Stephen Fry on language:

For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.” Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs. New examples from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire. Pedants will also claim, with what I am sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness, that their fight is only for ‘clarity’. This is all very well, but there is no doubt what ‘Five items or less’ means, just as only a dolt can’t tell from the context and from the age and education of the speaker, whether ‘disinterested’ is used in the ‘proper’ sense of non-partisan, or in the ‘improper’ sense of uninterested. No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of clarity almost never, ever holds water. Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

From rantingsbymm.blogspot.com:

Report lodged against Teresa Kok for insulting egg

KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 24, 2008) : The Seputeh Umno Youth division lodged a police report today against Seputeh MP Teresa Kok, claiming she had insulted the Royal Malaysian Police and the egg, which is an essential food of the underprivileged.

The division’s deputy head Alawi Dahalin and several other members lodged the report at the Brickfields police station.

Alawi said he had heard Kok complain about the food she was given while detained under the ISA, at a press conference at the DAP headquarters in Petaling Jaya, shown on the night news on TV on Sept 20, a day after she was released from custody.

He said Kok had said the food she was served was "fit only for dogs".

"By saying this, she had insulted the police and the poor. Eggs are an important food for low-income earners and the poor. As an elected representative of the people she should not have said that," he said.

As Orwell said,

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.... The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people.... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

From The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.

I don't think I can or should live in Singapore anymore. There is an appalling poverty of stimuli, without which I don't see how anyone can develop themselves or pursue their individual projects of self-creation. It is foolish romanticism to think otherwise. Even if you are not alone, even in your small communities you cannot stave off for long the impending engulfment by the larger structures that form your environment. The tendrils creep and surround you and slowly soak you up for its own nutrition. Before you realize it, you've become a part of it, all while thinking you're still your good 'ol self.

All this I managed to find confirmation in during my summer back home. I call it home but that's really just for convenient purposes. Home is perhaps where the heart is, and my heart is not in Singapore.

i would like to devote myself to the voracious consumption of all forms of human experience, yes i would.

no no, jabir, you cannot get disillusioned right now or you will not finish college! i've been on an intellectual malaise for the past year or so, because of issues i've found with university education that i try to ignore in vain because i can't fool myself to care about the contrived, bite-sized bits of 'learning' that i'm being fed here. i realize though, that getting caught up in meta-level issues does not bode well for my time here. i do after all want to get out of here like most people do: with the final proof of attendance that will hopefully make it easier to get what i want in life.

but i really just want to sit down somewhere quiet and keep reading and reading and reading. it doesn't seem like my personality fits active lively discussions anyway. when someone, particularly someone i care for a little too much for my own good, confronts my argument, i immediately feel hurt that they would want to do that, and cannot say anything in reply. then later, when i comes to me what i should have said, i hesitate to do so because i am afraid it will sound too much like intellectual l'espirit de l'escalier so i don't do it. i'm actually really meek. but not all the time, cos i'm sometimes i get into this i-can-do-anything-i-want mode, then i can really lash at anything and anyone. verbally, of course.

so i need to get into this mode more often. and quit thinking about the bigger things, or at least suspend them for now. then maybe i will get nearly as much out of my academic terms than from my vacations.

i've been neglecting this space for a while. so i think i will put up some of the stuff from my paper journal:

i have given up on any sort of abstract theorizing in favor of a grounded experience-based life. holistic experience is more natural, fulfilling and valuable than cut up rationality with its narrow premises that don't quite capture reality as well as intended. from experience comes empathy and therein we derive the source of our social connexions.

really, my philosophy, if i may call it that, derives from an acute awareness of human loneliness. humans are nasty, selfish hypocrites, but they are all we have. if everyone died but us, it would make for a truly miserable existence. the affective dimensions of our needs could not be fulfilled. perhaps this is why feral children grow up emotionally retarded (though not necessarily irreversibly perhaps) because the relevant capacities were not used and fulfilled as best they could.

free will: i don't think we have as much of it as we believe we do, despite appearances. so as loathsome as people are, that's just how it is, just how people work. it is not so bleak because so much has been possible even in such impaired conditions of existence. maybe this is why i forgive people easily. often, i find that misanthropy is the rationalizing of bitter disappointment and loneliness. such moments are part of our psychological make up and we need to be aware of them as such, to be able to deal adequately with them.

in part, this philosophy is the result of a desire to lead a calm, peaceful, but aware co-existence with everything around me.

disappointment with humanity comes from idealistic, abstract expectations of what people should be, but in a way divorced from holistic experience, and derived from narrow subjective/affective premises we think up in such moments.

awareness is the result of intellectual and experiential inquiry.

in this respect, i am nihilistic, because i fail to identify with prescriptive norms and rational notions of what people should be like. awareness helps make us better social connections and decisions when we interact with others.

perhaps the biggest flaw is drawing a strict distinction between man and nature.

truth in contradiction: no theory or ideal is true or possible if it does not contain a contradiction, or at least the possibility of it. hence, the impossibility of utopias.

most of the above is the result of a prior exchange with a floormate whose views one might characterize as randian. and yes, my thoughts are quite disjointed. i could try to organize them better, but i'm not in the mood for it. also, robert pirsig's zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance has influenced some of these thoughts, but more because it allowed me to articulate them than in a more substantial manner.

below are other paper journal jottings from other times:

because people translate accents unconsciously, speaking with a comprehensible accent is not so much about speaking in a familiar accent as it is about speaking with a consistent one.

can we have art for art's sake? no. even our conceptions of beauty are value-mediated, although they are transparent to us. perhaps this is the larger Platonic fear of art.

'easy'? no, even if not much effort is needed, i wouldn't see it as some kind of competition. it's not like the girl has to be difficult enough to not risk her reputation and the guy has to get the girl to prove his manliness. i am more than willing to say that i am above the juvenile gender games. i think the culprit is in our judgment of self-worth. we are all worth the same. nothing we do or are can make us any more worthy than anyone else. value is arbitrary and illusory.

the dominant paradigm in sexist singapore is that women are worth something. but worth is commodifying. are these women objectifying themselves?

if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
mike b: yes. by the definition of 'sound', there would still be sound even in absence of its perception.
me: but this a human definition. what if you go back to when there were no people and thus no definitions.
mike b: but the definition is always there. otherwise, how can you even ask the question?
me: where would this definition of sound be then, if it is always there?
mike b: ??
me: you're cutting things up by reason and observation. you don't have access to kantian noumena.
pirsig: scientific myths traps us.
me: so how can you even ask the question without presupposing the answer?
quine: yes, this is why the skeptic is at a disadvantage because she cannot disprove something without referring to it and thus also implicitly also proving it.

you'd get looked down on as a straight men had you a, say, vietnamese girlfriend, but a gay man with a vietnamese boyfriend would not face the same judgment. why? gay men's relationships are viewed as superficial and sexual so a gay men's choice of mate doesn't reflect his inner personal tastes as simply his libidinal ones. straight relationships are seen as depicting traditional heterosexual love, not just sexual desire and are seen as deeper and more significant. it shows how society is still heterosexist in being unable to see homosexual relationships as equal in depth to heterosexual ones.

man is the measure of all things.

do we choose the narratives we set ourselves in?

what is a singaporean film? it's not something uniquely singaporean. it has to be something so breathtakingly new that they have to call it something, and because they don't know any better, they call it a singaporean film, just cos that's where it came from.

so, what if racism is biological? maybe when we see people of different race from us for the first time, our facial recognition modules are stumped and have trouble properly discerning among individuals within that color group. thus we fail to recognize their individuality. this makes it easy to make unfair aggregate judgments about them, especially since we also fear the new so often as the case is. so we can't base morality on biology.

yeah, i'm on a swing. typically i oscillate between INTJ and INFJ. and occasionally INTP.

Max, my floormate, made a pretty cool short film for dvdfest called They call him Jabir. I'm a really bad actor, have a weird accent, and blink too much in it, but here it is anyway:



Some background to the film: Everyone on my floor knows me as the 22 yr old freshman who was a national judo champion in Singapore and weighs only 120 pounds. So they thought they should make a film for me. The line I said to Alex (played by Yoshi) in the film, "Do not threaten me, Alex" was a real line I said to the real Alex when he threatened to take away my dessert when we were having dinner one time. I don't normally speak like that.

i feel so disengaged. i need to reconfigure my worldview.

scarlett johansson is coming to my school today!

so my hair is the longest it has ever been right now (it's cold so i don't get migraines like i would in singapore) and i've been trying to deal with stubborn curling sideburns that refuse to stay down flat against my face. but just now, i realised that i can actually tuck them behind my ear where they seem to stay. so problem solved.