Henry 10: Shakespeare's history plays have a new marketing department

Shakespeare's (English) history plays are too confusing for today's audiences. The problem, according to the new marketing director, is largely a matter of inconsistent branding. From a branding perspective, this list has a number of obvious problems:

• King John
• Edward III
• Richard II
• Henry IV, Part 1
• Henry IV, Part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, Part 1
• Henry VI, Part 2
• Henry VI, Part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII

For a start, is the product called "Henry" or not? Far too many different names. And they're all kings, right, so why is only John called out as such? Also, some of these guys sound like sequels or minor revisions, not full fledged new kings, which is going to affect sales. Let's get this sorted out by regularizing the names and choosing a natural and consistent numbering scheme. 

• Henry I
• Henry 2
• Henry 3.0
• Henry 3.1
• Henry 95
• Henry NT 4.0
• Henry 98
• Henry 2000
• Henry XP
• Henry 7
• Henry Fundamentals for Legacy PCs
• Henry Vista
• Henry 8
• Henry 10

"You can observe a lot by just watching" Yogi Berra

While it isn't always easy, I can usually tell where people were raised as well as where they were born. Koreans raised in Los Angeles have a style completely different from those born in Seoul; the English, en masse, look different from the Scots, and it just takes one look at those wacky triangular eyeglasses for me to know that a young lady is either French or getting that way. In the same way, just by looking, I can pretty much diagnose the families waiting for the Newark to Gatwick flight. Here's one, prematurely greying father with John Lennon glasses, slightly older  mother with shoulder length hair, three blond boys with backpacks and crew cuts. I'm like, O.K. , he's British, she's American, all three boys born in the USA. Or, Asian looking father, fiftyish, no mother in the party, two young teen daughters, one classically Eurasian looking, the other blonder. Sure, I can do that: he's born in Hong Kong, but doesn't speak Cantonese well, one kid born in Shanghai, the other in canoe transit up the Amazon. Same father, I think, but the first girl's mother is definitely working as a dogcatcher in Evansville, Indiana, and the second one's mother once had that unfortunate accident with a hairnet and an avocado. Could these be the same person? Very likely, but I'm not infallible, while I know for sure that the father is part-time seal tamer and computer science professor, I can't be be sure whether he's a bigamist. It's just a matter of assessing the evidence.

I can also tell what language people speak, because the patterns of vowels and consonants shape the face. Turkish oral surgeons spend 47% of their time unsticking the tongue tip from the roof of the mouth. "Who put the gluten in this agglutinative language?", they cry. And did you know that Mick Jagger was raised Basque? His English accent is a fake: he stole it from a classmate at LSE, using 1960s recording technology and a hypnopaedic pillow. You don't get those lips from an Indo-European language, let me tell ya! Angela Lansbury is Swedish, and Dick van Dyke really is a cockney. As a young man Rex Harrison sang Wagner's Parsifal with Maria Callas in the Italian premiere at La Scala: the My Fair Lady thing is a front. Not many know that, but you can see all this in their faces.

Just by looking, I can tell whether your dog will develop cataracts (and whether your cat will develop doggeracts, should you care). Show me your friend's wardrobe, and I can predict the mean rainfall over the Andes for the next two weeks. Two glances inside your purse and I can diagnose your psychological problems to eight decimal places AND predict your fashion preferences. Just from your diet, I can tell you not only your height, weight and hat size but your views on a wide range of social issues and the three last digits of your social security number. If you were raised by wolves, I can tell. If you were kept locked in a cupboard by your neglectful parents, I will spot it, and be able to offer career advice, speech therapy and a range of inexpensive  after-care options. If your father married his half sister and you were raised by a vengeful dwarf in the forest, I will know, and be the first to offer you a place to lay your sword. And advise you on whether the local fire brigade is any use for your unknowingly genetically suspect purpose. But I'm not special, I think most people could do that, just by looking.

Plain speaker's guide to "any more" and "anymore:

First here's a rephrasing of what Huddleston and Pullum's epic Cambridge Grammar of English says about "any more" and similar adverbs. The main discussion is on p 710 and following, with other bits on 823 and 831

1. They are polarity sensitive: this means that there is a difference in acceptability between "She isn't here any more" and "She is here any more". For many speakers, the first is OK, the second not.


2. The difference between "any more" and "anymore" is a British/American spelling difference.


3. You can line up "anymore" with "still" and "no longer". They differ in how they work with negation.

My own impressions follow. Most speakers can say :

"She is still here" (i.e. she is here and has been for a while)
"She is still not here" (i.e. we are waiting, and she still hasn't arrived),
"She is not here anymore" ,"She is no longer here" (in both cases, she was here, but now isn't)

Many speakers find: "She is not still here","She is here anymore" awkward. For the first one the intended meaning is the same as the one expressed by "She is no longer here". Some speakers, including me, blow a fuse when confronted with the second one, and don't even understand what it means. For others, "anymore" can be used anywhere that "nowadays" is, with much the same meaning, so "She is here anymore" could be used (if you are, say, in a bar) when the person in question used to avoid the bar but now hangs out there on a regular basis. Similarly "Ice cream is cheap anymore" works for many people, but in my natural dialects, I  would have to either turn it round and say "Ice cream isn't expensive anymore" or punt and say "Ice cream is cheap nowadays".

Unfortunately, linguists have taken to confusing themselves and others by talking about "positive anymore".  If they had called it "nowadays anymore" there would have  been no trouble. These adverbs are neither positive nor negative, just a little fussy about what kind of sentences they like to be wrapped up in. The "nowadays" translation helped me, and is from John Lawler. As he says

Apparently, for users of positive "anymore", "nowadays" doesn't
cut it anymore. Anymore, they use "anymore" instead. Or perhaps
only in certain speech contexts; the definitive sociolinguistic
study remains to be done.

I guess I can forgive him for using the term "positive", because he puts it in quotes and gives an amusing example.

By the way, in Columbus, Ohio. ice cream really is cheap and good at Graeter's and  Jeni's . No ice creams were consumed in the creation of this post, but several area shops are on high alert.

Environmentally concerned spouse

"It felt so good to throw away that Martha Stewart dishwasher liquid"

Context: in our machine, Martha Stewart's green dishwasher liquid may be green, but isn't effective for washing.

Alice in Wonderland

Well, I liked it. I'm glad we didn't get discouraged by the reviews and go and see "Up in the air" instead. My favorite character, the creepy (though "good") White Queen.



Tim Burton was not at all faithful to the originals, but made a suitably weird world for Mia Waskikowska's Alice to inhabit. Some of the characters are like Lewis Carroll's. Steven Fry's Cheshire Cat was just one of many good efforts in small parts.



This  Alice is a modern teenager, who resists the conventional roles that get thrust on her. She's not a Victorian maiden, and she's a pretty reluctant Hollywood action hero. Her dress in the potion clip deserves to make somebody a few millions in sales, and all the costumes and visuals are up to Tim Burton's usual standard. I especially loved the army of playing cards.

In this movie the IMAX 3D was just OK, for me, not a big thrill like the 3D from Avatar.

Helena Bonham-Carter's Red Queen is BIGHEADED, IMPATIENT, AND UNREASONABLE. Apparently she based the performance on her imperious toddler daughter.



Somebody (not Lewis Carroll) made up a lovely bloodhound for Timothy Spall to play.



The bloodhound produces the best line in the movie, spoken by a deeply cynical talking horse. I won't spoil it …

Heard Keith Devlin on NPR ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12463231 ) saying that the original Alice was partly a sly mathematical satire. Let's just say that Tim Burton's Alice has less math in it than Mean Girls. Actually, Wasikowska's Alice is a bit like Lindsay Lohan's character in that film, and there's one incidental plot touch in Alice that Tina Fey would have been proud of.

Bottom line: fun movie, great visuals, plot maybe a little conventional, enjoyable performances by a swarm of British stars. No math, chess or puzzles, but that's OK. I'd be happy to see it again.

DSM V

DSM V is the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There are some major changes that are very well covered in press stories (bipolar? children, Asperger's). It's obvious that a label such as Asperger's can affect the expectations and actions of doctors, patients, family members and anyone else who gets involved. The new DSM gives us a chance to think about some of the following:

• What happens when a doctor applies a label to a patient. Do they get access to medication, support services, behavioural treatments? Are any of these forced on the patient?


• From the reports it seems to an open-and-shut case that some children diagnosed with bipolar disorder have been receiving heavy psychotropic drugs when they shouldn't have been. This is a case where the changes in the DSM are clearly motivated by a desire to reduce the amount of inappropriate treatment.


• What about the people who currently identify as Asperger's but do not necessarily fit the diagnostic criteria for the sub-class of Autism Spectrum Disorder that replaces it?  Such people might easily have Aspergian traits, but have learned, for example, to handle social interaction with a degree of smoothness and grace. Does their identity depend on fitting into a particular medical category, and if so, is that OK?


• It's a commonplace among social scientists that labeling a person has consequences. Many mental illnesses have an associated stigma. To a degree, Asperger's has an anti-stigma, because of the wonderful things that Aspergians have often done. So it turns out that removing the label is an act that has consequences.


• In the New York Times, Dr William Carpenter is quoted as saying "“Concerns about stigma and excessive treatment must be there. But keep in mind that these are individuals seeking help, who have distress, and the question is, What’s wrong with them?”. This is interesting, but actually the DSM is not exclusively for doctors and other health professionals, it is also a resource for people who don't necessarily think of themselves as having anything wrong with them. I was queasy about using the term patient earlier on. This is why.

If you care to comment, take a look at DSM5.org The process looks as if it is very top down. Here's a representative piece of verbiage.

Anyone can submit their suggestions and ideas to the members of the work groups through the DSM-5 Web site, by clicking the "Participate" button on the upper right hand side of this screen and registering. The proposed draft revisions to DSM-5 are posted on the Web site, and anyone can provide feedback to the work groups on these during periods of public comment.

Finally, members of the DSM-5 Task Force have given numerous interviews to members of the trade and consumer media to help explain the process of development to mental health professionals, consumers and family members, and members of the public, and will continue to do so through the development process.

[my emphasis]. Notwithstanding the public comment process, I don't see a strong intent to involve. anyone who is not a psychiatric professional. I think this needs to change, or be changed.