Congress shall make no law 
respecting an establishment of religion,
      or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; 
            or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; 
                  or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, 
                        and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 

     -- The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

---

But perhaps the place to start is with this idea of conventional language (ConLang). I read this morning that the New York Hall of Science has

'managed to harness a potent, nearly inexhaustible source of energy: children. Realizing the futility of battling young metabolisms, the museum puts kids to work. In the rotunda, where a stationary bicycle is hooked up to an airplane propeller, not a moment goes by without some kinetic 12-year-old furiously pedaling and cooling the whole building.' ("Discover," 4/99, p 20)

Never mind whether one can have a source of energy that is not potent (or whether the influence of PCBs and the like in the environment may not reduce these very kids' potency somewhat, or the agist implication that big people dont bicycle); its the conflation of cause and effect I'm after here: certainly the guy/ gal is pedaling, but is s/he cooling the building? I understand the appeal of parallel construction, with two nice round gerunds side by side -- but what happened to the causal relation? The youngster pedals, as I understand it, in order to cool the building. They are not two separate activities, nor are they inseparable: first he pedals, and in the natural order of things ('of course,' we say), the prop rotates. The design of the prop is to move a volume of air; the motion of the air increases the rate of evaporation on our skin; the increased evap cools us; and (in our generosity) we declare the entire building is cooler. Let it be so -- but if we dont therefore say the boy is 'pedalling and moving and evaporating and declaring' (tho if he is as furious as the story reports, he may be declaring more than our ears should hear), let's not say he's 'cooling,' either.

After all, English has other constructions by which two verbs can be associated, besides the simple copula, 'and.' For one, theres what is called the infinitive: the 12yo pedals to cool the whole building. At once, we have a different image: the connection between rotating fans and cooling buildings is not a foregone conclusion, nor need we suppose that the pedaller even thinks it is: she is going to see if it cools, or more likely, she's pedalling just to see how fast she can make the prop go around, regardless).

My point, however, is not physics, or even grammar as such, but that language and thought are pretty closely related. Of course, we know the score -- but what about, say, a 12 year old reader who *believes the story, and thus loses an opportunity to *see a difference between fact and fiction, mechanics and wishful thinking? If one abandons an elocutionary device, one should at least discover what *thoughtful purpose it served (or do I mean, was intended to serve? Well lets see...) so that it too is not lost. Indeed, like heirloom seeds and endangered flora and fauna, our manners of thought may also be under serious threat.

Ol' Miss?

Suppose that one listened intently, or was inclined to a view, or moved to express it, or took a point that was made: is it too much to say that one would be drawn into a conversation? That a school was not a building, but the Socratic activity for which a distinct edifice was useful. To get really carried away, suppose a scholar really was at leisure, rather than in pursuit of a degree, following a career, or developing character. Having lost these edifying connections in language, there is no choice but to teach 'objectives' instead of students -- and they in turn do 'exercises' instead of making sense.

Indeed, how does one distinguish 'having a choice' from 'making a choice' when only 'deliverables' are recorded? If the pause between thought and action, the moment of deliberation (not to say discrimination) is no longer appropriate to our social functionality (so that it need no longer be taught or demonstrated or referred to), does the managerial distinction between decision and execution, administration and implementation, adequately replace it? When every role is objectified and quantified, where does the quality of humanness fit?

At some point, of course, you object: words mean what we agree they mean, and if 'listening' no longer means leaning over, why drag up such hoary epistemological bones anyhow? Enough with the old Roman relics already, or Greek or Sanscrit or whatever -- get with evolution, man. Objects -- including 'intellectual property' -- are what we deal in nowadays, and our values depend strictly on their value; that is, on how much one wants to deal.

Names, for instance, are useful things. To have the name of a thing is to have a leg up on understanding where the thing fits in conceptual space. Its no guarantee, but it is a kind of map. In this material age, however, it is now itself, property, and the degree to which its recognized by 'the market' is the very definition of fitness. Needless to say, the market in (entirely unguaranteed) maps is booming.

Beulah land

The studies carried out by the committee have too often revealed a growing reluctance among the members of the hierarchy to acknowledge responsibility. It is becoming difficult to find anyone who has even the slightest sense of responsibility. The temptation to deprive the concept of responsibility of all substance is a dangerous one [for] that concept is the ultimate manifestation of democracy. (2)

There is, I suggest, a cultural blind spot which has obliterated the distinction between means and ends: speech is not communication; one can only speak in order to communicate. That is, the causal link is wide open, and only the active participation of the other elements -- namely, the listener -- can complete the circuit. When one draws and the other lists, or one expresses and the other is impressed ;-) then are both present and presented, regardless of the medium. Its called doing the communicational rag.

Now, to shine this light on the DNS Mess which the US Dept of Commerce is desperately trying to get shut of by aiding and abetting ICANN in a putsch for global power over the Internet:

Thus, when commerce discovered the Internet, with Jon Postel's handy notebook-style of record-keeping of what domain names went with which IP address, they had a rather dfifferent mindset than the engineers who actually made the thing work. Was there .com for commercial eneterprise and .org for non-profits? Who cared, if one could as easily register DMSO.org as DMSO.com, whether one's operation actually belonged in that classification (especially if the 'legitimate' name had already been registered by someone else)? The Domain Name System was an add-on in any case, a collegial convenience that saved one the task of typing in a string of digits which, after a while, all look the same. The value of an aide-memoire to someone checking to see if the link was up to a given site is one thing, however; its value to one whose intention is to make the site memorable by 'the public' is something else again.

The business of making names memorable in and of themselves probably began with the singing commercials of the early 50s: Tide (Proctor and Gamble) and Frigidaire (General Electric) and everyone else have been parlaying the familiarity-factor for generations now. 'Public relations' has become a recognized craft in itself. By the 90s, to advertise no longer meant to announce; it meant to cajole, seduce and brainwash, and the effects of 'consumerism' (which is properly called propagandizing) had spread from simple peddling of wares to electoral politics, foreign policy administration (which is called globalization, but means concentration of power), and anything at all that can be tied to 'public opinion,' including the corporate media themselves.

In the encounter between an ad hoc arrangement of 'running code' and a determined bunch of marketeers, of course the 'significance' of different top level domains was was sure to lose out. The IANA was concerned only that the hardware components could find each other; enforcing the meaning of the names was not its concern. And when in 1995, NSI (the registrar for both .com and .org, under contract to the NSF) began to make money from the registration process, the battle was joined with no holds barred. (4)

Perhaps the grammar here is not as clear as gerund versus infinitive, but I think the case can be made for claiming URLs for the public domain, on the grounds that names are part of everyday meaningful language, and further, that we use that language for everyday purposes -- we don't become consumers until we arrive at the chosen destination. Otherwise, if they become trademarks in law, we face the prospect of paying a 'character-charge' for accessing them at all (even inadvertently), and the even more dismaying prospect of escalation to graphical ('iconized') pointers. Perpetual litigation over how many pixels constitute a violation of intellectual property rights comes very near to arguing the number of angels dancing on pins.

Crossing over to the farther shore

In the midst of mundane strife and turmoil, not only do we need to know where we stand, but we should be able to point to it.

Notes

Comments? Contributions? Write to Serchan.