The Bobby Fischer enigma

I have recently finished reading Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall – from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady. This is one of the reasons I love reading non-fiction. What author could invent a character as compelling as this Chicago-born chess player? Whenever I read a book, I like to do background research -. it makes the reading experience more complete. So I also saw the HBO documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World.  I will now tell the story of the descent into madness of Bobby Fischer, the man who made chess sexy.

Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943.. His birth certificate listed his father as Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, who had been married to Fischer’s motherRegina. Some sources imply that Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian Jewish physicist, may have been Fischer’s biological father. Whoever the father was, Bobby grew up without one, sharing his early life with his mother and his older sister Joan. They had moved about in his infancy, but in 1949 they settled in Brooklyn. It was here that Fischer began playing chess at the age of six, using the instructions from a chess set bought at a candy store below their flat.

Fischer is said to have had an IQ of 180, but he generally seemed to find school a waste of time. One of the academic institutions he attended was the Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where he would stay until he dropped out at the age of 16. Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond were also students at this time. He seemed unaware that Streisand had a secret schoolgirl crush on him. She remembered that ““Bobby was always alone and very peculiar. But I found him very sexy.”

He may not have been an academic star, but Fischer put in his 10.000 hours of practice. This idea was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. Throughout the work Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule“, He claims that be successful in any field you need to practise honing your skills for a total of around 10,000 hours – mostly during childhood. Fisher certainly put those hours in. He became the youngest U.S. Champion in history two months short of his 15^th birthday. He played in eight United States Chess Championships, each held in New York City, winning every one. His real obsession though was to win the world title. It would take him more than a decade to reach his objective. He complained that the Soviet players were colluding against him. There was definitely a lot of psychological gamesmanship. The Russians used the fact that he had dropped out of high school to taunt him for being nyeculturni - unschooled and uncultured. My favourite was when they asked Fischer if he was A Benthamite. I think football could learn from chess. Mourinho should get Pepe to ask Messi if he agrees with Kant’s categorical imperative or ask him to outline the principal weaknesses in Feuerbach’s critique of religion.

By the early 1970s Fischer dominated his contemporaries to an extent never seen before or since, as he had notched up 20 consecutive wins against the world’s top players. He was now ready for his assault on the champion Boris Spassky. There were the usual disputes over prize money. He actually went two down in the match after a howler in the first game and dispute over lighting in the second. But Fischer would go to win comfortably. He was now champion of the world.

Bobby Fischer was twenty-nine and in his prime and he finally had the fame and fortune he had always known he deserved. Fischer returned from Reykjavík with more than the world championship. He was now a media superstar. Young, famous, rich, and on top of the world. Unprecedented offers rolled in for millions of dollars in endorsement deals, exhibitions, basically anything he was willing to put his name or face to. He turned all of it down. He didn’t play in the first year after he won the title. This sabbatical lasted into a second year and then a third one. Meanwhile his challengers were fighting it out for the right to play him in 1975. The former champion Spassky was out, destroyed by a young Soviet upstart Anatoly Karpov. Thief match between Fischer and Karpov promised to be a fascinating contest. But then the wrangling began. Fischer, surprising no one, had many strong ideas about how the event should be run, including returning to the old system with no limit to the number of games. In the end no agreement was reached and Fischer’s reign, which he had hoped would last 20 years, was over in just three. Karpov was champion by default.

Ever since Fischer gave up the title his actions have been subject to fevered speculation and armchair psychoanalysis. I don’t think that it is a case of Fischer chickening out. There had been similar shenanigans before the 1972 clash and Fischer had gone on to win comfortably. Karpov indeed considered Fischer the favourite, rating his own chances of victory at 40 percent. Brady’s argues that on the board Fischer feared nobody. However, former champion Garry Kasparov points out that Fischer’s problems were always in getting to the match. He believes that Fischer was a perfectionist who simply couldn’t countenance failure, and Karpov would have put his invincibility at risk. Fischer had not played any chess in three years. Of course this is one of those classic sporting counterfactuals which we will never know the answer to.

These are Bobby Fischer’s wilderness years, when he slipped out of public consciousness. Just when it seemed that he would never play again Fischer came out of retirement to face Spassky.. Of course Fischer would not do anything in a conventional way. It was his first match in twenty years with a $5 million prize fund paid for by a shady banker and arms dealer, Jezdimir Vasiljevic. Fischer insisted that the organizers bill the match as “The World Chess Championship“, although Garry Kasparov was the recognized FIDE World Champion. Fischer, bearded and with a few more kilos, claimed he was still the true World Champion, and that all the games in the FIDE World Championship matches, involving Karpov, Korchnoi, and Kasparov, had been fixed. The venue was war-torn Yugoslavia a country about to self-destruct. Fischer was breaking sanctions and he received a notification from theU.SState department, which he publicly spat on in an infamous press conference. Fischer won again, but despite his protestations that this was the real world championship, it does seem to have been something of a sideshow.

Fischer now began a career as a shock jock characterised by his virulent anti-Semitism and his attacks on his country of birth. Remember that his mother and possibly his father were Jewish. There is a term, self-hating Jew, used to describe Jewish people who hold anti-Semitic beliefs or engage in anti-Semitic actions. This seems to be a perfect description of Fischer. He blamed a Jewish conspiracy for taking away his world title. On September 11, an obscene rant of his celebrating the attacks was broadcast on Philippine radio and then around the world on the Internet. In July 2004 he was arrested in Japan for having a revoked passport and held in captivity for eight months until the granting of Icelandic citizenship allowed him an escape route. Fischer was hero in Iceland and this would be where he would live out the rest of his days until his death in 2008 from kidney failure. He had of course refused medical treatment.

Fischer’s life was ultimately a terrible waste. How could someone with so much talent fall so far? Fischer was a victim of celebrity and his outrageous talent. Brady does not try to justify Fischer’s excesses, but prefers to remember his genius. He compares Fischer to Wagner. The fact that he was an anti-Semite and Hitler’s favourite composer does not prevent us from listening to him. We can separate the man from the art. Brady had to come to terms with this before embarking on this biography. Here is how Brady concludes the biography:

And what, then, will be the inheritance bequeathed by Bobby? For chess players, and for people who followed the story of Bobby Fischer’s rise to become what many say is the greatest chess player who ever lived, his legacy for his heirs and the world alike may simply be the awe that his brilliance evoked.

Bobby Fischer – a life in quotes

Here is a selection of Bobby Fischer quotes I found, mainly from Wikiquote:

All that matters on the chessboard is good moves.

I’m not as soft or as generous a person as I would be if the world hadn’t changed me. Interview with Ralph Ginzburg, 1961

I’m not afraid of Spassky. The world knows I’m the best. You don’t need a match to prove it. Interview by William Lombardy, 1972

Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they’re going to know the truth when I do this book! Press Conference, September 1 1992

What is going on is I am being persecuted night and day by the Jews, for telling it like it is. They want to put me in jail, they’re robbing me of everything I have, they’re continuously lying about me. I’ve had enough of this shit. The latest thing they’ve done is I had some stuff in storage back in Pasadena for 12 years, spent a fortune on storage fees, a fortune on safes… and these God-damn Jews in America have just gone and grabbed it all. Radio Interview, January 13 1999

My main interest right now is to expose the Jews. This is a lot bigger than me. They’re not just persecuting me. This is not just my struggle, I’m not just doing this for myself… This is life and death for the world. These God-damn Jews have to be stopped. They’re a menace to the whole world.  Radio Interview, March 10 1999

America is totally under control of the Jews, you know. I mean, look what they’re doing in Yugoslavia. Radio Interview, May 24 1999

I studied that first Karpov-Kasparov match for a year and a half before i cracked it, what they were doing, and discovered that it was all prearranged move-by-move. There’s no doubt of it in my mind. Radio Interview, June 27 1999

I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he’s like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing. Radio Interview, July 6 2001

I was in Japan a couple of months ago, I saw a preview for the movie Pearl Harbor. And they showed the Japanese airplanes coming in to bomb Pearl Harbor, and I applauded. Nobody else in the theater applauded. Radio Interview, July 6 2001

Look at all I’ve done for the US. Nobody has single-handedly done more for the US image than me, I really believe this. When I won the World Championship in ’72, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country. I turned all that around single-handedly, right? But I was useful then because there was the Cold War, right? But now I’m not useful anymore, you see, the Cold War is over, and now they want to wipe me out, steal everything I have, put me in prison, and so on. Radio Interview, September 11 2001

Look at the history of the (United States). The history of the country is basically what? Get something for nothing, right? Take, kill. They invaded the country, they robbed the land of the American Indians, they killed almost all of them off… That’s the history of the United States. A despicable country. Radio Interview, September 11 2001

I was going to do a book about the first prearranged Karpov-Kasparov match, ’84-’85. But the God-damn Jews have stolen my entire file on that. Radio Interview, January 27 2002

The United States is an illegitimate country, just like Israel. It has no right to exist. That country belongs to the Red man, the American Indian… It’s actually a shame to be a so-called American, because everybody living there is a usurper, an invader taking part in this crime, which is to rob the land, rob the country and kill all the American Indians. Interview en-route to Iceland, March 24 2005

What’s in a business name?

Lexicon Branding was founded in 1982 with a single mission: To create extraordinary brand names. Names that get attention, names that generate interest, and names that tell the relevant consumer something new. From the company website

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

 _____

In 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin two Stanford computer science grad students began collaborating on a search engine which they called BackRub.  Two years later they decided that this name just wasn’t right. Following a brainstorming session they came up with Google, a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. They wanted to reflect the search engine’s mission to organise the vast swathes of information on the internet. And the rest is history. Would BackRub have come to dominate the market like Google has done? We will never know the answer to that question. In 2001 Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture. This word is said to derive from accent on the future. The name emerged from an internal competition and was submitted by Ken Petersen, a Danish employee from the company’s Oslo office. The name change proved fortunate when the Enron imploded. It enabled them to distance themselves from Arthur Anderson, which was effectively dissolved as a result of its unfortunate role in the scandal. And Philip Morris has sought to change its image as a purveyor of addictive carcinogens with the name Altria, designed to evoke images of altruism. And for me the most was when Procter and Gamble callously killed off Mister Proper replacing it with the insipid Don Limpio.

Lexicon Branding, Inc., which was founded in 1982 by a UCLA political science graduate, David Placek is perhaps the most prestigious firm in the world of company names and brands. This firm, which is based in Sausalito, has been responsible for 15 billion-dollar brand names, including BlackBerry, PowerBook, Pentium, Scion, and I have mentioned the tech ones because these are the most famous ones in global terms, but they are in many other sectors. Sales of products with Lexicon-created brand names now total more than $100 billion.

How do they come up with these names? After meeting the clients they have different teams coming up with thousands of potential names. The names are gradually whittled down. They normally present the client with between 25 and 50 words. They use multiple strategies to generate names: free association, mind maps. Linguistics plays an most essential role for Lexicon. They have a global team of 77 Ph.D. linguists from around the world who evaluate the pros and cons of each name. They don’t just worry about the meanings of the words, but they have conducted extensive research into how sound symbolism affects our perception of brand names. The sound cl as in cluster, clamp, or close, signifies ‘togetherness’. So you get the name Clio for a small but cosy car. Lexicon’s team of linguists found that names starting with the consonants V, F and S sounded the fastest, while names starting with B, D and P suggested dependability.

What makes a successful brand name? It should be memorable. Successful names can often be incredibly simple. Leonardo put it very succinctly: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” A short name is good, but it is not essential. The name has to be available. I heard one estimate that 98% of the words in a typical dictionary have been registered as dotcom domains or trademarks, leading to a glut of fabricated names such as Diageo or Verizon. The drawback with having these meaningless names is that you have to spend millions to make them mean something. A name that will travel well is also useful. The internet is full of stories about brand names not working well internationally. I’m never sure how much truth there is to them, but here are a few examples:  A famous French mobile company’s slogan – The future’s bright … the future’s Orange –  did not go down well with the Catholic population in Northern Ireland The Mitsubishi Pajero translates as tosser in Spanish and in Germany a latte is an erection

I heard Placek talking on the radio about what his company does. He believes that it is a mistake a brand name too descriptive. The hotel chain Budgetel was struggling. The name, which sounded a bit cheap and cheerful – wasn’t attracting customers. Lexicon suggested that they change it to Baymont Inn & Suites and the company has gone from strength to strength. Intel were the first microprocessor company to brand their microprocessors.. Pentium takes the Greek word for five with the Latin suffix ium which evokes strong powerful elements such as titanium. Lexicon wanted to create an image of speed, power and innovation.

I think we shouldn’t make too much of all this. A company will be successful because of what they do rather than what they are. General Electric, I.B.M and Singer sewing machines don’t strike me as particularly inspiring but that didn’t stop them enjoying success –they did this on the basis of what they achieved , rather than what they were called. You can have the best name in the world, but if there is nothing behind it, the product will surely fail. Lexicon came up with Zune for Microsoft’s MP3 player. It was supposed to be their iPod killer but in the end the it was beaten hands down by the Apple device. I am not really an Apple fan, but they have captured a really important sector. One has to ask oneself if iPad is such a great name. When it came out people were joking about sanitary pads. But it doesn’t seem to have held it back very much. Anyway if you want to find any more about this subject, I suggest you BackRub it.

More ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar

I have already the featured the spEak you’re branes blog, which features the ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar taken from the Have Your Say section of the BBC website. Here is a selection:

All atheists are anarchists by nature; and all anarchists are parasites by design that enjoy feeding off the misery endured by the vulnerable. The vulnerable of course are all those Religious individuals who wouldn’t wish their worse fears on anybody else. All anarchists should be asked the simple question :- ” when did you decide to be born “. Catch-42, Macclesfield, England

Geoff #5 Spell checker on word does not teach you vocabulary , it often results in extremly poor grammer as word does not really perform grammer checks. People do a brain dump and then only look at individual words in spell check and leave it at that which often leads to extremly poor grammer  Stick to TV mate  Cam

Has anyone else noticed that ‘Dawkins’ spelt backwards is ‘snik wad’, eh? I think that tells us a lot. errrrr

Cease sex education immediately. What a lot of absolute tosh! In this world full of left wing do-gooder, liberal pansies, what do we need this nonsense for. We never had such a waste of time when we were at school, 50 or so years ago, and we found out what to do, as did the early cave men! We will be telling them how to use toilet paper next! Teenagers deserve what they get, as they have no moral scruples whatsoever, following in the footsteps of their parents. Don’t treat them on the NHS, but let them pay privately for their disease. Why should precious resources be diverted from real, and genuine sickness, to deal with the likes of some teenagers who, with their “sex education”, should know better!  grumpovian

I shake my head in wonder and sadness at our readiness to sacrifice our beautiful and precious talent on the alter of political correctness that will not allow even the mention of alternative cancer treatments in the public venue, in spite of the overwhelming scientific evidence that some of them work very well. think

This will most likely get moderated and yet it should be considered because it is relevant. Consider: Female President of the USA+ THREAT + PMT = Armageddon Peter Buck

Speed in relation to what? Is the speed of light supposed to be absolute or relative to its immediate surroundings? Remember the test route is travelling in space due to movement of the earth. Maybe the calculations need to include speed of rotation of the earth, rotation around the sun, and movement of our solar system in space. Or maybe Einstein’s theories were incomplete. Mike Solomons

And the reason Rhianna’s gig sold so many……well, personally I think that white people are becoming a minority in this country…..enough said!!!  Jessica Hulme

A mass sterilisation programme is what is needed in these places, never mind poring money into them. I am sick and tired of seeing TV reports of people unable to provide for themselves, living in poverty in squalor but manage to reproduce without an ounce of responsibility. Reg

Red meats PERMANENTLY change the DNA of the bowel. Research it! We should only eat animals which we can kill with our hands (as our teeth witness). Humans only eat cows and pigs because we developed tools, but they are not our natural foods and we should not eat it. Listen to the scientists. They spend their lives researching such things. The masses rely on gut reaction. zrzavy

So a Parrot can learn Urdu as well as English while a bloke in Pakistan gets his wife to sue the British Government because HE refuses to learn English, and unless he does we won’t let him migrate here. It sort of puts things in perspective dosn’t it! Marshian, Romney Marsh

Have the Labour Party just elected as leader a man who has only been an MP since 2005, who is living with someone their child, but who isn’t married, and is the son of a Jewish Marxist Communist theorist? I ask only because surely this ticks every box in the PC wish list …. how will this play in the Muslim community? Desiderius Erasmus

Libyan mothers crying? Only for the cameras. Muslims are incapable of human feelings (being zombie-creatures, human corpses animated by demons from Hell), neither for their little terrorist-larvae nor anything else. It is your humanity which is suspect, since you seem to believe Muslims share it. Are you going to call me a Kraut now, bigot? Your comments are very dull and boring. Nearly everyone on the forum is far smarter and more educated than you are. You write like a 70-year-old farmer. As I have already explained, if you had the IQ to understand the concept, no American is going to tell the truth to a stranger over the phone who knows their full family name and home address, when the American is asked his opinion of Jews. Anyone with an IQ of 70, the legal retardate level, would know this without being told, because he would be born and raised in the US, surrounded by Jews all his life. The American would know to keep his mouth shut about what he honestly thought, and just tell the pollster whatever the pollster wanted to hear. The Galluppoll is pure propaganda, worse than worthless as factual evidence, and everyone in the world knows it. Except you, apparently, because of your low IQ. It’s not surprising that you don’t even know what the word ‘bigot’ means, or that you are one. FirstAdvisor

I would have liked to help stop the thuggary but I did not want to get arrested, sued, breach their human rights, get fined by “no win no fee” solicitors, get a criminal record, lose my job. It looks like the law/police/goverment is on the side of the thugs, blindfolding common sence. If the the law is incapable then take away all their money including their family who shelter them. david jones, walsall uk

More people get cancer because their parents survive cancer due to advanced medicine. So the cancer causing genes are being passed on more than ever. And the medicine/care for these cancer patients is escalating costs massively. We are hindering the Darwin Principle. If we stop cancer victims having offspring or ensure the offspring don’t have the cancer genes, this would be better for our future! Neo

Lets face it BBC, you are really not interested in what people have to say, unless of course it agrees with yourselves. I subscribe to many national newspaper comment sections which are far less restricted then HYS, and at least allow people to have a view. I really do hate political correctness, and lets face it, the BBC is extremely politically correct. Being the voice of the political Liberal Left will always rule the BBC, and anyone who doesn’t agree with your views will always be excluded. It is a sad show of democracy when our national broadcasting company is so undemocratic, but unfortunately the state of our big brother society which tells all UK citizens what they should believe, how they should be anti-Christian, pro Europe, anti British culture because we MUST fit in with our immigrant population and not fly any British flags, must call Christmas, Winter Festival, must not use Christian prayer for anyone, I mean heaven help us all if we believe in God, we are considered freaks. I feel extremely sad that the BBC has become what they are today….slaves to the popular policially correct society, instead of actually having a mind of their own. Thankfully, there are still organisations out there, including many national newspapers, who still have some guts and stand up for the people. KnightShift

What a sad world we are becoming. It was once thought that technology especially computers would be a slave to man, a tool to ease his burden and give him greater leisure time but it seems to me that man is becoming the slave to technoogy with people spending every spare minute glued to their computer.  If that’s living then its your choice and your welcome to it personally I would much prefer to go for walk in the country and stop and chat with people in the flesh. Don’y get me wrong, social networking sites have their place in society and are brilliant for the less abled bodied person although experience tells me that many of the so called less abled bodied people would benefit from a walk in the country.  RonC

Mr Hawking, you have a brilliant mind, but you and others like you are flawed. I shall attempt to point out the flaws:

Take the amoeba. The amoeba is the most complex single celled organism in existence. The amoeba is also unique, because, it has been proven that it perceives and recognizes that there are forces/life outside of what it knows. If you apply heat or cold, the amoeba reacts. It knows it did not generate the heat or cold, but it recognized it and adapted accordingly. The amoeba recognizes others of its kind, and even other single celled organisms. It reacts and adapts accordingly. The amoeba recognizes light and dark, and adapts accordingly.

The reasons I post this is that humans are like the amoebas. We are the most complex of organisms, we recognize other organisms, and we develop our own mechanisms of dealing with life inside and around us. We also ‘know’ that there are a higher set of powers/environments out there, forces yet to be ‘discovered’, etc etc, but we still adapt and overcome.

For you to deny the existence of God or saying ‘God is not needed for our environment’ is like the amoeba wagging one of its tentacles at us, the humans, saying the same thing. This logic by association is exactly the reason why God 1: is real and exists and 2: determines ‘our Judgement’ when we die. Does the pietry dish get flushed? Does the amoeba who dies gets ‘reborn’?

To say that the “Big Bang” happens without God’s hand, is like saying “we humans didn’t put amoebas in the pietry dish”. Going by your argument that ‘gravity exists, therefore, Big Bang occurred’, means there had to be a set of environments and objects in place for gravity to happen. And, another counter-argument to your gravity farce, if this is in any way shape or form true, explain to me what a Black Hole is, what it does, and what happens to ANYTHING that gets pulled by a black hole?

For all we know, the black hole could be a vacuum cleaner going through and sucking up everything out of the pietry dish. Now, does that mean that the Bible is ‘word’? That, depends on the interpretation of each person and the faith of each person. It may not be perfect, since it is of mortal design, but it IS the best we got so far. Until some evidence comes along that can be explained in a calm, rational, justifiable manner, then, I guess “God” is the best we got (and the only one that makes sense). hause

Quotes of 2011

Here is my selection of quotes from last year:

A poet once said, ‘Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line”  Ex US Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain quoting  the Donna Summer song,  The Power of One, the theme of the 1999  Pokémon movie

We are the 99 percent. The Occupy movement

All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything. That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath. Newt Gingrich

But our assessment is that the Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people. Hillary Clinton’s assessment of the situation in Egypt in the final days of the Mubarak regime on January 25, two weeks before Mubarak fell from power.

There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reform. Hillary Clinton once again shining.

They love me … They will die to protect me, my people. Muammar Gaddafi in March.

I am on a drug. It’s called ‘Charlie Sheen.’ It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body. Charlie Sheen

Well, what I want them to know is just like John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa, that’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.  Michele Bachmann, whose hometown is Waterloo, Iowa claiming John Wayne for her hometown. Unfortunately the John Wayne connected to Waterloo was not the Duke, but notorious serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978.

Nobody should believe that another half century of peace and prosperity in Europe can be taken for granted. Therefore, I say that if the euro fails, Europe fails.  Angela Merkel, German chancellor

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. The last words of Steve Jobs, as reported by his sister Mona Simpson in her eulogy.

A stag night? I’ve been having a stag night for the past 50 years. Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, 85, before his wedding to Crystal Harris, 24. She later called it off

A pretty boy with no brains. Model Nereida Gallardo, on her former boyfriend, footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.

A lazy, feckless, flatulent, oaf with a moustache leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat. Top Gear’s Richard Hammond comparing  Mexican cars to the country’s people.

 I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. Another Top Gear presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, has a drastic solution to the public sector strike in December.

This is one of the most humble days of my life. Rupert Murdoch before a parliamentary committee hearing on the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal.

I loved Michael too. I’m as much of a fan as any of the others. To be blamed for his death has not been an easy thing. Dr Conrad Murray

She’s a pop music legend, and the industry would not be the same without her. I used to hang pictures of her on my wall and touch myself when I was in bed. Lady Gaga introducing Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards.

This has all been invented by porn-obsessed prosecutors. It’s all the work of their fevered imaginations. My roots are strengthened by Christian values that have been with me since I was growing up. Can you imagine if I would allow any sort of blasphemous behaviour in my house?”  Silvio Berlusconi

When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30% of women said, ‘Yes’, while the other 70% replied, ‘What, again?‘”  Silvio Berlusconi.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire friendly Congress.  Warren Buffett arguing for a higher tax rate for America’s super-rich.

He’s a musical genius. It’s like living with Picasso. Gwyneth Paltrow about her husband, Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

It has been a really tough weekend. Harold Camping, doomsday prophet two days after the Rapture failed to occur on May 21; Camping’s other prediction on Oct. 21 did not come true either.

Quite simply, we lost our way. News of the World, in editorial that ran in its final edition. The 168-year-old British tabloid closed in July in wake of phone-hacking scandal.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales … are grim indeed. Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice, in court’s decision allowing sale of violent video games to minors. Scalia was comparing these games to gruesome fairy tales.

There is no doubt we have killed Osama bin Laden. The fact of the matter is you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again. US President Barack Obama 

Gadaffi was too nice: The Dictator’s Handbook

I have recently finished reading The Dictator’s Handbook by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. They are not the first to attempt to give this kind of advice; in Renaissance Florence Niccolo Machiavelli, an out of favour Florentine statesman wrote The Prince, a book which eschewed pious platitudes Machiavelli’s work is now considered a masterpiece. Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, have produced their own unapologetically cynical version of how politics works for the 21^st century. They actually claim to have improved on Machiavelli, which is a rather a bold assertion. I won’t go into that, but I will try to give you a flavour of this book.

The Dictator’s Handbook is designed to popularise Bueno de Mesquiita and Smith’s more technical and maths-laden research academic research. The book looks at a number of questions that I’m sure we have all wondered about. Why do leaders whose dismal economic policies wreck their countries keep their jobs for so long? Why are resource-rich lands so often badly run? Why are very unpleasant leaders given vast sums of foreign aid, and what are the effects of this economic assistance? The authors’ starting point is that all politicians set out to gain and maintain power; national interest is not a factor; leaders are interested only in themselves.

The rigid dividing line between democracy and dictatorship is for them a convenient fiction. What differentiates these systems is the most efficient way to stay in power. A ruler has to distinguish between:

1. The nominal selectorate, or interchangeables. This includes every person who has at least some legal say in choosing their leader.
2. The second level is the real selectorate or influentials. This is the group that actually chooses the leader.
3. The most crucial of these groups is the third, the subset of the real selectorate that comprises a winning coalition or the essentials. These are the people without whose support the leader could not survive in office.

We need to bear in mind that no leader, be they Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin or Robert Mugabe, can do exactly what they want. What differs is the number of people you depend on. When coalition is small it is good to favour the few; corruption rent-seeking and bribery are the most efficient ways to perpetuate yourself in power. You need to dole out private goods to your key supporters. If you try and help the general population and forget about these supporters, you may well find yourself out of a job. On the other hand in a system with a large number of people in your coalition it is impossible to bribe everyone –it would have to be divided to thinly. You need to provide public goods that benefit society as a whole.

Dictators are vulnerable when they first come to power, have a serious illness and when they are old. This is because this is when their supporters are most worried about whether the leader will be able to deliver in the long run. And then there is the fundamental question: how do some autocrats manage to stay in power for so long? To give you a flavour of the book here is an extract from he book where the authors give their five rules for staying in power:

Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. Bravo for Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He is a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition.

Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced. Bravo to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for introducing universal adult suffrage in Russia’s old rigged election system. Lenin mastered the art of creating a vast supply of interchangeables.

Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. Bravo to Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari, estimated to be worth up to $4 billion even as he governs a country near the world’s bottom in per capita income.

Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. Remember, your backers would rather be you than be dependent on you. Your big advantage over them is that you know where the money is and they don’t. Give your coalition just enough so that they don’t shop around for someone to replace you and not a penny more. Bravo to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe who, whenever facing a threat of a military coup, manages finally to pay his army, keeping their loyalty against all odds.

Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better. The flip side of rule 4 is not to be too cheap toward your coalition of supporters. If you’re good to the people at the expense of your coalition, it won’t be long until your “friends” will be gunning for you. Effective policy for the masses doesn’t necessarily produce loyalty among essentials, and it’s darn expensive to boot. Hungry people are not likely to have the energy to overthrow you, so don’t worry about them. Disappointed coalition members, in contrast, can defect, leaving you in deep trouble. Bravo to Senior General Than Shwe of Myanmar, who made sure following the 2008 Nargis cyclone that food relief was controlled and sold on the black market by his military supporters rather than letting aid go to the people—at least 138,000 and maybe as many as 500,000 of whom died in the disaster.

The authors talk about the resource curse. Having a large supply of oil enables autocrats to pay off their supporters and accumulate enormous personal wealth. It is tragic that while oil revenues provide the resources to deal with these countries’ problems, they actually create the political incentives to make the situation worse. And foreign aid tends to serve a similar function. There is a fascinating chapter about this aid. It is dispersed not to mitigate poverty but to purchase loyalty and influence. The authors cite the famous FDR quote from 1939 about the brutal Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza García: “He’s a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.” And it is much cheaper for a democratic regime to purchase a dictator. Autocratic aid recipients will often be prepared to make unpopular domestic political decisions provided that they receive enough benefits to give out goodies to the loyalists who sustain their power. The classic example of this is Egypt’s rapprochement with Israel – a policy not popular with Egypt’s masses. The Egyptian media then attacks Israel so that the government can extract even more aid for implementing unpopular policies.

There are also some interesting curiosities. Dictatorships often have good records in primary education. They need to have workers with basic labour skills like literacy and numeracy. Universities are dangerous, as they can be focal points for dissent. The authors point out that excepting China and Singapore, no nondemocratic country has even one university rated among the world’s top 200.* Despite China’s vast population, the top ranking Chinese university, Peking University, comes in 46th place. The highest ranking Russian university, the Lomonosov Moscow State University, is 112th. By contrast, relatively small countries like Holland, Norway Canada and Israel have several universities ranked among the top 200. Autocrats want workers to have basic labour skills like literacy. However, they are only interested in higher education for their own children who are often educated at elite foreign universities. Kim Jong Un was educated in Switzerland.

Highways to airports are straighter in dictatorships than democracies. They calculated the ratio of driving distance to the distance as the crow flies from the major airport serving each national capital for 158 countries.10 A low ratio means a fairly straight road; higher ratios, more curves. Of the thirty lowest ratios places where the driving distance is closest  to the distance as the crow flies—only two,Portugal and Canada are democracies. The former has the world’s thirteenth lowest ratio and the latter is twenty-eighth. The countries with the ten lowest ratios -Guinea, Cuba, Dominica, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Equatorial Guinea- are hardly a who’s who of democracy.

2011 was a complicated year a dictators. Gaddafi was a successful leader, who outlasted sevenU.S.presidents, surviving for nearly 42 years. But his complacency led him to ignore Rule 5. He was just too nice. He allowed too much press freedom and educated his people too much. Given the oil revenues he controlled, this was totally unnecessary. It has also been a tough year for democracies, especially here in Europe. Democracies have followed policies that do not seem to have served the public good. Leaders may share the same motivations to remain in power, but democracies create better incentives. This is not a romantic vision of politics. It is not a ringing endorsement. Democracy and dictatorship are not absolute categories. You can’t beat that Churchill quote: democracy is the worst system except all the others.

*Not counting universities in Hong Kong, which were established under British rule before Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997.

Drunkorexia and other new words

Here is another selection of new words I found on the Wordspy website:

architectural myopia

Building design that emphasizes distinctive, attention-getting features over practical concerns or simple aesthetics.

couch commerce

Ordering goods and services while relaxing at home

drunkorexia

Eating less to offset the calories consumed while drinking alcohol.

fat-finger problem

The tendency to make errors on a device where the keys or screen elements are too small.

grey-sky thinking

Negative or pessimistic thoughts, ideas, or solutions

hopium

The irrational belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, things will turn out for the best.

mailstrom

An overwhelming amount of email; an email deluge.

no planer

A conspiracy theorist who believes that no planes were involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001

smartphoneography

Photography using a smartphone’s built-in camera

two-pizza team

In a business environment, a team of employees that is not too large (and so can be fed with at most two pizzas).

Advertising: all lies and manipulation?

H. G. Wells referred to it as legalized lying, while Jerry Della Femina, who worked in the business, described as the most fun you can have with your clothes on. I am referring to advertising, about which I recently heard a fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4′s One to One. The person being interviewed by the BBC’s Evan Davis was adman Steve Henry, a member of the British Advertising Hall of Fame. This interview was part of a series of three episodes on people who lie for a living, with Henry sandwiched between a credit card fraudster and a transsexual. Memorable campaigns are discussed including the “Slag of all Snacks” line for Pot Noodle. Henry mentions the lying and how his colleagues expressed great regret that they couldn’t lie more. Of course some of the lies are harmless. Henry cites the case of the Patagonian Toothfish, which is now known as the Chilean Sea Bass. This is part of a fascinating trend where the fishing industry has to convince people to eat unglamorous fish because their traditional catches are fast running out. The orange roughy may not be the world’s most appealing name, but it definitely sounds more appetising than the slimehead. Pollack, once considered suitable for cat food and the primary component of fish fingers when minced, was given a new name by the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s. They want to persuade consumers to try “colin and chips as an alternative to cod. The new name, which should be pronounced co-lan, is French for hake. It gives the fish a more sophisticated air. And finally the humble pilchard has been rechristened the Cornish sardine.

I am intrigued by the way you can use language to frame reality. In advertising you see a lot of deliberately vague language. The idea is to make claims that cannot be falsified.  Here are some of the words advertisers like to use:

Adverbs that weaken (e.g. “often”, “probably”)

Numerically vague expressions (e.g. “some people”, “experts”, “many”)

Use of the passive voice to avoid specifying an authority

Modal verbs like “can,” “could,” “may,” and “might,” among others

Henry gives that classic example of the comparative: “Nothing acts faster than Anadin: The fact all analgesics worked at the same speed is beside the point. And there was a chocolate bar which had “New Size” emblazoned across the bar. This was true – it was actually smaller than the previous bar had been!

Then there are those weasel words.* For me natural is a classic weasel word.  In a post I did about the misuse of the word, I mentioned Natural American Spirit, an organic cigarette brand whose slogan is: “Taste nature. And nothing else.” Classic weasel words are helps and fights. A few years there was a Kellogg’s advert showing a photograph of a mother playing with her child, asserts that ”a bowl of cereal may help reduce the risks of osteoporosis” by providing recommended daily amounts of calcium. ‘Up to’ or ‘as much as’ are great for making dodgy numerical claims

Henry and Davis didn’t really talk about another of the keys to success in advertising – creating anxiety among consumers. The period I typically associate with this is the 1920s. After World War I there was a shift from the Puritanical values of hard work and thrift, toward a more consumerist society. Hollywood, with its cult of the beautiful body, was on the rise.  One commentator wrote:

“Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”

A fascinating case study is provided by Listerine. This product has enjoyed a number of different lives. It began as a powerful surgical antiseptic, and then it morphed into a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhoea. However it was when it was pitched as a solution for halitosis that sales took off.  This obscure medical term for bad breath was just what the doctor ordered for Listerine. Their adverts used to feature young men and women, eager for marriage. There was just one problem – their partner’s bad breath. “Can I be happy with him in spite of that?“, one forlorn maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath had not been seen as such a social faux pas. But Listerine changed the rules. Other terms that emerged in this period athlete’s foot, dead cuticles, psoriasis and BO. Luckily those men in white coats from the laboratories of the United States had not only identified these new conditions, but — miraculously, it seemed — had simultaneously come up with cures for them. Having said that, I probably wouldn’t want to go back to pre-20th century hygiene levels.

I think we shouldn’t overstate the case against advertising as it merely reflects human tendency to accentuate the positive and cover up the negative. It’s not just filthy lucre which engages in this kind of spin. We all engage in advertising. When we write a CV we seek to present ourselves in the most positive light.  The same thing happens with dating; the majority claim to be a lot richer, taller, slimmer, and better-looking than average.  Politics is full of it too. However, we are not passive recipients of adverts. We are becoming increasingly aware of the games advertisers play. You can lie and get a sale but if your product doesn’t satisfy your consumers, you won’t get repeat business. The industry is evolving and consumers are more media-savvy than they used to be. Advertisers will have to find new ways to get through to us.

___________

*Evan Davis pointed out the origin of the term weasel words; the weasel sucks the contents of the egg through a tiny little hole leaving the egg apparently intact when in reality it’s empty. Curiously an article in the Buffalo News attributes the origin of the term to William Shakespeare’s plays Henry V and As You Like It, in which the author includes similes of weasels sucking eggs.

Pseudoetymology:Shakespeare, kangaroos and fornication

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. This journalistic aphorism also seems to be apt in the world of pseudoetymology, popularly held but false beliefs about the origins of specific words or expressions. Truth is the first casualty in popular etymology! In his book The Stuff of Thought Steven Pinker had a faux etymology of the word etymology. The word is formed from the Latin “etus” (“eaten”), the root “mal” (“bad”), and “logy” (“study of”); it means the study of things that are hard to swallow. With the invention of the Internet this type of material has found a new channel. I will look at why this type of story has become so popular later in this post. But first I wanted to furnish you with some of my favourite examples.

I must also admit that I have fallen for some of these in my time. For example I reproduced the famous Bernard Levin quote about the linguistic influence of Shakespeare. This quote is rather misleading as Shakespeare probably didn’t actually invent many of these words and expressions; his works merely reflect the first recorded use. Geoff Nunberg claims if we could google Elizabethan English as thoroughly as we can the modern language, we’d probably discover that Shakespeare didn’t invent 90 percent of these words. What’s more it is Milton and not Shakespeare who introduced the most words into the English language. According to Gavin Alexander of Cambridge University, who has trawled the entire Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare with 229 neologisms, trails John Milton (630), Ben Jonson (558) and John Donne (342 words) as a coiner of new words and phrases. Anyway it would have been a bit strange If Shakespeare had filled his plays with hundreds of completely new words; His audiences would probably have been lost.

And when it comes to words and expressions there are plenty of old chestnuts. My first example is rule of thumb. One story doing the rounds is that in English common law a man was allowed to discipline his wife provided that he beat her with a stick no thicker than his thumb.  This is not true, although the exact origin of the phrase is uncertain. It could be connected to the thumb as a measurement device or in the use of the thumb in a number of apocryphal “rules.” One suggestion is that it comes from beer brewing before the invention of thermometers, when brewers would use their thumbs to measure the temperature of the beer. This is just speculation. The phrase also exists in other languages, for example Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, or in the variant “rule of fist” in Finnish, German and Dutch. The fact that it also exists in Persian would suggest that it goes back a long way.

And staying on legal questions, does testify have its origins in the testes (testicles)? According to my trusty Wikipedia the origin is in the Indo-European roots of *tre- meaning ‘three’ and *sta- meaning ‘stand’. A witness was thus ‘a third person standing by’. From that came the verb testificare ‘to bear witness’, which evolved into Middle English testify in the fourteenth century.

I’m sure you’ve heard the one about the word kangaroo being the product of a cultural misunderstanding. The story goes that when they were asked to identify the mysterious marsupial the natives replied with ‘I don’t know’ in their language. The real story is somewhat different. In eighteenth-century Australia there were at least 700 Aboriginal tribes, speaking as many as 250 different languages. Kangaroo or gangaru comes from one of these, the Guugu Ymithirr language of Botany Bay, where it means the large grey or black kangaroo, Macropus robustus. As the English settlers moved into the interior of Australia they used this word to refer to any old kangaroo or wallaby. When the Baagandji people, who lived 2,250 km (1,400 miles) from Botany Bay and didn’t speak Guugu Ymithirr heard the English settlers using this unfamiliar word they assumed that it meant ‘an animal that no one has ever heard of before’. Since they had never seen them before, they used the word to describe the settlers’ horses.

Many tall tales revolve around acronyms, which, given their prevalence today, are in fact surprisingly modern, not really coming into existence until the last century.. What is less surprising is that the majority of the early ones were military – the armed forces do love their acronyms. AWOL, absent without leave, is generally considered the first one. Although it has its origins in the American Civil War, it only began to be pronounced as a word at the time of the first world war The big explosion of their use came with the Second World War as a number of new technologies emerged. It was in this period that the term acronym was coined by the military. They were not only technological though. One of the most famous is SNAFU, which in its polite form is rendered as Situation Normal All Fouled Up.

The fact that acronyms began to appear in the 20th century should alert us to the false etymologies that claim that some words began as acronyms. The typical examples you hear include tip (To Insure Promptness), posh (Port Out Starboard Home), cop (Constable on Patrol),  golf (Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden) and shit (Ship High in Transit). They are all nonsense.

And then of course we have fuck. This word presents a lot of difficulties to etymologists because by its nature it was used far more extensively in common speech than in easily traceable written forms. The OED states that its origin is uncertain, but that the word is “probably cognate” with a number of native Germanic words whose meanings involve striking, rubbing, and having sex.

This type of vacuum provides an excellent opportunity to slip in a factoid or two. Recently a student of mine came out with one: fuck is an acronym of Fornicating Under Consent of King. There are whole edifices built around this. Here is on of my favourites. It is the Middle Ages and the Black Death is wreaking havoc onBritain’s population. Uncontaminated resources are scarce and towns are trying to control populations Many towns require that their residents ask permission to have children. Couples that want children are required to first obtain royal permission through a local magistrate or lord. They then place a sign somewhere visible from the road in their home that said “Fornicating Under Consent of King”, which eventually is shortened to FUCK.

Looking up the word in a good dictionary would have been sufficient to debunk any of these tall tales. They are the lexical equivalent of the conspiracy theory. Cecil Adams of the wonderful Straight Dope website has an excellent rule of thumb: the cuteness of the story is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of its actually being true. So why do we do it? We love a good story. We seek to impose order on a chaotic world. We also need to recognise the difficulty of the enterprise. There are a lot of times when it’s just impossible to know when a word or phrase was first used. Reality is often messy and  stories fill this gap. We are storytelling apes. They have a hold on people that mere truth can’t attain. You are not especially popular if you try to disabuse someone of these myths. I can sympathise with this feeling as these creation myths are funnier, more colourful and more memorable than the real explanations, which I have to admit I find confusing and often forget. That’s enough for this week, so goodnight and sleep tight*

* In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase “goodnight, sleep tight”.

 

Further reading

Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths.   Michael Quinion

Dodgy etymology: niggardly

Last week when I was doing my post about the n-word I saw how bad etymology can have more damaging consequences. The word niggardly is a word which lends itself to misunderstandings. One famous case some ten years ago involved David Howard, a white aide to Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of Washington, who used “niggardly” when referring to a budget, apparently upsetting one of his black colleagues (identified by Howard as Marshall Brown), who interpreted it as a racial slur and lodged a complaint. As a result, on January 25 Howard offered to resign the Mayor took him up on it. However, after pressure from the gay community (of which Howard was a member) there was an internal review into the matter, and the mayor offered Howard the chance to return to his former position. Howard turned that down but accepted another post with the mayor instead.

There is one problem with this outrage – the word niggardly, which means “stingy” or “miserly, has its roots in the Old Norse verb nigla, “to fuss about small matters”. This is where we get the word niggling, as in a niggling injury. It has nothing to do with the word nigger. The best riposte to such nonsense came from Julian Bond, who was then chairman of the NAACP:

“You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding”,

This explanation was not enough for some people. One  outraged Washingtonian had a rhetorical question: “Do you really think [that Howard] didn’t notice he had to pass ‘nigger’ before he could get to the ‘dly’?”  In print, too Howard got some flak. Julianne Malveaux understood that the words had different roots, but she was still annoyed: He should understand “that perhaps there are other ways to indicate a tightness in a budget—that one might say parsimonious, frugal, or miserly.” Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post asserted that “when the subject of race is at hand… the only dictionary that counts is the one that gives meaning to human experience.”

Soon after the Washington incident there was a similar case involving the use of niggardly by a professor teaching Chaucer at the University of Wisconsin. The professor compounded his “crime” by continuing to use it even after the student, Amelia Rideau, told him that she was offended. She complained to the faculty:

“I was in tears, shaking. It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid.”

I did a quick search of my blog and in three and a half years I have not used the word once. I would probably prefer parsimonious, and I think one should try to measure one’s words. The controversial writer Christopher Hitchens admitted that he may have  had second thoughts about using it in public.

It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as “niggardly.” Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved—having felt the word hanging in the air a bit—to say “parsimonious” from then on.

I do think is necessary to measure our words when we speak But I hate this kind of ignorant censorship. These days there seems to be a lot of mileage in being offended, but that will be a subject for another post.