Cinema Violente

Scanning the cable movie listings recently I was struck by the collective violence in the short descriptions of that night's movies.

Documentaries and animations and comedies were there, Horton the elephant was even there, but they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of violent language: killer, murder, tragic, sadistic, relentless, vicious, violent, mutilated, brutal, amoral, gruesome, psychotic, hideous, and on and on.

The majority of the films were action-oriented and murderous. I'm as used to, and immune to, this stuff as anybody who watches movies, but that night it reached a critical mass. So I decided to extract a selection of descriptive phrases from those cable movie listings to serve as a contemplation on entertainment in our culture.

The extract that most caught my attention with its bizarrely mundane presentation of the plot was this: "His drinking starts to interfere with his assassination duties...." So, is this a fall-down-drunk-and-couldn't-hit-the-side-of-a-barn comedy? Or are assassins now presented as skilled high achievers -- as long as they manage their drinking?

I planned to list some of the other phrases I extracted from the movie listing to show how they are individually more or less commonplace, but how they collectively describe a film industry and a culture drunk on violence. (There's that drinking problem again.) But I think we've all seen enough of that stuff.

Instead, here's a video essay on how the mpaa film rating system is much more tolerant of violence than of sexual content in films.

Blind to the Rear: Backing-up Accidents

Ever looked out the back window of your vehicle and thought about all the things that you couldn't see back there? Blind spots vary, but, unless you're sitting on a motorcycle or golf cart, you obviously can't see everything that’s behind you. However, you may be surprised at how large blind spots can be, and truck and SUV blind spots can extend for 30 feet or more. And those blind spots are a big hazard for little people who play in driveways.

A recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study says that in 2007 about 14,000 people were injured and 221 people were killed in backing-up accidents. The study found that such accidents accounted for one-fifth of all fatalities in accidents that occur in driveways, parking lots, and on private roads, the category of "non-traffic accidents." Kids and Cars says that backing-up accidents cause almost half of non-traffic fatalities of children.

The NHTSA study is part of a process to establish rules for rear-view visibility in cars, SUVs, and vans. In advance of these guidelines, vehicle owners can install systems to provide a warning or a rearward view. Sensing systems, often marketed as parking helpers, can provide audible alerts to warn of objects behind a vehicle, and rear-facing cameras can show what is directly behind a car using its own display or the vehicle’s navigation screen.

The NHTSA only recently began to study non-traffic accidents, and says it plans to continue doing so. And I'm going to start looking behind my vehicle before I back out of the driveway.

The danger of blind zones

Dwarf Planet Arrives: Oxford Updates

A friend sent me a link to a cracked.com article about new words recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The article listed fifteen amusing words, from Bouncebackability (ability to recover from a setback) through Cyberslacking (you can probably guess that one) and Threequel (one more than a sequel) to Prebuttal (pre-emptive rebuttal). It was clear that these were "new words" and not words the the OED had somehow overlooked all these years.

The article piqued my interest in that twenty-volume repository of the English Language. How do they keep up with the dynamic growth of English? The OED currently contains about 60 million words, but new words keep popping out of the ether, so the busy OED editors are constantly discovering and including new words. And watching and thinking about words they may add in the future, like earworm: the tune that you can't get out of your head.

The OED editors periodically announce additions and updates to the existing content on their website (oed.com). Here are a few selected new entries that were published just this month:

amateur night, n. and adj.	dwarf planet, n.
bailout, n.	fudgsicle, n.
blue state, n. and adj.	grilled cheese, n.
Bushian, adj.	plasmoditrophoblast, n.
Clintonesque, adj.	searchability, n.
commitment-phobia, n.	swotty, n. and adj.
configurable, adj.	turducken, n.

Of course, you know what all of those words mean. Well, not plasmoditrophoblast, I suppose, unless you are perhaps a plasmoditrophoblastologist. And why did it take so long to get fudgsicle and grilled cheese? Swotty is obviously about studying too much, as you probably knew. But then there’s turducken down there at the bottom. That's a catchy little word, about which the OED has this to say:

"A coming together of three words and of three birds. As a blend of the nouns duck and chicken are affixed to the first part of the word turkey, so a boned chicken is used to stuff a boned duck, which is in turn used to stuff a partially boned turkey. The result, in both cases, might equally be regarded as inventive, elegant, and appetizing, or as an ungainly way of overdoing things somewhat.”

Say waiter, on second thought I think I’ll just have a salad.

Postscript. The Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLAT) also has some new words. The Oxford editors want the Latin repository to be as complete and up-to-date as the English dictionary. So here are the new Latin words recently included: Just kidding. Latin is a dead language. You knew that. Quisque comoedus est.

Fifteen Words You Won't Believe They Added

Cyber-Neologoliferation: The Oxford English Dictionary Meets Cyberspace

Superpowers: Take Your Pick

I've always liked Superman stories. More the comics than the movies. And the result, I guess, is that it often seems like it would be easier to work one's way through the daily to-do list with a few appropriate superpowers. Or at least one.

A good friend of mine facilitates leadership boot camps for teens. She knows how to engage her audience, and sometimes asks them to respond to the role call with their favorite superpower. And what do they say? Most often they say “flying” or “invisible,” she reports. ("Good thing they're not," she adds with a smile.)

What if you could have a superpower? Which would you pick? If you google "superpowers" you'll find many possibilities. Here's a short list of everyday superpowers to start with.

Flying	Shape shifting	Talk with animals
Future telling	Slow or stop time	Teleporting
Invisibility	Multi-lingual	Telekinesis
Invulnerability	Super intelligence	Time travel
Longevity	Super speed	Water breathing
Mind reading	Super strength	Weather control
Mind control	Super senses	X-ray vision

My choice, at least for today, is time travel. But I'm going to give it some more thought.