Read Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking Online
Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (25 page)
and so forth. Our challenge list is, of course, just the TOTI.
The purpose of acronyms, and the reason that they are so popular all around the world these days is, of course, that each one takes a long (sometimes very long) and complex linguistic structure and makes it much simpler and more digestible, by sweeping the parts under a kind of “linguistic rug”, or, to change metaphors, by making a black box that carries out its function very efficiently but into which no one ever bothers to peer, or at least not very often. The parts of acronyms are deliberately buried so that listeners and readers won’t see them, can’t get at them, and thus will not be distracted by mental activity going on at too fine a level of detail. Listeners and readers are meant to focus on a higher, more relevant, more chunked level.
Indeed, the parts of an acronym are hidden by a kind of membrane or “skin”, making a concept that might otherwise be off-putting become palatable and even sometimes pleasing by its relatively simple, attractive packaging. Thus for most people, “DNA” is easy to remember, while “deoxyribonucleic acid” seems forbiddingly technical and complex. The fact that “DNA” seems to mean nothing at all whereas “deoxyribonucleic acid” clearly
does
mean something is precisely the advantage of the acronym. It becomes much more word-like and much less like a technical term.
When an utterance uses an acronym instead of the full phrase that it stands for, the number of visible parts in it is smaller than it would have been, as several pieces have been chunked into a single piece, and so the processing by the mind is easier. The principle here is similar to that of checkout lanes marked “10 items or fewer” in grocery
stores, where a pack of six bottles of beer counts as just one item, as does a bunch of grapes with 100 grapes, and a bag of sugar containing a million grains of sugar. If each beer bottle were autonomous, if each grape were wrapped in an individual small bag, or if sugar were sold by the grain (heavens forbid!), it would be quite another story. Just as chunking of grocery-store items greatly simplifies the processing, so does linguistic chunking in acronyms. Our short-term or working memory does not get overloaded by too many items.
As an example, consider the following hypothetical announcement, which may seem a little heavy in the acronyms, but compared to much of the bureaucratic email we receive, it is actually pretty tame:
MIT and NIH announce a joint AI/EE PhD program in PDP-based DNA sequencing.
As is, it contains about fifteen “words”, but if it is unpacked into more old-fashioned English terminology — “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institutes of Health announce a joint artificial-intelligence and electrical-engineering doctor of philosophy program in the sequencing of deoxyribonucleic acid based on parallel distributed processing” — it would be over twice as long. And is it clearer or more confusing in this unpacked version?
An actual bureaucratic email contained the following noun phrase:
the URDGS IT Training and Education Web Markup and Style Coding STEPS Certificate Series
In this phrase, “URDGS” stood for “University Research Division and Graduate School”, “IT” for “Information Technology”, and “STEPS” for “Student Technology Education Programs”. Thus if one unpacks all acronyms (and does not rephrase in an attempt at increasing clarity), one gets the following:
the University Research Division and Graduate School Information Technology Training and Education Web Markup and Style Coding Student Technology Education Programs Certificate Series
This is quite a proverbial mouthful, and it certainly taxes one’s linguistic processing capability at or beyond its limits. The phrase with the acronyms is still hard to parse, but it comes closer to being humanly parsable.
Using acronyms is a favorite device of bureaucrats, but it’s also popular usage, because if they’re used in moderation and with care, they can be very helpful. Because our technological society is growing in complexity in many ways at once, we simply have to have ways of ignoring the details underlying things, whether they are physical or linguistic. A typical teen-ager’s cell phone, for instance, has many millions of times more parts than does a grand piano, for instance, and yet because of the way it has been cleverly engineered for user-friendliness, it probably seems far simpler than a
piano to the teen-ager. Just as we need to hide the massively complex details inside our fancy gadgets by elegant and user-friendly packaging, so we need to hide the details of many ideas in order to talk about them in a sufficiently compact way that we won’t get lost in a mountain of details. And thus acronyms flourish.
Furthermore, acronyms become more and more opaque over time, like metaphors. Just as we speak of “dead metaphors”, so we could speak of “dead acronyms”. For instance, probably most people today do not realize that the following words first saw the light of day as acronyms:
yuppie (“young upwardly mobile professional”)
laser (“light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”)
radar (“radio detection and ranging”)
modem (“modulator–demodulator”)
snafu (“situation normal all fucked up”)
scuba (“self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”).
And indeed, who would want to think of, or say, “radio detection and ranging” instead of just “radar”, or “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” instead of just “laser”? Cognitively, we
want
these membranes to be opaque. Just as we are happy not to see people’s veins, intestines, brains, and other internal organs, so we don’t want to be constantly reminded of all the infinite details inside the things we deal with on a daily basis. We want our eyes to be closed so that we can see better. In a word, we want to be spared looking at the trees so that we can clearly make out the forest.
Few dictionaries would have an entry for the compound noun “Jewish mother”. And yet despite this lack, the phrase is the name of a well-known and fairly easily described category. At its core is the notion of an extremely overprotective, constantly worrying, ever-complaining mother, so much so that she wants to know everything about her children’s lives, and to control everything in them. Her children are the entire focus of her life and she wants to be the same for them. Clinical psychologists might find Jewish mothers to be interesting case studies, while other people might tell jokes about them, caricaturing the nature of the category that they belong to:
You know she’s a Jewish mother if, when you get up at night to go to the bathroom, your bed is already made when you come back to go to sleep.
A Jewish mother considers her fetus to be viable when it has finished medical school.
A Jewish mother calls up the airline and without a word of prelude asks, “Excuse me; when will my son’s plane be arriving?”
Simon calls his mother up and says, “Hi, Mom, how are things?” “Oh, they’re fine, Simon.” “Oops! I’m sorry, ma’am — I must have dialed the wrong number.”
The curious thing about this expression, revealing that it names something quite different from what its two sub-words would suggest, is that members of the category
Jewish mother
don’t need to be Jewish, nor even mothers. A father, a grandparent, a co-worker in one’s office, someone in a bureaucratic hierarchy — all of them can be members of the category
Jewish mother
, as long as they exhibit its more central and crucial features. Consider the following scenario, for instance.
One of William’s co-workers has taken William under his wing. He does all he can to help William rise up the company’s ladder, taking it for granted that for William professional ascent is the absolute number-one priority. In fact, he wants William to consider him to be the linchpin of his professional life, so much so that he looks downcast whenever he sees William talking to any other co-workers. Not only does he advise William professionally, but he’s taken it upon himself to give William personal counseling. He is convinced he knows what’s best for William. In addition to making sure William gets promoted, ever since he found out that William is single, he’s gotten into playing the role of matchmaker as well.
Calling William’s intrusive and oversolicitous co-worker a “Jewish mother” involves dropping some of the
a priori
expected requirements for membership in the category — specifically, that it should involve a biological mother, that the person should be a woman, that there should be some kind of parental link, and of course that the person should be Jewish. Indeed, the key characteristics of a
Jewish mother
don’t devolve from or imply any kind of religious beliefs. Thus a single and childless Catholic man — even a priest — could easily belong to the category
Jewish mother
, and contrariwise, many Jewish mothers are at best weak members of the category
Jewish mother.
What matters most of all for us to see someone as a
Jewish mother
is that the category’s most stereotypical characteristics (overprotecting; kvetching; deriving one’s main satisfaction from the successes of another person; giving boundlessly and expecting boundless reciprocation thereof) should be present to a sufficient degree, because it is they that most crucially help us to recognize members of the category.
Our ability to make analogies is what allows us to extend this particular category so that it includes all sorts of entities, such as William’s co-worker, that share the category’s most central characteristics independently of whether the surface-level description of those entities is consistent with the verbal label. When a category is deeply enough rooted in one’s mind, its standard verbal label is but a relic reminding one of the early stages of the category’s creation, rather than a fence sharply setting off the category’s boundaries.
So far, we have been looking at rather short phrases. But what about phrases that stretch out a bit longer? Below we offer a sampler of idiomatic verbal phrases, none of which should strike a native speaker of American English as particularly strange:
to be up to one’s ears in work, to go in one ear and out the other, to roll out the red carpet, to roll one’s sleeves up, to be dressed to the nines, to be in seventh heaven, to be dead as a doornail, to wait until the cows home, to burn the candle at both ends, to swallow one’s pride, to eat humble pie, to take it for granted, to kick the bucket, to let the floodgates open, to drop the ball, to catch the drift, to be caught off guard, to get away with murder, to read between the lines, to read the handwriting on the wall, to lick someone’s boots, to have the time of one’s life, to drop something like a hot potato, to throw someone for a loop, to throw someone into a tizzy, to get a kick out of something, to play it by ear, to bend over backwards, to fly in the face of the evidence, to tie the knot, to get hitched, to open a can of worms, to scrape the bottom of the barrel, to drop a bombshell, to be caught between a rock and a hard place, to paint oneself into a corner, to eat one’s words, to let the cat out of the bag, to spill the beans, to be knocking at death’s door, to play the field, to make a mountain out of a molehill, to shout at the top of one’s lungs, to be scared out of one’s wits, to act like there’s no tomorrow, to take a rain check, to cry all the way to the bank, to cross swords, to drag someone over the coals, to hit pay dirt, to make hay while the sun shines, to rise and shine, to set one’s sights on someone, to make someone’s blood boil, to shout something from the rooftops, to lord it over someone, to even the score, to give someone a taste of their own medicine, to turn the tables, to miss the boat, to jump on the bandwagon, to have no truck with someone, to put the cart before the horse, to close the barn door after the horse is out, to while the hours away, to kill time, to spend like a drunken sailor, to get the hell out, to take it out on someone, to go for broke, to even the score, to be in the pink, to be riding high, to be down in the dumps, to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to carry coals to Newcastle, to scatter to the four winds, to open a Pandora’s box, to be carrying a torch for someone, to get something for a song, to be whistling Dixie, to need something like a hole in the head, to tell it like it is, to be playing with a stacked deck, to make a long story short, to give someone short shrift, to be feeling one’s oats, to sow one’s wild oats, to butter someone up, to slip someone a mickey, to laugh on the other side of one’s face, to hit the nail on the head, to miss the point, to make the grade, to lose one’s marbles, to grasp at straws, to be on pins and needles, to run the gauntlet, to blow one’s chances, to shoot one’s wad, to keep one’s cool, to throw a monkey wrench into the works, to screw things up royally, to look daggers at someone, to look white as a sheet, to be pushing up daisies, to send someone to kingdom come, to knock someone into the middle of next week, to cut the mustard, to cut to the chase, to jump ship, to crack the whip, to go belly-up, to be champing at the bit, to have one’s cake and eat it too, to kill two birds with one stone…
This colorful list, illustrating the richness of the English language, names as many categories as it has entries. Suppose, for instance, that you’re in a situation where you know something catastrophic might happen at any moment — for example, you have a heart condition that could trigger a sudden heart attack without warning. You might say, “I feel a sword of Damocles hanging above my head.” You might also say this if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, notorious for its seismic activity, and whose
residents live in fear of “the big one” (that is, the next big earthquake, whose date is of course completely unknowable). You might also say this if you live with someone who, once in a blue moon, throws a terrible temper tantrum. You can surely think of many other situations that belong to this natural-seeming category — for indeed, that is precisely what “the sword of Damocles” names: a
category
, with all that that entails.