What do you do with the Visual Thesaurus? No, really. What do you do with it?

When I first stumbled upon the Visual Thesaurus, I was so engrossed that I watched the whole demo -- a flower of synonyms bloomed onscreen, each prose petal linked with a colorful filament indicating hyponyms, hypernyms -- basically all the -nyms you could ever want were on display. I watched, mesmerized, as the words shifted around each other, as if in a cool garden breeze.

And then, slightly dazed from the loveliness of the display, I opened a new tab, went to www.thesaurus.com and started looking through lists of words to actually find the one I wanted.

Because, as beautiful as the Visual Thesaurus is, it does not seem, to me, to serve the actual purpose of a thesaurus, which is to help a lowly mortal like myself make the best use of the absolutely astronomical number of words available to an English speaker. Yes, English has a staggering number of words. It is very hard to remember all of them at once and very easy to fall back on the ones you use most often. But one component of good writing is an innovative and rigorous application of our expansive vocabulary, and to that end, I find combing through lists of synonyms to be quite helpful.

The Visual Thesaurus sticks it to traditional thesauri for the long lists I rely on, claiming that by representing the exact relationships between words in a spatial format this tool is more intuitive and thus more useful than some boring list (I mean, when were lists invented, anyway -- the stone age?). And that by somehow recreating the word maps we have in our brains, it will improve the process of...well, the process of what? I use a thesaurus to find the word best suited to my needs. But is that what the Visual Thesaurus is intended to help do? Or does it have another aim in mind? In truth, I'm not sure.

Ultimately, I think this tool is constrained by its design. By eschewing lists in favor of clouds, the number of words that fit on the screen is severely limited. So instead of getting 50 synonyms, you only get 15. And the relationship information doesn't make up for having fewer choices. I don't need a tool to go out of its way to tell me that an individual is a type of witness. That information is already in my brain. I appreciate that the tool is trying to think like me: it's actually kind of flattering. But I don't see the purpose -- unless the tool can think so much like me that it is actually going to write my essay, I would rather it do things that my brain can't do, like store long lists of words!

Is this technology that is still searching for a purpose? Are there other ways of using a thesaurus that I am ignoring? Or is this an example of form winning out over function, a dazzling design that does not get any job done? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Why Law School is Stressful

There are of course many reasons that law school is stressful: it's difficult; it's competitive; it's expensive. But what I find most stressful -- and most disheartening -- is the way it fuels ritual self-deprecation. Some days I am reminded of discussions that, as a woman, I learned to have in my teens where you go around the table and each woman castigates herself for having eaten a cupcake or failing to do crunches or daring to have hips. I used to speculate about the purpose of this public self-shaming: it seemed like a way of humanizing yourself, offering a piece of yourself to the group, aggressively baring your flaws.

But what happens in law school is, I think, a little different. The truth is that not since high school have I been part of a community that polices itself so zealously. In high school, the monitoring was social: confidants, crushes, companions. Now, it is academic. And it's not just about keeping other people in line but about making sure that you measure up. Thus, again and again I watch one person's sincere question provoke anxiety in someone else: "Why didn't I think of that? I must be hopelessly off-track."

In general, I think that homogenous communities are prone to this kind of searing pressure to conform. And law schools, like undergraduate campuses, are by nature homogenous, or at least homogenizing -- not because of the background of the students, not because of their interests or talents, but because of their goals, fears, and desires. It doesn't matter where you're from or what you read for fun or what challenges you have faced: at the end of the semester, we're all trying to pass the same final and that pressure can squeeze the individuality right out of you. That's why I think that the working world -- where you tend to find age diversity (one of the most important and often overlooked kinds of diversity) -- felt like such a relief to me after college (at least in some ways): in the topsy-turvy dimension outside school, people do all KINDS of crazy things, in any which order, and it's rare for everyone you know to be panicking at the same time, for the same reason.

It just makes me sad to see some of the very brightest people I know criticize themselves on a daily basis for doing something other than reading Examples & Explanations 12 hours a day. And this is my rant about it.

Procrastinating

Richard Betts, paraphrased in a New Yorker piece about wartime intelligence, says that there is an inverse relationship between the accuracy and significance of information. In other words (and only in some situations), the more precisely we know something, the less sure we are of its value to us. Or maybe, the only things we know for sure are those things that don't really matter. The more certain we are, the less we should care.

It seems counterintuitive and that's probably why I find it so appealing and want to say that it's ALWAYS true. That might be an overstatement.

But I'm sure this applies outside the specific scenario of spying. And once I'm done studying for Con Law, I will try to figure out when...

Semi-colon

I decided recently that if I ever get a tattoo, it will be a semi-colon. It is my most favorite and expressive punctuation mark. It suggests two thoughts are connected without up and telling you how they are connected, forcing you to suss out the relationship for yourself. It is subtle and pleasing to the eye, the delicious fusion of a comma and a colon. What more could you want?

I am not the only one who feels this way. French people totally agree, as manifested by their rampant and glorious over-usage of the semi-colon. It turns out that there is a reason for this. In her brutal review of the new Simone de Beauvoir translation, Toril Moi points out that:

French and English differ significantly in their tolerance of relatively vague connections between sentence elements. The translation theorist Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher has shown that English requires more explicit, precise and concrete connections between clauses and sentences than French and, conversely, that French accepts looser syntactical relations. In other words, if French syntax is imported directly into English, sentences that work in French may come across as rambling or incoherent in English.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

Yes! This is indeed the case. French sentences are often conglomerations of many clauses that could stand on their own, but are instead stitched together with commas and semi-colons. In French, this seems elegant, suggestive, flirtatious. In English, this seems pretentious, misguided, and distracting.

Sadly, I found an example of this in a translation of one of my favorite French authors, and I am trying to decide how I feel about it. Is the translation merely offering the respect due the original? Rendering the delicacy and decadence of the prose in another language? Or is it weirdly attached to empty syntactic structures that weigh the English down instead of dressing it up?

The example I would offer involves commas. The original line is: "Je n'etais pas encore tombe tout a fait, c'etait mon premier poste, j'avais vingt ans." (Note: the accents are missing. I am not going to figure out the formatting nightmare that is inserting accents on blogger right now.)

Translated as: "I hadn't fallen yet, not exactly, it was my first post, I was twenty."

HMM. Thoughts?

Crim Law 101

My first-year criminal law course is not quite what I expected. Instead of Law & Order, it's maybe more like...Deadwood. All the stuff that everyone was excited about -- the right to an attorney, Miranda, unreasonable search & seizure, habeas, the 5th Amendment -- all the good stuff that lends that particular glint to Sam Waterston's eye is Criminal Procedure.

Crim (as opposed to Crim Pro) is more like, how was larceny defined under the common law? Which, OK, sounds a little dry. But it has its moments.

Like the definition of 2nd-degree murder, which in many places includes reckless murder -- when you kill someone in a way that isn't quite intentional but is so deeply thoughtless it means you are probably a zombie. The language that many states use is "recklessness manifesting an extreme indifference to human life and an abandoned & malignant heart."

Abandoned & malignant -- isn't that evocative? It's like you left your heart on the bus one day and it got dumped at the terminal and then it just sat there, growing increasingly enraged, until one day it struck out on its own to do evil. Or like your heart turned to ash sitting right inside you. I think I have seen this happen to items that get left in the fridge...I'm pretty sure that we have some abandoned & malignant pesto from L's birthday that is trying to climb out of its bowl...