Our Changing Times

Our Changing Times

    There were the words blasted all over the cover of a recent issue of TIME, "Is Monogamy Over...and 21 Other Questions About the Way We Live Now."  Other questions dealt with everything from trading brains for beauty and giving rights to robots.  Silly, overall.  But in their previous issues were a series of polls revealing a bit more about our changing habits, although these polls and data compilations (being a magazine directed at the U.S.) deal mainly with the U.S.  Some of the results are indeed trivial, such as women taking more selfies than men, or that a gamer in Sweden has the most YouTube subscribers (37 million);  but some of the other data was quite different...the most beneficial vegetable (highest number of minerals and nutrients) is watercress; the second largest carbon footprint from humans comes from eating meat (almost double that of riding in a plane or running your air conditioner); 82% of U.S. college alumni "said they cheated during their undergraduate careers;" over a third of police officers now wear body cams; and the average American wedding costs $31,213 (not including the honeymoon).

    On the world front, the data proved even more interesting: mosquitoes (transmitting diseases) killed 755,000 people last year (sharks killed a grand total of 3); the Pew Research Center found that 86% of Brazil's population feels that climate change is a "very serious problem" (the results were 45% in the U.S., 33% in Russia, 24% in Israel and 18% in China); the estimated growth of the Muslim population is expected to grow by 73% by the year 2050, the fastest of any religious group (as far as charitable giving, religious groups received nearly double what other charity groups received last year); in China, 700 million people declare no religious affiliation; and while countries such as Germany took in nearly 100,000 refugees last year, Lebanon took in nearly ten times that amount and Turkey took in nearly 20 times that amount (since 2011, the U.S. has taken in about 2% of Germany's numbers).

    Almost all of this comes from data, lots of it.  Turn on your smartphone and likely over 50 apps click on and run in the background (another app such as Clean Master can put many of these tracking apps to "sleep" and extend your battery life).  Says the TIME piece: We're rich in data--but the returns are diminishing rapidly, because after a certain point the more information you have, the harder it becomes to extract meaning from it.  Ironically, an excess of information resists analysis and comprehension in much the same way a lack of it does.  As a result, the more that new technology floods our world with complex information, the more we end up calling on a much older field of human endeavor, one that has always been devoted to making complexity comprehensible and extracting meaning from chaos...and it's not just people.  There's a relatively new phenomenon at work known as the Internet of Things, meaning the global network of objects --cars, Coke machines, glasses, pacemakers-- outfitted with sensors and transitters that communicate with the cloud and one another.  These objects leave trails in the digital world the same way people do.  A 2014 study by the market-research firm IDC estimated that the world of digital data would grow by a factor of 10 from 2013 to 2020, to 44 trillion gigabytes, or 44 zettabytes.  At which point our stock of numerical prefixes will have to expand too.

    So, bringing this all back to the earthly level (zettabytes??), I jump back to the Kidder/Todd book (Good Prose) mentioned in the last post.  What struck me most about the book was the vast difference between writing and editing, as exemplified by the two authors.  In my earlier years, I had been fortunate to have two excellent teachers of English who made the subject fun, each providing easy to remember grammatical shortcuts and puzzles to keep a curious set of minds entertained (drop me a line and I'll dash out a few of them).  But throughout the years, even in reading such books as Bill Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors, I had thought that certain grammatical phrases were etched in stone.  But editor Todd and writer Kidder correct many of those views with the corrected red pencil of a stern and unforgiving teacher.  Here are but two examples: 1) "May" and "might."  Avoid the troubling construction favored by sportscasters in which something that could have happened in the past is described as if perhaps it did happen: "If he'd caught that pass, they may have won the game."  The past tense of "may" is "might."  2) "Who" and "whom" confusion.  In speech, one can always use "who" when in doubt.  It is better to be informal and wrong than wrong and pompous.  Common pompous errors: "Whom shall I say is calling?"  "Give the job to whomever will do it better."  The rule governing such constructions isn't altogether obvious.  "Whom" is the objective case, but in phrases like the preceding ones the whole clause ("whoever will do it better") functions as the object, with "whoever" the subject of the clause.  This rule may be arbitrary, but it is the rule and violations of it grate on educated ears.  In formal writing you don't want to be wrong or pompous, so it's worth taking time to figure it out.  "Who shall I say is calling?" is correct, as is "The person whom you called is not in."

    Ouch.  So much for that perfect score on the test.  But for me, it was a fascinating lesson that even this late in life, things once thought correct can change (whether the rules have changed or the memory of how it was learned has changed).  Watching and graphing the data will be the new learning curve for many of us, and while some things will change at a pace too fast to chart, other things may take much longer.  But change is happening, always has according to many.  And whether it's pointed out in a magazine or by a strident instructor, one should be willing to take it in, toss it around for a bit, and see if it gets accepted into our frozen libraries of grudges and old habits.  Like it or not, change is happening and we may be surprised to find such changes both welcome and educational...the "good ol' days" have always been, and likely always will be no matter your age or country.  But it would seem that that is but one constant, for the other is apparently always changing.