L’esprit du jogging

    In attempting to remember some other French, I just encountered a fact that I had once known but since forgotten: French for “jogging” is jogging, pronounced with the soft J. I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — that the verb form is faire du jogging. Meaning, “I go jogging” would be rendered, Je fais du jogging. I don’t know why this tickles me so much, but it does. France is sort of officially butt-hurt about its language's loss of stature in the post-WWI period; once the language of diplomacy, it has been thoroughly displaced by English.* There’s a cadre of old white dudes who gather in a room somewhere in Paris to issue official directives about what is and what isn’t the French language. One of the things these guys get hot-and-bothered about are loanwords. I’m not hot-and-bothered about them at all, but I do find them hilarious, especially in contexts like this, in which a resolutely ugly English word has been Frenched up a little bit. It also has to do with faire’s status as an all-purpose verb that means something like “do”, but also means “make”, and a bunch of other stuff — anyway, a transliteration of Je fais du jogging might be, I make some jogging. Which . . . anyway, you get it.

*Here I’ll plug Helen Zaltzmann’s podcast, “The Allusionist”, especially the episode “The Fix (part 2)”, which is about the bizarre pidgin spoken by EU bureaucrats.

    There were a lot of reasons I was looking this up, but one of them is is that I often have really good ideas for this blog when I’m out running, and one of two things happens: they leak out of my head, or when I get home it turns out they’re actually pretty stupid ideas. For obvious reasons I can’t give you any examples of the former. The latter usually boil down to dyspeptic screeds that lack much substance. The one I was thinking about today was an incident this morning at the store. I had hot food in my hand, and got in the shortest checkout line. Only two people. I figured I was fine. Instead, the checker spent several minutes having a conversation with the person she was supposed to be checking out. I have this thought often when simple tasks are going undone due to lack of efficiency or dilligence on the part of people who do things like operate cash registers for a living: Yes, I realize we’re all very stupid here, but this is beyond the pale. I had been thinking that for a while before I realized — this cashier wasn’t too stupid to operate her register. She just didn’t care to. I stood there burning my hands because she was just having a fine ol’ time with somebody else.

    See, what’s the value in that, other than to further my ongoing project of making sure my loyal reader doesn’t think too highly of me? There is none. But there you have it. This is the kind of thing that seems like a good story when I’m out running.

    I assume you’re seeing what I’m seeing here: if the ideas I do remember are so bad, what are the odds that the ones I don’t remember are any better? And rationally, I’m with you. But there’s something tantalizing about those esprits du jogging that wink out of existence as soon as I’ve had them. I can’t help but think that there’s great work just leaking out of my ears a lot of the time, leaving me with hostile drivel like the cashier story. When I was younger I carried notebooks with me all the time, and wrote down my every stray thought. Sometimes this seems like a terribly self-centered practice, to assume that your every errant thought is worth writing down. At other times, it seems like simple good practices for a writer. Maybe I should be doing that again.

    Anyway. Here’s a list of podcast episodes I’ve listened to this week: Love + Radio — “The Red Dot”; Fangraphs Audio — “Dave Cameron Extends a Metaphor”; TBTL — 2.5 episodes; Home of the Brave — 4 episodes, including the first two of “A Tour of Burned Churches”, which I highly recommend; Vulture TV Podcast; You Must Remeber This — “MGM Stories, Part 3: Buster Keaton’s Biggest Mistake”; A Way with Words — “Burn Bag”; The Allusionist — “The Fix (part 2)” (good), “Dancing about Architecture” (boring); Criminal — “No Place Like Home”; The Gist — 3 episodes; On the Media — “Pope-ular Opinion”; Freakonomics Radio — “How Did the Belt Win?”; This American Life — “Return to the Scene of the Crime” (parts — I skipped Dan Savage because sometimes he annoys me)

Dyspeptic Screed #1

    I am so goddamned sick of the word “around”.

    Have you noticed this word plaguing our language? It’s used by people who are trying to be gentle and sensitive to indicate that there might be complexity, but without having to take a stance, try to interpret, or really say what they mean. On a podcast I listen to today, it was used this way: “Yes, I am uncomfortable about some of thing things you say around race & gender.” I get what they’re saying, and if I’m going to be one of the cool kids who pretends as though descriptivism is possible I guess I shouldn’t raise an objection. But it’s not stuff people say “around” race & gender. It’s stuff people say about race & gender.

    This isn’t wholly a windmill-tilt, though it is kind of, I know. I get the sense that people use this word in an attempt to soft-pedal disagreements and communicate some kind of generalized anxiety about a complicated topic. Which is fine, I guess, but in the end it’s just mealy-mouthed and meaningless, a priviliging of comfort over clarity, and an allergy to even the hint of conflict, which — well, suffice it to say I am unconvinced that the aversion of conflict is a wholly, or even largely, valuable goal. If ideas and values never come into conflict, then they never have to change. That’s bad. That’s a bone-deep conservatism that damages discourses and blunts conversations.

    So just cut out the wishy-washy bullshit. Say what you mean. Don’t say "around". Say “about”. And be specific. You’re not helping anybody by trying to be sensitive; you’re just failing to say anything.