Religiosity penetrates language like mold veins an exceptionally blue cheese. This is true for the English language in general but is particularly pronounced when it comes to profanity. This fact is not remotely surprising if you take even a second to think on it. The word profanity itself is a religious one for Christ’s sake! ⊕ Were it not for the act of measuring all utterances against God’s hair-trigger wrath, there would, strictly speaking, be no such thing as “profanity.” 

Profane,  from the Latin profanare “to desecrate,” from profanus “unholy, not consecrated,” from pro fano “not admitted into the temple (with the initiates).

The term has been broadened, in modern usage, to encompass any “naughty” words not fit for “polite” company ⊕ Even so, the desire to have something forceful to say, which properly utilizes a good long row of exclamation points ⊕, when we stub our toe, or cum, or get punched in the neck, or open a cable bill while in public has lead us to coin a plethora of seemingly benign substitution expletives.

Today these substitutes, so numerous as to vastly outnumber the “curses” they stand-in for,  are mostly the kind of limp, forceless words you associate with grandparents, cartoon characters, and 7 year-olds. They are also the kind of words that are so ingrained in our language and minds that we never give a thought to their origins or what they are actually standing-in for. A euphemistic substitute of this kind has a name, if you were not aware, and that name is “minced oath.” ⊕

Minced Oath.  A semi-technical term for a specific kind of euphemism or disguise mechanism, whereby an offending term or taboo phrase is modified so as to be used without giving offense. Periphrasis or circumlocution is the most common modification, that is, to “speak around” a profane word, implying it without saying it.

While there have long been linguistic taboos associated with the scatological and the sexual ⊕ it will not surprise you to learn minced oaths are, as a group, overwhelmingly Religious in origin.

Just a few examples:

Gosh darn it — God damn it
Jeepers Creepers — Jesus Christ
Tarnation — Damnation
Dad gum — God damn
Doggone it— God damn it
Jiminy Cricket — Jesus Christ
For Pete’s sake — For St. Peter’s Sake
By golly — By God’s body
By Jove — By Jupiter/Jehovah
Judas Priest — Jesus Christ
Good gravy — Good God
Drat — God rot it
For crying out loud — For Christ’s sake
Goodness gracious — Good God
Holy mackerel — Holy flesh
Jumping Jehosaphat — Jumping Jesus
Suffering succotash — Suffering saviour
Blimey — God blind me
Dangnabbit — God damn it
Gee whizz / geewhillikers — Jesus’ whiskers
Good grief — Good God
Egad — Oh God
Gadzooks — God’s hooks
Zounds — God’s wounds +
Etc…

That there are so very many of these types of minced oaths is actually somewhat comical, not to mention quite revealing in regard to Man’s outlook on taboo language.

Why comical? Because these archaic forms sound silly to our modern ears? ⊕ No. Because as a good hardline theologian (or hardline amateur) will happily remind you, any God worth the knee-pains of prostrating oneself before would not, could not, be fooled by a bit of loophole-exploiting linguistic flimflam. Which is to say, minced or not, the intention is identical and so the iniquity is equal.

 
Quote: “It is a vain endeavor on the part of some to avoid the guilt of profane swearing by mincing their oaths, as is the practice of many whose consciences still trouble them so much as to hinder them from the more out-breaking forms of this sin. Minced oaths are either oaths, or they are nonsense. If oaths, they are of course profane. If they are nonsense, they are not “good nonsense,” and are clearly forbidden by Matt. xii. 36. -William S, Plumer, D.D. LL.D., The Law of God, 1864.

It’s our persistence, in spite of this fact, which I find revealing. It would seem that we modify our speech knowing full well that the modification does not successfully solve the “problem.” We are motivated not by fear of God’s wrath ⊕ evidently but by fear of more tangibly immediate reprisals by the morality patrol. In short we will modify our behavior so as not to hassled by other (very real, persistent, and annoying) humans but not to protect against “eternal damnation” in the (very theoretical, abstract, quite possibly imaginary) afterlife.

Eeentahresting.

I am tempted to say that not only has profanity been historically framed by Religious attitudes, but that ultimately, and in more than merely a semantic way, it’s precisely Religion’s imperative against profanity which powers the great profanity dynamo. The whole purpose (and satisfaction) of cursing is the emphasis it affords, the action of saying something instantly an unmistakably recognizable as apart from genteel speech. Had Religious attitudes, over centuries, not explicitly shaped an entire canon of taboo utterances for us to utilize… well, where would we be then? We’d be grunting and groaning in exclamatory frustration.

Either that hurling fistfuls of feces.

Anyhoo, let’s amble back around to profanity and my atheism shall we?

As I said, I tend to feel betrayed by my own profane vocabulary when cursing. As though using Religious words, in the service of that perfect angered emphasis, were offering free press to Christianity, or worse, an implicit acceptance of their “sacredness.” It is habitual, after all, yet I can’t help but feel a twinge of annoyance that even in the midst of my passionate, animal, fist-shaking, secular tirades Religion ought to impose itself into my life. Of course, when I take the time to analyze this reaction, the irony of it, I can’t help but laugh.

For one thing our modern take on the term “profanity” has clouded an important distinction…

“The person on the street uses the term “profanity” broadly to refer to all categories of offensive speech. however, profanity and blasphemy are specific categories of religious speech sanctioned by religious authorities. To be profane means to be secular or indifferent toward religion. Blasphemy is more troublesome; it is an attack on religion and religious figures. It represents and intentional and offensive threat to religion…” -Why We Curse: A Neuro-psyco-social Theory of Speech, by Timothy Jay

So adhering to this more precise definition my existence is the “profanity,” while my use of Christian terminology, when swearing oaths, is more accurately “blasphemy.” That distinction goes a long way in easing my mind since blasphemy is something, as an atheist, I really don’t need to lose any sleep over or shy away from. 

Moreover, when you get right down to it, were I able to remove all references to “bearded men in the sky” from my angry outbursts, what would be the result? I’d be very obediently following the 2nd commandment in a way most devout, minced-oath-bandying believers can’t seem to manage, and that, my potty-mouthed friends, is just plain crazy talk.

In closing-

Having thus, worked it all out in my mind I’m confident I will no longer feel embarrassed by involuntary blurtings of “Jesus fucking Christ!” when, say, a rabid squirrel scampers up my pant-leg or a coworker, smilingly, asks me about my weekend.

Still, I think that it would be useful to have a good long list of non-religious oaths at our disposal should we choose to “go in another direction” with our anger. In as much I’ve started a post over at the annex where I’m soliciting your best minced oaths, in-use, inherited, or invented. If you’d like to contribute click here.

Hope you enjoyed.

The figure in the image is actually a Kwakiutl tribesman dressed as a Thunderbird. It’s a detail of a photograph shot by Edward S. Curtis, published in 1914. If you’ve never heard of Curtis he was a portrait photographer, living in Seattle, who decided sometime around 1900 to begin documenting the Native American tribes living in the Pacific Northwest. This project, with eventual interest of Theodore Roosevelt and resultant funding by J.P. Morgan, evolved into a 20 volume ethnographic opus called The North American Indian. The first volume was published in 1907, the last in 1930, at which point Curtis had shot about 45,000 photographs of over 80 separate tribes. Impressive though those numbers are, and expansive though the project was ⊕ Curtis died in 1952, broke, and with his life’s work forgotten.

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” So said Karl Marx. Were that representation pictorial and cultural rather than political, the sentiment might well be characterized as the driving force behind The North American Indian project. Curtis was a strong adherent to the prevailing sense that the American Indian was a “vanishing race” with no hope of maintaining any identity as Indian, and that it was the duty of the dominant culture to record the existence of the one being absorbed.

It was this conviction that lead him, in the course of his documentations, to go so far as to stage photographs depicting tribal traditions which had gone out of popular practice 50 years prior to his arrival with camera in hand. He paid tribes to undertake ceremonies out of season and reestablish ceremonies no longer practiced. He brought with him props, wigs, shirts, and other accouterments to “reenact” scenes, and was careful to remove “modern” items already adopted by tribes from the frame before shooting. His interest was in the “traditional” Indian, regardless of whether those traditions had already evolved away from the preconceptions of white america.

It’s because of this subjective tampering that Curtis’ photographs, even after their rediscovery and popularization in the 1970’s, remain somewhat controversial. On the one hand there are charges that his photographs, to large degree, simply reenforced the condescending stereotype of the “noble savage.” On the other hand it is unarguable that much of the material in The North American Indian does, in fact, represent unique ethnographic data recorded nowhere else. The prevailing attitude toward the project seems to be that though it is most assuredly “of its time,” harboring all manner of preconception, it is none the less invaluable for what it did manage to record.

In any case as regards Curtis’ life work I think it’s important to mention two things:

1) Even without intervention or the use of props or staging, photographs of this kind, framing a conquered culture through the conqueror’s lens and produced specifically for the conqueror’s consumption, will inherently deal in presuppositions. That seems inescapable. They will reinforce stereotypes to the exact degree to which the viewer, or framer, holds them dear.

2) Regardless of exactly the nature of what his photographs evoke, they are evocative, and very often beautiful, which is possibly the best one can say about a photograph from the artist’s standpoint. Not from a documentarian’s, or an ethnologist’s standpoint certainly, but from an artist’s.

Now to the photographs themselves…

Let me be the first to admit that when you have a collection as large as Curtis’ to draw from, you can gather together a group of pieces that illustrate damn-near any point of view you wish to support. For my part, I don’t want to drive home any particular point about Curtis’ outlook or the experience of the Native American’s he photographed.

I chose 18 images, drawn mainly from his time spent with the Kwakiutl and Navajo tribes, and exclusively of men obscured by ceremonial dress, their humanity left only as a vague outline, because I find them to be, as a group, a particularly potent illustration of the subjectivity inherent to viewing not only photographs of other cultures, images of the “Other,” and images of the unknown, but images of the past in general. These photographs are of men without men’s faces, without eyes to search, without familiar situations to read into, and so you are left to your own perceptual devices.

Quote: “It is a truism that to visitors of a new land – certainly to settlers – the original inhabitants were profoundly Other: The settlers may have had to struggle physically with the indigenous people for possession of the land, and in the process the original inhabitants became that which the settlers defined themselves against. It was virtually inevitable that the representations… would incorporate, reflect, or respond to, perhaps justify, the assumptions of the dominant (whites). ...The representations produced by the project tend to conform, in other words, to the lineaments of “the white man’s Indian.” ...Members of a dominant group, no matter how “intimate” their sense of their involvement with the people concerned, will represent nothing but the assumptions of their own kind.” – From the introduction to Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian by Mick Gidley.

Quote: “If the modes of seeing in different communities are at least in some respect irreconcilable because they reflect incommensurable presuppositions about the human situation, how can such communities understand one another? Or are cultures windowless monads– communally solipsistic entities in which only those who share the same conventions can make sense of one another, with everything outside the cultures walls either ignored or relegated to the status of error? Can one culture use its own terms to say something about another culture without engaging in a hostile act of appropriation or simply reflecting itself and not encountering the otherness of the Other? –From Chapter 2 of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of the Modernist Form by Paul B. Armstrong.

Quote: “When the last Red Men shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone.” -Attributed to Cheif Seath in an address surrendering the Puget Sound region to Governor Isaac Stevens in 1854, but which is almost certainly a fanciful recreation set down by some unknown author many years later. Coincidentally, it was Seath’s daughter, Princess Angeline, who was Curtis’ first Native American subject. 

Personally I find this group of photos, in the almost total disembodiment of their actual subjects, really compelling. Their historical accuracy makes no difference. I can’t help but imbue them with a host of disparate, sometimes totally contrary emotions. My mind draws all kinds of corollaries and branches out into all kinds of narratives. Most likely you, yourself, draw a whole other set of conclusions…

Anyhow, though Curtis didn’t live to see it, his work is now widely written about and very well represented on the internet. Curtis’ story is a fairly interesting one, the debate over and reactions to his work even more so, and there is a whole lot of it to be seen out there if your so inclined-

Nortwestern University Collection
Library of Congress Collection
Old-picture.com collection
First People
Project Gutenberg
Edward S. Curtis in Context
Selling the North American Indian
Flurry & Company Ltd.
Video excerpts from Coming To Light
PBS American Masters
Prayer to the Great Mystery
The Imperfect Eye of Edward Curtis.
Etc, Etc, Etc.

Hope you enjoyed.

First let me get you up to speed on what exactly Klein’s invention is all about in case you missed the story-

NPR’s site explains it as follows:

Quote: “Klein says this all started when he used a modified version of Skinnerian training to teach his cat to use the toilet, and it worked really well. That made him think that he might be able to use the method with crows. The first inklings that he would work with crows came about 10 years ago, at a cocktail party, when he argued that harnessing the birds to do something useful would be a much better plan for his native Seattle, plagued by crows, than mass slaughter.

In the first two steps of his four-step experiment, Klein says he provides crows with coins, peanuts and the vending machine, in order to get them used to the materials. Then he provides the birds only with coins, and in frustration they bang around until the coin gets in the machine’s slot. That introduces the next step, when the machine dispenses a peanut as a reward for each coin. In the fourth step, he gives the birds nothing. But the crows see that coins have been spread on the ground near the machine. This reveals what’s special about crows. Squirrels, for example, look at the box a half-dozen times, then disappear to play in traffic. Crows make the connection: Pick up the coin, put it in the box and receive a reward.”

Because the crows “make the connection” the vending machine idea works, as might more complex ones some day.

Crows have demonstrated their intelligence time and again. They have a penchant for trickery (a.k.a. tactical deception), seem to create their own “dialects” as a means of differentiating family groups, and have exhibited the ability to solve a problem spontaneously by crafting a tool, a feat not even our cousins the chimps have managed. All of this seems to points to sophisticated cognition skills, a trait which itself suggests crows share some abstract thinking skills with us humans.

So… the point is crows are smart.

Which got me thinking.

If we start stimulating their abstract thinking, with that most stimulating of abstractions– cash, what associated experiences might we be opening them up to? I mean, what else might our cognitive brethren learn, that we ourselves have learned, by being placed on this fast track of abstract thought? What epiphanies and what unpleasant shocks lay between them and their eventual empire of the birds?

These are questions responsibly-all-powerful and world-shaping beings must consider. For instance…

Will they learn the gut-twist and discomfort of the “awkward encounter” as multiple crows arrive simultaneously at the vending machine? Will they stare at their claws after a polite, but not overly welcoming, caw? Will they learn to feign interest in some banal object in the safe haven of the middle-distance? Will they pretend the machine is out of the particular peanuts they like and walk away, preferring to sneak back later when that super-annoying crow from accounting is gone?

Will the crows learn the infuriation of trekking all the way from their nest, with exact change, only to have their quarter clank through the innards of the machine and spat out again, and again, and again, until they, feathers beginning to rustle, inspect the coin and find it’s… Canadian!? Will they caw a beak-clenched epithet at Canada? Or at the deli clerk who passed the thing off? Will they throw the coin in disgust before flying away or, irrationally, and with no good reason whatsoever, keep it?




And what if after a few generations of commerce their abstract thinking improves to the degree that they notice the variances in iconography which help to differentiate one coin from another? And what if their jump-started cognition actually produces some sparks of recognition?

What if, in the lazy hours of the afternoon while distractedly fondling a smooth coin with their wings, they begin to look more closely?

I would assume that the fierce eagle, so beloved as symbol in these United States of America, might have somewhat different associations for the moneyed crows about town.

And the feathers in some American Indian’s headdress? Surely a celebration of the proud splendor and noble traditions of indigenous cultures would not be the very first thought to pop into their minds?

As for our mythologies, our winged women and our Mercury’s and Pegasi and Griffons and Sphinx’s… well, I can’t even begin to imagine the crows’ consternation at the thought of these, most likely hungry, abominations.




Lastly, I wonder what, a hundred successfully-vended and belly-filled years from now, when the crows have learned well and their dependance on the coin has increased… when the first few murders of young have already been born with enhanced coin-detecting vision that sees straight through pants pockets and purse leather… when a crude “pawnshop dialect” has been invented approximating human-sounding phrases like “oh hell naw!” and “c’mon mister, that’s a family heirloom!”... I wonder what those unfortunate crows not fortunate enough to be hatched with a silver dollar in their beak might be reduced to?

Not so funny is it?

Anyhow, it’s a fascinating invention, so kudos to Mr. Klein… my low-browed, yuk-yuk, ah-cha-cha-cha! sullying of it notwithstanding. You can read more about the vending machine, Klein’s ultimate aims, and see a short video as well, at the official site.

Hope you enjoyed.

When, as children, we first catch wind of the existence of astrological symbols we are at a point in our lives when anything which might help solidify our identities by differentiation is something deserving of our attention. Most of us, I would venture to guess, take hold of our symbol for some short interval as children, and wring whatever meaning we can out of it, drawing corollaries between ourselves and others who shared the same sign, taking heart in character traits supposedly attached, bolstering, through mythical means, our sense of ourselves. When later in our lives we reject astrology as fanciful and amusing hokum it hardly matters. Our signs are still there as the tiniest footnote at the bottom of our appraisals-of-self. We will always see in them the faintest reflection.

An analogy might be that of the lapsed Catholic, who was brought up going to church, but who on adulthood rejected religion outright. Catholicism was something born-into, something outside oneself, something not chosen but inherited. Even after a definitive choice is made to reject it, however, the symbol of a cross will always manage to successfully travel that guarded pathway to our interiors. Whatever judgement the brain passes that symbol will still hold sway with the eyes.

When I was in art school I was obliged, as all hopeful image-makers are, to re-examine the personal symbology of my life. Did any of the tired old symbols carry any weight or meaning? Could any of them be used, adapted, perverted? It dawned on me around that time that though I was fond of “The Balance” as a symbol ⊕, the equal-armed beam balance which is universally used seemed not quite right. This scale with its symmetry and elegance and precision could simply never be an accurate symbol for me, my mind, or the life that I lived. It was altogether too platonic.

A few years later while working, for a short time, as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art an alternative symbol presented itself. During a shift I was stationed in one of those wonderful, dimly-lit, and comparatively empty areas of the museum ⊕, beside some long glass cases containing Roman artifacts. There were small functional and decorative objects of all kinds inside —vessels and tools and little statues and amulets all jostling together like a the contents of Romulus’ hall closet.

Amongst all of this iron and bronze a single object seemed to demand further scrutiny. It was asymmetrical and brutal looking, with its dangling chains each terminating in a hook. I had no guess as to its function or purpose. Torture device? Weapon? Brutish tool of animal husbandry? Looking at its little placard I discovered it was called a “Roman Balance” or “Steelyard” and that it was in fact a scale. I marveled for a moment at the coincidence. Of all the objects to draw my eye and interest it had to be a scale. I knew immediately that I’d found an object I could get behind, an object which resonated with me somehow. I’d found a proper Libran symbol for myself.

A bit of background information:

The Roman balance (or statera as it was originally known) is so called because no instance has been found of its existence prior to the Roman era. A similar principle was used in ancient Egyptian balances, however, and independently created examples have been found in China. Some evidence seems to exist that this type of scale was actually in use among Greek craftsmen in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. before Hellenistic mathematicians like Archimedes ever formally demonstrated the theoretic basis for their workings. 

The Romans brought these scales to Britain around 55 B.C.E. and the English word ‘steelyard’ by which they are referred today is thought to be a mistranslation of the German ‘Stael-hof’ ⊕, which was itself the name of the base of the Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages, who used the Roman balance extensively in their businesses.

Functionally steelyards differ from the balance because they have unequal arms and employ a counterpoise, rather than a series of fixed-mass weights, which is shifted along the long arm in relation the the fulcrum. At the place where the counterpoise keeps the beam exactly horizontal, the weight of the object is indicated on an engraved scale on the long arm. ⊕

Though steelyards are less precise for weighing small objects like coins or jewels ⊕ they have the benefit of employing a single weight for a wide range of loads. They were particularly useful for weighing heavy objects like vehicles, sides of beef, and humans. Additionally they had the benefit of cheap manufacture and portability. In as much they were used as industrial scales straight through the eighteenth century and remain in use in markets all throughout Asia and and the Middle East today.

I happen to find them, with their precarious asymmetry, their hooks and chains and their myriad forms of sculpted counterweights quite compelling, and beautiful.

Visually, viscerally, the steelyard seems to embody some aspect of balance, or perhaps the personal quest for it, which the equal-arm balance does not. After having discovered it there at the Met I visited it often. It didn’t take me long to realize that this object had symbolic potential far beyond the whimsical introspection it might supply for the comparatively small group of us who were born under the sign of Libra.

What, after all, do the scales symbolize for the rest of humanity?

Justice.

Thinking of the equal-arm balance, alone, in silhouette, or held aloft by the left hand of Themis / Justitia / Lady Justice, notions undoubtedly come to mind. They are precise and unambiguously immediate, aspirational and inspirational, they are resplendent and exalted, they are incorruptible and pure. In other words they have no relation whatsoever to the realities of human justice as it is experienced and met out.

Now look at the steelyard. It is hard-looking and vaguely menacing, all hooks and chains and lengths of metal. It has a brutality to it somehow. You can imagine wielding it like a club or a flail and imagine the damage it might do were it wielded against you. Then there’s its asymmetry, which on first glance seems so counterintuitive to achieve any kind of balance. By design its sides are unequal, set against one another at cross-purposes. One side only holds the weight while the other only passes judgement, and a not quite precise judgement at that.

It’s a strange, hard, dangerous looking object, all angles and points set against a shifting bluntness, and one could imagine that were you to hand one to a child she’d be just as likely to smash in a skull as to balance anything whatsoever.

Though functionally the steelyard can achieve the same aims as our aspirational equal-arm scale, visually it suggests a complexity and precariousness and menace entirely more human, and I’d argue entirely more appropriate, symbolically, for our notions of crime and punishment, corporeal or otherwise. If a pound of flesh needs weighing this is the scale for the job.

Add to this to the forms which the steelyard’s counterweight took, and could take, and all sorts of explicit symbolic relationships emerge. In the past these “poises” as they are sometimes called were often fashioned in the shape of gods, men, women or animals. One could easily imagine a slab of beef on the hooks counterbalanced by golden McDonald’s arches for instance, or an emaciated corpse counterbalanced by an Iron Cross, a knife counterbalanced by a black glove, a smoldering retarded child counterbalanced by a weight in the shape of Texas, a boot stamping on a human face, forever, counterbalanced by a giant silver dollar, or… well… whatever delightful image strikes your fancy!

The steelyard can do it all.

Anyhow, since happening upon that Roman balance about 12 years ago I’ve adopted it in my mind. When I think Libra I think steelyard, and so, conversely when I think steelyard I think, in some small way, of myself.

When I see a statue or etching of Lady Justice my mind reflexively erases that flimsy equal-arm balance with its impossible precision and imaginary exaltation and replaces it with its hard, practical, rough and ready, asymmetrical cousin. ⊕

Symbols are what they are, obviously, and not much more, but shouldn’t good ones reflect in some way the truth of a thing? Shouldn’t they hold their weight as it were? For me the steelyard does the job admirably and, yes, before you ask, even Nonists need symbols they can believe in.

Hope you enjoyed.

Well, as you might expect, it turns out that the “perfect alphabet” of the title, which the book sets forth as remedy to the “absurdities” of English, also mentioned in the title, is a phonetic alphabet created by Comstock himself.

Quote: “It is generally admitted that our orthography is more complicated than that of any other language. Various attempts have been made by different individuals to simplify it. The author of this treatise, however, proposes not only to simplify it, but to perfect it.”

Before you go off half-cocked mocking and scoffing Dr. Comstock for pomposity, first remind yourself that he invented his more-perfect-than-English alphabet at a time when religious and philosophical outlooks on causality were giving way to scientific ones, which is to say that the prevailing feeling among the educated was that with some properly focussed brain-power any “problem” could be “solved” by scientific means, that this was the age of the elocution movement, and that there had already been, before he ever set overconfident pen to paper, at least a century’s worth of individual efforts to overhaul English. Benjamin Franklin had made his own attempt as early as the 1760’s after all, and you wouldn’t mock old Ben now would you?

Then there is the little matter which, being so far removed from grammar school, you have likely forgotten- English is a weird and knotty frankensteinian creature.

(After many paragraphs to back up the statement) Comstock puts it this way: “Our language is hedged about with difficulties which can hardly be overcome even by years of laborious study. The young student is obliged to waste much precious time in learning to spell and read our crooked words, and the adult foreigner is appalled by obstacles which seem to be insurmountable. Now, all these difficulties would be entirely removed by the adoption of a perfect alphabet — an alphabet which should represent language phonetically.”

Of course, now that you’ve reminded yourself of these things, you can go ahead and laugh anyway.

I personally find myself amused, not so much by the seemingly quixotic quest to just put on the brakes and change the course of a living language, but by the obvious galled irritation Dr. Comstock felt.

Quote: “...the 38 elementary sounds of the English language are represented in 336 different ways, which may be considered equivalent to three hundred and thirty-six different letters! Is it possible to conceive of a more complicated, absurd, unphilosophical, and barbarous system of orthography?”

Barbarous?! Hahaha.

We, all of us, find aspects of our own vocations thorny and annoying. The convolutions and abstruseness and wrong-mindedness which seem to permeate every human endeavor formulated or informed by any consciousness other than our own can exasperate; but imagine if your vocation was language! Imagine if it were English itself that stuck in your craw. Talk about fighting windmills. 

Anyhow, if you are interested, Comstock’s phonetic alphabet broke down essentially as follows- 

Quote: “This Alphabet comprises all the letters of the Phonetio Alphabet for the English Language, with additional ones to represent sounds peculiar to foreign languages. Comstock’s Phonetic Alphabet is the common, or Boman alphabet, not only so extended, by the addition of new letters, that there is a character for every articulate sound, but so improved by the introduction of signs for the various modifications of the voice in speech, that there is a character for every accent, inflection, intonation, etc. Hence it must be considered a perfect alphabet.”

Including all 44 characters and 16 tone marks Comstock’s perfect alphabet looked like this-

If you were enthusiastic about the alphabet and wanted to set about immediately hand-writing a letter to your dear old mother, or your betrothed in Niagara Falls, you could refer to this chart as a guide-

Meanwhile if you wanted to set about teaching the gents down at the club or the fellows at the beer garden this new method, some charts depicting mouth articulations, grouped by phoneme, would be helpful. Luckily Comstock furnished these, saying- 

Quote: “An accurate knowledge of the positions which the organs of articulation should assume in the formation of the several elements of vocal language, is very important to those who would speak with ease and elegance. To aid the reader still further in the acquisition of this knowledge, he is furnished with the various postures of the mouth, required in uttering the elements energetically, and singly.”

“The pupil should exercise his organs of speech, in the most forcible manner, every day, on all the elements. The vowels should be exploded from the throat, both interrogatively and affirmatively, in every range of pitch.”

Certainly, even armed with logic and charts and enthusiasm, there would be some doubters. To them, leaving aside stability and ease of use, you could quote a few of the many benefits Comstock himself lists, like, say-

3. It would enable one to spell and read in one-twentieth the time required by the present absurd and barbarous orthography.

4. It would render the teaching and the learning of the English language, which, by the old theory, are extremely irksome, highly interesting.

7. It would interdict provincialisms; because, according to this theory, all words are spelled as they are pronounced, and, consequently, pronounced as they are spelled, every graphic word being a perfect Daguerreotype of the vocal word which it represents.

10. As, in phonetic spelling, most of the words have fewer letters than are employed in our present orthography, this alphabet would enable a writer to put more matter upon the same page.

13. The adoption of this alphabet would not only be the means of greatly advancing the cause of science and literature, but would be invaluable to the missionary in disseminating a knowledge of the gospel among the heathen.

How can you argue with that? Comstock certainly couldn’t see any way.

Quote: “The Author feels confident that no one who peruses this treatise understandingly, will desire to cling any longer to the old system of orthography, unless he prefers chaos to order, —discord to harmony, —darkness to light. Hence, he sends forth his Alphabet to the world with the most sanguine expectation that it will meet the entire approbation of the public, and be speedily adopted.”

I might wonder weather, having seen his countrymen choose chaos, discord, and darkness over his perfect alternative, he died sanguine as well… were it not for the obvious linguistic contradiction of it.

Anyhow, hindsight being smug and sadistic as it is, we know his grandiloquent claims and aims came to naught. We know also that the scores of other contrived alphabets which came before and after his met similar fates. I don’t believe there has ever been a constructed script, in the history of the world, which has supplanted a “naturally” evolved predecessor by dint of logic and force of will. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that, as in Comstock’s case, a switch might benefit 3rd graders and immigrants but would effectively render the entire adult population of the country illiterate in the bargain?

Perhaps it’s because, ever since learning as ankle-biters what the characters MOMMY added up to, our alphabet is so intertwined with our language, and hence, our thoughts, our minds, our being, that we would never and could never willingly replace it?

Perhaps it’s because language is a vibrant and living and evolving thing which has never, not even in or present “barbarous” orthography, been truly tamed and finally codified?

Or perhaps it’s just that the overwhelming majority of us are not elocution teachers, or linguists, or grammarians, and so the quirks of English just simply do not stick in our craws enough to warrant, in any of our minds, a “solution?”

Hell, I don’t know.

Though his perfect alphabet is all but forgotten, I would like to thank Dr. Comstock, none the less, for not only affording me a chuckle (which I suppose I ought to be offering apologies for rather than thanks) but more importantly for occasioning circumstances in which the letters “Phonemenon” could be put together, in that exact order, and be something other than a misspelling.

So in his honor, finally, let me offer the following, may it live on in the minds and mouths of we who have choosen chaos, discord, and darkness:

Pho·nem·e·non [fo-neem-uh-non]
noun. plural: phonemena.
1. A vocalization, or sound made with the mouth, that is perceptible by the senses.
2. A remarkable or outstanding utterance.

Hope you enjoyed.