Some interesting websites or: how I act when I'm insecure, which is all the time

The main purpose of this website is seemingly to display my own ntelligence—certainly that seems to be a common enough reason to make a blog like this one. But I don’t know whether I’m as intelligent as all that: I think that I just have an occasional stream-of-consciousness essay-ette to write that maybe I’d like to share with a few readers. Maybe at some point somebody will read these pieces in retrospect: Mark Fisher’s blog was published as a book, after all. [In a development that would make the master proud, the blog seems to have undergone shoggothic mitosis: here’s another archive of the same content.] Certainly other people develop sprawling hypertext webrealms: check out Ralph Dumain’s Autodidact Project and Justin B Rye’s Home Page. They seem content to make their own sites for their own purposes. If someone reads them, so much the better.

I suppose that I’m insecure about my own intelligence: who wouldn’t be? In my experience, if one thinks that they are actually “smart” (I’m speaking of myself here), then they probably aren’t: there’s always so much to learn that one doesn’t yet know, so thinking that one already knows it all only keeps one from learning something new; in the long term, certainly a detriment. But what this insecurity causes (speaking of myself and others here) is the tendency to try to seem smart by using big, fancy words. There’s jargon, and then there’s shibboleths. Claude Piron pointed out that we often do this to make ourselves feel superior to others who don’t know the words. I know that I not infrequently (and often incorrectly) use fancy technical terms not because I must, but because I can: it makes me feel smarter to use “smart sounding” words, or at least, it makes me feel less dumb. But sometimes this jargon covers up that we have nothing to say, or it does our saying for us. (Hypertext is a dizzying power: I can punch holes through the text and connect it to other points in other texts—what a drug!) Often we (I) lean on heavy-hitting words to reassure myself that I do have something to say; this is especially true when I (and others) talk about language. Yes, of course it is useful (sometimes) to use a technical term, but often the technical terms are themselves the subject of debate (are the english compound verbs (jargon!) formed “be -ing” as in “I am cooking” “they were eating” called “progressive” or “continuous”? This is a problem I run into while I’m teaching English: many English reference grammars (A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Quirk et al., the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English by Biber et al., and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Huddleston, Pullum, et al.) call this aspect “progressive”, but the English Language textbooks that we use (The series of English File, Navigate, and Family and Friends books from Oxford Press and the Prepare series from Cambridge press) refer to this phenomenon as “continuous”—I am certain that there is an explaination for this difference, or a distinction between the two that I don’t understand. Does anybody have any insight?) and deciding which one to use is often a matter of local usage rather than correctness. Indeed, chosing what term to use can be a matter of pedantry or performance: I say “progressive” not only because I think it’s better, but because I read it in fancy reference grammars rather than ordinary textbooks (which in the end is why I think its better); I’m driven to talk like that to show of that I do, in fact, read books.

To that end, I’ll end with this excerpt from a book by my father’s favorite philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. In his 1911 text An Introduction to Mathematics, the English mathematician prefaces his discussion of imaginary numbers with this note on terminology (on p. 87–88):

A certain type of minor intellect is always worrying itself and others by discussion as to the applicability of technical terms. Are the incommensurable numbers properly called numbers? Are the positive and negative numbers really numbers? Are the imaginary numbers really imaginary, and are they numbers?—are types of such futile questions. Now, it cannot be too clearly understood that, in science, technical terms are names arbitrarily assigned, like Christian names to children. There can be no question of the names being rights or wrong. They may be judicious or injudicious; for they can sometimes be so aranged as to be easy to remember, or as to suggest relevant and important ideas. But the essential principle involved was quite clearly enunciated in Wonderland to Alice by Humpty Dumpty, when he told her, à propos of is use of words, "I pay them extra and make them mean what I like.

So there—at least in this account, the term is just the name, nothing more, nothing less, and knowing the name is a convenience to refer to specific phenomena. Using the names with people who don’t know them only serves to show them that you have no consideration for whether they understand you or not—in the end, it only shows them clearly how insecure you are.