Tag communication

Separate Has A Rat In It

Dusty Leave a comment

All right: so I have two classes of College Readiness, and they both had to write a UChicago essay — and they both picked a prompt for me to write. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this. If you want to see all the prompts, go here.)

The other class chose this one:

People often think of language as a connector, something that brings people together by helping them share experiences, feelings, ideas, etc. We, however, are interested in how language sets people apart. Start with the peculiarities of your own personal language—the voice you use when speaking most intimately to yourself, the vocabulary that spills out when you’re startled, or special phrases and gestures that no one else seems to use or even understand—and tell us how your language makes you unique. You may want to think about subtle riffs or idiosyncrasies based on cadence, rhythm, rhyme, or (mis)pronunciation.

Here is my response.

Language Separator

See the rat?

I am a dull man. 

I am utterly unspecial, solidly in the mainstream: I am a white American male, cis/het, raised vaguely Christian but now a non-practicing atheist. I am married. I am 49 years old. I own a car and a house, with a mortgage on the house. I have a Bachelor’s degree, more debt than savings, and I vote Democratic. All completely “normal,” in that people who look and live like I do have made sure that our culture believes that people who look and live like I do are the norm, the standard, the expectation – and therefore everyone else is a little weird, a little off, a little less than what they are “supposed” to be. Like most people who look and live like me, I am aware of my privilege, I oppose the unfair societal structures and institutions that promote it – but I don’t really do too much to change them, because after all, I do benefit from them. I feel guilty when I think about that, so I try not to think about it.

Sorry: that went too political. (I am keenly aware that some people find it awkward and uncomfortable – challenging – when I speak of political matters. I do not want to offend them, so I usually do not speak of political matters.) My real point is that there is very little about me that is, according to our society’s generally understood and accepted standards, abnormal.

Until I open my mouth.

My mouth itself is pretty normal (Though I have WAY more fillings than is normal, I think – over 40, with 5 crowns. I have abnormally bad teeth.), it’s what comes out that is abnormal. First of all, I have a weird accent: my parents (The most important influence on a person’s accent and dialect) are from the West Coast, Washington and California, so I speak somewhat in their accents; but I was raised first on Long Island, which has a distinct accent, and then in a suburb of Boston, which has a STRONG accent. I didn’t acquire or keep either of those accents in their entireties, but I did pick up a few pronunciations; and more, Boston’s speech patterns were strongly influential: I speak too fast, as Bostonians do, and I talk faster the more excited I get; and I cuss intemperately. So I sound like a mishmash of two coasts and four states.

It’s more than my accent and my speech patterns, though: it’s what I say.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a student and an artisan — a wright. A smith. — of language. I study literature and rhetoric, and have mastered them to a degree that allows me to teach, generally successfully. I possess linguistic capacity more than sufficient to enable the utilization of language both fanciful and ornate, drawing from the recondite and recherche realm of jargon as well as splashing through the filigree fountain of poetry.

I talk good, is what I’m saying.

 And, as you can see, because I can use language well: I can also abuse it.

My favorite form is mispronunciation. I enjoy completely destroying the actual sounds of words, especially foreign ones. Especially French. Because if any language has worse pronunciation than English, it’s French. That word I used between “recondite” and “realm?” I would enjoy saying that “ruh-churchy.” So I feel that we should pronounce La petite fromage, the little cheese, the way it is spelled: lah puh-teet froh-midge. I draw from classic influences to pronounce the K and the G in “knight,” and to describe for my students when they put the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble.

But mispronunciation alone is too simple; a little tame, really. Much more funner is improper forms of words, particularily when the wordination is constructicated of rootages and suffixery (Holy crap, autocorrect accepted that one!  Is that really a word?! Mmmmno, it’s redlined. I think I stunned the autocorrect.) that are close, almost recognizable — but also completely wrong. That’s the besterest. Though one step higher here is when I can corrupt a common usage of a modern slang term in order to make it seem more grammatical while also being deeply annoying: when I was on Twitter, for instance, I made a point of saying I twitted a twit, not tweeted a tweet – because after all, it wasn’t called “Tweeter,” was it? (Now it should be xitted a xit on Xitter, not xeeted a xeet on Xeeter. Though either one would presumably make Elon Musk apoplectic, and that’s a good use of language.)

I admit it’s a touch upsetting that I say these kinds of things and play these kinds of games with my students, because for some reason, they trust me to steer them right with their usage of English, the poor innocent fools; I’m sure I’ve given more than one a bad idea about words from some joke or other — though I will further admit that that’s funny. I do teach them the real insane trivia hidden deep in the pockets of the English language: the word floccinaucinihilipilification (WHICH I TYPED RIGHT THE FIRST TIME) and the sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Both of which are real. And “Y’all’d’nt’ve,” which is not real, but should be. These all show actual facets of this mad and madcap and maddening language that I love, so they are all lessons, on some level, at some point. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that most English teachers do not teach those lessons.

Then there are the foreign accents (Or as I am fond of saying, the furrin accents, which we don’t talk here in ‘Murrica.). A number of them show up when I read aloud, when there is some identifiable speech pattern in the dialogue, or a clear setting in an accentish area. I’ll read British stories in my best London fog, and I’ve read ev’ry danged word of Huck Finn by that Mark Twain feller in my best countrified speechery. I do sometimes use my past exposure to New York and Boston accents to play those characters when reading, especially if someone needs to be a tough guy; but I don’t put on my Pepe Le Pew when I read Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” And I never use Apu Nahasapeemapetilon’s accent, not even when I read The God of Small Things. On the other hand, I will neither confirm nor deny that Neil Gaiman’s story “Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” retains a place in my Fantasy Literature elective specifically because I get to use my Scottish brogue.

Of course, none of these accents have the same color, force or frequency as my pirate accent. Not only because I dress up like a pirate for every Halloween, and dress up my voice like one on every September 19th (International Talk Like a Pirate Day, if ye be of the uninitiated). Also because I love doing that accent, and so it shows up whenever anyone makes a pirate reference around me, which is fairly frequent given my reputation and the assorted pirate paraphernalia which I have acquired over the years. If anyone tells me a pirate joke, I am honor-bound to respond in the appropriate manner: “AYE LAD, THAT WERE A FINE SALLY — I’LL SHARE IT WITH ME OWN CREW, THE NEXT TIME I WANT THEM ALL TO FALL ILL OF VILE PUN-ISHMENT! HAR HAAARRRRRRR!!”

Even this list, though, is not exhaustive, because it doesn’t include the character voices I use. In class there are a few definite ones; I am very fond of the voice of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, as performed by Andy Serkis; it’s a bit rough on the throat, but so very taassssstttyy, precioussssss… And just to one side of that, almost two sides of the same coin, is the voice of Edna Mode from The Incredibles, which I also love using, as long as it is attached to the right character (NO! CAPES!). Those two are my favorites, though also I am not above talking like a Goodfella (“Do I amuse you? What am I, some kinda clown to you?”) or the Lennie of the cartoons (“And I will hug him and pet him and love him and squeeze him and call him George!”) though never when I read Of Mice and Men because that book makes me cry and I can’t make fun of it that way. 

And it goes on from there. When I am reading test directions aloud and I get to a portion that is capitalized or in bold print, I will shout those words at the top of my lungs (“DO NOT WRITE IN THE MARGINS OF THE ANSWER SHEET”), without any warning at all; partly because I like to make my students jump (and laugh, because breaking the tension is part of my job), and partly because I want to make fun of the directions, which are universally terrible. I can actually sing reasonably well, but when I sing in class I usually make my voice sound as awful as I possibly can, intentionally breaking and scratchy and missing all of the notes. I sometimes read as fast as I can, which thanks to my Bostonian upbringing is pretty damn fast, so that all the words run together into a completely indistinguishable fog of sounds.

So the question is: why? Why do I do this? Why am I like this? Especially given my responsibility as a teacher, and my deep and abiding love for my language, and for speech both written and spoken?

Honestly? I don’t know.

It might be because I don’t want to conform. I have to follow the rules in too many ways already; even worse, I have to fight for the rules, have to make other people obey them, have to get them in trouble when they break them: and I hate that. I also can’t stand it when people turn up their noses – or even worse, break into that violent, assaultive cackle that people put on – when they catch someone saying something “wrong,” and they take advantage to say, “It’s ‘wrongly,’ you pathetic dolt!” I hate the arrogance of that, the contempt of it. I hate the hard-edged insistence on rules: when we all know that in English, the rules don’t apply. Tell me the “I before E rule.” Go on. I dare you. 

There are no rules in English, other than the only rule that matters in any language, in any form of communication: if communication was successful among all parties, then the language was effective. That’s it. That’s the whole point. We speak and we write in order to communicate something. Sometimes there is a secondary purpose (or even a primary one) such as intimidation or seduction or persuasion; but in those cases, the goal of the intimidator or seducer or persuader is still a goal that must be communicated, even if only by achieving it. But if my audience can understand what I want them to understand, then nothing else matters: that’s the truth. That’s what I want people to understand, to absorb and believe. That’s why I tell my students (sometimes to the chagrin of my fellow English teachers) that you may start a sentence with “and” or “but,” and you may use “I” in a formal writing context, and you may use contractions, as well. And you may cuss: because sometimes the only word that properly communicates one’s message is “FUCK!!”

Oops. Got too offensive there. Now this document’s going to get flagged. A much worse F-word.

I love playing with English. That’s why I love ee cummings (Even though much of his poetry is political, and even more of it is offensive: but all of it is fun.), who wrote like this:

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

 and why I admire and enjoy the novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (Even though it is very political, and therefore quite offensive… but it’s okay, because Russell Hoban also wrote this), which looks like this:

Looking at the moon all col and wite and oansome. Lorna said to me, ‘You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.’ 

I said, ‘What thing is that?’ 

She said, ‘Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’ 

 and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (Which is both extremely political and EXTREMELY offensive, so…maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.), which looks like this:

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” 

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.

and all the fantasy novels and science fiction movies and so on that make up entirely new languages, and then translate them into English: because language is fun. The more fun you have, the better it works. The more fun it is, the more you want to use it: and that makes more communication, which means more connection, which means more peace, love, and understanding.

And that would be the besteresterest.

The point of this essay was meant to be what in my language use sets me apart, divides me from other people; I do think it is the degree to which I mess with language, the number of games I play with it, the variety of ways I push the bounds of what is acceptable and what is normal. I do all those things more than most people; and that’s what sets me apart. What I don’t try to do, ever, is make my language harder to understand, to make communication fail: it is maybe my worst habit as a writer that I always try, over and over, to make my communication more clear, to explain further, to give another example, another synonym. As you can see. It makes me much too wordy in my writing. But it also makes me a good (if talkative and boring) teacher. It makes me a good friend, and a good husband, because I always try to explain what I am thinking and what I am feeling; I always try to communicate (And I realize that communication also requires listening, if you were thinking that I do all the talking. I don’t. It’s just that my turn takes three or four times as long.). My wife and I rarely fight because of that, and our fights usually end in compromise and agreement: because we communicate. (I don’t deserve all the credit for that. My wife is exceptionally good at understanding me, and herself, and she listens too. She is also very patient with me, which I appreciate forever.) I think it’s good that I am able to use humor to break up those long, repetitive speeches in which I try to explain everything I am thinking, over and over again.

I just wish other people enjoyed my portmanteaus as much as I do.

Oo! That’s one I forgot to mention! Portmanteaus: when you put two words together into a single word, like breakfast+lunch=brunch, or smoke+fog=smog. I love those things. I think of them constantly, and I bring them up all the time – here, wait, I have a list of my favorite ones.

What’s that? Oh – you have to leave? No time to discuss word nerdery with me? I understand. 

Maybe next time.

And then again: maybe not. 

Just know that I’ll always be here, ready to talk about words, ready to play word games – and ready to communicate. And whether that makes me different, or makes me just like everyone else, I don’t actually care. As long as we’re having fun. And not being … too offensive.

Oh and — fun being offensive? That’s offunsive. And that is a portmanteau.

What It Means to Be a Writer

Dusty Leave a comment

Scrolling through my Twitter feed when I found a link to this piece.

I walk by accident into one of London’s über-bookstores to be taken over by a very familiar type of sadness—as a child I used to feel this way when thinking about the cosmos and my own insignificant place in it. This is London’s biggest bookshop: 6.5 km of shelves, the website proudly tells us, as if this particular length and not another were a reason to rejoice. Book after book after book thrown into this worded jungle—a hoard that could be a waking counterpart to a Borgesian wet dream. Fiction books and books on writing fiction. Photography and art books and books on photography and art. And so on: most forms of expression and myriad words of meta-dialogue, some of them even justified or at least nicely edited and with colourful covers. Nothing escapes this total library: no corner of the universe or the mind is left unaccounted for. It is a hideous totality for it is an ordered totality, filtered through the minds of who knows how many marketing specialists; it is effective as a selling platform but it is a desert of anonymity for the diminished names on the shelves. Were I ever to be asked for a writing tip, something born out of this experience would be my choice: walk into any gigantic bookshop and think whether you can face being one more name lost in this desert of words. If that ideal situation proves too much to bear do something else with your time (it is of course highly likely that if you go around asking for writing tips you will never make it on print).

Okay, first of all, that parenthetical comment at the end gets you a punch in your snooty little snoot with a fist labeled Fuck You. I presume you mean that true poetry, great writing, emerges from the soul as a fait accompli, like Athena cracking her way out of Zeus’s head fully-grown; if a would-be writer is too naive to recognize this immortal truth, and to think that one could simply ASK for a way to be a better writer, then that person is doomed to less than mediocrity. Or else it is the bourgeois feeling of the “writing tips,” the oversimplified, sanitized, pre-packaged saccharine packets that show up in ten-item numbered lists on the various clickbait websites advertised on Facebook. I am more understanding of contempt for those, as I am contemptuous of people who make a living on the internet by telling people how to make a living on the internet – by running a website telling people how to make a living on the internet, which is done (Spoiler alert!) by getting people who want to make a living on the internet to buy your secret to making a living on the internet; and the people who do this always seem to call themselves “writers.” But my contempt is for the people at the top of the pyramid: not for the people down on the ground, choking on dust and sand, dreaming of a way to climb. Those people who want writing tips because they want to be better writers deserve respect for their courage in trying to find a way to get what they want; and their desire to improve, whether or not they know a good path to improvement, is admirable and not at all an indication of their potential as writers. Fuck you in the snoot, sir.

Now let’s talk about the central issue here. You’ve got two problems with this bookstore and the despair it engenders in you. One is that your words will never be truly unique, because somebody out there will say pretty much the same thing you say – or in Borges’s universe that you reference later, with his infinite Library of Babel that holds all combinations of letters and thus every possible book, one of the other volumes on the shelves will say exactly what you say. And maybe Borges was right and it does repeat in a chaotic pattern for eternity, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right? All the kilometers of fiction books, the books about art and photography and writing; all been done before, nothing is new, nothing is original. Somebody get me a cigarette and a bottle of cheap red wine, and build a Parisian basement cafe around me for a tomb.

The second problem is that you will never be the one person whose words everyone reads, everyone knows, everyone talks about; because there will always be so many others putting words on the page, that it is impossible that your words would be the ones that capture every reader at once. Particularly not if you want to capture every non-reader as well. This problem seems to be the larger one, as you speak more of being lost in the noise than you do about repeating what has already been said.

The futility of writing is something I face up to every time I set pen on paper or hand to keyboard. Why am I doing this? My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift.

This is a poor proof. Your message in a bottle being surrounded by other messages in a bottle does not make your message pointless. Not even in the metaphor: so long as one person finds your message and reads it, and – I suppose – comes to rescue you from your desert island of despair (Perhaps your bottle message is something entirely different, something like “If you let your eyes go unfocused, a Moen kitchen faucet starts to look like a snobbish sheep with a very long snout. But it’s hard to recapture the magic once your eyes go back to normal and the sheep turns back into a faucet, so don’t waste it.” In that case, you won’t be rescued, but somebody may spend a lot of time squinting at their kitchen sink because of you, which is pretty funny, really. I’d call that success.), then your bottle was a success. You won. You did what you set out to do. You made your point. Wherefore, then, does it become pointless? Is the idea that the thousand bottles around your bottle make it less likely that your bottle will be read? This is not true for the same reason your enormous bookstore should not lead to despair. Ready for the reason? Here it is.

There is more than one person reading. (Shocking, I know. Hold onto your snoot, Buttercup.)

Let’s start with the metaphor. There are a thousand bottles with messages in them, bobbing in the water by the seashore. If there was only one person walking by, and for some reason that person had sworn a sacred vow to read only one bottled message, then your chances of being read are a thousand to one. Agreed, and that would suck. But in the – ahem – “real world” of this fantasy, that one guy wouldn’t stop at one bottle: he’d keep opening bottles. Because if he was doing it out of curiosity, out of a need to see what was written on those messages; or if he was looking for the perfect message, the one that would speak directly to his soul, then reading one message would never be enough. He’d read another, and another, and another. He’d probably try to read them all. I would. Wouldn’t you? If you saw a thousand bottles bobbing in the water with message inside them?

And if it was more than one guy on the shoreline? If it was actually a crowded beach, with tourists, and beachcombers, and dogwalkers, and a tai chi group, and a bunch of hungover teenagers wrapped in sandy blankets and the stench of wet cigarette butts? The bottles would catch all of their interests. They would all want to open their own bottle, be the first to read a message. Then they would share the messages they found with each other. They’d be diving into the water, throwing bottles back onto the shore, shouting and laughing and waving their messages over their heads. The more bottles there were in the water, the bigger the spectacle would be, and the more those people would be drawn to where the bottles were. They might even come back the next day to look for more bottles.

Are you following me, sir? Those bookstores with the kilometers of shelves? They are not only filled with books, they are filled with people. People who read books. And those people never stop at just one book. I know: I used to frequent a very similar establishment, Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. Five floors of twelve-foot-high bookshelves, covering an entire city block. I never expect to see so many books on display in a single place in my life again. I could spend the rest of my life reading (Ah, bliss!) and not finish a single floor’s worth of books. I went there every month for the ten years I lived in Oregon, to buy books, and you know what? That place was always packed with people. With readers. Never mind the kilometers worth of shelves: how many kilometers of people do you think go through those stores on any given day? 3,000 people, on the average. [source] Average front-to-back measurement of a person is approximately ten inches; I’m an American and we’re thicc, so let’s bump that up to a round foot. (Screw the metric system, though I’ll convert for your convenience, sir.) 3,000 feet of human every day, which is very nearly one kilometer of human flesh – around 915 meters, to be precise. And that’s not even lying down head-to-foot. That means that in a week, if the London store has a similar number of visitors, the people looking at those books outdistance the books they are looking at. And I can tell you that the turnover rate for the people looking is far higher than the turnover for the books on the shelves.

There are an enormous number of books in the world, and it grows every day. It is impossible for one person to read them all, and realistically impossible that one of them will be read by all people.

But that doesn’t mean that my book won’t be read. It doesn’t mean that your words will never be seen.

I think about selling my books, which I have not yet succeeded in doing. But let’s imagine that I do so: imagine if my sales, by every measure of the publishing industry, are absymal. Let’s pretend that I only sell one thousand copies of my novel about a time-traveling Irish pirate. So lame, right? I am – what was your phrase? – “lost in this desert of words.”

A thousand people bought my book. Presumably that means a thousand people read it. (Some surely would cast it aside in disgust or disappointment, sure, but I think some of them would like it enough to share with someone else, or else resell it. Let’s just imagine that one sale equals one reading.) Think about that. I have never been in a room with a thousand people who all know me: not in the way that a reader knows at least an aspect of a writer. I have spoken to thousands of people in my life, but I doubt that a full one thousand of them cared about what I had to say: cared enough to sit down, in a quiet room, and spend hours just listening to my words, thinking about my thoughts. Hearing me. If I could sell just one thousand copies of my book, then I could achieve that. So what if at that same time a million people were listening to Stephen King, and ten million were listening to Kim Kardashian? So what if the world is larger than I can speak to at once? So what if all I can have is one small corner –with one thousand people listening to me?

Isn’t that enough?

Think about it in terms of time. I don’t know how many hours it takes me to write a book, but the pirate book was finished in about a year, so let’s use that. It’s a pretty fast read, I think; someone could finish it in maybe ten hours of reading at a leisurely pace, maybe even less. If a thousand people spend ten hours reading my book, then the year of my life spent writing it (And of course the vast majority of that year was spent sleeping, working, eating, singing in the shower, watching TV, playing The Sims, et cetera) has turned into ten thousand hours of other people’s lives spent – on me. There are 8,760 hours in a year (And 525,600 minutes), so even if I had spent every single one of them working on my book, that time spent is balanced by time spent reading my book if only a thousand people were to read it. More than balanced.

So the question is, what more could you possibly want?

If the only thing that would make writing worthwhile, that would give this endeavor a point, is if every single person on Earth read your work, and only your work, then I agree that writing would be pointless. But I can’t fathom a writer, a real writer, being that childish, that selfish, to think that the world must revolve around your work and your work alone. I mean, the only cultural phenomenon with that impact is Wyld Stallyns. Granted, you’re not them, and neither am I. And that stings a bit, I’ll bet. Yeah, it does me too.

I’ll comfort myself just thinking about how easy it would be to get a thousand people in the world to read a decent book. Shit, if all I want is readers, I could offer it for free and get that many readers without even trying. You wrote this obnoxious angsty piece of snobbery, and I read it, and then spent – mmm – more than an hour responding to it. See? The time you spent on this crud then earned for you this time spent out of my life. Time I could have been reading, ya selfish bastard.

And honestly, I think this is enough time spent on you. I am sorry that your life is so empty and meaningless, and sorry that I threw a couple of hours of my life into your black hole of an ego. Do us both a favor: gain some perspective, will you? Thanks.

(I have to say: the rest of the piece has some valid points about marketing on social media, and about the democratization and banalisation [His word] of writing that has occurred through the internet. There is some good thought here. If there hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have read all the way to the end, and then taken the time to write a response. I don’t disagree with everything he says. Just the central premise. I dream of having a thousand readers, and I am absolutely sure that, even in a world inundated with voluminous writers of every imaginable quality and a limited number of readers with a limited number of books they will read, still: I will hit that mark. And it will be worth it.

(Thank you for inspiring me to write this, sir. Now pull up your fucking pants.)

The Right Opinion

Dusty Leave a comment

There’s something I’m tired of hearing.

I get it all the time. Mostly because my interactions with other human beings take place almost exclusively in the classroom, where I talk to teenagers, or on the internet, where I talk to people on the internet. And as we all know, these are, far and away, the two most annoying groups of people on the planet. (Yes, I’m aware the second group includes me. Seeing as I’ve spent my entire life after the age of two in schools, in one way or another, I think I’m an honorary member of the first group, too. Of course I know I’m annoying. That’s beside the point.) And this is one of the most annoying things that people say. It’s annoying because it is an attempt to end discussion and debate, to validate the worst garbage that comes out of people’s brains: the thoughtlessness, the prejudice, the spite, the hate, the idiocy, the vapidity and superficiality — all of it. And I’m tired of it. So, by the power vested in me by my love of both thought and communication, and the energy and time vested by me in both of these aspects of human existence; by the authority I have gained through fifteen years of teaching, by the resentment and impatience that has built in me all that time and which has granted me the sheer gall to presume to say something like this, I hereby declare and assert:

Nobody has the right to an opinion.

That’s what people say that I’m tired of hearing. They say it in several different ways: Everyone has the right to their own opinion. That’s just what I think. We just have a difference of opinions, and we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m entitled to my opinion.

That last one is the worst. That last one is the one that got me thinking about this subject for this blog. Because it says it all, doesn’t it? Entitled. I’m entitled to my opinion. Apart from the political baggage that has been strapped onto that word through the labeling of certain parts of the social safety net as “entitlements,” which apparently require “entitlement reform,” the word “entitled” contradicts itself. It means that you inherently deserve something, that it is yours by natural right; but when we call someone entitled, what we mean is that they don’t at all deserve the thing they claim, that they have it through underhanded means, or without justification — often because it was given to them without effort. That they didn’t earn what they feel “entitled” to.

And I’m thinking now that people aren’t entitled to have the opinions they claim to have.

I think you have to earn the right to have an opinion.

Not to voice it; once you have it, you have the freedom of speech and of the press, and you can shout your opinions from the rooftops — even if those opinions are offensive or unpatriotic or even inflammatory. You can post it on Facebook and you can whisper it to yourself in a movie theater and you can march around the streets wearing it on a sandwich board and you can even hold a parade declaring that you hold this opinion. Have at it, feel free; I would never stop you. In fact, I will applaud you.

But first you have to earn that opinion.

People need to earn their opinions because, first, people hold a lot of really stupid opinions. They think climate change is not real; they think the universe was created in six days about 6,000 years ago; they think that white people are better than all other people. They think that Will Ferrell is funny, they think that Jon Stewart is not, they think that Taylor Swift shouldn’t be forcibly removed from popular culture and never allowed to return. They think that 9/11 was an inside job and that Barack Obama is coming for their guns and that the worst thing the government has done in the last ten years is Benghazi. All of these opinions (Okay, forget about the middle three, there; those are examples of what we really mean when we say “That’s just my opinion,” which is personal preferences. But seriously: removed entirely from popular culture. I don’t mind her existing, but I don’t ever want to hear from her or see her again.) are not only held contrary to fact, but are held contrary to facts or despite facts that are patently obvious and really beyond contestation. And the excuse we allow people is the belief that everyone has the right to their own opinion. This is the justification for absurdities like insisting that schools teach Creationism alongside Darwinian evolution: because, we say, some people believe one thing and some people believe another thing, and both people have the right to their opinions, and we have to respect both opinions.

I can’t believe that people are too dumb to understand the evidence. I can’t believe that the truth is so hard to understand, or so hard to accept, that people are incapable of understanding and accepting it. Because some people do, and there’s nothing that makes those people inherently better than the people who do not. They are capable of accepting the truth: they just don’t. And the reason, I think, is that people don’t think about their opinions. They don’t look for evidence, and they don’t consider all sides of the issue. Why? Because they don’t have to. Because they already have their opinion, and they have the right to their opinion. And that’s why they believe stupid things. I don’t think that people are actually incapable of thought, even though they — oh, who am I kidding? Not “they.” We. — even though we act like it a lot of the time; but we don’t think when we believe we don’t have to, just as we don’t work when we don’t have to, and we don’t wear pants when we don’t have to. The idea that we have the right to our opinion simply because it is our opinion, the belief that everyone has this inherent, unalienable, natural right, and that it is sacrosanct — this is why these opinions still exist and why they are allowed to plague and annoy, and even to harm us.

No more. From now on, everyone, everywhere, has to earn their opinions.

And here’s how you do that: you have to think about your opinions. You have to consider all of the available evidence you have access to (On a sliding scale: the stronger the opinion, and the more important, the more evidence you must consider. We can hold tentative opinions when we don’t have all the facts yet, or when the subject isn’t all that important. Like whether cheesecake is a pie or a cake. Or if Star Trek was socially progressive for having the first interracial kiss on TV, or regressive for — every other kiss involving Captain Kirk. But those opinions must be tentative: held lightly, offered only with reservations.), and you have to listen to the opinions of those who think differently, and you have to think about whether those people might, in fact, be right. And when they are right, you have to adjust your opinion accordingly. You don’t have to change your opinion entirely; it is your opinion — but you have to include an exception, or a caveat, or an alternative. In other words, your opinion must be rational, and it must be open to change. You have to work on your opinions, and make them the very best opinions you could possibly have. Then — and only then –can you take pride in holding those opinions.

The other reason why people should earn their opinions is because the idea that we don’t, the idea that my opinion is as good as your opinion simply because it is my opinion, is used ever and always to end debate and discussion. I believe that discussion is necessary: discussion, communication, is how we gain — everything good, really. Collaboration and cooperation are necessary for society, and society is necessary to maintain both the species and the culture we have created. Communication creates empathy and understanding, which allows for acceptance and peace and harmony. Speaking your mind allows you to shape and solidify what you think; I often start these essays with little more than a single idea, and the rest only appears as I write it (I know: you can tell. Sorry about that.). Communication makes us better people, and happier people, and safer people — and therefore, I would argue, we should have some right to communicate, both the right to speak and the right to hear others speak to us.

Yes, I would argue. I argue a lot; that’s the way that I am annoying, both in the classroom and on the internet. People often don’t want to argue with me, and I can accept that; not everyone likes to struggle and fight. No problem. But even if we aren’t going to argue, we should at least discuss: we should share our ideas, our evidence, our thought process. This is how we learn and grow, this is how we gain respect for each other, and for our opinions: through communication, through conversation. I don’t have to argue, I don’t need to be right, to win or lose — but I do want to understand, and I do want to be understood. I need that. Yet too many of my discussions end the same way: the other person says, “Well, that’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to that opinion. You’re entitled to yours.”

This sounds like a validation, but it isn’t. It’s the opposite: it’s a put-down. This is telling me that you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want to share your thought with me: that I’m not worth the effort. This is blocking communication, and therefore also blocking understanding. This is imposing silence on me, not only depriving me of understanding your position, but also stopping me from making my position understood. You don’t have the right to do that, and if the way you do that is the statement, “That’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to my opinion,” then you don’t have the right to that opinion. In fact, you’re not entitled to any opinion.

You have to earn your opinions.

That’s my opinion. Anyone care to discuss?