Altogether, already...“alright” is not all right

This was originally posted in 2010. I am re-presenting it with some editing.

Things I know for certain about my mother tongue, the English language:

It's crazy. Rules are there, but constantly broken.

It's abused and misused constantly.

Milena, a lady from Serbia, told me she had lived in Germany for three years, then moved on to America. I thought her English was excellent, but she was exasperated with the language. She told me, “In Germany they have one word for a thing; in English you can have twenty words mean the same thing.”

Yes, that's true. That's because English is the ultimate thief. We have stolen words from other languages and done it shamelessly. We have screwy spelling and we did it deliberately to confuse people trying to learn English. We like how esoteric our language is and we want to keep it to ourselves. Or if not, it seems that way.

In English we have words that over the years have taken on different meanings. My favorite example is “weird,” which used to mean something supernatural, and now means anything unusual or offbeat. I think the whole handling of “weird” is weird (in the modern sense). A good word with a specific meaning has had all meaning taken from it, reducing its impact. The list of words whose meanings have changed is long. “Decimate” is another example. I see that word in the newspaper all the time: “The Taliban decimated a village,” in modern usage meaning they destroyed it completely. The original meaning of the word came from the Romans, who, when faced with a village they thought unruly, would take all the men and kill one in ten. That was decimating a village. At one point I thought of founding the Anti-Decimation League, sending letters to any publication that used it outside of its original sense. Then I read a dictionary which gave the original “one-in-ten” meaning as a secondary definition of the word. I felt betrayed by the very people I used to support my other arguments.

Before English spelling was standardized it was a free-for-all between writers, and many words were spelled phonetically, even by otherwise smart men. A religious leader, in a tract regarding Egyptian hieroglyphics, used the word "caractors" for "characters". That makes sense to me to have words spelled like they sound, except we can't do that, because, 1. It would put all the dictionaries out of business, and 2. we'd have to interpret each document, each novel or newspaper article trying to figure out what the writer is saying.

Nowadays people don't necessarily go to a dictionary to check on a spelling. They leave it up to the devil, Spellchecker. Spellchecker is the devil because it leads people astray. It does not know if you write a sentence, “The man ran threw the building,” that “threw” is a homonym for “through,” with an entirely different meaning. Spellchecker didn't know, for instance, the difference between “sewn” and “sown” when my local newspaper posted a headline, “Seeds of revolution are sewn.” No, buttons are sewn, seeds are sown.

And those are words it recognizes, at least. If you have a word it doesn't carry in its database it may give you a suggestion, but unless you check the definition the suggestion could be completely off. A friend writing an e-mail to me told me he had a diagnosis of tendentious. Tendentious means having a definite tendency or goal. My friend meant tendinitis, a medical condition, which Spellchecker didn't know. It threw (not through) out a word that sounded close. My friend trustingly hit the button, substituting the word.

There are fads in language, and writing about all of them would take another post, but words pop into usage, especially hyperbole. For the last few years even the most garden variety of things have been “awesome.” “My trip to Walmart was awesome.” It describes people, too. “Man, you are so awesome!” A radio talk show host said once when a caller gushed all over him using that word, “No, Mt. Rushmore is awesome. Me, I'm just okay.” (“Okay” is probably the most widely used English word on the planet, picked up for usage in every language and meaning the same thing as it does to us.)

Another fad is to use multi-syllable words when one syllable will do. I hear “absolutely” used for “yes.” Other words I've heard used for yes are “definitely,” and “affirmative.” Why use more syllables than you need? Go to another country and if you say “yes” or “no” in English people will know what you mean. Say "absolutely" and you’ll get a blank look. It works for English speakers like me, too.

Finally, some words look right to people and may one day be correct, but now they're not. “Alright” is not a word. It looks like a word. As my American Heritage Dictionary says, “It is still not acceptable to write all right as a single word, alright, despite the parallel to words like already and altogether and despite the fact that in casual speech the expression is often pronounced as if it were one word.” I'm thinking of it because a book I'm reading uses that incorrect usage and it bothers me. Even a headline popped out at me in my local newspaper: “The Backstreet Boys are back, alright!”

“Alright” ain’t a word. “Ain’t” also ain’t a word and it ain’t alright to use it.

Mystery series that kill

Noomi Rapace

Over the past three nights I’ve watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy from Sweden on Netflix. I have seen it before, but I liken it to The Godfather because the story is so epic and involving I wanted to watch it again to catch things I missed the first time.

Before I go on I confess I have not read the Steig Larsson novels on which the movies are based. I would like to at some point, but I am basing my review solely on the motion pictures.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, is one of the great characters in movies. As played by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish versions she is unforgettable. You look at the picture of her above and you know she is portraying a woman with a troubled soul. The sequence from which the still is taken is her conversation with her legal guardian, Nils Bjurman. She realizes in order to get money from her account she has to give him sex. What follows is a brutal rape, a very rough scene to watch. Even though the viewers squirm, the rape leads to one of the best revenge scenarios ever. Lisbeth, at one point described as “five feet tall and 88 pounds” is deceptively tough. She can handle herself because she’s a genius with a photographic memory, and for another she’s a survivor of the plots against her.

As a child Lisbeth tried to kill her father. She threw gasoline on him and set him on fire. He survived but she was put into a mental institution presided over by the insidious Dr. Peter Teleborian. I’m getting ahead of myself because Lisbeth’s backstory is not fully explored until the second and third parts of the trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. There is a whole plot involving Swedish national security, a Soviet defector and a cover-up. It’s a great story, and if you haven’t seen those movies take my word that they are worth watching, but not unless you have seen the first part.
  
In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo we are introduced not only to Salander, but to Mikael Blomqvist (played by actor Michael Nyqvist). Blomqvist is a muckraking journalist who has been sued for libel by a rich businessman and found guilty. Before reporting for a prison term he is hired by another rich man to find the truth about a missing girl, Harriett, who disappeared forty years before. The Vanger family is rich and corrupt, and Blomqvist, after enlisting the aid of Lisbeth, gets further into the investigation than anyone else has in forty years. The truth is shocking and disturbing, and was the basis for the Swedish title of the book and movie, Men Who Hate Women.

I have seen the American-made version starring Daniel Craig as Blomqvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth, and while it was a good movie in its own right, I believe the Swedish version to be much superior in all ways, especially the part of Lisbeth.

Rooney Mara

With Netflix online I have access to some really interesting movies and television programs. I’ve been taking advantage. For instance, another Swedish series, Wallander, is available on Netflix. Wallander was presented on Swedish television as 90 minute movies, and are in sequence, developing characters. The star is Krister Henriksson. After seeing those 13 episodes I watched some of the English versions of Wallander with Kenneth Branagh, and as with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo I prefer the original in Swedish to the English-language versions. I’m a fan of Branagh,  but not as Wallander.

Krister Henriksson

I went to my library and found an earlier Swedish Wallander DVD series with nine episodes from 2005 in the same format. The series is based on characters in novels by mystery writer Henning Mankell. As an additional item of interest, one of the male leads in that series is played by Ola Rapace, who at the time was married to Noomi Rapace.

I might prefer the Swedish versions of mystery stories because there is a heaviness that hangs over Scandinavian countries. Maybe its their wintery climate, or maybe it’s just my perception. Whatever the truth of it is, the Swedes who made the Lisbeth Salander movies and the Wallander TV series have invested a lot of local color into their films, and made them all the more interesting.

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I wrote of the famous Swedish mystery series of novels about police detective Martin Beck here.

Monster in the neighborhood

In 2012 and 2013 we’ve had several outrages. We’ve had the shootings in Aurora; we’ve had the Newtown shootings. We were upset when the dictator of North Korea was telling the world he was going to shoot off a nuclear missile. We’ve also had the Boston Marathon bombings, and now we are witnessing a horror story with a man named Ariel Castro.

Poor Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s outrageous autocrat. He had America’s attention, and was satisfied  especially because he’s a fan of American NBA basketball  that the ball was in his court. He was controlling the tempo of the game. He thought he had a slam dunk with his threats of launching a nuclear missile. Then Boston happened and the crowds who had been watching him dribble down the court suddenly left the arena before the buzzer went off. How could he know that in America we have such short attention spans? The nuke threat was a nine-day wonder, something Kim Jong Un had no experience with in his own country of total news control and no competitive cable channels. We turned our attention away from Kim, and worse for him, we ignored him. We followed the story of the Boston bombings with rapt fascination. We had the satisfaction of seeing the case wrapped up in less than a week. It was like the script of an action movie. Kim was probably left sputtering with frustration at the sudden turn of events.

But in the meantime three women and a child were living out the script of a real life horror movie. Ariel Castro, far from being a showboat and belligerent like Kim, went about his dreadful business without so much as raising an official eyebrow. In this country if you mind your own business you are assumed to have a right to privacy. I don’t disagree with that, but you don’t have a right to keep captives in your house to make subject to your sadistic depredations. Outside the house Castro’s profile was too low for him to come to anyone’s attention. By keeping that profile and being allowed his privacy he committed real life acts that would be at home in the worst horror film you have ever seen.

Something about monsters. They don’t look like they do in movies, or even in the editorial cartoon above. If you were to encounter either Kim or Castro in a crowd you wouldn’t look twice.

When you think about it, the worst monster is whom? The North Korean dictator, despite his rotund and clownish appearance, is actually monstrous on a grand scale. His government runs a system of labor camps much like the Nazi or Soviet gulags, where slave laborers and their families live and die. The citizens of North Korea, starved and beaten down by their lifestyle, look as if they have been lobotomized, turned into robots.

On the other hand, as far as monsters go, Ariel Castro is right up there with those people we most fear moving in next door, the quiet and totally deranged. Who knows how long this could have gone on before he was eventually discovered, or would he have died of a heart attack or cancer and then had his secrets exposed? We are used to people like Kim, and we let the U.S. government handle the situation. There’s nothing we can do but sit in front of our televisions and hope things turn out all right. But someone like Castro is much scarier. We work alongside him, we chat with him over the hedge, we sit in a restaurant and have a meal right next to his table. There is nothing on his face, in his demeanor, or in his voice that leads us to believe he is capable of maintaining such a chamber of horrors as the house on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland.

Give me Kim Jong Un as the bad guy anytime. We know how to deal with the Kim Jong Uns of the world. It’s the Ariel Castros against whom we have no defense.

Mysteries wrapped in enigmas

I originally posted this in 2010; with slight editing I am presenting it again.

The past couple of days I watched some DVDs I borrowed from my local public library. Despite the different subject matter all three were essentially mysteries, and all ended without resolution. In the past that was a strict no-no. The thinking was that a mystery had to be solved or the audience would be unsatisfied. Actually, it’s the other way around. If you leave the audience wondering then they have more fun making up their own ending.

Black Christmas was made in '73 and sank at the box office. It was released later to television as Silent Night Deadly Night, and over time attained cult status. Why? Because it predated by half a decade other movies with the same theme, like John Carpenter’s Halloween. Movie fans love this kind of thing because it's the sort of trivia they can haul out at a party, make themselves sound hip. “Did you know that the first slasher movie was a little known Canadian film from 1973 called Black Christmas? It was directed by Bob Clark, who went on to make Porky's...” Yep, I can hear them now at a party. I should know. I'm one of them.

At the end of the movie Detective John Saxon thinks he has the killer, but the killer is still out there. Boo! So who is the killer? We don't know.

The movie, when viewed in context of what movies followed, is fairly standard fare. Sorority girls have a killer in the house who is murdering them. Olivia Hussey, who was Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, plays the lead. Margot (Lois Lane) Kidder is a second lead, even though John Saxon is listed as star. Saxon doesn't show up until late in the story, after all the buildup.

Kidder is easily ten years older than she should be to play a sorority girl, and probably should have played the house mom instead. Hussey said, in an interview included with the DVD, that she was given the opportunity to make the movie, go to Canada and leave her new baby for a month. What? Leave your newborn? And you admitted it? Here's your Mom-of-the-Year Award, Olivia!

Black Christmas is good for its genre, creepy and effective for its time, even innovative compared to its imitators. It's not a great film like the cult film fans claim, but it is well made and gets a high mark from me for its creative use of electronic filtering and voice alteration for the killer's voice over the telephone, and the POV shots, which were made with a special harness for the camera operator. Only the killer's hands are shown, and they are the hands of the real-life cameraman.



I’ve written about Cloverfield before. It’s a monster movie told in a POV fashion through a video camera. I tried not to think of the moving camera, and it was easier on television. Some people got motion sickness in the theater, so beware. At the end of the movie we still don’t know where the monster came from, why he rampaged New York City, or why the hell the movie is called Cloverfield, the worst name ever for a monster movie. The ending is left open, just like its inspiration, the events of 9/11, were  resolved after the fact. In the movie the guy hauling around the video camera, Hud, speculates on the monster: maybe it came from a trench in the ocean, maybe it came from outer space, maybe it’s something to do with the government! The others shush him. They have more important things to worry about. At the end the main character, Rob, speaks into the camera saying that if someone is watching the tape they know more about what happened than he does, even though he’s in the middle of the action. In the 1950s monster movies invariably had a scientist who stopped the film dead with some sort of boring explanation of why a giant gila monster/scorpion/lizard/ants, blah-blah-blah, have appeared. As an audience we don’t really care. The producers thought we cared, which is why they included those types of explanations. We just want to see the monster, please. Send the scientist home, we don’t care why the monster is there, we just want to see him stomp people and cars.

   

 The Bourne Identity is the third film I watched. It was the first of a trilogy from Robert Ludlum, involving a CIA killer with amnesia, Jason Bourne, played by Matt Damon. The reason for all of the goings-on and incredible action sequences is resolved at the end of the trilogy, but the end of The Bourne Identity the mystery is left open. There is a resolution of sorts, as Jason gets back together with Marie, whom he met under less than ideal circumstances, but who was drawn into his dangerous life. At first it was against her will and then she went willingly. Isn't that just like a woman? Falling for the wrong guy?



So all three movies had in common that we really didn't know what had caused the havoc we had just spent a couple of hours watching. For me that's OK; I had some good endings made up in my head. For Black Christmas the killer was the guy with a 35-mm helmet-cam. In Cloverfield the monster was Godzilla’s love child with Mothra...or Gamera...or whoever else it was Godzilla had the hots for, and in The Bourne Identity it was hardly a mystery at all. It was a secret government program that created Bourne. When in doubt always go to the government card. It's always the government who is the source of all things sinister, all things dangerous. We know that from dozens of movies and TV shows over the past 30 years. It’s the stuff of which paranoia is made.

Sex and violence: KSL and NBC

In a column for the Salt Lake Tribune on April 22, 2013, television columnist Scott D. Pierce gave his opinion on a TV show:

“Have you checked out the NBC series, ‘Hannibal’? Here ae a few things you might have missed:
» The naked body of a woman impaled on antlers.
» Bodies carved up so that their backs are splayed like grotesque angel wings.
» Characters dining on human body parts.
» People buried alive, covered in compost and fed sugar water so they grow fungus all over their bodies.
» Victims with their eyes gouged out.
» Victims being shot as blood splatters in slow motion.
» A victim whose throat is slashed and blood gushes from her wound.
Just to name a few.
In the 23 years I’ve been a TV critic, “Hannibal” is the single most violent, gory series that’s aired on network television.”

Pierce goes on to say that the show is not as gruesome as “The Walking Dead,” but that show is on cable. He also goes on to ask, “. . . have you heard of protests by the parents groups that want to cleanse TV? . . . Janet Jackson has a momentary wardrobe malfunction and these groups go nuts, but prolonged, horrific violence? No problem!”

He also mentions that KSL-TV, the local NBC affiliate, wholly owned by the LDS Church, removed shows like “The Playboy Club” and “The New Normal” as not being “consistent with the KSL brand, but that brand is consistent with ‘Hannibal’?”

Pierce also mentions other violent TV shows like “Criminal Minds,” “Supernatural,” and “The Following,” and says, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations that went like this:

“Parent: Is such-and-such show OK for my kids to watch?

Me: Well, 11 people are shot to death, there are two stabbings, a guy’s head is chopped off and there’s blood everywhere.

Parent: But are there sex scenes?

Sigh.”

Pierce has articulated in a funny but powerful way a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past few years. The public tolerance for violence, the old blood-and-guts, is much higher than it is for sex. I’m not a psychologist, so I have no answer for why that is, but if I were to make a stab (ho-ho, stab) at it I’d say it’s because we are a very violent species. We seem to be less hung up on doing violence to one another (check out the current debate over guns, “stand your ground,” etc.) than we are about having sex, which is much more a threat to parents than having their kids exposed to violence.

In that backwards way humans sometimes think, sex is more dangerous than violent death.

My son, Dave, and I watched a couple of violent movies recently, Cabin in the Woods and Safe, and my observation is that the human mind is able to sort out fantasy from reality. Maybe it’s just me. When I watch some of this stuff my mind is telling me it’s all make-believe and special effects. Sometimes we try to trick ourselves with words, like using “action” for bloody violence rather than, well, “bloody violence” to explain a shoot-em-up like Safe, which is front to back martial arts and guns. The bullets are spraying out like water out of fire hoses. But as usual, only the bad guys get killed. (Part of the fantasy  good guys always prevail.)

I could dismiss Safe as part of that fantasy world of violence, where the mind tells us it’s exciting, but not realistic.

A bit more problematic was Cabin in the Woods, which has the horror movie elements of young people meeting violent deaths in an isolated spot, but with the added plot contrivance of it being all set up by external forces watching it on television monitors from a world below ours. In both movies violent death and body mutilation are part of the story, but one movie is categorized as “action,” and the other movie “horror.” At least a parent can hopefully figure “horror” may be more gruesome than “action,” although with today’s entertainment the lines are blurred. What I remember about the critics view of Cabin was that it is “fun” because it uses standard horror movie elements but with a twist. The blood and gore, well, that was expected and as usual, glossed over by critics. They expect those who like blood and gore will go see the movie, those who don’t won’t.

Back to Pierce and his comments about sex and violence on local broadcast television. In a surprising follow-up column appearing on May 3, Pierce said that KSL had pulled “Hannibal” from its schedule. He asked “Why did KSL air four episodes of ‘Hannibal’ before yanking it?” He answered himself. “Not a clue. The blood was flying from the opening moments of Episode 1. The only plausible explanation is that nobody at KSL watched it. Which they deny.”

A self-directed question by the columnist: “Is it Scott D. Pierce’s fault KSL yanked ‘Hannibal’?” Pierce answers himself. “Well, [Tami] Ostmark [VP of KSL’s marketing, research and promotion] said my column questioning how Channel 5 could refuse to air “New Normal” and yet air “Hannibal” alerted them to content issues.

“‘It started with your article,’ she said.

“I did not call for KSL to pull the show. I questioned the inconsistency of KSL’s decisions and questioned parents who worry about sex in the media but not violence. I would have preferred that Channel 5 get over its homophobia and air “The New Normal.” Station execs insist it’s not about homophobia. But I’m not buying it.”

It’s not always easy to keep up with these things, why people would prefer their children watch violence than sex. It probably has more to do with their own prejudices.  Sex is much more a part of everyday life than violence. In real-life the violence in Aurora, Newtown, Boston, to name a few, show real-life consequences to people and their families. In violent movies and television the victims of violence are props, not much more than paper targets. If cops get killed in movies the audience knows they aren’t real cops, that they are stuntmen or actors who will get up after the scene is filmed and go home to their families. I believe that most people who watch violent, “action” movies know that, if not consciously, at least unconsciously. On the other hand, if you watch pornography the sex is real, and if you see it simulated on television it also looks pretty close to real, and that creates a whole other reality and threat in the minds of some.