women do consider the vast majority (or possibly all) come-ons as a compliment. I try to take them as they come. But I’m sick of the ‘compliment’ defence in general, it’s as bad as the joke defence. Sexual attention is neutral: when you get it a lot like Raven does, it’s as annoying as being asked about your height all the time, and it also is sometimes used as a way to hurt people, making them scared, or embarrassed, or leaving them feeling like shit the rest of the day. Some other times, it’s a compliment, or mutual, or otherwise wonderful.

And you know, most people can tell the difference. The people on the receiving end know the difference, and the people dealing it out damn well know the difference too.

The height analogy glosses over the fact that being constantly reminded of your gender (not always by being hit on) destroys the "we’re all geeks/friends/partners/collegues here" feeling. I’m lucky to escape that, and if I was offered the trade of being constantly reminded that I’m female — and therefore different — in a group of men against being reminded that I’m really tall — to some people, unattractive — I’ll keep taking the latter.

But in either case I can’t stand the stupidity of the "it’s a compliment!" defense. Nothing’s automatically a compliment.

Some things are meant to be a compliment, or friendly, or whatever, and are taken badly because the recipient has had a bad day, doesn’t like the same things about themself that you like, or has heard your complimentary little joke fifteen times that morning, and fifty times yesterday, thanks. Some people are cranky (OK, I confess).

But some things are never meant to be a compliment in the first place. Come-ons regularly fall into one of those categories. If you want to compliment someone, see if you can figure out what makes them happy, rather than deciding on their behalf what should make them happy, doing it, and then giving them a lecture when they complain.

Native speakers of English: do you think the word “touristic” is English? I’ve hardly been able to move on the continent without seeing “touristic offices”, “touristic guides” and “touristic cities”. I’ve been assuming that it’s a translation slip-up by non-native speakers bringing a word over from their native language (French seems to have the word touristique and Spanish has touristica I think). Wherever the adjective “touristic” is used I’ve just substituted “tourist”: “tourist offices”, “tourist guides” and “tourist cities”.

But I’ve started to see it so often, that I’m wondering if there’s a basic bit of travel vocabulary I’ve missed!

So, help me out. Would you ever call something a touristic experience? Have you scorned a city as just being too crowded and touristic? Ever asked for a ride on the little touristic train?

I just got a supposedly anonymous review of my OSDC paper with a very recognisable name stuck in the middle of the name of the file containing the review. So it’s quite a good chance that I know my reviewer’s surname and first initial. (There is of course, the small chance that a reviewer stuck someone else’s first initial and surname in the filename…) Likewise, Andrew just got one entitled spiv.txt, meaning that it was written by someone who knows that Andrew’s IRC nickname is ‘spiv’. The overlap between people he talks to on IRC and people who have had papers accepted (the speakers review) at OSDC is fairly small, so he can fairly easily pick the two or three people who that could have been.

Just goes to show how hard setting up an anonymous review process is. When the anonymity goes both ways—the reviewers don’t know the authors’ identities either—it creates some amusement for readers. Academic papers that were prepared for blind review read strangely because the authors refer to their own past work really distantly and non-judgementally in the third person because they couldn’t tell the reviewers that they wrote the paper under consideration. I suspect that half the time it’s obvious to the reviewer anyway, since, often, of all the techniques in the world that author S could have chosen, they’ve chosen to follow up on Smith et al (2005) and Smith et al (2002). I wonder who author S might be?

As part of linux.conf.au 2007, which is being held at the University of New South Wales, Sydney from 15–20 January 2007 I’m organising a LinuxChix miniconf (‘miniconf’ is lca jargon, for people who know their academic conferences it’s essentially a workshop scheduled into the main conference and included with the main registration—not to imply, I hasten to add, that lca is an academic conference).

We’ve just put out our Call for Presentations (we aren’t going to require written papers), feel free to pass it onto any interested women or groups.

Google is having a women in engineering event on Thursday October 26. It will feature Jen Fitzpatrick (Google’s Engineering Director) and Rob Pike (famed hacker of general UNIX stuff and author of beloved C textbooks) as speakers plus a panel featuring local women software engineers, including a number of Sydney LinuxChix. And I will be there in my capacity as an Anita Borg scholarship finalist, practicing my best happy for the winner face!

Date

Thursday 26 October

Time

6:30pm–10:00pm

Location

Google Sydney, Sydney CBD (Level 18, Tower 1, Darling Park, 201 Sussex Street)

More details and RSVP

http://services.google.com/events/ohsydney_rsvp

Women only?

I’m assuming so (unless you’re a man who actually works for Google), I’m waiting on someone at Google to say for sure.

At present there’s places left but be sure to RSVP.

Yesterday, after talking with Akkana Peck on IRC about quiet servers, I was all set to write a long request for recommendations for server recommendations that are small, cool and quiet. But the ends of the Internet have converged, it seems, so I’ll probably just watch Jordi Mallach do the same thing.