Not your problem, you say? I don't mean the problem of wandering into the wrong restroom. Wait until you undertake to study one of the world's many languages which arbitrarily assign genders to inanimate objects. This includes most European languages (English being the most prominent exception) and others besides—Arabic, for example. Swahili has "noun classes" which work like a multivalent version of gender.
I have heard that French schoolchildren, for example, can predict with uncanny accuracy the genders of objects they have never seen before. This seems hard to believe (what about the case where two different words denote the same object but have opposite gender?). And by what possible logic is a spoon masculine, a fork feminine, and a knife neuter (as is the case in German)? Another argument against the inherent character of grammatical gender is the lack of consistency across languages: for example, "the moon" is la lune (feminine) in French but der Mond (masculine) in German.
Some languages, like Russian, or Arabic, make it fairly easy to predict the gender of a word, not by the nature of the object but by the form of the word (does it end with a?). Others, like German, have essentially no connection between the form of a word and its gender. In such cases we have no alternative but to remember the gender of each word.
This is a perfect situation in which to apply the techniques of memory training, as I have previouslydescribed. The key is to use vivid mental images to impress the gender of an object on the mind.
For a language like French, or Italian, with (only) male and female genders, an obvious approach suggests itself: visualize the object with a sex characteristic: a phallus for masculine objects, a large pair of breasts for feminine objects. (To forestall an avalanche of hostile comments, let me declare that I have nothing against small-breasted women—this merely reflects the principle that vivid, exaggerated, sexual, and even scatological images stick better in the mind).
Once you get into more than one language, you need a distinct set of visual tags for each to avoid confusion. For that matter, some languages have more than two genders: German, Russian, or Sanskrit have three, and Swahili has sixteen (though sadly, these do not reflect sixteen distinct varieties of human sexuality—that would be fun).
Let's take German as an example, which has three genders. How about the tags chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry to represent the three? Chocolate is feminine and vanilla masculine, of course (because that's yin and yang), which leaves strawberry to be neuter. Eventually, you'll need to remember these three on your own.
We could certainly go with longer lists, but this post is getting long enough as it is. The conclusive step is to form a vivid mental image linking each object with the appropriate flavor.
Start with moon and vanilla (masculine). Picture yourself eating a vanilla ice-cream cone, only the scoop of ice cream is actually a miniature moon. There's even a tiny spacecraft landed on it with astronauts waving a tiny flag, while the tiny command module buzzes around your head like a fly.
Now hat and vanilla: You are wearing a hat made of vanilla beans. Make sure to see it in your mind's eye.
Letter and vanilla: You receive a letter printed on vanilla ice cream. You struggle to read it before it melts.
Sun and chocolate (feminine): The sun in the sky is a huge ball of chocolate. The rays are covering you with a brown, sticky coating.
Jacket and chocolate: You are wearing a jacket made of chocolate bars—a little gooey, but oh so stylish.
Wall and chocolate: The wall of your room is an enormous chocolate bar, still in the wrapper.
By now you see, I hope, that it takes no special creativity to come up with these images. There are a few standard tricks.
Mouse and chocolate: You open a chocolate bar wrapper, and a mouse scampers out.
Now house and strawberry: Imagine returning home one day and finding your house has transformed into a giant strawberry, still with doors and windows.
Finally, hotel and strawberry: You are waiting in line to check in at a hotel and you notice all the other guests are giant ambulatory strawberries, each holding his or her suitcase.
Now it's quiz time. Keeping in mind the code (chocolate=feminine, vanilla=masculine, strawberry=neuter), what is the German gender of each of these words?
Brief (letter)
Haus (house)
Hotel (hotel)
Hut (hat)
Jacke (jacket)
Maus (mouse)
Mond (moon)
Sonne (sun)
Wand (wall)
With practice, you will find this works as well for a hundred words, or five hundred, as with the nine given here.
An alternative way to select a symbol to represent a particular gender (or other grammatical categories) is to pick one example word from the class—let moon represent masculine and sun represent feminine, for example
Okay, so it's been two years since Part I. Super-quick review: images are easier to remember than symbols or words, and you can help yourself recall images—by making them absurd, outrageous, or offensive. I'm still weaker than I want to be at remembering people's names (notwithstanding theoretically having learned the secret years ago), but I have noticed it works better if I allow my brain to indulge in childish impulses that I had left behind. As George Carlin says, "I always felt sorry for guys whose names were Dick and Peter." Next time you meet a Dick or Peter, recall this comment and allow yourself a (secret) mental snigger at the image it brings to mind. See if the name doesn't stick in your mind.
For abstract information such as numbers or playing cards, more sophisticated tools must be brought into play as well. The Major system is a simple but powerful tool for translating numbers into words—and hence into concrete images—that can then be memorized by other means.
It is simplest to explain by starting at the reverse end—translating words into numbers. One must invest the time to memorize the following phonetic code:
s, z become 0
t, d, th become 1
n becomes 2
m becomes 3
r becomes 4
l becomes 5
ch, sh, j become 6
k, (hard) g become 7
f,v become 8
p,b become 9
Anything not on this list—w, h, y and any vowel sounds—is ignored. Any word or phrase can be translated into a unique sequence of digits using the code. Take the word "fan", for example. F becomes 8, a is ignored, and n becomes 2, so "fan" becomes the number 82. Keep in mind these are sounds, not letters—so "phone" also becomes 82. This example also shows that a single number can correspond to more than one word (or phrases). On the other hand, (a crucial point) two different numbers will never correspond to the same word.
The game gets more interesting when you play it the other way around: find a word or phrase to correspond to a sequence of digits:
0 becomes s, z 1 becomes t, d, th 2 becomes n 3 becomes m 4 becomes r 5 becomes l 6 becomes ch, sh, j 7 becomes k, (hard) g 8 becomes f,v 9 becomes p,b
This can test your vocabulary. Consider for example the number 102. This translates into dsn or dzn or tzn or tsn. We could use the single word "dozen", but this has the drawback of being difficult to visualize (as well as inviting confusion with the number twelve). I prefer "hoatzin". I just happen to know what this is (an atavistic species of bird with claws on its wings) thanks to my abnormal predilections in childhood reading. Every two-digit number can be expressed as a single word (usually in several ways); most three digit numbers have single-word equivalents; with four digits or more it's hit-and-miss. I have, by the way, found the 2Know freeware program to be an extremely useful tool—it allows you to enter any sequence of digits and searches a rather deep dictionary for equivalents or partial equivalents.
So, for example, if you want to memorize the first several digits of Pi:
Of course, this is nonsensical, but as explained in Part I, that hardly interferes with committing it to memory.
By the way, I see that this code was devised in almost the same form by Gregor von Feinagle in 1808. I would have thought it was some person named Major, but there you go. This leaves the name of the system as something of a mystery.
Most who make frequent use of this system use a set of "peg words": standard terms representing the numbers up to 100. This spares even a moment's hunting for a suitable word in the easy cases, and also allows one to associate particular items with each of the numbers up to 100 and reliably recall them later. For example, for me, the number 56 is always "leech" (unless I have a specific reason to choose something different). I can associate anything with the number 56 by mentally connecting it to the concept of "leech." That wouldn't help if the next time I think of 56 I convert it to "eyelash"—but I won't, because by now when I think 56 I instantly think "leech." In a future post, I'll give my own list of peg words for numbers from 00 to 100.
Of all the various self-help gimmicks I've tried over the years, I think memory training must be the best in terms of cost-benefit ratio. I routinely use this to remember phone numbers, account numbers, and so on.
Check out this nifty video that shows a whole hike along the more than 2000 miles of the Appalachian trail, compressed into five minutes. One particular instant (literally) that caught my eye was the appearance of a stile.
In case you don't know what a stile is, it is a set of steps used to cross over a fence. I presume that animals don't care to climb up and over the steps.
And in case you do know what a stile is, then I have one question for you:
Why?
This was the question I was asking myself after watching the video. Why do I know the name of this thing? I can specifically recall in distant childhood my parents explaining it to me. Out of all the words they could have chosen to explain to me—"diabetes", "micromanagement", "bagels", etc.—they chose the word "stile." I can only assume that they expected my adult life to be filled with various and sundry stile-related activities, but in this as in so many other respects, events did not develop as expected.
So, as it turns out, I have some number of brain cells devoted to remembering this word, describing an object which I have encountered maybe once in my life, and which could just as well be described by a phrase "a set of steps used to cross over a fence," and which in fact lies dormant for years (except for occasional Julia Stiles-related thoughts). How do I get those brain cells back?
In this scene from the 1960 Spartacus, the leader of the slave revolt meets several new volunteers, escaped slaves, including the house slave Antoninus whose talents include singing songs and also juggling. Spartacus's skepticism is apparent. Later on, Spartacus comes to embrace the singing of songs as a necessity undergoes a change of heart and embraces the singing of songs as a necessity even for a rebel army.
This little bit of byplay came to mind when I saw the recent heartwarming (aww...) story about the chorus from a New York city working-class elementary school that was invited to perform at the Oscar ceremony, and also while reading Kelly Tyler-Lewis's book The Lost Men, about Shackleton's Ross Sea party. Many have heard of Shackleton's failed attempt to cross the Antarctic continent, and the various heroic efforts by which he managed to bring back the entire crew alive.
Well, not quite the entire crew, it turns out—if you take into account the second of Shackleton's parties, who sailed to the opposite side of the continent in order to lay down caches of supplies for Shackleton, whom they expected to be trekking across. Three of that party did not make it back.
Scurvy was one of a thousand problems Shackleton's Ross Sea party had to deal with—even though by that time it was well known that scurvy could be prevented by drinking lime juice, or even (I didn't know this) by eating seal meat. The problem was the expedition cut corners and didn't drink nearly enough juice, or some just refused to eat seal meat because they didn't like it. I like to think I myself would just eat the damn meat and deal with it (especially since food overall was fairly scant), but then again, I've never tasted seal, so who am I to judge? (Update: as of 2012, I have tasted it, and it's really not that bad.)
Scurvy provides a useful metaphor for a more widespread paradox worth keeping in mind: Cut back to the bare essentials, and you will find something essential missing.
This is the problem with the current mania for schools to cut out art and music programs, or physical education, or even recess. Bean counters may have a difficult time distinguishing such "non-academic" pursuits from mere amusement. But an academic program stripped down to the absolute essentials is like a diet stripped down to essential bulk foods—the brain is doomed to suffer a slow, wasting death, particularly when it comes to curiosity about the larger world.
Take another look at those kids from New York P.S. 22? How easy it to get any bunch of 6-to-12-year olds to buy into a program which demands discipline, and teamwork? And how many such programs can demonstrate clearly that discipline and hard work pay off?
(Warning: major spoilers about the plot of Atlas Shrugged follow. This is in addition to the usual spoilers about the meaning of life and stuff.)
This little video snippet shows my namesake explaining his path to Zen enlightenment—the buttering of French bread. Robert Pirsig's picked a killer title for his 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but the reader who looks for much of anything about Zen is going to be disappointed (as is the reader who looks to learn anything about motorcycle maintenance). My bookshelf holds another book Zen of Code Optimization, which I suspect to be almost the exact opposite of Zen, in that it relies on meticulous analysis. Leo Babuta's Zen to Done productivity system is Zen-like in spirit inasmuch as it tries to simplify as much as possible, but as far as I can tell has no real connection with Zen philosophy.
Don't get me wrong. All the foregoing are worthy products, and it doesn't bother me that the "Zen" buzzword has become something of a marketing gimmick—although a Zen priest might take a different view. It seems a harmless and possibly amusing superficiality, like the legendary Japanese department store that used a crucified Santa Claus as a Christmas decoration.
Then again, the word Zen has passed into common usage as an everyday adjective, difficult to define precisely (which is what makes it useful), but generally referring to that which is holistic, surprisingly indirect or even seemingly paradoxical, as when Mr. Miyagi teaches karate through car-waxing. Come to think of it, this doesn't bother me either.
What will make me snort and spit out my coffee is when someone claims with a straight face to be a Zen adherent when all they have done is read a book or two, or perhaps not even that. It's as if watching every episodes of "Hogan's Heroes" qualifies one to march in the Veteran's Day parade.
This came to mind again recently when I saw the trailer for the new Atlas Shrugged movie coming out on April 15. From the trailer I can't tell whether the version of Objectivism presented is the genuine, Ayn-Rand version, or the superficial version that's been going around for the past few years, which we might call the Glenn Beck version.
Among Atlas Shrugged discussion group I discovered that two people might agree on a certain tenet of the book but disagree diametrically on how to map that point into the real world. Is Bill Gates a John Galt or a Wesley Mouch?
In the aftermath of the stock-market crash a couple of years ago, we were presented with the spectacle of incompetent investment bankers, who got tired of reading bad stuff about themselves in the newspapers, threatening to "Go Galt"—that is, renounce their chosen profession and leave the rest of us to struggle along without them—to which my unforced reaction was always Yes, please! Put that in writing and we'll sign it.
Will Wilkinson put it neatly: The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. Zen and Objectivism, though very different philosophies, seem to share a common misfortune of attracting dilletantes who like the charisma factor but reject (or more likely are ignorant of) the discipline demanded of real adherents.
One of my friends who is a genuine Objectivist remarks with amusement on the many politicians and pundits these days who claim to be both serious Objectivists and devout Christians. I mean, have you read Atlas Shrugged, people? (In all seriousness, I suspect probably not.) It would be difficult to find a more implacably contradictory pair of philosophies.
But then again, such people seem to flunk the Christianity test as well as the Objectivist test—that inconvenient business about selling all you have and giving to the poor, or refraining from casting the first stone. One benefit of embracing two contradictory creeds is that one can piously cite a justification for whatever shallow, self-indulgent whim possesses one at the moment. I guess that's the point.
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