Henry Reed’s “Returning of issue” for Day 6 of National Poetry Month.
Returning of issue is the sixth and final part of Henry Reed’s Lessons of the war cycle. Published two and a half decades after Naming of parts, it is in two voices, like the rest of the cycle, but they are difficult to tell apart. The recording of the poem on the Sole Arabia Tree web site (follow the link and scroll down to the bottom of the page) differentiates the two voices very nicely; it’s also a somewhat different version of the poem, and you may find the differences interesting. The version that you see here is the written one from the aforementioned site.
From a linguistic point of view, the most obvious (to me, anyways) thing going on in this poem is that Reed goes back to plays on the various meanings of the English word issue, and in the case of this poem–as opposed to his Unarmed combat–the sense of progeny is one of the meanings that he draws on, as the sadder parts of the poem are a dialogue with the trainee’s deceased father. Here are a couple of the relatively obscure items of vocabulary–scroll down past the illustrations to find the poem.
A sergeant-major is a very senior enlisted man in the US military; in the UK of Reed’s time, I think it was a warrant officer. The “RSM” of the poem is the regimental sergeant major, a leadership position that is held by someone who has been in the military for quite a while. The photo is of a British RSM; no date, sorry. Picture source: https://goo.gl/aV1Z9IIn theory, “stupefaction” is the state of being surprised into silence. You’ll also hear it use to mean something like a state of silence or dullness from any cause whatsoever. Picture source: https://goo.gl/SLM93N
Reed, Henry. “Returning of Issue.” Listener 84, no. 2170 (29 October 1970): 596-597.
LESSONS OF THE WAR
VI. RETURNING OF ISSUE
Tomorrow will be your last day here. Someone is speaking:
A familiar voice, speaking again at all of us.
And beyond the windows— it is inside now, and autumn—
On a wind growing daily harsher, small things to the earth
Are turning and whirling, small. Tomorrow will be
Your last day here,
But not we hope for always. You cannot see through the windows
If they are leaves or flowers. We hope that many of you
Will be coming back for good. Silence, and stupefaction.
The coarsening wind and the things whirling upon it
Scour that rough stamping-ground where we so long
Have spent our substance,
As the trees are spending theirs. How much of mine have I spent,
Father, oh father? How sorry we are to lose you
I do not have to say, since the sergeant-major
Has said it, the RSM has said it, and the colonel
Has sent over a message to say that he also says it.
Everyone sorry to lose us,
And you, oh father, father, once sorry too. I think
I can honestly say you are one and all of you now:
Soldiers. Silence, and disbelief. A fact that will stand you
In pretty good stead in the various jobs you go back to.
I wish you the best of luck. Silence. And all of you know
You can think of us here, as home.
As home: a home we shall any of you welcome you back to.
Most of you have, I know, some sort of work waiting for you,
And the rest of you now being, thanks to us, fit and able,
Will be bound to find something. I begin to be in want.
Would any citizen of this country send me
Into his fields? And
Before I finalise: one thing about tomorrow
I must make perfectly clear. Tomorrow is clear already:
I saw myself once, but now am by time forbidden
To see myself so: as the man who went evil ways,
Till lie determined, in time of famine, to seek
His father’s home.
Autumn is later down there: it should now be the time
Of vivacious triumph in the fruitful fields.
As he approached, he ran over his speeches of sorrow,
Not less of truth for being much-rehearsed:
The last distilment from a long and inward
Discourse of heartbreak. And
The first thing you do, after first thing tomorrow morning,
Is, those that leave not been previously detailed to do so,
Which I think is the case in most cases, is a systematic
Returning of issue. It is all-important
You should restore to store one of every store issued.
And in the case of two, two.
And I, as always late, shall never know that lifted fear
When the small hard-working master of those fields
Looked up. I trembled. But his heart came out to me
With a shout of compassion. And all my speech was only:
‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and am no more worthy
To be called thy son.’
But if I cried it, father, you could not hear me now,
Where now you lie, crumpled in that small grave
Like any withering dog. Your fields are sold and built on,
Your lanes are filled with husks the swine reject.
I scoop them in my hands. I have earned no more; and more
I shall not inherit. And
A careful check will be made of every such object
That was issued to each personnel originally,
And checked at issue. And let me be quite implicit:
That no accoutrements, impedimentas, fittings, or military garments
May be taken as souvenirs. The one exception is shirts,
And whatever you wear underneath.
These may be kept, those that wish. But the rest of the issue
Must be returned, except who intend to rejoin
In regular service. Silence. Which involves a simple procedure
I will explain in a simple group to those that rejoin.
Now, how many will that be? Silence. No one? No one at all?
I see. Very well. I have up to now
Spoken with the utmost of mildness. I speak so still,
But it does seem to me a bit of a bloody pity,
A bit un-bloody-feeling, after the all
We have bloody done for you, you should sit on your dumb bloody arses,
Just waiting like bloody milksops till I bloody dismiss you.
Silence, embarrassed, but silent.
And am I to break it, father, to break this silence?
Is there no bloody man among you? Not one bloody single one?
I will break the silence, father. Yes, sergeant, I will stay
In a group of one. Father, be proud of me.
Oh splendid, man! And for Christ’s sake, tell them all,
Why you are doing this.
Why am I doing this? And is it too late to say no?
Come speak out, man: tell us, and shame these bastards.
I hope to shame no one, sergeant, in simply wishing
To remain a personnel. I have been such a thing before.
It was good, and simple; and it was the best I could do.
Here is a man, men! Silence.
Silence, indeed. How could I tell them, now?
I have nowhere else to go? How could I say
I have no longer gift or want; or how describe
The inexplicable tears that filled my eyes
When the poor sergeant said: ‘After the all
We have bloody done for you’?
Goodbye forever, father, after the all you have done for me.
Soon I must start to forget you; but how to forget
That reconcilement, never enacted between us,
Which should have been ours, under the autumn sun?
I can see it and feel it now, clearer than daylight, clearer
For one brief moment, now,
Than even the astonished faces of my fellows,
The sergeant’s uneasy smile, the trees, the relief at choosing
To learn once more the things I shall one day teach:
A rhetoric instead of words; instead of a love, the use
Of accoutrements, impedimenta, and fittings, and military garments,
And harlots, and riotous living.
For National Poetry Month, Day 5, here is “Psychological warfare,” Part 5 of Henry Reed’s “Lessons of the war.” Trigger warning: racist and homophobic language.
When I was a kid, my father would give me helpful life lessons, such as what to do when slapped to the ground by a German soldier versus what to do when slapped to the ground by a Japanese soldier. Note that there are two assumptions here: (a) you’re a prisoner of war when this happens, and (b) the advice was presented as what to do when you’re slapped to the ground by a German or Japanese prisoner-of-war-camp guard, not if you’re slapped to the ground by a German or Japanese prisoner-of-war-camp guard. This phrasing, amongst similar phrasing in many of my father’s life lessons for me, contributed to a number of things in my life: (a) I didn’t realize that the Second World War was over until I was probably 9 years old–I used to freak when planes would fly overhead, not knowing whether they were friend or foe–and (b) I always assumed that really horrid shit was going to turn my world and my life upside down, one way or the other. I tell you all of this to give you some context (which is to say: my selfishly personal context) for today’s celebration of National Poetry Month: the fourth in Henry Reed’s Lessons of the war cycle. I’ll warn you again that there is reprehensibly racist language, as well as homophobia, in this poem; in reading it, I keep in mind that this comes out of the mouth of a character that Reed is criticizing. Reading this as an adult who “gagne son croûte” by working with language, I’m reminded of Krippendorff‘s discussion of pre-WWII Fascist propaganda and by the similarity between that Fascist propaganda and Trump’s message; it’s the weird mix of nationalism, racism/homophobia, and craven cowardice (is that a pleonasm? probably) in the character’s words that brings both pre-WWII Fascist propaganda and Donald Trump to mind for me.
The version of the poem that I’m giving you here is from the Sole Arabian Tree web site, your source for all things Reedian. Unfortunately, I don’t have a source for a recording of Reed reading this one. The promised illustrations precede the poems, and explain (or try to) some of the language in the poem.
“To ebb” is to flow down, as in the receding of the tide. Note the wet sand–that is what has been left uncovered by the receding of the tide or of a wave. To “ebb up,” as it is used in the poem, sounds awfully odd, and I haven’t found it in the British National Corpus. Picture source: https://goo.gl/A8r13sPart of the cemetery at Passchendaele, the site of a prolonged battle that took about 400,000 lives and moved the front line only several kilometers. When the speaker asserts that the trainees will all have heard of it, he’s probably right; how he managed to get captured there is hard to imagine, given that the German casualties were enormous. I speculate that this is part of Reed’s way of showing us what an idiot this guy is. Picture source: https://goo.gl/ej8DpxWhen the speaker refers to the recent “mobs,” he’s using an old slang word for a “mobilization” or call-up of civilians to the military. Here are Brits responding to the August 1914 mob, I believe. Picture source: https://goo.gl/Eha36AThe “helpless men descending from the heavens” to whom the speaker refers are German paratroopers. Don’t spend too much time searching for pictures of them on line, or you will be looking at pictures of little children waiting in line for gas chambers before you know it. Picture source: https://goo.gl/pIYaly
LESSONS OF THE WAR
V. PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
This above all remember: they will be very brave men,
And you will be facing them. You must not despise them.
I am, as you know, like all true professional soldiers,
A profoundly religious man: the true soldier has to be.
And I therefore believe the war will be over by Easter Monday.
But I must in fairness state that a number of my brother-officers,
No less religious than I, believe it will hold out till Whitsun.
Others, more on the agnostic side (and I do not condemn them)
Fancy the thing will drag on till August Bank Holiday.
Be that as it may, some time in the very near future,
We are to expect Invasion … and invasion not from the sea.
Vast numbers of troops will be dropped, probably from above,
Superbly equipped, determined and capable; and this above all,
Remember: they will be very brave men, and chosen as such.
You must not, of course, think I am praising them.
But what I have said is basically fundamental
To all I am about to reveal: the more so, since
Those of you that have not seen service overseas—
Which is the case with all of you, as it happens—this is the first time
You will have confronted them. My remarks are aimed
At preparing you for that.
Everyone, by the way, may smoke,
And be as relaxed as you can, like myself.
I shall wander among you as I talk and note your reactions.
Do not be nervous at this: this is a thing, after all,
We are all in together.
I want you to note in your notebooks, under ten separate headings,
The ten points I have to make, remembering always
That any single one of them may save your life. Is everyone ready?
Very well then.
The term, Psychological Warfare
Comes from the ancient Greek: psycho means character
And logical, of course, you all know. We did not have it
In the last conflict, the fourteen-eighteen affair,
Though I myself was through it from start to finish. (That is point one.)
I was, in fact, captured—or rather, I was taken prisoner—
In the Passchendaele show (a name you will all have heard of)
And in our captivity we had a close opportunity
(We were all pretty decently treated. I myself
Was a brigadier at the time: that is point two)
An opportunity I fancy I was the only one to appreciate
Of observing the psychiatry of our enemy
(The word in those days was always psychology,
A less exact description now largely abandoned). And though the subject
Is a highly complex one, I had, it was generally conceded,
A certain insight (I do not know how, but I have always, they say,
Had a certain insight) into the way the strangest things ebb up
From what psychoanalysts now refer to as the self-conscious.
It is possibly for this reason that I have been asked
To give you the gist of the thing, the—how shall I put it?—
The gist.
I was not of course captured alone
(Note that as point three) so that I also observed
Not only the enemy’s behaviour; but ours. And gradually, I concluded
That we all of us have, whether we like it or lump it,
Our own individual psychiatry, given us, for better or worse,
By God Almighty. I say this reverently; you often find
These deeper themes of psychiatry crudely but well expressed
In common parlance. People say: ‘We are all as God made us.’
And so they are. So are the enemy. And so are some of you.
This I in fact observed: point four. Not only the enemy
Had their psychiatry, but we, in a different sense,
Had ours. And I firmly believe you cannot (point six) master Their psychiatry before you have got the gist of your own.
Let me explain more fully: I do not mean to imply
That any, or many, of you are actually mentally ill.
Though that is what the name would imply. But we, your officers,
Have to be aware that you, and many of your comrades,
May have a sudden psychiatry which, sometimes without warning,
May make you feel (and this is point five) a little bit odd.
I do not mean that in the sense of anything nasty:
I am not thinking of those chaps with their eyes always on each other
(Sometimes referred to as homosensualists
And easily detected by the way they lace up their boots)
But in the sense you may all feel a little disturbed,
Without knowing why, a little as if you were feeling an impulse,
Without knowing why: the term for this is ambivalence.
Often referred to for some mysterious reason,
By the professionals as Amby Valence,
As though they were referring to some nigger minstrel.
(Not, of course, that I have any colour prejudice:
After all, there are four excellent West Nigerians among you,
As black as your boot: they are not to blame for that.)
At all events this ambivalence is to be avoided.
Note that as point seven: I think you all know what I mean:
In the Holy Scriptures the word begins with an O,
Though in modern parlance it usually begins with an M.
You have most of you done it absentmindedly at some time or another,
But repeated, say, four times a day, it may become almost a habit,
Especially prone to by those of sedentary occupation,
By pale-faced clerks or schoolmasters, sitting all day at a desk,
Which is not, thank God, your position: you are always
More or less on the go: and that is what
(Again deep in the self-conscious) keeps you contented and happy here.
Even so, should you see some fellow-comrade
Give him all the help you can. In the spiritual sense, I mean,
With a sympathetic word or nudge, inform him in a manly fashion
‘Such things are for boys, not men, lad.’ Everyone, eyes front!
I pause, gentlemen.
I pause. I am not easily shocked or taken aback,
But even while I have been speaking of this serious subject
I observe that one of you has had the effrontery—
Yes, you at the end of row three! No! Don’t stand up, for God’s sake, man,
And don’t attempt to explain. Just tuck it away,
And try to behave like a man. Report to me
At eighteen hundred hours. The rest of you all eyes front.
I proceed to point six.
The enemy itself,
I have reason to know is greatly prone to such actions.
It is something we must learn to exploit: an explanation, I think,
Is that they are, by and large, undeveloped children,
Or adolescents, at most. It is perhaps to do with physique,
And we cannot and must not ignore their physique as such.
(Physique, of course, being much the same as psychiatry.)
They are usually blond, and often extremely well-made,
With large blue eyes and very white teeth,
And as a rule hairless chests, and very smooth, muscular thighs,
And extremely healthy complexions, especially when slightly sunburnt.
I am convinced there is something in all this that counts for something.
Something probably deep in the self-conscious of all of them.
Undeveloped children, I have said, and like children,
As those of you with families will know,
They are sometimes very aggressive, even the gentlest of them.
All the same we must not exaggerate; in the words of Saint Matthew:
‘Clear your minds of cant.’ That is point five: note it down.
Do not take any notice of claptrap in the press
Especially the kind that implies that the enemy will come here,
Solely with the intention of raping your sisters.
I do not know why it is always sisters they harp on:
I fancy it must ebb up from someone’s self-conscious.
It is a patent absurdity for two simple reasons: (a)
They cannot know in advance what your sisters are like:
And (b) some of you have no sisters. Let that be the end of that.
There are much darker things than that we have to think of.
It is you they consider the enemy, you they are after.
And though, as Britishers, you will not be disposed to shoot down
A group of helpless men descending from the heavens,
Do not expect from them—and I am afraid I have to say this—gratitude:
They are bound to be over-excited,
As I said, adolescently aggressive, possibly drugged,
And later, in a macabre way, grotesquely playful.
Try to avoid being playfully kicked in the crutch,
Which quite apart from any temporary discomfort,
May lead to a hernia. I do not know why you should laugh.
I once had a friend who, not due to enemy action
But to a single loud sneeze, entirely his own, developed a hernia,
And had to have great removals, though only recently married.
(I am sorry, gentlemen, but anyone who finds such things funny
Ought to suffer them and see. You deserve the chance to.
I must ask you all to extinguish your cigarettes.)
There are other unpleasant things they may face you with.
You may, as I did in the fourteen-eighteen thing,
Find them cruelly, ruthlessly, starkly obsessed with the arts,
Music and painting, sculpture and the writing of verses,
Please, do not stand for that.
Our information is
That the enemy has no such rules, though of course they may have.
We must see what they say when they come. There can, of course,
Be no objection to the more virile arts:
In fact in private life I am very fond of the ballet,
Whose athleticism, manliness and sense of danger
Is open to all of us to admire. We had a ballet-dancer
In the last mob but three, as you have doubtless heard.
He was cruelly teased and laughed at—until he was seen in the gym.
And then, my goodness me! I was reminded of the sublime story
Of Samson, rending the veil of the Temple.
I do not mean he fetched the place actually down; though he clearly did what he could.
Though for some other reason I was never quite clear about,
And in spite of my own strong pressure on the poor lad’s behalf,
And his own almost pathetic desire to stay on with us,
He was, in fact, demobilized after only three weeks’ service,
Two and a half weeks of which he spent in prison.
Such are war’s tragedies: how often we come upon them!
(Everyone may smoke again, those that wish.)
This brings me to my final point about the psychiatry
Of our formidable foe. To cope with it,
I know of nothing better than the sublime words of Saint Paul
In one of his well-known letters to the Corinthians:
‘This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day
No man can take thee in.’
‘This above all’: what resonant words those are!
They lead me to point nine, which is a thing
I may have a special thing about, but if so,
Remember this is not the first war I have been through.
I refer (point nine this is) to the question of dignity.
Dignity. Human dignity. Yours. Never forget it, men.
Let it sink deep into your self-consciousness,
While still remaining plentifully available on the surface,
In the form of manly politeness. I mean, in particular, this:
Never behave in a manner to evoke contempt
Before thine enemy. Our enemy, I should say.
Comrades, and brothers-in-arms,
And those especially who have not understood my words,
You were not born to live like cowards or cravens:
Let me exhort you: never, whatever lies you have heard,
Be content to throw your arms on the ground and your other arms into the air and squawk ‘Kaputt!’
It is unsoldierly, unwarlike, vulgar, and out of date,
And may make the enemy laugh. They have a keen sense of humour,
Almost (though never quite, of course) as keen as our own.
No: when you come face to face with the foe, remember dignity,
And though a number of them do fortunately speak English,
Say, proudly, with cold politeness, in the visitor’s own language:
‘Ich ergebe mich.’ Ich meaning I, Ergebe meaning surrender, and mich meaning me. Ich ergebe mich.’ Do not forget the phrase.
Practise it among yourselves: do not let it sound stilted,
Make it sound idiotish, as if you were always saying it,
Only always cold in tone: icy, if necessary:
It is such behaviour that will make them accord you
The same respect that they accorded myself,
At Passchendaele. (Incidentally,
You may also add the word nicht if you feel inclined to, Nicht meaning not. It will amount to much the same thing.)
Dignity, then, and respect: those are the final aims
Of psychiatric relations, and psychological warfare.
They are the fundamentals also of our religion.
I may have mentioned my own religious intuitions:
They are why I venture to think this terrible war will be over
On Easter Monday, and that the invasion will take place
On either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday,
Probably the Thursday, which in so very many
Of our great, brave, proud, heroic and battered cities,
Is early closing day, as the enemy may have learnt from their agents.
Alas, there may be many such days in the immediate future.
But remember this in the better world we all have to build,
And build by ourselves alone—for the government
May well in the next few weeks have withdrawn to Canada—
What did you say? The man in row five. He said something.
Stand up and repeat what you said.
I said ‘And a sodding good job’, sir, I said, sir.
I have not asked anyone for political comments, thank you,
However apt. Sit down. I was saying:
That in the better world we all have to try to build
After the war is over, whether we win or lose,
Or whether we all agree to call it a draw,
We shall have to try our utmost to get used to each other,
To live together with dignity and respect.
As our Lord sublimely said in one of his weekly Sermons on the Mount
Outside Jerusalem (where interestingly enough,
I was stationed myself for three months in 1926):
‘A thirteenth commandment I give you (this is point ten)
That ye love one another.’ Love, in Biblical terms,
Meaning of course not quite what it means today,
But precisely what I have called dignity and respect.
And that, men, is the great psychiatrical problem before you:
Of how on God’s earth we shall ever learn to attain some sort
Of dignity.
And due respect.
One man.
For another.
Thank you; God bless you, men. Good afternoon.
Henry Reed’s WWII poetry remains sadly relevant in the age of Trump: “Things may be the same again; and we must fight // Not in the hope of winning but rather of keeping // Something alive…”
More of Henry Reed’s WWII poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month 2017. Unarmed combat was published in 1945. I found this version on the Sole Arabian Tree web site, where you can find an audio recording of Reed reading it at the bottom of the page. English notes after the poem, as always.
LESSONS OF THE WAR
IV. UNARMED COMBAT
In due course of course you will all be issued with
Your proper issue; but until tomorrow,
You can hardly be said to need it; and until that time,
We shall have unarmed combat. I shall teach you
The various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Which you may sometimes meet.
And the various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Do not depend on any sort of weapon,
But only on what I might coin a phrase and call
The ever-important question of human balance,
And the ever-important need to be in a strong
Position at the start.
There are many kinds of weakness about the body,
Where you would least expect, like the ball of the foot.
But the various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Will always come in useful. And never be frightened
To tackle from behind: it may not be clean to do so,
But this is global war.
So give them all you have, and always give them
As good as you get; it will always get you somewhere.
(You may not know it, but you can tie a Jerry
Up without rope; it is one of the things I shall teach.)
Nothing will matter if only you are ready for him.
The readiness is all.
The readiness is all. How can I help but feel
I have been here before? But somehow then,
I was the tied-up one. How to get out
Was always then my problem. And even if I had
A piece of rope I was always the sort of person
Who threw rope aside.
And in my time I had given them all I had,
Which was never as good as I got, and it got me nowhere.
And the various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Somehow or other I always seemed to put
In the wrong place. And, as for war, my wars
Were global from the start.
Perhaps I was never in a strong position.
Or the ball of my foot got hurt, or I had some weakness
Where I had least expected. But I think I see your point.
While awaiting a proper issue, we must learn the lesson
Of the ever-important question of human balance.
It is courage that counts.
Things may be the same again; and we must fight
Not in the hope of winning but rather of keeping
Something alive: so that when we meet our end,
It may be said that we tackled wherever we could,
That battle-fit we lived, and though defeated,
Not without glory fought.
in due course:Merriam-Webster: after a normal passage of time : in the expected or allotted time. Reed uses it to have his drill sergeant say something that sounds both military (“in due course”) and silly, simultaneously–definitely a theme in this series of poems:
In due course of course you will all be issued with
Your proper issue
issue: Reed goes whole hog with this one, using it three times in the poem, each with a different meaning, mostly ambiguous even in context. There are many, many possible meanings for both the nominal (noun) and verbal uses of the word; I’ll give you only the ones that I suspect he means to play with here, all of them from Merriam-Webster:
Verb: British:provide 2b, supply. Now: Merriam-Webster says that this is a British usage, but the verb is most certainly used in that way in the US military. Note the weird preposition that can occur here, although it doesn’t have to, at least not in the US. In the poem: On Twitter: I read that all members will be issued with a new card valid for 10 years. On the other hand, it’s perfectly fine without a preposition, too: in Switzerland every single male has to serve in the military between 18-20 years old. they are issued a rifle and keep it after serving (Twitter) Now that DeVos is Secretary of Education will each teacher be issued a rifle to guard against Grizzly bears? #wcedchat(Twitter)
Noun: in the military, your “issue” is something that you receive, that gets distributed to you; in this case, it’s what you get in basic training. That’s typically uniforms, basic supplies, and stuff like that. Here’s an example from Quora: At Army boot camp, the recruits first process in at the reception station. There, they are given their initial clothing issue, which includes BDU’s, dress uniforms, boots, black shoes called low quarters, belts, hats, coats, and even towels, socks, and underwear. Another example: …we all received a complete Navy sea bag issue of clothing. (How I learned about life: Navy boot camp, by Edward Olsen)
Noun: this word can also mean children, offspring, progeny.
…and of course there is an issue in the sense of what Merriam-Webster calls a vital or unsettled matter.
Here’s the third appearance of issue in the poem:
But I think I see your point.
While awaiting a proper issue, we must learn the lesson
Of the ever-important question of human balance.
ball of the foot: a picture will be worth a thousand words here.
to go whole hog: in closing, here’s one that I somehow couldn’t find a way to not use. To go whole hog: Merriam-Webster defines it as to do something in a very thorough and complete way. How I used it: Reed goes whole hog with this one, using it three times in the poem, each with a different meaning, mostly ambiguous even in context.
Fields, lexical and otherwise: Henry Reed’s sweetly funny WWII poem “Movement of bodies.”
For the third day of National Poetry Month, here is more of the gentle humor of Henry Reed. This version of Movement of bodies, published in 1950, comes from the Sole Arabian Tree web site, where you can find a recording of Henry Reed reading the poem.
LESSONS OF THE WAR
III. MOVEMENT OF BODIES
Those of you that have got through the rest, I am going to rapidly
Devote a little time to showing you, those that can master it,
A few ideas about tactics, which must not be confused
With what we call strategy. Tactics is merely
The mechanical movement of bodies, and that is what we mean by it.
Or perhaps I should say: by them.
Strategy, to be quite frank, you will have no hand in.
It is done by those up above, and it merely refers to,
The larger movements over which we have no control.
But tactics are also important, together or single.
You must never forget that, suddenly, in an engagement,
You may find yourself alone.
This brown clay model is a characteristic terrain
Of a simple and typical kind. Its general character
Should be taken in at a glance, and its general character
You can, see at a glance it is somewhat hilly by nature,
With a fair amount of typical vegetation
Disposed at certain parts.
Here at the top of the tray, which we might call the northwards,
Is a wooded headland, with a crown of bushy-topped trees on;
And proceeding downwards or south we take in at a glance
A variety of gorges and knolls and plateaus and basins and saddles,
Somewhat symmetrically put, for easy identification.
And here is our point of attack.
But remember of course it will not be a tray you will fight on,
Nor always by daylight. After a hot day, think of the night
Cooling the desert down, and you still moving over it:
Past a ruined tank or a gun, perhaps, or a dead friend,
In the midst of war, at peace. It might quite well be that.
It isn’t always a tray.
And even this tray is different to what I had thought.
These models are somehow never always the same: for a reason
I do not know how to explain quite. Just as I do not know
Why there is always someone at this particular lesson
Who always starts crying. Now will you kindly
Empty those blinking eyes?
I thank you. I have no wish to seem impatient.
I know it is all very hard, but you would not like,
To take a simple example, to take for example,
This place we have thought of here, you would not like
To find yourself face to face with it, and you not knowing
What there might be inside?
Very well then: suppose this is what you must capture.
It will not be easy, not being very exposed,
Secluded away like it is, and somewhat protected
By a typical formation of what appear to be bushes,
So that you cannot see, as to what is concealed inside,
As to whether it is friend or foe.
And so, a strong feint will be necessary in this, connection.
It will not be a tray, remember. It may be a desert stretch
With nothing in sight, to speak of. I have no wish to be inconsiderate,
But I see there are two of you now, commencing to snivel.
I do not know where such emotional privates can come from.
Try to behave like men.
I thank you. I was saying: a thoughtful deception
Is always somewhat essential in such a case. You can see
That if only the attacker can capture such an emplacement
The rest of the terrain is his: a key-position, and calling
For the most resourceful manoeuvres. But that is what tactics is.
Or I should say rather: are.
Let us begin then and appreciate the situation.
I am thinking especially of the point we have been considering,
Though in a sense everything in the whole of the terrain,
Must be appreciated. I do not know what I have said
To upset so many of you. I know it is a difficult lesson.
Yesterday a man was sick,
But I have never known as many as five in a single intake,
Unable to cope with this lesson. I think you had better
Fall out, all five, and sit at the back of the room,
Being careful not to talk. The rest will close up.
Perhaps it was me saying ‘a dead friend’, earlier on?
Well, some of us live.
And I never know why, whenever we get to tactics,
Men either laugh or cry, though neither is strictly called for.
But perhaps I have started too early with a difficult task?
We will start again, further north, with a simpler problem.
Are you ready? Is everyone paying attention?
Very well then. Here are two hills.
English notes
This poem is full of delightful plays on multiple meanings of words, most of which I’ll skip to focus on the lexical field of geographic terms. Reed uses a bunch of terms that refer to elements of topography (Merriam-Webster: the art or practice of graphic delineation in detail usually on maps or charts of natural and man-made features of a place or region especially in a way to show their relative positions and elevations) as metaphors for a woman’s body. Many of these are terms that a typical native speaker (including myself) wouldn’t necessarily be able to define specifically, although I would guess that most people would at least know that they refer to elements of a terrain, and might even be able to group them into two classes: ones that refer to elevations (high points), and ones that refer to depressions (Merriam-Webster: a place or part that is lower than the surrounding area : a depressed place or part :hollow). I’ll split them out in that way, then follow them with a few miscellaneous terms. (All links to Merriam-Webster are to the definition for that word.) For a reminder, here’s a paragraph from near the beginning of the poem:
Here at the top of the tray, which we might call the northwards,
Is a wooded headland, with a crown of bushy-topped trees on;
And proceeding downwards or south we take in at a glance
A variety of gorges and knolls and plateaus and basins and saddles,
Somewhat symmetrically put, for easy identification.
And here is our point of attack.
Elevations
The famous “grassy knoll.” I got this off of a JFK assassination conspiracy theory website, but have no idea to whom it should actually be credited.
knoll: Merriam-Webster: a small round hill :mound. The term grassy knoll, a small hill covered with grass, is closely associated with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, particularly with conspiracy theories about it.
headland: Merriam-Webster: a point of usually high land jutting out into a body of water :promontory
plateau:Merriam-Webster: a usually extensive land area having a relatively level surface raised sharply above adjacent land on at least one side :tableland
gorge:Merriam-Webster: a narrow passage through land; especially: a narrow steep-walled canyon or part of a canyon
basin:Merriam-Webster: a large or small depression in the surface of the land or in the ocean floor. As I speak a bit of French, it’s difficult not to make the association here with le bassin, the pelvis.
saddle:Merriam-Webster: a ridge connecting two higher elevations; a pass in a mountain range. In English, this has the same connections with sex as it does in French: J’en ai-t-y connu des lanciers, // Des dragons et des cuirassiers // Qui me montraient à me tenir en selle // A Grenelle!
engagement: In the context of the poem, the most obvious meaning is the military one of a hostile contact between enemy forces (Merriam-Webster). Presumably Reed is also playing here on the more commonly-used meaning of a commitment to marriage (my best guess on all of the crying trainees).
tactics versus strategy: tactics are short-term–a tactical nuclear weapon is one that you would use on the battlefield. (Not very fun to think about, is it? When I tell people that some aspects of the peacetime military seem kinda silly and they ask me for examples, I always tell them about our “what to do in case of nearby nuclear weapon explosion” drills.) In contrast, strategic nuclear weapons are meant for the bigger picture–the stuff that you would use to hammer the other guy’s country in such a way that he becomes unable to continue fighting at all. My tactics in my professional life mostly consist of making schedules to ensure that I don’t miss deadlines, while my strategy is the set of papers that I plan to publish in the next few years. From the poem:
Strategy, to be quite frank, you will have no hand in.
It is done by those up above, and it merely refers to,
The larger movements over which we have no control.
But tactics are also important, together or single.
You must never forget that, suddenly, in an engagement,
You may find yourself alone.
For the second day of National Poetry Month, here is more of Henry Reed’s wistful beauty. I got this version from the Sole Arabian Tree web site; at the bottom of their page for this poem, you can find a link to a recording of it. After the poem, you’ll find a couple of notes on the vocabulary.
LESSONS OF THE WAR, by Henry Reed
Published 1943
II. JUDGING DISTANCES
Not only how far away, but the way that you say it
Is very important. Perhaps you may never get
The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know
How to report on a landscape: the central sector,
The right of the arc and that, which we had last Tuesday,
And at least you know
That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army
Happens to be concerned—the reason being,
Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know
There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,
And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly
That things only seem to be things.
A barn is not called a barn, to put it more plainly,
Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.
You must never be over-sure. You must say, when reporting:
At five o’clock in the central sector is a dozen
Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,
Don’t call the bleeders sheep.
I am sure that’s quite clear; and suppose, for the sake of example,
The one at the end, asleep, endeavors to tell us
What he sees over there to the west, and how far away,
After first having come to attention. There to the west,
On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow
Vestments of purple and gold.
The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,
And under the swaying elms a man and a woman
Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say
That there is a row of houses to the left of the arc,
And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans
Appear to be loving.
Well that, for an answer, is what we rightly call
Moderately satisfactory only, the reason being,
Is that two things have been omitted, and those are very important.
The human beings, now: in what direction are they,
And how far away, would you say? And do not forget
There may be dead ground in between.
There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got
The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture
A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,
(Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)
At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance
Of about one year and a half.
English notes
This illustration seems to come from a forum about a computer game or something. Nonetheless: it’s a pretty good illustration of dead ground! Picture source: https://goo.gl/5rWBHB
dead ground: technically, this is space that cannot be observed. Tracing back through references, it seems to have come from a term for describing parts of the base of a castle’s fortifying walls that were sheltered from fire by the defenders, and therefore were weak points vulnerable to attack. Here’s one Quora writer’s definition of it:
Dead Ground is when the observer is unable to resolve keeping eyes on over an intermediate part of the stretch of ground being observed. The observer may be interchanged with detection equipment and includes areas of surveillance which are obscured from a clear alarm signature (environmental distortion from clear auditory reception) or trigger reception (automatic pixel motion detection) by the way the observer is angled. Dead ground exists in hidden embankments and undulating paths, roads or desert open areas with heat waves rising and obscuring or creating distorted imagery.
It’s April 1st, and that means National Poetry Month. Here’s one that I find both achingly beautiful and super-funny. Getting the humor might require having spent some time in the military, which I did; getting the vocabulary certainly does, as it’s full of technical terms for rifle-parts. I found the version that I give here, with its nice links to some of the difficult vocabulary, on the Sole Arabia Tree web site. Go to it for a recording of Henry Reed reading the poem.
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.
The big thing in language these days is distance-based representations of semantics. The idea is that the meaning of a word can be discussed in terms of its closeness to, or distance from, other words.
How the hell would you measure that? Current approaches to distance-based semantics are based on something called the distributional hypothesis: the idea that a word’s meaning is, in essence, the set of words that it occurs with. (With which it occurs, if you prefer.) When you have sets, you can calculate the distance between (or closeness between–it doesn’t matter what you call it) those sets. I’ll give you an example of this in which we’ll use a distance metric (metric, in this case, means a number that measures something) called the Jaccard index. It’s based on counting the number of things that two sets have in common and then adjusting it with respect to the total number of things in the sets.
Let’s walk through the intuitions behind the Jaccard index. The first intuition: the more things that you share with another set, the more similar to that set you are. Let’s think about two sets of words:
Set 1
fur
eat
pet
play
ball
Set 2
fur
eat
pet
sleep
mouse
What do those two sets share?
fur
eat
pet
That’s three things. Now let’s look at Set 1 again, versus a third set:
Set 1
fur
eat
pet
play
ball
Set 3
scales
eat
sun
sleep
climb
How many things do they share?
eat
Based just on the counts of things that these three sets have in common, you might say that Set 1 and Set 2 are the most similar to each other, since they have the most things in common.
Now, it’s a bit more complicated than this. Think about these two pairs of sets, and tell me which you think is closer: Set 3/Set 4, or Set 1/Set 2? Here’s Set 1/Set 2 again:
Set 1
fur
eat
pet
play
ball
Set 2
fur
eat
pet
sleep
mouse
…and here’s Set 3/Set 4:
Set 3
scales
eat
sun
sleep
climb
Set 4
scales
eat
sun
sleep
climb
strike
hiss
bird
molt
brumate
To brumate: similar to hibernating, but the state of dormancy is not as deep.
Set 1/Set 2 share 3 things. Set 3/Set 4 share even more–5 things. But, how much more similar does that make them? I’m going to suggest that it’s not as much as you might think. The reason that I’m saying this is that the fact that Set 3 and Set 4 share as much as they do has to take into account the fact that Set 4 has more things in it than any of the other sets have.
How can we take this difference in the set sizes into account? We’ll do something called “normalizing” the count of the things that they share: we’ll make it relative to the sizes of the sets that we’re comparing. How we’ll calculate the sizes of the sets: we’ll count up the total number of words that you would get if you added both sets of words together, and only counted each unique word one time. We’ll go back to Sets 1 and 2:
Set 1
fur
eat
pet
play
ball
Set 2
fur
eat
pet
sleep
mouse
What are the unique words in the combination of both sets?
fur
eat
pet
play
sleep
ball
mouse
There are 10 total words in the two sets, but if you only count each word once–each unique word, that is to say–you have 7. Now let’s look at 3 and 4, this time counting the unique words that are found in the combination of the two sets:
Set 3
scales
eat
sun
sleep
climb
Set 4
scales
eat
sun
sleep
climb
strike
hiss
bird
molt
brumate
scales
eat
sun
sleep
climb
strike
hiss
bird
molt
brumate
To normalize the number of things that two sets of things have in common by the total number of types of things in the set, we divide the number of things that they have in common by the total number of things. So, for Set 1 and Set 2:
3 things in common / 7 types of things = 0.43
For Set 3 and Set 4:
5 things in common / 10 types of things = 0.50
…and those are the Jaccard indexes for Set 1 and Set 2, and for Set 3 and Set 4.
Let me give you one more pair: Set 1 and Set 1. If you calculate the similarity between a set and itself, you get a value of 1.0. What you should take from that is that the range of values for the Jaccard index is from 0.0 to 1.0. Knowing that, you have a point of reference: if the Jaccard index is close to 1.0, then the two things are very similar (because identical things give you a Jaccard index of 1.0). On the other hand, if two things are very different, then you’ll have a Jaccard index that’s close to zero. This might seem obvious, but imagine if there were no upper limit on how big the Jaccard index could get. What would 20 mean? What would 4,808 mean? Who the hell knows? Metrics in the range of 0.0 to 1.0 are the ginchiest.
So, now that we have a way to quantify the similarity (or difference) between two sets based on the quantity of things that they share, normalized by the total quantity of things: suppose that those things are the other words that some word occurs with. If you replace the names of the sets like this:
…then you could imagine the words in those sets being the words that dog, cat, lizard, and snake occur with. When we calculate our numbers, we end up with dog being more like cat than it is like iguanaor snake. In contrast, our numbers are consistent with the idea that iguanas are more like snakes than they are like dogs or cats…and that’s one way that you can think about quantifying the similarities between the meanings of words.
John Rupert Firth. Picture source: Public domain, photographer unknown.
These particular kinds of distributional representations of word meanings go back to the 1950s and the work of John Firth, who famously (OK: famously among linguists) said that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps.” Distributional representations suddenly become popular in the language processing world (surprising, to some extent, because the language processing world is populated much more by computer scientists than by linguists) a few years back, for two reasons:
Thanks to the Internet, we now have access to quantities of textual data that are big enough to be able to calculate reliable quantities–you need a lot of data to actually make this kind of approach work.
People have recently had some success with figuring out ways to do calculations of these numbers in ways that are efficient enough to be able to handle those enormous quantities of data without bringing every supercomputer in the world to its knees. If you tried to do something like this naively, you would be calculating the similarity between every word and every other word; no one actually knows how many words there are in (to take one example) English, but you’re probably talking about a table with 10,000,000,000 cells in it. A few years ago people came up with a couple ways of reducing that number drastically, and that makes it practical to do the calculations and to store their results. (If you could do one calculation a second, it works out to a bit over 19,000 years.) Now my laptop can crunch the numbers for a few million words or so worth of text overnight.
We’ve talked about calculating the Jaccard index today (shared things divided by total things), and calculating it on the basis of words. That’s a very straightforward way of doing this–the Jaccard index is the simplest distance metric that I know of, and words are the easiest things to count. However: words are actually much more difficult to count in real life–or even to define–than they seem to be in the examples that we looked at, and there are lots of other things that one could count that might work out better. There are also different ways to define what counts as “occurring together.” To give you some examples of the kinds of questions that you need to think about in doing this kind of thing:
Words: What is a unique word? Do you want to count Dog and dog as the same word, even though one starts with an upper-case letter, and the other starts with a lower-case letter? Do you want to count reproduisisse,reproduisît, reproduisissions, reproduisissiez, and reproduisissent (the forms of the imparfait du subjonctif of the French verb reproduire, “to reproduce”) as the same word? How about pet peeve and bête noire–do those count as one word, or two? Do you want to count bete noire as the same word as bete noir, bête noire, and bête noir? (More generally: do you count an incorrectly spelt word with its correctly-spelled equivalent? If so: how the hell do you spell-correct the Internet?)
Things to count: Do you want to count $1, $2.25, 50%, and 75% as 4 different things? Maybe you want to consider them all as numbers, in which case there is just 1 “thing?” Maybe you want to count $1 and $2.25 as prices, and 50% and 75% as percentages, in which case there are 2 things?
What “occurring together” means: Is it occurring in the same sentence? The same newspaper article? The same book? Maybe it means occurring within two words to the right or within two words to the left–i.e., occurring within the four surrounding words?
…and that’s the kind of thing that will keep graduate students busy for the next 5 years or so, unless something else becomes au courant in the meantime (au courant discussed below in the French and English notes), in which case all of the grad students who were betting their careers on the latest cool thing will be spending some time engaging in some serious nombrilisme and then either starting all over again or quitting grad school and going into building better search engines for Twitter or something. Welcome to my world.
For more information on distance-based semantics and its alternatives, see Elisabetta Jezek’s The lexicon: an introduction.
I got into this 2400-word little essay in the course of trying to come up with a way to respond to a series of comments on my last post in which we got into a discussion of whether or not the English word bete noire means the same as the English word pet peeve (see how I snuck an assumption in there about how many “words” are in bete noire and pet peeve?) Obviously I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole here. More on the bete noire/pet peeve thing some other time, if Trump doesn’t nuke some country because the president said something mean about him (remember how he was saying that Hillary wasn’t “tough enough?”) and bring the world as we know it to an end, along with all of the electricity. A quick discussion of some relevant French and English words follows.
French and English notes
au courant: This expression exists in both English and French, but with different uses in the two languages. In French, it means something like “up to date,” and is used to describe people. In English, it can be used in the same way, but is also (and I think more commonly, although I don’t have the data to demonstrate this, one way or the other) used to describe things, in which case it means something like “in fashion.” Additionally, in English, this is a very high-register word–you wouldn’t use it with just anybody. Here are some French examples from the frTenTen12 corpus, a collection of 9.9 billion words of French scraped off of the Internet that I searched via the Sketch Engine web site:
Nous tiendrons nos lecteursau courantde cette tentative…
…que Dieu t’entende pas petite Marie Bon courage et tiens nousau courant…
Vous êtesau courantde ces dangers, vous devez donc protéger votre PC contre toutes intrusions.
…mea culpa, je n’étais pasau courant
…ni les Etats-Unis ni l’URSS n’ont étéau courantde cet événement…
Peut-être que le jeune mutant étaitau courant, aussi elle décida de l’attendre devant la porte.
I like the second-to-last one, because it describes two countries there, rather than the two people that you would expect.
To find examples of au courant in English, I went to the enTenTen13 corpus, a collection of 19.7 billion words of English-language text, which, again, I accessed through Sketch Engine. Here is some of what I found:
…a library ofau courantphraseology and jabber…
Where once the adage “Things go better with bacon” wasau courant,”Things go better with cheese” is timeless.
That isn’t to say that paisley prints are reserved solely for custom-fitted,au courantFrench fashion houses; just the opposite.
Pappardelle is theau courantcut of pasta right now…
It’s all veryau courant, yet it’s not at all.
Being au courant can be its own sort of stultifying endgame.
Comparing the experience of putting these two lists together, I can tell you that I had to hunt to find examples of au courant in French where it wasn’t modifying a human, and I had to hunt to find examples of au courant in English where it was modifying a human (my last example here is the closest that I came). Here’s how it was used in the post: That’s the kind of thing that will keep graduate students busy for the next 5 years or so, unless something else becomes au courant in the meantime, in which case all of the grad students who were betting their careers on the latest cool thing will be spending some time engaging in some serious nombrilisme and then either starting all over again or quitting grad school and going into building better search engines for Twitter or something.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably have some interest in language–language in the abstract, or le langage in French, as opposed to (or in addition to) any particular language, or la langue in French. I’m reblogging here the reading list for a week of a course on language processing that I’m teaching at the moment. The theme of the week is data in language processing: what you (might) mean when you talk about “data” with respect to language; what kinds of data there are; where that data comes from; and how to make some data if you can’t find the kind of data that you need.
I’m posting this particular reading list because I often suspect that many people who know that I’m a linguist imagine that I spend my days sitting around discussing how funny irregular verbs are, or how cool it is that French has three verbs that mean “go back,” or whatever. What you’ll find on this list has very little to do with coolness or lack thereof, and a lot to do with data formats, data set sizes, statistics, and a bit on ethics. Personally, I find this stuff fascinating–but, it’s often worth getting a glimpse at what we call in my field “the sausage-making process.” Enjoy! (Or go watch the latest episode of “The Walking Dead”–it’s pretty good.)
Here are some suggested readings for Week 5. Remember that I do not distribute my lecture notes. Note also that you are responsible for all of the material on which I lecture. These readings are not required, but they are intended to cover everything that I talk about in our lectures (modulo the caution in the preceding sentence). All of them are available for free on line except for the books (although the Good and Hardin book is available for free, as well). All of them should be available in an academic library. Feel free to contact me if you have trouble finding a copy of either.
How to respect both logical positivism and the zombie apocalypse while educating computer scientists.
zombilingo.org, a web site that supports research on what linguists call the “heads” of groupes nominaux (“noun phrases,” in English).
In my professional life, one of my pet peeves is scientific discussions that involve the verb to believe. For example:
…we believe that [joint circumscription] will be important in some AI applications. (John McCarthy,Circumscription–A form of non-monotonic reasoning,publication date unclear)
We believe ontologies are key requirements for building context-aware systems… (H. Chen, T. Finin, and A. Joshi, An ontology for context-aware pervasive computing environments, 2003)
We believe enzyme-loaded erythrocytes may have therapeutic possibilities for several diseases. (Ihler et al. 1973, Enzyme loading of erythrocytes, which I should note has been cited over 300 times nonetheless)
I have actually been–on multiple occasions–cautioned against using formulations like Je pense que… (“I think that…”)in some professional situations in France, as it’s considered a sign of having a position that you’re not actually confident that you can defend. (Native speakers, can you comment on this?)
I’m not shy about bringing up my problems with the verb to believe in any discussion in which I find myself that claims to be scientific, be those lab meetings or reviews of papers/grants/whatever. I would not label myself as a logical positivist, but I try to always keep in mind the potential logical positivist position–it’s not a bad foundation for a philosophy of science. (See, I didn’t say I think that it’s not a bad foundation for a philosophy of science–I flat-out asserted it. In academic writing, I would follow that assertion with a few credible citations.)
Follow these links for more information on the zombie apocalypse and…
In light of that tendency of mine towards the empirical and the epistemological, students are often surprised to learn of my concerns regarding the upcoming zombie apocalypse. Clearly, zombies are something about which I have no empirical data, and one would have to classify the upcoming zombie apocalypse as something about which I have beliefs, but not knowledge, and therefore outside of the realm of something that I would talk about in my professional life. So, yes: students are surprised when I bring it up. (As far as I can tell, my French colleagues just think I’m crazy, or chalk it up to some quirk of the Anglo-Saxon psyche, or something. I actually have no clue what my American colleagues think.)
Here’s the thing: the zombie apocalypse is an engaging point of entry into the problem of making robust systems. In the context of computer programming, you could think of “robustness” as the ability of a program do deal with the unexpected–making speech recognition systems that will work in a crowded restaurant (impossible 20 years ago, not unusual today), or building sentence analyzers that won’t reformat your hard drive if someone passes them a sentence in Uzbek. In particular, the upcoming zombie apocalypse is an engaging entry point to the problem of how to think about the problem of making robust systems. The issue is that a major contributor to robustness is planning for unanticipated inputs (I had English in mind when designing my sentence analyzer, and then someone gave it a sentence in Uzbek) or operating conditions (I never thought about someone trying to use my speech recognition system with a lot of noise in the background). Seulementvoilà–the thing is—it’s the nature of unanticipatedness that we have trouble coming up with the unanticipated. Even more fundamentally a problem: we often have trouble getting into the mindset of taking seriously the very idea that unanticipated inputs or operating conditions are even plausible. In fact, they are; but, how to get students to think about something that is, a priori, difficult to conceptualize? Posing the question as how will your approach work when the zombie apocalypse comes? typically leads to a laugh–and seems to give one a way to think seriously about what kinds of things might happen that you haven’t actually thought about yet. To think seriously about things that it’s difficult to think about by means of thinking non-seriously about things that don’t exist, you might say. You might say that–if you haven’t really thought about the upcoming zombie apocalypse.
English notes
pet peeve: something that annoys a specific person a lot. To call something a pet peeve, it should be rather specific to that person, especially with respect to the extent that it bothers them or with respect to the extent that they are sensitive to it. For example, traffic jams wouldn’t really be anybody’s pet peeve–everybody is annoyed by traffic jams. However, traffic jams caused by trash trucks doing their collections during rush hour could be someone’s pet peeve-say, if they happen to actually notice them more than most people would, in a situation where most people don’t particularly care whether or not a traffic jam was caused by a trash truck doing its collections during rush hour–they are equally annoyed by all traffic jams. How it was used in the post: In my professional life, one of my pet peeves is scientific discussions that involve the verb “to believe.”
French notes
la robustesse: robustness. You can use this in a lot more ways in French than in English. For example:
Hardiness would probably be the English-language equivalent here, where we’re talking about plants and their illnesses: Différentes maladies peuvent entraîner un flétrissement des tubercules qui se traduit, à son tour, par une perte derobustessedes plants. (Source: Sketch Engine web site)
Toughness would probably be the equivalent here, where what’s being discussed is fabric: Ce tissu se distingue par sa robustesse, sa longévité et son confort. (Source: click here)
There are soooo many ways to annoy a linguist–here’s a good one.
Favorite thing that I ever heard anyone say in Bulgarian: “Ani says that our lipstick should be as red as the bottom of the flag.” Picture source: http://www.worldstatesmen.org/Bulgaria.html
My airport shuttle pulled into a truckstop in Bulgaria, someplace between Sofia and Hissarya, so that we could all get out and stretch our legs. I paid the nice little old bathroom attendant my 50 stotinki and walked to the stalls, feeling proud of myself because I knew how to recognize the men’s room and the ladies’ room in Bulgarian Cyrillic. My hand froze as I reached for the door when I heard the nice little old lady scream другата, другата!!!–I spoke just enough Bulgarian to know that that means the other one, the other one!!! You know what they say: pride comes before a fall.
For your amusement, here is an article with many correct observations, and nothing but incorrect conclusions. The article is about the English language. The incorrect conclusions start with the first sentence, where one is stated quite clearly, and then they continue through the body of the piece, becoming increasingly more academic/less clear. (En clair: “in plain language, in plain English; not scrambled (e.g. a TV show).”) For my amusement, here are some comments while I wait for the coffee to finish. Quotes are in italics.
First sentence: English is a difficult language. What would it even mean for a language to be “difficult?” That children can’t learn to speak it natively? No such language exists. That you had trouble with it in high school? That’s not exactly a convincing form of evidence. That you think that people with differently-colored skin/from different parts of the country/from different social classes than you don’t speak it correctly? Fuck you.
Second sentence: It’s irregular (teachers taught, preachers praught?), single words take on multiple meanings (‘set’ has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary) and its pronunciation is fiendish (cough, though, bough, through, tough, plough). I love the “teachers taught, preachers praught” thing–super cute–but have no idea why one would think that irregularity was any more difficult than anything else. From a hearer’s perspective, the discriminative power of irregulars is much higher. To think about it from a computational perspective: irregulars don’t require any processing–you just consult the equivalent of a mental “dictionary.” In contrasts, regulars require that you chop things up (e.g. if it were teached, you’d have to separate teach and -ed) and then figure out what they were (the -ed of kissed is not pronounced the same as the -ed of hugged), and then look up what they meant. You can argue that the claim that I’m making here about increased discriminative power for the hearer means increased memory load for the speaker, and you’d be right–which is why linguists don’t bother talking about this kind of thing very much. You quickly come back to the question that I raised about the first sentence: what would it even mean to be a “difficult language?”
The author continues:
This isn’t only about our famous English sarcasm. It’s a sign that the words themselves are not as reflective of our thought as, perhaps, they should be. When I say, ‘I beg your pardon’, I can mean ‘I apologise’, ‘I didn’t hear you’, or most probably ‘I’m absolutely fuming at what you said’. No wonder English is famed for being such a tricky language to learn, if what we’re trying to get across is based really on our tone of voice more than anything else.
Does the author really believe that this is something that is unique to English? As far as I can tell: yes, he does. But: it isn’t. Here’s an example from Bulgarian:
Да, да.
What those words are: yes, yes. What that means: No. You can tell the difference from the intonation. Is that kind of thing interesting? Absolutely. Is it in any way unique to English? No.
…single words take on multiple meanings… From my perspective, that is a confusion about what a “word” is. If a word is a relationship between a sound and a meaning, then the thing to say here would be that there are multiple words in the language, some of which sound the same as other words. If that’s the case: big deal. Do you know of any languages where that’s not the case? I don’t.
…and that, my friends, is yet another way to irritate a linguist: say dumb shit about how special Language X is because you don’t know anything about any other language, and therefore don’t actually have anything to compare it to. (The author does mention Mandarin, but what he says about it is too stupid uninformed for me to respond to before I’ve had another cup of coffee. Back reviewing grant proposals–computational linguistics isn’t all beer and pétanque…
Zipf's Law 
