T.W. Emory's Blog

October 20, 2021

My brother occasionally refers to what is called “the mom voice.” It’s not an original term with him, of course, and when he uses it, he’s usually half-joking. But only half. My brother (to quote him) likes to characterize “the mom voice” as “the civilizing force for humankind,” and he contends that “without it echoing in the backs of our heads, few would remember to say, ‘thank you,’ ‘please,’ and fewer would remember to wipe their feet or even clean the lint filter or take out the garbage.”

Whether a person has given this much thought or not, most of us who have had moms, know this “voice”—i.e., that imposing tone and manner in which moms interrogate, deliver commands, rebukes, reproofs, and authoritative verdicts. It’s a “voice” developed and seasoned while rearing children, and which continues to be used on grown children, husbands, grandkids, relatives, as well as strangers, be these salespeople, service people, doctors, lawyers, or various Grand Poohbahs and Big Kahunas.

Curiously, “the mom voice” (whether coming from one’s own mom or not) seems to continue to evoke a response in people well into their adult life, and long after the woman using it has finished raising her family. My guess is that response to “the mom voice” is a kind of Pavlovian reflex and reaction, since most of us grew up with some version of this “voice” being regularly employed on us, so that we’re sort of conditioned to “sit up and take notice” when our ear happens to catch it, even if we might not always hear and heed it as adults—or at least, not in the same way that we once did. Thus, “the mom voice,” with its she-who-must-be-obeyed vibe, is one of those you-know-it-when-you-hear-it kind of things.

November 10, 2020

All oral and written communication boils down to making some kind of statement or asking a question. I was surprised when I first realized this. I suppose I’d assumed that the mechanics or functional details of communication (and not just its content), was a far more finely-drawn and nuanced business than it actually is. But no. You’re either making a statement, or you’re asking a question. Now statements vary, of course, as do questions; but still, it’s either one or the other. Period.

With all these statements and questions going on, it would suggest that conversation is a regular give-and-take, tit-for-tat, or back-and-forth affair, or perhaps even a combative and adversarial proposition, not unlike fencing. Sometimes. However, a question doesn’t always get a reply, and a statement doesn’t always give rise to a query. Some people answer questions with questions, while others respond to statements with statements. In fact, a study seems to indicate that most people get by just fine in life by mainly making statements, and asking very few questions.

Back in July of 2016, the Scientific American featured an article titled “The Neuroscience of Everybody’s Favorite Topic—Why do people spend so much time talking about themselves?” Evidence indicates on average that people spend 60 percent of conversations talking about themselves—and that this figure rises to 80 percent on social media platforms. Why so? Apparently, because it simply feels good. Experimental research reveals that such “self-disclosure” activates areas of the brain or neural regions associated with motivation and reward, and that the rewarding feeling comes even if no one is listening. But this isn’t solely a matter of being self-centered as one might be quick to assume, because apparently there can be positive benefits to oneself as well as to others through self-disclosure. Sharing private information about ourselves to others can increase interpersonal liking, help form new social bonds, promote teamwork, as well as lead to personal growth by getting helpful feedback.

So, if people spend 60% of their communication in self-disclosure, and this goes up to as high as 80% on social media platforms, then one take-away from this experimental research seems to be that most of us probably use far more statements than we do questions. It also seems to give a fresh shade of meaning to that classic line from the movie Beaches, which oddly enough, combines a statement with a question: ”But enough about me, let’s talk about you… what do you think of me?”

May 15, 2020

Unlike other creatures on this planet, we humans are planners—both big and small plans. We can speak one or more fully-developed languages. We can reason; we can think abstractly. It’s no surprise then, that in recent years university researchers in both the U.S. and Sweden have found that humans have a much better capacity than other animals to deal with sequential information. Various birds and mammals that were tested had great difficulty in distinguishing certain sequences of stimuli, owing to a what is regarded as a simpler kind of memory. In contrast, the capacity we humans have to recognize and remember sequential information is an absolute must for things like language, mathematics, or even for playing strategy board games like chess, Go, and Catan.

Many decades prior to the aforesaid research, the writer and humorist Mark Twain noted one specific difference between humans and lower animals by stating: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” And if you’ve spent any time around cats, you’ve likely observed that a cat lives for the present moment. A cat doesn’t pine away for its kitty days, nor does it ponder its coming old age. In contrast we humans have a sense of the past, the present, and the future, along with the joys and sorrows that accompany this ability. With this very human faculty squarely in mind, the ancient Chinese philosopher and writer, Lao Tzu, astutely observed: “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

So, the definite downsides of dwelling too much on the past or on the future have been known and discussed for ages. To help deal with such downsides, some modern psychologists encourage a practice known as “mindfulness.” To live ‘mindfully’ is to become more present; to be in touch with one’s experience in the here-and-now; to live in the present moment rather than dwell on the past or the future. It is said that practicing such mindfulness helps with anxiety, depression, and can also diminish neuroticism. With evident good reason then, the psychologist Abraham Maslow (known for “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”), said: “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”

So, it sounds to me that the main take-away from the foregoing is try to be a little bit more like your kitty-cat.

December 21, 2019

While “selective perception” can be a problem, it’s often very much of a necessity, because every day we’re all confronted with so much stimuli that we actually have to filter out what doesn’t suit our needs in order to carry out our lives sanely.

I recently read an astute expression of gratitude for selective perception and its concomitant “tunnel vision” that was ascribed to Stephen King, famous author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy novels. Before sharing King’s quote, and in order to fully appreciate his insight, it would help to know a bit about a writer that King alludes to in his remark, who is the namesake of a subgenre of fiction called “Lovecraftian horror.”

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer of weird and horror stories in the early part of the twentieth century. He spent most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island, and his stories were mainly set against a New England backdrop. Rather than simply focus on gore or other shocking elements, in his stories, Lovecraft featured the unexplainable dread of the unknown, he highlighted the fragility of sanity, and he challenged basic presumptions of reality. And so, to now share Stephen King’s comment: “Thank God for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.”

Pondering how and why it is that people often see things so differently, got me to recall an anecdote I heard many years ago about two different families moving to the same town on the very same day. There are probably variations of this story, but as I heard it, the first family arrives by car and pulls over to talk to an old timer on the outskirts of town. When the father asks the old timer what the people are like that live in the town, the old guy asks them what the people were like where they came from. All the family answer in agreement that their previous neighbors were friendly, law-abiding, and tended to mind their own business. The old timer says, “That’s the kind of folks that live here too.” This family proceeds into town and soon thereafter the second family arrives by car and also stops to talk to this same old timer. When the father asks the old guy what the people in town are like, he asks them what the people were like in the town they just left. In one accord the family answers that their former neighbors were unfriendly, scoff-laws, and real busybodies. The old timer tells them, “That’s the kind of folks that live here too.”

Perhaps an upbeat moral to the foregoing can be found in a new twist that’s been put to an old chestnut: A pessimist looks at a water glass and says “It’s half-empty.” An optimist comes across this same water glass and says “It’s half-full.” Finally, a realist also comes across this very same water glass, puts ice in it, tops it off with scotch, and says, “Cheers!”

June 30, 2019

When I was a young man, I knew an old man who used to say, ‘The more I see of some people, the more I like my dog.’ Years later I learned that this saying wasn’t original to him, but that different versions of it have been ascribed to well-known writers of the past. Another saying that this same old timer liked (and perhaps also borrowed), was: ‘Perfect individual freedom is divisible by the number of people present.’ In this man’s final years, he lived all alone, which probably caused him to put too fine and cynical of a point on the fact that as a group grows in numbers, so too, do rules, regulations, and restrictions. Still, his platitude about freedom does appear to be an across-the-board truism, just as the Ogden Nash poem about a dog being “man’s best friend” continues to have emotional resonance with many, given their day-to-day encounters with humans.

The foregoing was called to mind when I came across something Mark Twain said about free speech which he dictated to a stenographer for his memoirs a few years before his death in 1910. In a 1907 entry, Mark Twain asserted: “Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.” He contended that the fewer on hand to talk and listen, the freer the speech would be. In stipulating that the number of people should ideally be no more than four, he further stressed that “free speech was only possible” if the four persons “are all of one political and religious creed.” In setting forth this fairly tall order to achieve free speech, Mark Twain went on to remark that while it had been boasted ‘self-admiringly’ in both England and America that a man was free to “talk out his opinions,” there had never really been any such thing as free speech in these two countries, if “more than four persons are present” when it came to “certain tender subjects” that were “avoided and forbidden.” Perhaps this negative assessment was one of the reasons Mark Twain didn’t want his unexpurgated autobiography released until after he’d been dead for one hundred years.

Whether perfectly achieved or not, free speech has been highly valued in England and America. While regularly misattributed to Voltaire, it was actually English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall who wrote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This established “right to say” surely furnished Sir Winston Churchill with enough firsthand experience so that he declared: “Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.” Perhaps it was this particular human failing that moved Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde to take Evelyn Hall’s oft-cited phrase and give it this whimsical twist: “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”

February 25, 2019

Before recorded music, it was common for people to sing with others in public places, such as in a tavern or in a pub. Songs that were sung could be twenty verses or more, dealing with work, battles, buildings, ships, heroic deeds and such. Public sing-alongs gradually fell off with the advent of phonographs, the radio, and motion pictures. The 78 rpm phonograph records could hold only about three minutes of sound per side, so shorter songs became the norm. Unless a person sang in church or was a member of a choir or a glee club, more and more people began to know less about carrying a tune, or simply became inhibited about singing in public against an artificially high standard imposed by the recording industry. Radio and motion pictures also pretty much ended vaudeville as well as many communal plays and stage performances. Social interaction changed a bit more when television came into wide popular use, so that movie attendance suffered and radio began to take a backseat. While television has never completely replaced face-to-face interaction, still, such things as the convenience of picking and choosing shows on demand and having conflicts resolved relatively quickly and neatly have certainly added to the charms and seductions of this technology. And, with smartphones and other TV-connected devices beginning to displace more traditional TV viewing, some see new limits being placed on social contacts. Too, the pervasive use of computer and phone keyboards has caused many to bemoan the end of handwritten letters and to speak of “the death of handwriting.” As the media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman once said: “A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away.” So it has been, and so it continues to be.

Some cultural changes are very gradual and slow, while other changes are fairly quick and perhaps a bit nuanced, especially when it comes to social interaction, and particularly that caused by a dramatic development like the smartphone—considered by some to be the biggest breakthrough technology in the last 25 years. As an interesting example, the actor John O’Hurley voiced the opinion in a recent interview that the TV show Seinfeld “can’t work today because the cell phone would have killed it.” O’Hurley, who played J. Peterman on the popular 1990s sitcom, added that Seinfeld “… was about people engaging and thoughtfully engaging in minutia … There were no cell phones in Seinfeld.” Of course, more and more cell phones were actually in use by the late 1990s, but there was nothing then to compare to the ubiquitous smartphones of today. And so, O’Hurley’s point appears to be that had the principal characters of Seinfeld been glued to smartphones the way many people are today, it wouldn’t be the same show or have the same social resonance that it did when the show first aired. Again, as Neil Postman said, “technology giveth and technology taketh away.” And as he also observed: “Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose.”

October 25, 2018

In Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” His point being that as a general rule it’s not possible to keep a secret, for once shared it’s likely to get out. “Dead men tell no tales,” is another saying that makes a similar point—that tales stay secret only when those who know them are dead. A hundred years after Benjamin Franklin’s day, a humorist named Josh Billings wrote: “A secret ceases to be a secret if it is once confided—it is like a dollar bill, once broken it is never a dollar again.” So, secret-keeping is recognized as a dicey proposition, or at least it has the well-earned reputation of being so. What’s more, current research lends credence to this reputation.

According to a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that keeping secrets can be bad for one’s health—particularly when keeping a secret for a trusting confidant. Apparently, the more one fears betraying the trust of a friend, the more negative the effect on one’s mental state. The study found that the chief source for stress isn’t so much the effort to keep a friend’s secret while talking and socializing with others, but rather, it’s worrying about keeping the secret prior to one’s social interactions. And so, it’s all the pre-conversation fretting about keeping a secret that creates anxiety and leads to depression.

Curiously, the findings of the aforesaid study appear to support the argument that most conspiracy theories aren’t practicable because of how extremely difficult it would be for all the conspirators involved to keep the details of the conspiracy a secret. For that matter, if we put aside for a moment all the bad press about governmental leaks that seem to affirm this argument, there’s a striking irony worth noting about conspiracy theorists themselves. Those whose personal skepticism and distrust lead them to explain events or situations as being the result of covert actions carried out by the government, end up putting a great deal of confidence and trust in the secret-keeping abilities of the conspirators. But is such confidence and trust well-founded, given human nature?

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln spoke to the heart of the matter in his folksy manner when he said: “It’s not me who can’t keep a secret. It’s the people I tell that can’t.”

July 11, 2018

As a writer of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler is known for being more interested in the atmosphere he was creating than in the tale he was telling. In Chandler’s novels, the voice of his atmospheres-laced-with-a-story is Philip Marlowe, the streetwise detective-protagonist. Marlowe is a relaxed but frank narrator who weaves in wisecracks and life’s absurdities while emitting similes like people do carbon dioxide. Comparing his mysteries to those of other notable writers of his day, Raymond Chandler said:

“Very likely Agatha Christie and Rex Stout write better mysteries. But their words don’t get up and walk. Mine do.”

Chandler’s style is evident in his early short stories for pulp magazines, where some settings and characters appear briefly and only once, to serve mainly as a means of adding atmosphere. The longer narratives of his novels gave him even more freedom to focus on atmosphere and character, to emphasize scenes over structure, and to show that his detective mattered more to him than the plot.

Raymond Chandler was a master at packing a lot into even a small scene, evoking emotion through vivid dialogue and description that was filled with colorful similes and metaphors. One thing that apparently helped Chandler achieve his prose style was his habit of typing on small half-sheets of paper (holding around a dozen lines or 125-150 words), striving to create paragraphs or scenes that were freestanding units as to content and entertainment, which were then connected with other such units to form an enchanting whole.

For a typical example of one of Chandler’s small freestanding scenes or units, I’ll quote and comment on some brief excerpts from Chapter 26 of The High Window. Philip Marlowe has located the home address of a dental technician named H.R. Teager, whom he believes is somehow connected with the theft of a rare and valuable coin that belongs to his client. The Teagers live in an “upstairs flat” in a “yellow and white frame building” on “a wide dusty street.” Marlowe continues to ring their doorbell even though nobody answers because he knows that in “a neighborhood like that there is always an expert window-peeker.” As he expects, a neighboring door finally pulls open and “a small bright-eyed woman” looks out at him. “Her dark hair had been washed and waved and was an intricate mass of bobby pins.” The woman starts off talkative telling of the Teager’s sudden vacation departure, then becomes mistrustful to where Marlowe notes that the suspicion in her voice “was as thick as the ham in her radio.” Finally, she becomes preoccupied with the “heartrending dialogue of some love serial” coming from the radio behind her and hitting Marlowe “in the face like a wet dish-towel.” When he attempts to elicit more information from the distracted woman by pretending to be a hard-nosed bill collector, she refers to the “love serial” and says with a sad smile, “That’s Beula May … She won’t go to the dance with Doctor Myers. I was scared she wouldn’t.” Marlowe says, “Aw hell,” and drives home to Hollywood.

Agatha Christie and Rex Stout may have written better mysteries, but their words don’t get up and walk like Chandler’s do.

May 8, 2018

Public opinion and freedom of the press recently came up in a conversation I had with a good friend. After our discussion my curiosity got me hunting up noteworthy quotes on these issues ascribed to well-known people of the past. From these I selected two quotes on each subject that I felt particularly stood out from the rest.

Public opinion usually refers to the desires, wants, and thinking of the majority of people or the collective opinion of the general populace on a certain issue or problem. Alfred Austin, an English poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, stated: “Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.” His fellow countryman, the statesman, army officer, writer and one-time Prime Minister, Winston Churchill said: “There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.” Did this Poet Laureate and this former Prime Minister merely look upon society with a jaundiced eye? Or, is what people think that others think largely owing to what is published?

Late night hosts and some pundits on TV and radio will regularly do man-on-the-street interviews that reveal just how little the average American seems to know about such things as history, geography, and politics. These spontaneous chit-chats with the “common man” appear to dispute the flattering claims made by political candidates about most ordinary citizens being wise and well-informed. However, rather than demonstrating a lack of innate intelligence in the country at large, I tend to believe that these unscripted encounters show how the constraints of the workaday world and a multitude of nonstop distractions work against being knowledgeable. But whatever the reason, many people have no strong opinions or convictions and don’t care to voice them if they do and will simply “go along with” whatever view they believe the majority of their fellow citizens favor or support. It seems that Alfred Austin drew similar conclusions in his day and so said what he did as a result. Although many Hollywood film-makers insist that movies don’t shape society but merely reflect it, companies pay for product placement in films in order to influence consumers to buy. Related to this are the following questions: Does the media merely report what the majority favors and supports, or does it manipulate and shape what is to be favored and supported? Whether via print or electronic devices, do the various media outlets today simply tell us what most citizens want and think, or do these actually fabricate the desires and the ideas that are deemed acceptable? Were he alive today, I’ve got to imagine that Winston Churchill would weigh-in on these questions with a pithy remark or two.

Freedom of the press refers to the right to freely circulate published opinions without censorship by the government. H.L. Mencken was a satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. But doubtless it was his long stint as a newspaperman that led him to say: “Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.” And the writer, humorist, publisher and lecturer Mark Twain said the following about those who own such presses and their societal impact: “There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.” It seems Twain was more concerned about freedom from the press than freedom of the press. But were Mencken and Twain simply a couple of cynical curmudgeons? Or, does the average person who doesn’t own a press today, still need some protection from those who do?

While today’s digital age has certainly provided the average person the means to voice his beliefs and views, only the prominent, the influential, and the celebrated are apt to secure extremely large ‘followings’ in the various electronic venues available. Thus, it remains that the more traditional journalism organizations that employ print and electronic media are far from being displaced as primary sources of news and social commentary. So, although in the United States the first amendment guarantees “freedom of the press”, yet for all practical purposes, H.L. Mencken’s words still hold true, that only those who “own” some type of “press” are the ones who actually exercise such a freedom. And in this day and age with its up-to-the-minute online reporting and the compelling 24/7 news cycle brought about by cable and satellite television, one wonders what new concerns Mark Twain would have about freedom from the press were he alive today?

It might be considered unfair to take comments from the past that were made about society as it once was and apply these today. And yet, while the props have changed over time, human nature hasn’t, and it still appears arguable that published opinion disguised as public opinion is what the average person thinks that all his neighbors think. Moreover, most ordinary citizens don’t exercise “freedom of the press” simply because they don’t own one, nor are they completely protected from the influence of those who do.

January 14, 2018

Imposing order on chaos seems to be a deep-seated need in humans. So too, making the complex simple; or at least having the complicated made simple for us. Thus, the important role played by those writers and video-makers who turn technical information into something readily understandable and even interesting to the general public. Such “popularizers” definitely fill a niche in today’s society. In effect, they respond to the ‘cut to the chase’ and ‘cut the Gordian Knot’ demands of the average layperson.

Those two ‘cut’ expressions I just used, got me to thinking about how many common idioms contain the word ‘cut’ to convey the basic idea of quickly getting to the important or main part of something, or getting to what’s what in short order. For example, ‘cut the crap’ means get to the point, or tell it like it is. Then there’s ‘cut the red tape’ which has to do with eliminating or bypassing the complicated, as in rules and procedures. To ‘cut out the middleman’ refers to dealing directly or avoiding unnecessary stages. When you ‘cut corners’, you take the easiest, quickest, or cheapest way, though not necessarily the best way. And to ‘cut someone down to size’ means to deflate or reduce a person’s exaggerated sense of self-worth.

I find it interesting that these ‘cutting’ idioms keep company with a famous philosophic principle. “Occam’s razor” states that one should not make unnecessary assumptions and that the answer to a problem is often the simplest. Occam’s metaphorical “razor” cuts away, as it were, competing arguments and conclusions in order to leave the simplest argument and likely conclusion. And so, with that I’ll cut this short.