In January 2007 I published the GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a simple comparison of the options available to GNOME users for handling their day-to-day playback needs. It proved to be so popular that in December of 2008 I did a followup, excluding some abandoned players and adding some new ones. Though it hasn’t been quite two years yet, I thought it was time for another look at the state of audio players in the GNOME ecosystem.

This time around, I’ve got a heavy focus on new players, as there have been a number of new arrivals since my last shootout that show a lot of promise. This article will cover (in no particular order):

• Rhythmbox (0.12.8)
• Exaile (3.2.0)
• Banshee (1.7.4)
• Quod Libet (2.2.1)
• Guayadeque (0.2.6-svn1186)
• DeaDBeeF (0.4.1)
• aTunes (2.0.1)
• xnoise (0.1.10)
• GMusicBrowser (1.1.5-git)
• Aqualung (0.9~beta11)

All testing was done using an up-to-date Ubuntu Lucid x64 with all necessary repositories added, including some PPAs for the last versions of these players. Considered but not reviewed were Decibel Audio Player (hasn’t changed appreciably since last time), Gejengel (so unstable as to be unusable), and Bluemindo (still too simple to be useful).

Please note that this article necessarily incorporates some of my own biases. I am an avowed foobar2000 and you will notice that I tend to favor the utility-minded players over the media centers and iTunes clones. This article should still be useful, even if your own inclinations are different from mine.

“Left” and “right” are such common words that we don’t often realize just how significant they are; but like all simple words, they tend to be venerable, storied, and much more interesting than it may first appear.

I was inspired to do these words because of an e-mail forward joking about “left” and “right” politics by quoting Ecclesiastes:

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.

Left as we know it comes from Middle English—spelled various as left, lift, and luft—adapted from the Kentish adaptation of the Old English lyft, which meant “weak” or “foolish”. Circa 1200, when it began showing up in Middle English, it retained that same sense, but appropriated the sense being the opposite of right about a century later. It’s not a surprising event: the left side of the body has, back into antiquity, held connotations of evil, weakness, or general negativity.

The Latin word for left was sinister, and at some point gained the aforementioned connotation due to its speakers’ superstitions about the left side of things. Douglas Harper suggests this was due to Greek influence, since Romans generally regarded the left side as favorable. The connotation was strong enough that Old French adopted the word as sinistre, meaning “contrary” or “unfavorable” as well as its spatial definition. Today we no longer use sinister in its neutral form, but only as an adjective for evil. Left, meanwhile, though it began with largely the same connotations, only retains its connotations in certain phrases like “left-handed compliment”. The stigma of the left is sometimes retained in the language of other cultures in much the same way.

Most Romantic languages still use some form of the Latin sinister with the exception of Spanish, which does have the word siniestra in the English manner of something evil, but uses izquierda as the spatial left; this latter is one of a few Basque words which have found their way into mainstream Spanish.

By contrast, the Latin for right, dexter, gave us the adjective dexterous, which is full of positive connotations: in other words, right-handed persons were skilled, and the poor southpaws were considered weak at best and evil at worst. The modern “right” comes from the Old English riht, which meant “fitting”, “proper”, or “straight”. On the Latinate side, we can trace word back to the PIE root *dek[s]-, meaning “on the right hand”. Once again, there’s been a split between the spatial and connotative senses: in modern Spanish, for instance, diestro means right-handed or dexterous, but derecha means right in the sense of a la derecha, or “to the right”. In English we retain dexterous in the sense of skillful, and also “direct” from the same root.

These connotations explain many of the uses of these words—especially “right”—part from their spatial sense. But there are other connotations, too, such as the ones mentioned at the beginning of this article. The origin of political “Left” and “Right” is no secret, and gets bandied about during election cycles or by the annoying guy at parties. In fact, “Left” and “Right” are truncations of “Left-Wing” and “Right-Wing”, which refer to literal wings (as of a building) to the left and right of the president of Parliament during the French Revolution (circa 1789). The terms didn’t becoming commonplace in British or American political parlance for another century, however.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
by David Lipsky

Just under two years ago, David Foster Wallace killed himself, leaving behind a legacy that included—and perhaps unfairly focused on—his magnum opus, the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest. Though I happened to appreciate Wallace’s nonfiction (see Consider the Lobster) even more than his fiction, he was equally adept at both forms—at any form, to be honest.

When Wallace killed himself, the internet was full of retrospectives, but the one I recall as being the most beautiful was “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace”, which David Lipsky wrote for Rolling Stone. When I read, shortly after, that Lipsky would pen would of two upcoming biographies about Wallace, I was enthusiastic to say the least. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself isn’t a biography, if one wanted to be pedantic, but it’s as close to an unfiltered volume of DFW as we are likely to get.

The year was 1996. Wallace had just published one of his most famous essays, “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” for Harper’s, which made him something of a pseudo-celebrity in literary circles. But more important, Little, Brown had just published Infinite Jest, that colossal, postmodern book which consumed no fewer than three years of Wallace’s life. In what amounts to a publicity blitz in the high art world, Little, Brown sent Wallace on a book tour, and Rolling Stone sent report David Lipsky to spend a week traveling with Wallace and interviewing him, and amassing a stock of tape recordings and notes commensurate to that long a timespan.

Despite what was at that time a literary goldmine, Lipsky’s source material was never turned into a product. Rolling Stone‘s editor assigned Lipsky to something else and—much to the magazine’s detriment—these recordings and notes languished in a closet somewhere in the intervening years. The form they take now is an edited transcription, not an entirely new essay based on the source material. The basic form is this:

Time and Location [e.g. Bloomington-Normal Airport]

Lipsky asks something varying from surprisingly intelligent and literate to borderline tabloid, though these usually seem like after-the-face edits rather than faithful transcriptions of Lipsky’s questions.

Wallace responds, and these are—these are, you know, usually straight transcriptions, which veer from, like, that extremely folksy and vernacular way that Wallace could be when trying to be populist and grounded, to extended, beautiful monologues that go on for pages, which finally make you understand what Lipsky means when he says that DFW could extemporaneously “talk in prose”.

[Finally, Lipsky often interjects either narrative, such as describing what the two are eating, to longer musings about Wallace himself. I am unsure if these were inserted in the original notes or after, since some seem startlingly prescient.]

So it goes on for 350 pages. In much the manner you might expect, this narrative veers wildly from the utterly banal to the startlingly brilliant; to one with enough patience, it paints one of the clearest and most haunting portraits of DFW ever put to paper, but the form is filled with noise, and the short opening essays (one of them culled from “Lost Years and Last Days”) by Lipsky tease us with the extraordinary insight and tenderness with which one writing prodigy can more or less eulogize another. I can’t help, therefore, feeling as though, given enough care and time, Lipsky could have finally turned his source material into an amazing chronicle of the life, times, and psyche of David Foster Wallace. The cynical part of me thinks this book was rushed to press—preempting any such calculations—in the wake of Wallace’s death; the more generous part thinks perhaps the author and the editors thought the raw, unfiltered transcript (aided by Lipsky’s interpolations) to be the best tribute to a departed literary giant. In truth, I have yet to figure out which I believe.

What surprised me most about DFW in this interview is just how conflicted and insecure he seemed to be, especially dealing with a dose of newfound fame. Many of his conversations with Lipsky seem to center on how alien and troubling he finds the book tour, the sudden and orgasmic public attention, and the tension between those parts of us which relish low entertainment, vices, and all the visceral pleasures life has to offer (think of Chuck Klosterman’s MTV apologetics), and those parts of us which crave more, which shirk fame for fame’s sake, which—believe it or not—actually crave complicated pomo literature because it asks so much of us intellectually. Forget Lipsky: David Foster Wallace, given sufficient time and prompting, will have an entire dialectical conversation with himself; one gets the feeling it is a permanent fixture in his head, and the engine which drove all of his tremendous creative output. In the meantime, his extemporaneous prose manages to be more brilliant than ten thousand Dan Browns or Stephenie Meyers working in concert, leaving such gems as that which titled the book: “[...] although of course you end up becoming yourself” no matter whom you try to become.

Having read Lipsky’s earlier piece on Wallace, and knowing what he is capable of, I must admit to some measure of disappointment that Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself didn’t carry more of his own input; at the same time, it is impossible not to appreciate this transcription for the unique treasure it is.

In Search of Time: The Science of a Curious Dimension
by Dan Falk

I’ve always had an affinity for science fiction about time travel; to the limited degree that I comprehend it, I like hard science too. Something about the fundamental and inscrutable nature of time intrigues me, and so picking up Dan Falk’s In Search of Time wasn’t a difficult decision. It didn’t turn out to be the book I was expecting, but it was enjoyable enough regardless.

When a book proposes to look at the concept of time, one’s immediate impression is that it will be heavy on physics—probably it will cite heavily from Stephen Hawking—and talk about closed timelike curves and many dimensions. Falk does, eventually, but In Search of Time is more about anthropology than it is about physics. After all, in order to write a book about time travel in the way that Toomey did, we first have to develop a branch of science which can deal with the mathematical vagaries of time; in order to do that, we have to have a language to describe time, which itself requires that we have cultural or biological awareness of time!

We tend to take this for granted—our biology seems innately aware of time—but not all cultures have the same notion. Consider Latin American time: our southern neighbors’ curious cultural lackadaisical approach to punctuality that makes Type A westerners uncomfortable is not a metaphysical difference, but the mean attached to time in these countries is clearly different. Even in my own Anglo-Saxon history, minutes weren’t even known concepts until timepieces had evolved sufficiently enough to make them worthwhile.

The development of calendaring system—from ancient lunar cycles to our modern UTC time—was one of the most interesting parts of the book, as Falk managed to blend the scientific with the anthropological. Our base-60 system of time was a curious inheritance from the Babylonians; you probably knew about Leap Years, but did you know about leap seconds? Regardless of how one chooses to measure the passage of time (lunar cycles, solar orbit, or 9,192,631,770 rotations of a cesium atom), it defies a perfect system of measurement—hence our leap seconds and other fudging.

Even within recent memory, agreeing on time has been tricky. Our modern notion of time zones didn’t come around until the end of the 19th century, and even then only due to the Herculean effort involved in coordinating transcontinental railroads. Differences of even ten minutes between towns could give rise to catastrophic accidents. And if the concept of time zones was complicated, how would we ever figure out time travel—a concept fictionalized by H.G. Wells at about that same time?

At this point, Falk finally comes around to the difficult physics that we expected from the beginning: Einstein’s theories, quantum mechanics, closed timelike curves, paradoxes, and that sort of thought experiments that are as fun as they are painful. In talking with a number physicists (whose names, aside from Lee Smolin, I don’t know), Falk playfully asks his readers to consider if Julius Caesar is still alive. Is there a version of me for each moment that passes, existing simultaneously? Or is there a single me that passes through a series of empty frames in a linear fashion, in the way we usually experience time? Some theorists believe—not that there’s really any evidence to support the notion—that time is an illusion; based on our scientific notion that time is a dimension just like the three dimensions of space (hence the combined “spacetime” which arose from Einstein), this seems a little tenuous, but neither am I smart enough to refute or confirm any kind of statements about the nature of time.

In the end, In Search of Time provides no answers. Like much of this review, it trafficks in hypothetical questions and offers several competing half-answers from physicists from different camps (string theorists, loop quantum gravity theorists like Smolin, &c.) which all builds to the entertaining non-conclusion that the study of time is still more or less a crapshoot.

Codicil is known mostly as a legal term (for which see the official definition), but in practice is has come to refer figuratively to any addition or addendum, often with a quasi-scholarly connotation. Its use in English dates from the 15th century, when it came into the language from the French codicille and Latin codicillus , which referred to a short writing or small tablet (used for writing). It’s no surprise that the word’s origin is French/Latinate, since most of our legal terms come from that very source. Because French and Latin was, for a long time, the preferred language of the scholars and the judicial system after the Norman Conquest, our common words from that vocabulary Latinate almost to a one.

Codicil is a diminutive form of codex, which was Latin for both “tree trunk” and “book”, and which also gave rise to the more familiar code, initially in the form of a code of law or code of ethics, but which now refers to everything from the cheat code in Contra to the source code that I write at work.

Similar but distinct from a codicil is a corollary, which is not so much an addendum as it is a peripheral consequence of something. The official definition per Wiktionary is “Something which occurs a fortiori, as a result of another effort without significant additional effort.” From the Latin corōllārium, it originally referred to a gratuity, and was in fact ultimately from another diminutive form, this time of the Latin corona , or “crown”, and which is memorialized both in the terrible Mexican beer and the glowing rim of hot matter that surrounds stars. On the day this entry was written, in fact, the Earth was hit with a “coronal mass ejection”.

Though spelled similarly and with somewhat similar meanings, “ancillary” (“subordinate” or “auxiliary”) is not connected to corollary. It’s from the Latin ancillāris, from a word meaning “maid.” Ultimately, it derives from the well-known Proto-Indo-European root *kwol-o-, which means “move round, turn about, be much about”, and which is, appropriately, the origin of our word “cycle”.

When coming up with synonyms and related words for this week, it was difficult not to notice the surfeit of app- and add- roots. Consider appendix, which is English as well as Latin, and comes from appendō in the latter: ad (“on” or “against”) and pendō (“I hang”). Append is essentially the same word, except that it uses the suffix -ix, which is a common Latin suffix used in feminine agent nouns. It can also be found in words like cicatrix (“scar”, of unknown origin) and dominatrix, though generally speaking the feminine -ix suffix has been replaced with -[tr]ess suffix in English, and so words like actrix became “actress” (perhaps mediated by the French actrice).

But what of -add? Our word “add” (as in adding 2 + 2) is from the Latin addere, which means “to add”. Our addendum is a pure absorption of a Latin declension of that word, maintains roughly the same meaning: something that has or will be added [to something else].

As we’ve seen before in cases where it seemed to modern ears though words would be related, a combination of shared common structure, coincidence, and occasionally common ancestors lead to the pool of similar-ish words in today’s Word.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

Hoarding recently got a representative–for better or worse–in pop culture with the arrival of TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive; I’ll leave it to your own judgment if this is a good or bad thing, or just how “pop culture” TLC is, but in any case, it goes to show the tabloid power of psychological problems. Everyone gapes and gawks at home filled to the ceilings with piles of accumulated junk and wonders how these squirrely people can live their lives this way.

Stuff is an attempt by a noted academic and active therapist in the field (Randy Frost, along with a coauthor who is rarely mentioned by name) to summarize the state of scientific knowledge about hoarding, where it comes from, why it doesn’t easily conform to stereotypes, and how at least some of these people can be successfully treated.

The book begins with the tale of the Langley and Homer Collyer, two idle rich brothers who, it turns out, were severe hoarders; at least Langley was, whereas Homer was a blind invalid who either endorsed or at least acquiesced to Homer’s oddities. When Homer died in 1947 and details about the state of the Collyer’s brownstone in Harlem leaked to the press, the popular mind got its first real, publicized taste of a peculiar disorder that would become more common—or rather, likely, more visible—in the years to come, and culminating so far in the sort of insipid, voyeuristic dreck that TLC is so fond of airing.

The first modern-day hoarder we read about it is Irene, a severe hoarder whose husband has recently left her for obvious reasons, and who stands to lose her children in the upcoming divorce (this last event being common with hoarders). To Randy and Gail, she represents a perfect prototype from which to cover their various illustrative stories about hoarders: though she fits some hoarder characteristics to a T, she flouts other common stereotypes. She is amiable, outgoing, and sociable; she is intelligent and well-educated. She also displays characteristics of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, though Frost (who, beside being an expert on hoarding, is also active in the OCD field) notes that thinking about hoarding as a sister disease to OCD is misleading, despite the correlation—Irene maintains careful notions of “clean” and “dirty” items, which can be contaminated merely by someone bumping into them and sterilized with a moist towelette.

At its most fundamental, hoarding is about the perceived value we attach to objects; from the expensive red pumps we buy because they make our ass look good, to the ratty heirlooms we keep because they were our nanna’s, or the books or magazines we collect because one day we’ll get around to reading them, we swear, humans attach arbitrary notions to worth to stuff. For most, value works along a sliding scale, and we can prioritize what we buy and what we keep around based upon common sense and our monetary or spatial limitations. We are also capable of feeling more or less attached to things depending on their nature. To most hoarders, everything is important, or has the potential to be important. In prototypical Irene’s case, she has newspapers, magazines, and miscellaneous scraps of information all laying around because they might contain things that might be useful or important someday; alternatively, a seemingly useless object might have sentimental value even if it represents something unremarkable. To many hoarders, throwing away anything is like throwing away part of themselves.

Though hoarding is not necessarily an easy mold to fit, Frost’s exploration of its causes are unsurprising: like many mental health issues, there seems to be a connection between hoarding and psychological trauma. Sudden and tragic loss, or violation may cause a person to feel steerless and out of control; a fetishization of objects is a form of coping with that psychological trauma: it “affords many of its sufferers the illusion of control and replaces fear with a feeling of safety” (93). The recoil of the mind against trauma blurs the distinctions between normal and excessive, appropriate and inappropriate, healthy and harmful; the sense of proportion that imbues every decision we make is warped. In many cases the perceived difficulty of relinquishing an item is worse than the actual; or, the actual trauma is short-lived. So it seemed to be with many of the hoarders that Frost and his colleagues were able to help, though admittedly there were also a great many who made little progress or refused help entirely; as Frost insists, a hoarder has to want to recognize the illness (obliviousness is relatively rare) in order to get better, and of course it’s a long and difficult process.

Each chapter tells a different story or set of stories in the grand tradition of Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, illustrating some new aspect of the disorder: animal hoarders, garbage-hoarders, city-mandated cleanouts, hoarder relationships, and genetic influence. The good news is that recent work in the field (including Frost’s) has made the treatment of hoarders more successful, as more psychiatrists and public health official understand the disorder as something specific and distinct, and more effective treatment plans have been developed.

The Magicians
by Lev Grossman

In 2009, you cannot write a book about young magicians without knowing that your book will be held up against the Harry Potter series and probably discarded. Since J.K. Rowling dropped her cultural bomb on us all those years ago, we’ve already seen a glut of second-rate wizardry series, just as Stephenie Meyer’s already-execrable Twilight Series launched a tidal wave of slapdash “vampire” novels trying to catch even a sliver of the current mania. Ironically enough, when Grossman did a piece on Meyer for Time, he gushed and flattered and compared her to Rowling in a way that will be important later.

Lev Grossman is not a stupid man; his admiration for Meyer notwithstanding (and I hold the hope that it’s more recognition of her pop lit. cachet), his book reviews for Time are usually pretty good, and he seems like an all-around sensible guy. It seems unlikely, then, that he would dash out yet another book about teenage wizards and expect, without any sense of irony, for it to be lauded and praised. No, what you’ll find is that The Magicians is one part pastiche, one part bildungsroman, two parts satire, and one part miserable, myopic teenage pop lit.

If you’re going to write about teenage wizards and magic in 2009, then, you have few options:

1. Accept that you’re writing imitative schlock, like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson or Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap.
2. Include just enough self-abuse and satire as to elude such charges; Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles are a good example of this, though of course they predate all the recent wizardry zeitgeist by a considerable margin. Grossman knows about Harry Potter and Narnia; his readers know about them; and even his characters know about them and reference them.
3. Don’t really write about wizards at all. Believe it or not, this is the tack that Grossman chose.

Michael Agger, writing for the New York Times Book Review, said that the book could “crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults”; Grossman himself said you could “glibly but not inaccurately describe as Harry Potter meets The Corrections for shots of synthohol in Ten Forward.” It’s a specious comparison, even if done crudely or glibly, in the sense that the Harry Potter series is entirely about magic and wizardry, the characters of which happen to be engaging and dynamic. In Grossman’s novel, all of the magical aspects are purposely thin and facile, serving only as a shell for Grossman’s real interest, which is character drama and existential angst.

The Magicians begins with Quentin Coldwater, a smart but troubled 17-year old with an affinity for magic tricks, bumbling his way into Brakebills, an invisible school for young magicians. There are no 11-year-olds here; this is a college, with equivalent ages, and the entrance exam is difficult. Quentin, whose abilities up to this point included only faro shuffles and disappearing nickel tricks, manages a sudden burst of impressive magic that secures him one of twenty spots in the freshman class. Were this a typical wizarding novel, one might be inclined to believe that Quentin is secretly a master magicians, whose world-changing potential is just waiting to be unlocked, but this is not the case. In fact, Quentin is a screwup, at best a capable magician; his ultimate importance in the scheme of things ranks even lower than the main character, Thornmallow, of Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall (1991).

Quentin, like most of the other magicians in this secret world, were fans of the early 20th-century Fillory series, five books written by a reclusive Anglophile named Christopher Plover—an obvious nod to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Quentin, a high-performing student, suffers from typical teenage angst: he doesn’t like his perfectly pleasant parents, his crush won’t reciprocate his affection, and he doesn’t quite know what he wants to do with his life; he feels as though he is waiting for some shoe to drop, for some new and different phase of his life to begin. Brakebills offers that to him, at least at first.

Rowling spent a lot of time world-building; the notion was taken to the extreme in Susanna Clarke’s Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of the best novels of magic I’ve ever encountered. Grossman avoids most explanation of how magic works, how the magical world is different from the regular world, or how magicians have influenced history. In fact, all five of Quentin’s years at Brakebills are condensed into a sort of summary: we get a sense that he is competent enough at doing magic, but mostly it’s a lot of rote exercise. Much more time is spent on Quentin’s friendship and eventual romance with Alice, a mousy girl but excellent Magician. Though an improvement over his life in Brooklyn, Brakebills ends up being another kind of monotony for Quentin: the magical world isn’t radically different from his old world. The relationships are the same, and his own place in societal structure is the same. In fact, there doesn’t really seem to be a “wizarding world” in the same sense as Rowling’s universe; one is told that the magical world controls some large corporations, but mostly magicians either go undercover in normal life, or spend their time on ridiculous pursuits like Alice’s parents.

The only incident of magical note is a point when Quentin’s class is visited from a mysterious creature in a grey suit known as The Beast, a magical entity of tremendous power who eats one of the Brakebills students alive and then disappears. This scene in particular made me think of Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall and hold out the hope that Quentin would end up being an important character, but by this point I had resigned myself to the notion that The Magicians isn’t about magic at all; it has magic in it, but it’s really just about what it’s like to go from a child to an adult. Substitute the magical college of Brakebills for the the insular college world of any big university: the sudden freedom from parents, the uncertainty about one’s future, the sexual and substantial experimentation, and then suddenly graduation and the weightless sensation of being responsible for your own destiny, alone out in the world. Whether Brakebills and Fillory are some extended metaphor or merely easy narrative structure, they are clearly only incidental to the story—a not and a wink from Grossman indicating his private joke that he understands how alternately sick and excited we are for these prefab magic stories, and wouldn’t it be interesting to twist them to a surprising purpose?

Meyer and Rowling do share two important traits. Both writers embed their fantasy in the modern world–Meyer’s vampires are as deracinated and contemporary as Rowling’s wizards. And people do not want to just read Meyer’s books; they want to climb inside them and live there. James Patterson may sell more books, but not a lot of people dress up like Alex Cross. There’s no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.

Grossman’s world has no such integrity, I assume by design. In fact, the world Grossman creates is so bleak and monotonous and terrible that one seems all the more sad for reading it: the existential crisis that plagues Quentin and his companions is dreadful and depressing enough, never mind the misadventures and misfortunes they find in the magical world. It’s as though he wants to tell the new generation of workforce-bound students that he understands their plight, and that it will never get better. In the end, that’s what The Magicians seems to be: little more than the worst commencement speech ever given.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink

My interest in Drive was piqued by a presentation that Pink gave during a TED talk. The idea itself is interesting, but it also dovetails nicely with my general focus of study during my MBA coursework , namely intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. That might sound a little like jargon; it gets easier.

To understand where Pink is coming from, you first have to understand his simple (but, I think, generally accurate) summary of human cultural development. In the earliest stages of society, Man was motivated by a desire (1) to not get killed and (2) to have sex and reproduce; these rather Darwinian impetuses comprises what pink refers to as “Motivation 1.0″ beginning an extended software metaphor that is admittedly rather contrived and sickly. By the time we had figured out industry, and Frederick Taylor had begun to realize that managing employees could be approached as a science, our motivational scheme had advanced to “Motivation 2.0″: specifically, you reward behavior you want more of (carrot) and punish behavior you want less of (stick).

This scheme has survived ever since, and is the predominant way that businesses are run. Standard practice says that if you offer a higher salary, you get higher-caliber employees (think CEOs); similarly, you can get employees to work harder, faster, and better by offering them bonuses and raises. Everyone more or less assumes this to be true, but the premise of both Pink’s TED video and this book is that the theories behind “Motivation 2.0″ only work for a narrow band of work.

It turns out that for at least 30 or 40 years, behavioral scientists and IO psychologists have known that when it comes to creative work, or work that involves problem-solving, monetary inducements actually decrease performance. Pink illustrates this on a small scale with Sam Glucksberg’s use of the Candle Problem, but it’s more or less been validated by experiments from every major school of economics and business in the world. His prominent real-world examples include a comparison of the volunteer-driven Wikipedia (the world’s largest encyclopedia) and the Microsoft-financed Encarta (which folded in 2008), as well as the open source movement worldwide.

Throughout, Pink says he’s talking about the difference between “what Science knows and what Business does”; why, he wants to know, do so many businesses still persist in the “carrot and stick” model of management when there’s all this data that undermines it? We as readers are likely to agree; by the end we are asking ourselves, with just a hint of froth, why such a thing should be. As with so many books which proclaim to shake the very foundations of something, they rarely offer a careful, reasoned account of conflicted opinions. The obvious answer is that there are certain businesses that can make these principles work—Pink notes Google and Atlassian specifically—but there are still a lot of them that can’t. Whenever we talk about globalization and the flight of jobs from the U.S., we invariably say that industrial jobs and low-level white collar work (call centers, for instance) are moving to developing countries like India, but they’re being replaced by knowledge-based and creative jobs that require more that rote work. I agree this is true, but we’re still a long, long way from that being the norm: not every institution has the leisure of employing only creative, honest people who like their jobs. Pink assessment of Motivation 3.0 is correct, but not yet widespread.

To his credit, I think Pink understands that, despite his Paul Revere act—”Intrinsic motivation is coming! Intrinsic motivation is coming!” The transition from the old Frederick Taylor method of incentive and management is happening, but it’s happening slowly, and we’ll never entirely get away from a business world where money and pseudo-monetary perks are still heavily used to incent good performance and behavior. As if to help, the last third of Pink’s book is a “Motivation 3.0 Toolkit”, which seemed to me a lot like filler: when simplifying intrinsic motivators to the level of popular science, you can only talk for so long before you begin to repeat yourself (Pink is guilty of this). So how do you round out your book to an even 256 pages? Why, recommend a lot of books that bolster your argument, and reiterate all of your points in blurb form, as though a Powerpoint presentation for managers.

Pink has genuinely interesting things to say, but I can’t help but feel like his TED talk was much more compelling in its brevity and delivery; by contrast, Drive felt a little turgid.

Hitch-22
by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t likely appreciate The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A man who for many years called himself a socialist and or a Trotskyist, Hitchens now finds himself largely decamped from the Left, operating in some vague political DMZ, his politics both hawkish and liberal.

Whether correct or not (most people find at least something about which to disagree with “Hitch”), it would be unfair at least to say that the man is uninteresting, not simply for his intriguing mix of ideas, but for the rather storied life he’s led—even moreso than I was aware. In latter days, he’s become something of a darling of the pro-liberation crowd with respect to Iraq; he’s a frequent contributor to Fox News, though I imagine he finds most of their bobble-head commentators to be irritating and boorish; simultaneously, he’s come to be a leading voice in anti-theist rhetoric (certainly, his lecture schedule has borne that out). But, in fact, I think Hitchens as political polemicist unfairly impinges upon Hitchens as a literary critic and even, oddly enough, Hitchens as a travel writer.

Given how generally well-spoken and well-read Hitchens is, it should come as no surprise that he was something of a nerdy boy, excelling at the private English boarding school to which his parents sent him. It will be a surprise to those who only know the pro-war latter-day Hitchens to know that he spent most of his life being a card-carrying socialist, getting arrested at rallies, demonstrating against dictators, and generally doing the things that insufferable and indispensable young activists do. It was also a trifle surprising to learn that Hitchens is or was bisexual—or at least took part in homosexual sex up through his college years. Ever the understated Brit when it comes to himself, he never comes out and says this, but it’s clear enough that it’s so. Of the many other stridently homosexual writers that Hitchens knows, he is perhaps the most vocal of Gore Vidal (“massive old darling” that he is).

Rather than stick to a strictly chronological progression, Hitchens divides his chapters by subject, ordered more or less by their order of occurrence. His childhood passes quickly, and I am not terribly surprised that he glosses over this. One of the earliest critical junctions comes at that point where his mother leaves with another man and the two commit suicide in Athens. Hitchens, then in college, describes having to see the crime scene with a sort of distant horror that comes off as heartbreaking. I’ve never known the man to be overly sentimental, and indeed he describes the experience with a philosophical disgust rather than a particularly personal one. This is a memoir, after all, and not a biography: Hitchens controls the content and tone, and thus one shouldn’t expect any shocking revelations from the Hitchens you know and love (hate?) from his appearances on television and previous books. In fact, if you follow his lecture/debate circuit to the extent that Youtube et al. will allow, you’ll find that he uses some of his same phrases, expressions, and stories from the lecture in his book (or vice versa). Though I’ve no doubt that he’s very good at extemporizing (in fact, I’ve seen him do on Uncommon Knowledge), this book as with his speeches is a sort of rehearsed intelligence; or, more likely, he extemporizes from a pool of practiced points, since he lectures so frequently upon the same subject.

One chapter is devoted to his closest friend, Martin Amis; another to Salman Rushdie, which is of course a springboard to Hitchens to express his views on religion, tyrants, and religious tyrants. In fairness to Hitch, he abstains from becoming overly polemical with respect to religion, since his last book was devoted entirely to the subject. He does spend a fair amount of time explaining his views on the various conflicts in the Middle East, which have distanced him from many of his former associates (and employers), but this is largely in service of an overarching point that Hitchens attempts to make with Hitch-22, namely the sort of “double life” that he’s led, both in the sense of believing in two (apparently) contradictory ideas and of having so often compromise his ideals in order to get a story. But don’t mistake me: this is no wistful or maudlin look back, nor an expurgation of youthful indiscretions; though the Hitchens writing his memoirs may be different than the Hitchens planting coffee plants in Cuba after Castro’s revolution, there’s an internal consistency that is at least somewhat gratifying. The same moral impetus made Hitchens (initially) celebrate Castro as made him encourage the invasion (er, “liberation”) of Iraq; defend Paul Wolfowitz and excoriate Henry Kissinger; defame Mother Theresa and laud Thomas Jefferson. The book reminded me more of Love, Poverty, and War than it did his most recent work; stiff-lipped and intellectual, it is occasionally turgid or pedantic, but mostly it’s a fascinating (albeit circumscribed) window into the mind of arguably one of the brightest public commentators of our generation.

The modern English Color is now the same as the Latin from which it came, though the intervening steps are not: the Latin led to the Old French color, which led to the Anglo-Norman colur, which visited Middle English as colour. The Old Latin root is colos, which referred not to color in general but any sort of covering, which contributed to the earliest sense of the world, which referred to the color of the skin or complexion in particular. The Old Latin comes from the PIE *kel-, meaning to cover or conceal. Our modern definition is from the 14th century, from Middle English, at which point it had replaced the word previously employed, blee.

Blee was a perfectly lovely word, from the Old English blēo, and I’m sorry it left the language. It came from the Proto-Germanic *blījan (“light” or “happy”), itself from PIE *bhlē̆i-, which also meant “light” in color or complexion. Along an evolutionary fork, it gave us the Old English blīþe, from whence “blithe” (as in “blithely”), which meant a light of mood (“glad”) rather than of color.

Of course, as anyone who’s ever looked at a box of crayons can attest, there is a wide variety of color words in use, despite the relatively circumscribed nature of our word for the phenomenon in general.

    blue

Our modern “blue” carried forward from the Middle English blue, though it changed from blewe or blwe. The word we know is a deriviation from the Middle French bleu (think “chicken cordon bleu“, or literally “blue-ribbon chicken”). The Old French was blo, which had both the sense of “pale” and “light-colored” as well as referring specifically to the hue blue, and came from the Frankish blao and ultimately from the Proto-Germanic blæwaz, which is where most of the Germanic languages derive their words for it: Icelandic blár; Dutch blauw, German blau.

Interestingly, the etymology for “blue” is tied up with that of “yellow”. The Middle High German word for the latter was bla, for instance. This likely because the PIE root which, coincidentally, gave us blee (*bhlē̆i-) also referred to blue or yellow hues.

A short note on “indigo”: Those who remember their mnemonic for the colors of the spectrum may also note that both blue and “indigo” make an appearance. Indigo is officially a spectral color (as initially defined by Isaac Newton), but the human eye is generally unable to distinguish it from blue and violet, its neighboring colors. The word comes from the Greek indikon (ἰνδικόν), or “Indian dye”, referring specifically to the blue dye coming out of India at that time; it was first used to refer to a color in 1289. The Greek word for India came from the Old Persian hinduš (هند) and ultimately from the Sanskrit for river: síndhu

    yellow

The “yellow” we know and loves comes from a different path, however. The Middle English yelwe comes from the Old English geolwe, which itself is from the Proto-Germanic gelwaz, from whence also the modern German gelb and Swedish gul. The earliest known reference we have to the word is in Beowulf (XXXVI), which talks about a geolwe linde (yellow linden [tree]).

The Latin for yellow or blond is flāvus, which came from that same PIE root, *bʰlē̆i. But the Germanic branch comes from a different root, ĝʰel, which means “to shine”, and is the root not only for “yellow” but also “green” in some languages.

Many historical languages used their word for yellow to refer to both the hue and to the blond color of hair or complexion. Our modern word “blond[e]“, alas, has no etymological connection; it’s ultimately from the Frankish blund, which refers to a mix of yellow and brown specifically, but blended or mixed colors generally—and, you guessed it, “blond” is related to “blend” at the PIE level.

    red

Red is one of those simple, timeless words that seems like a cognate in just about every language. It’s from the PIE *h₁roudhós, which gave rise to everything from the Sanskrit rudhirá (रुधिर) to the Greek erythrós (ἐρυθρός) to the Latin rūfus to the German rot. Our modern “red” comes by way of the Proto-Germanic rauđaz and the Old English rēad. It’s also the source of “ruby” (from the Latin rubeo, or “I am red”) and ruddy (from the Old English rudiġ, from the same PIE root).

Red is unique because, though one might think that our basic colors would have simple and definite roots, it is the only color for which there is a single, definitive root in Proto-Indo-European.

    green

One might expect the etymological origins of a word to relate to the concepts our ancient forebears word have described with them. Blue for the ocean, perhaps, or red for blood (in the case of the Sanskrit rudhirá, this is actually the case, but it didn’t appear to have that meaning in PIE). So far this isn’t so (although “rust” is ultimately derived from the PIE red).

That changes with green, which has (I think) the neatest etymology of all the colors. We get it from the Old English grēne, via the Proto-Germanic *ʒrōniaz, and ultimately from the PIE root *gʰrōni-, which means “to grow”; the corollary to this is that when most plants are healthy and grow, they also turn or stay “green” as well. In this case, it appears likely that the word which described a phenomenon of healthy plants also came to describe their color, as well. The word had split off by the time of Old English, so that “grow” is growan.

    orange

Orange, like purple, has no other word in the English language that rhymes with it. It is also semi-famous for being both a color and a fruit; the fruit existed before the color. When the word first arrived in a form which would look familiar to modern speakers, it was orenge, from Old French by virtue of Anglo-Norman, which likely borrowed it from some construct of Italian. What we know for certain is that the ultimate origin is Sanskrit (नारङ्ग, or nāraṅgaḥ) by way of one or more Dravidian languages such as Tamil. The Spanish naranja borrows directly from this lineage.

Because the geographic distribution of oranges excluded much of the Western, English-speaking world for a long time, orange the color was referred to as geoluhread—which, if you’ve been paying attention to the Old English words so far, is a compound noun meaning “yellow-read”, which is not only straightforward but accurate as well.

    purple/violet

Our modern “purple” comes with only minor orthographic changes from the Old English purpul (first recorded in 10th century Northumbrian text), which got it from the Latin purpura, which got it from the Greek porphyra (πορφύρα), which was used to refer specifically to a color of snail-derived dye (called “Tyrian purple”) used extensively by the Phoenicians. It was expensive, and used largely by royalty, which is why deep purple is still associated today with royalty. The Hebrews called it argaman (ארגמן), though their word means “crimson” and not purple.

Though we most commonly use “purple” to refer to the color, the correct spectral term is “violet”; purple occurs somewhere between violet and red. That is to say, “violet” is a wavelength of light; “purple” is a combination of blue and red light. As with the orange, the term “violet” to refer to a color arose from the flower known as “violet” and not the other way around.

    white

White is not technically a color, but rather the effect produces by unsplit spectral light. Regardless, it’s often thought of as a color, certainly in terms of cultural or linguistic connotation. We English speakers get it from the Old English hwīt, from Proto-Germanic *khwitaz, and you can still see it in Icelandic as hvítt and slightly less so in the German weiß. Ultimately, it’s from the PIE kwintos, or “bright”, and which makes sense, because a white object is reflecting all visible spectra of light back at the observer’s eyes.

    brown

Brown is not a spectral color; it’s not even a particularly well-defined color. In fact, the word comes from the Old English brún, which can refer to just about any dark or fuscuous color; the meaning as we know dates from Middle English in the 14th century. The ancestor of this word was the Proto-Germanic brûnoz, which referred to dark colors with a shine (think polished wood), and which also gave rise to the word “burnish”.

The ultimate origin of “brown” is the PIE *bher-, which is related to *bheros, from whence words like “beaver” and “bear” (in the sense of a “dark animal”).

    grey

Grey first arrived in English in about 700 C.E. as grǣġ from the Proto-Germanic *grēwjaz and the PIE ghreghwos, which, strangely, means “to shine or glow”. Ironically, IE had a number of roots which refer to grayness (pel-, sal-, smel-, k̑as-, and k̑ei-, the latter of which had a meaning closer to the obsolete meaning of “brown” in the sense of any dark or dull color).

Most Americans spell it “gray”, but for most of the word’s life as we know it, “grey” is the accepted spelling. In fact, the Americanized “gray” didn’t appear until the 19th century, along with the other changes that distanced American English from British English (such as color → colour, organise → organize, and theatre → theater).

    black

Black is everything or nothing: in substractive color, such as paints, it is created by combining all pigments together. In spectral light, it is created by the total absence of visible light spectra. We get it from the recognizable Middle English blak, from the Old English blæc, from the Proto-Germanic *blakaz (which denoted something burnt), and ultimately from the PIE *bhleg- (to burn, or to shine).

There is an interesting double-meaning inherent here: we can understand that the end result of a conflagration is blackened fuel, and in that regard the root makes perfect sense. But technically speaking it refers to burning or shining, which seems the opposite of our notion of blackness. Other words for burning derive from the similar *bʰel- (i.e. the Latin flagrare, from whence “conflagration”). Compare the Old English blæc (“black”) to its companion word, blac (“bright” or “shining”). Previously, Old English used sweart for black, from whence “swarthy” and “sordid”.

Cultural Connotations (updated on 25 June 2010)

When I originally did this entry, I had thought about including a section on the cultural connotations of the various covered colours, but the entry was already one of the longer Wednesday’s Words that I’d done, and the process seemed a bit too daunting. I just today happened across this handy chart that summarizes it. It’s hosted locally (click for a larger version), but comes from the creative folks at Information is Beautiful.