so·te·ri·ol·o·gy \suh-teer-ee-ol-uh-jee\, noun:

1. spiritual salvation, esp. by divine agency.
2. the branch of theology dealing with this.

Recruiters who write job descriptions with requirements like this:

• Great Communication – must be able to speak very clear

One of the classes I’m taking on Coursera is Principles of Economics for Scientists, taught by Prof. Antonio Rangel at Cal Tech.

First of all, it’s a great class. Rangel has a real passion for the material and he’s provided extra resources to accomodate online students, many of whom probably don’t have the math background of the average Cal Tech student.

He’s from Madrid, so his pronunciations and mannerisms are different, like the gesture below, which I captured from one of the video lectures.

He was explaining how something or other would increase our understanding of economics and he punctuated the word “understanding” by pointing at his head with two fingers. I don’t know what this gesture means in Spain, or if it means anything at all. Probably he knows what it means in America, but as I said, he’s passionate about the material and I think he loses himself in what he’s saying.

He’s also one of the only two people I know who pronounce the word “subsequent” as sub-SEEK-went, the other being one of my work colleagues, who’s actually from this country and therefore has no excuse . . .

The last couple of weeks in ModPo, we’ve been reading “Language Poetry” and aleatory poetry, including the work of Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Jackson Mac Low, Jena Osman and Joan Retallack.

I have to admit it all seemed lazy to me. The reader has to do all the work. (See below for a differing opinion.) I didn’t like any of the poems enough to share one, so here instead are the lyrics to Randy Newman‘s “Marie”:

Randy Newman at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You looked like a princess the night we met
With your hair piled up high
I will never forget
I’m drunk right now baby
But I’ve got to be
Or I never could tell you
What you meant to me

I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie

You’re the song that the trees sing when the wind blows
You’re a flower, you’re a river, you’re a rainbow

Sometimes I’m crazy
But I guess you know
And I’m weak and I’m lazy
And I’ve hurt you so
And I don’t listen to a word you say
When you’re in trouble I just turn away
But I love you

I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie

If that isn’t poetry, I don’t know what is.

Here’s what ModPo professor Al Filreis says about aleatory poetry:

So this kind of writing, I want to emphasize, has rigor and it has intention at the level of design. It’s not easy, it’s not facile and it’s not to be confused with improvisation and indeterminacy and even random or arbitrary are the wrong words to describe it. Many, as I’ve said, resist it. Many find no beauty in it. . . . Why should I waste my time, it doesn’t mean anything. Well, I have so many things to say in response to that and gosh, I’m not even sure where to start, but I’ll give it a try.

Well, here’s one thing: when I think about how much of my time I spend, my own time, how much time I spend and waste really, watching and listening to things that make a whole lot of conventional sense but ultimately don’t mean anything. Where normally meant statements are empty and useless and unbeautiful, I figure that I owe it to those who seek a significant alternative, the time of day. Maybe they’re telling me to relax. Maybe they’re telling me let down my guard. I’m always, I seem to be always on guard for meaning in meaninglessness. Maybe I should let down that guard and maybe I should hear the music in the apparent dissonance and discordance of my world. And maybe the discovery of sense in language that was not intended at the level of the sentence or of the phrase makes that sense all the more powerful. And maybe when words formed through quasi non-intentional chance operations produce something “accidentally” lovely (I’ve got air quotes around the word accidentally), when that loveliness is accidental, I’ll be all the more astonished at the beauty that’s just out there, that’s ambient in our language and just waiting to be rearranged.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine . . .

“Unique” means “one of a kind.” So it’s not correct to describe something as being “very unique,” “quite unique,” “rather unique” . . . it’s either unique or it isn’t.

Yeah, I know everyone does it but it’s still wrong. Instead, try using “unusual” or “uncommon” or “out of the ordinary” or “atypical” or “rare.”

Thank you . . .

ple·o·nasm, noun

1. the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy.
2. an instance of this, as free gift or true fact.

My fellow Americans –

U.S. embassies in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have been attacked by Muslims offended by a YouTube video.

“Offended Muslims” — there’s a pleonasm for you!

The embassy in Egypt, hoping to pacify the attackers, issued a statement opposing “continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”

DISAGREE! We should be APPLAUDING efforts to offend religious believers. We should be STEPPING UP efforts to offend religious believers.

My friends and I risked everything — including our lives, that’s how important it was to us — to ensure that Americans could speak their minds without interference from government.

Religion is all horseshit anyway. There’s no God. There’s no Allah. It’s all a bunch of made-up bullshit. Fairy tales!

As John Lennon — an Englishman, but otherwise a good bloke — used to say: Imagine no religion . . .

I’m going to savagely murder the next person I hear use the word “spend” as a noun, as in “leveraging our spend.”

Spend is a verb. Spending is a noun, e.g., “leveraging our spending.” I would still have to maim you for saying “leveraging” though, so try “getting the most for our money.”

You can also avoid death by saying “How much does it cost?” instead of “What is our spend?”

You have been warned.

I am sparkling. You are unusually talkative. He is drunk.

I daydream. You’re an escapist. He ought to see a psychiatrist.

Let me tell you something about crows: Sometimes they fly in a big circle. Sometimes they fly every which way.

Whoever invented “as the crow flies” to mean “in a straight line” must have never seen an actual crow . . .

“Look at it, feel it, play with it . . . that will quelch your fears.”

One of our contract programmers tells me that his current project is “basically done.”

“It’s done or it’s basically done?” I ask.

“It’s done. Amanda is testing it.”

“How do you know it’s done if she’s still testing it?”

“All the tickets are closed except one, so it’s basically done.”

“I don’t mean to give you a hard time. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a difference between ‘basically done’ and ‘done.’ Because usually there is. I inherited a project here last year that when I got it, it was ‘basically done,’ except it needed some more testing. I put one of my best guys on it and he was still working on it a year later when it was finally cancelled. It took a year to go from ‘basically done’ to cancelled. Hence my lack of fondness for hearing projects described as ‘basically done.’”

Notes for next team meeting: Effective immediately, we’re not going to describe any task as being “basically done,” “pretty much done,” or my personal favorite, “done — it just needs a little more testing.” (Isn’t that what testing is for — to find out if it’s done?)

We’ll classify things as either Done or Not Done. If it’s not done, we should be able to say what has to happen in order for it to be done.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Anyone who uses the word “surface” to mean “put forward for consideration,” e.g., “I’d like to surface a topic.”

If you must use “surface” as a verb, I’m okay with you surfacing a driveway or surfacing a submarine, but if you’re going around surfacing topics, then you really need to leave the world immediately . . .

What is most easily put into words is not necessarily what is most important.

If you’re fat, don’t say you “work out,” just say you “exercise.”

In case you’re not one of the 5 million people who’ve viewed it already . . .

• RT @capricecrane: To the world you may be one person but to one person you may be the world. And to everyone else, you're just some asshole. #
• Pet peeve: People who pronounce -th as -f, as in "toof" or "boof" #

Our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality.

— Paul Auster, City of Glass