What's in a name?

A guest commentary on the local PBS newsmagazine suggested that the name of Our Fair City's downtown revitalization project should be changed because people have come to associate the name with "boondoggle." (Clearly he means in the sense of "work of little or no value done merely to keep or look busy," and not in the sense of "a project funded by the federal government out of political favoritism that is of no real value to the community or nation," and certainly not in the sense of "a plaited leather cord for the neck made typically by a camper or a scout." I digress.) He thinks that changing the name of the project will allow people to start to believe in the project again.

My first thought about the gentleman in question is that he hasn't read Shakespeare, or he'd know that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, or that conversely...

Appearances are important, but they're not the most important thing in the world. And I don't buy that changing the name of something will necessarily improve the substance of that something. This town has had downtown revitalization projects for almost a century. We've seen this before. We're not going to think things have changed downtown just because someone attaches a new name to the same project. We'll believe things have changed downtown when things change downtown.

Unlearning

Every now and then, you check your facts and learn that something you've believed with all the certitude of a zealot is not true. I had planned to post about "impact" not being a synonym of "effect," but my dictionary says that "effect" is one of the definitions of "impact," both as a noun and a verb.

One less thing to gripe about... er... about which to gripe. Maybe I should check my facts on ending sentences with prepositions. That'll be fun.

Television

Television will suck out your soul through your ears and what's left of you will be a quivering mass of brainless mush.

Or it will waste more of your time than you care to admit.

Actually, those are not mutually exclusive consequences to watching television.

Watch with care.

Its...

Apparently, it's a difficult concept that possessive "its" has no apostrophe. Not that that's a particularly new observation. There used to be (maybe still is) a usenet group devoted to the fact that possessive-its-has-no-apostrophe.

"It's" is a contraction. "It's" is short for "it is" or "it has" (where "has" is an auxiliary verb used with a past participle to form perfect tenses, as in "it's been good seeing you," or "it's gone"). "It's" does not mean "it owns," and while I try to be linguistically open-minded, I hope "it's" never becomes standard for possessive its.

Living Dangerously

Some old man ran a red light today. After he had stopped at said red light. And after traffic from both perpendicular directions had started to go through the intersection.

Some not-so-old man walked into a crosswalk against the light. There was sufficient traffic that he should not have done so.

Inexplicably, no one was injured. Or murdered.

Judy Is a Punk

I love the song. Truly, madly, deeply, love the song. Well, maybe not madly or deeply, but definitely truly.

But my name is not Judy. (My desire for a certain level of privacy prevents me from revealing my real name. Not that my real name matters.) I did once wish that my parents had called me Judy, because in those days, I wanted Judy Jetson's hair.

The song is a better reason to want the name.

(My apologies to anyone whose brain exploded at the juxtaposition of Judy Jetson with the Ramones, but that's what you get for reading this blog.)

Useless, useless, useless...

Of all the useless information I could possibly post, perhaps the most useless is that I'm not dead. (I mean, it's not useless to me, but generally speaking, most people in the world never even knew I was alive.)

A Few Useless Items

Sometimes perfectionism can be self-destructive. Best to avoid it before it becomes a menace.

Sometimes weather can be inconvenient, and sometimes menacing weather is unavoidable. (This is just a general observation, not anything relevant to my day.)

Speaking in abbreviations is annoying. If something is funny, really laugh-out-loud funny, the appropriate response is to laugh out loud, not to say "L.O.L." As an example.

Eep.

Four-way stops are the devil's handiwork.

Word Nerd: Affect/Effect

In the category of "Not Everything You Were Taught in School Is Complete," there is the issue of when to use "affect" and when to use "effect." What you were likely taught in school is that "affect" is a verb ("Will my poor job performance affect the amount of my raise?") and "effect" is a noun ("Your poor job performance has the effect of decreasing the amount of your raise"). You may even have been taught a mnemonic device to help you remember the difference: AVEN (Affect=Verb, Effect=Noun).

That's all well and good, because "affect" is a verb, and "effect" is a noun, but because this is the English language, it's not even half the story. "Affect" is also a noun, and "effect" is also a verb. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Affect" means "to produce an effect or change in," as in "Unemployment news affected the Dow Jones negatively." It also means "to impress the mind or move the feelings of," "(of pain, disease, etc.) to attack or lay hold of." As a noun, it means "feeling or emotion," or in Psychiatry, "an expressed or observed emotional response." Once upon a time (about 600 years ago) it meant "inward disposition or feeling."

"Affect" has other definitions as a verb, including "to pretend or feign," "to assume artificially, pretentiously, or for effect,"¹ "to use, wear, or adopt by preference," "to assume the character or attitude of," and "(of substances) to tend toward habitually or naturally." It also has the archaic definitions of "to have affection for" and "to aspire to," and another obsolete definition: "to incline."

Then we have "effect," which as a noun means "something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence," "power to produce results; efficacy, force, " "the state of being effective or operative; operation or execution," "a mental or emotional impression produced, as by a painting or speech," "general meaning or purpose, intent," "the making of a desired impression," "an illusory phenomenon," and "a scientific phenomenon." As a verb, it means "to produce as an effect; bring about, accomplish."²

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a short paragraph that uses three different uses of "affect" and/or "effect."

¹This is one of my favorite definitions of this word. Like you care.

²All definitions from Random House Webster's College Dictionary. In all likelihood, if I had the unabridged OED, this post would be a lot more complete in its information you probably don't care about.

Old Werewolf Movies

Before Hollywood, werewolf legends didn't necessarily involve the full moon, or humans (usually men, usually Lon Chaney Jr.) sprouting hair in painstaking stop-motion (The Wolf-Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man). I have not found a werewolf legend involving rare Tibetan flowers (Werewolf of London).

These old werewolf movies suffer for their dated look and feel, their outdated make-up, their poor dialogue, and their silly law enforcement officers (in The Wolf-Man, the murder weapon that was used to kill the original gypsy werewolf played by Bela Lugosi, is returned to its owner). And yet, weak as they are by today's standards, these movies provide a unique form of entertainment. If we wish to know what future generations are going to think of today's cutting-edge movie effects, we can experience it by watching old monster movies.

Beaucoup Greetings

Hello, and welcome to Beaucoup Uselessness. I have no defined plans on how I'm going to use this space, but I hope it will be entertaining.