What do you call someone who doesn’t drink?

By: | March 7, 2022

When I was in my 20s and we liked to be out professionally drinking after a day of professionally working, a study made the news – I have no idea which study, by whom, or exactly what it said because I only heard about it through the bitter complaints of my friend. She was a fast-rising corporate lawyer who could reliably drink the other associates at her firm – or partners, or senior partners, or clients, or whoever, male and female – absolutely under the table. It was her superpower, and in her view did a lot to redress her grievances about being 5 foot 2. Being able to hold her liquor really set her apart when an evening began to devolve and other people started to make bad choices. It translated into a lot of respect at work – a strange but not infrequent category error. 

So you can imagine how it landed for us when scientists said women should only be drinking half as much as men. “Is there *nothing* that women can just HAVE?” she texted me. The dramatic overstatement was tongue-in-cheek. But I felt the same resentment. 

Many years and conflicting scientific evidence later, I’m not drinking anymore. It had nothing to do with the hamfisted messaging about alcohol’s harms, nor was it a result of problem drinking (I was always an embarrassing lightweight). The hangovers just started to be more un-fun than the drinking was fun, no matter how much or how little I drank. This is apparently a common complaint when you get old and decrepit. So about a year ago I decided I was done.

It was good timing! If I had opted to do this ten years ago, I would have been faced with a pretty bare cupboard. In those bad old days we had O’Douls, widely understood to be a meagre mercy granted to people who wanted to control their drinking but didn’t want to be infantilised by sipping a glass of milk when everyone else was brandishing their fancy big-kid beverages. There was also nonalcoholic champagne or sparkling cider, usually deployed by preggos who weren’t “out” yet (speaking from experience).

But in 2021 and 2022, if you’re not drinking, the world is your oyster. There are enough people looking for alcohol-free varieties that the market has exploded with all kinds of creatively named and colourful options. In 2021, nonalcoholic beverages raked in $331 million, up a third from the prior year. (The culprit is allegedly Gen Z, which incidentally is also accused of killing the wine industry, driving them in their desperation to consider launching ‘Got Milk?’-style industry adverts. Is there a word for something predestined to become a meme?)

And yet, despite big markets full of big numbers, a general awkwardness lingers around not drinking. No matter how pretty your nonalcoholic beverage, people want to know why.

Many think pieces and trend pieces have emerged over the past couple of years to help people address the social consequences of “not drinking without an excuse”. If you’re not an alcoholic, on antibiotics, or pregnant, we just haven’t quite settled on how to process your decision.

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When Wordle Gives You Icky Words

By: | March 4, 2022
Sashay_Britt.Reints.jpg (1024×681)

This post first ran on January 28, 2015, but I thought of it again recently while playing Wordle and finding that that day’s answer was “moist.”

Words are a writer’s currency, and we each have our favorites. The first word I remember falling in love with was onomatopoeia. It had a satisfying rhythm, plus there was the delight of discovering, oh — there’s a word for that.

That joy of discovery was exactly what I felt reading Lost in Translation, a delightful new book by Ella Frances Sanders, who draws illustrations to help explain “untranslatable word from around the world” like trepverter (Yiddish for the perfect retort that comes to you later, when it’s too late), iktsuarpok (Inuit for the act of repeatedly going outside to check if anyone’s coming), cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish for a man who insists on leaving his shirt tails untucked) and tsundoku (Japanese for leaving unread a book you’ve bought, perhaps piling it on top of a stack of other books you haven’t read).

English also has no true equivalent to my own favorite foreign word: gemütlichkeit, a German term that connotes the kind of warm coziness you feel when gathered around a fire with your dearest friends, perhaps drinking Glühwein. It must exist in some language, but I’m still seeking a word to describe a dog’s joy while frolicking in fresh snow.

Many of my beloved English words are onomatopoeic ones like flicker, boing, ripple, riffraff, guffaw and clusterfuck. As a kid, my favorite part of art class was the smock. Not the thing itself, but the occasion to say the word aloud, repeatedly. Smock, smock, smock. I don’t know why I love it, but I do. I also love sassy and saucy and, especially, sashay. I could say that word all day.

Some friends of mine live on Twining Flats Road, a name as close to perfect as I can imagine for their little valley path. Speaking of paths, I like meander and lollygag and serendipity too. Maybe it’s my affinity for dancing, but I also love the words funk, groove, twist, skip and twirl.

Chuckle is another favorite word. It so perfectly embodies the act that it describes — that deep, unconscious laugh performed almost under your breath and mostly to yourself. What’s not to love?

A lot, according to some of my fellow LaWONians. I can’t remember how it came up, but some other writers here tell me that not only do they not like chuckle, they despise it. “Chuckle and grin are lazy,” one LaWONian told me. Two people here have told me that no one actually uses the word chuckle. “You really use them in conversation?” one asked. “I can’t imagine, except ironically.” Apparently I’m an anomaly.

It’s not just chuckle. Until this conversation began, I had no idea that there were words people hated intrinsically. Sure, I assume that every writer hates words like leverage, proactive, literally, task (as a verb) and decision-maker, for the way they’re so clumsily used. But I was shocked to learn that people hated munch and nosh and grin too, just because. The things I like about those words — that they have edges and an embodiedness to them — were exactly what make other people cringe, apparently.

WinnerMoist

I was still at a loss, until someone mentioned what I’ve come to think of as the most detested word in the English language: moist. I’d never had much of an opinion on the word, and my initial reaction to the group proclamation of hate for it was, really? The first thing it brought to my mind was a cupcake. But then I said moist aloud, slowly. As the word passed through my lips, I felt a lingering disgust. There was something repulsive about the way it formed in my mouth, and once I noticed, I couldn’t un-notice it.

MoistMen_steveLyon

Researchers have a term for this: word aversion, and a recent experiment found that about 20 percent of the study’s 400 participants equated hearing the word “moist” to the displeasure of listening to fingernails scratching a chalkboard. The experiments described in this paper suggested that “semantic features of the word – namely, associations with disgusting bodily functions – underlie peoples’ unpleasant experience.” They don’t say whether this effect is amplified when moist is paired with another word that many people seem to hate: panties. But the researchers (Paul Thibodeau and Christopher Bromberg at and Oberlin College and Robby Hernandez and Zachary Wilson at Trinity University) present another tantalizing but unproven possibility — that speaking the word moist engages facial muscles that correspond to expressions of disgust. Their hypothesis makes sense to me, since the word felt neutral to me until I practiced saying it aloud.

And on that note, I will end this post with a poem from Richard.

Words-we-hate haiku

Ample slacks.  Moisture.

Munch; nosh:  It’s Penis Friday.

Seminal!  (Chuckle.)

Photos: Moist Men by Steve Lyon. Winners use moist towelettes by Brian J. Matis. Sashay by Britt Reints.

Why I’m Smiling in a Megadrought

By: | March 2, 2022

We had a doozy of a snowfall last week in southwest Colorado, the high desert blanketed a foot and a half deep, the mountains getting a good four feet. Knock on wood, I don’t like to tempt the fates of nature and climate change, and I’m not meaning to brag, I just want to celebrate having to shovel five times in a few days to keep a path open to our vehicles. 

Snow is everything here. This corner of the Rocky Mountains is one reason Lake Powell is draining while Lower Basin States are in a hydrologic tizzy. Low snow packs have become the norm as our reservoirs dwindle and aquifers choke. Another reason for the dryness is Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and L.A., where most of our water goes. I live between here and there and when we get a snow like last week I feel about ten pounds of constant pressure lift off my shoulders. 

Anywhere you live, you feel the pressure. It might be intensified hurricanes, unprecedented heat, or tidal surges submerging streets and basements no one’s ever seen flood. In my neighborhood, it’s snow, or the lack thereof. 

At the café in town, the usuals at a morning table were talking about winters we used to have, backroads in the 1970s impassible till July and now they’re open all winter without plowing. They remembered high country snow over your head lasting months. Bantering and razzing each other about politics — both political persuasions sitting at the table — they talked about climate change and sea level rise without arguing, as if it were as true as sunrise, nothing more than daily news.

In town, we got a brief taste of the last century as plows piled up snow eight feet tall down the middle of the highway. Even the old curmudgeons had to smile.

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The Shoulders of Giants

By: | February 28, 2022

The first woman to get a Ph.D. in oceanography in the United States—and in North America, and, perhaps, in the world—was Easter Ellen Cupp. She received it from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1934. I learned this because I have been reading about one of Cupp’s supervisors, a man named Harald Sverdrup, for a book on seabirds I’m supposed to have finished. When you work on a book about a science, you tend to read a lot about some very hardworking and accomplished people. Their stories can leave you (me) feeling kind of lousy about your (my) work ethic.

Such is the case with Harald Sverdrup. He was really something. Born in 1888, in the town of Sogndal, Norway, he came from a family known more for farming, politics, and the Lutheran clergy, but he was drawn to the natural sciences. He went to the University of Oslo, where he excelled in geophysics, meteorology, oceanography. When he graduated he studied under Vilhelm Bjerknes, then the world’s preeminent meteorological theoretician. After he finished his Ph.D. he joined Roald Amundsen, who, a few years removed from his triumph at the South Pole, was planning an expedition to the North Pole. Amundsen never reached the pole, but Sverdrup collected reams of data on all manner of natural phenomena. When he returned from the expedition several years later he assumed Bjerknes’ old professorship at the University of Oslo, before being asked to become the director of Scripps in 1936.

At Scripps, Sverdrup more or less developed oceanography as a modern scientific discipline. He established a core curriculum and published the field’s first textbook, The Oceans, in 1942. The Oceans became the standard text for the next several decades; oceanographers still refer to it as “The Bible.” All the while Sverdrup was doing groundbreaking (or waterbreaking) research on the dynamics of ocean circulation, revamping also the research ethos to emphasize long pelagic cruises. He would eventually be memorialized as a unit of flow: the Sverdrup (Sv), or the volume transport of one million cubic meters of seawater per second.

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Science Poem: Wildfire, Hundred Acre Wood

By: | February 25, 2022
A dark, hazy wildfire scene. The blazing trunks of distant trees can just be made out through the smoke.

In 2019, a forest caught fire in Sussex, England. This would not have made international headlines, except that the forest in question was Ashdown Forest, the real-life inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin’s beloved Hundred Acre Wood. As the fire spread, dry-eyed forest rangers explained to reporters that the blaze and the little lives it took were no big deal, really, nothing to worry about.

From an ecological perspective, they were probably right. But I just kept thinking about all those little lives: the breathing, fleeing, terrified, heart-beating descendants of Rabbit, Piglet, and Roo. So I did what I often do when things are on my mind. I wrote a poem about it.

We are now entering the third year of a global pandemic—a worldwide conflagration that has already taken so many lives. Reading this poem now, I can’t help but hear echoes of the forest rangers’ impassive assessments in the daily spate of ableist comments from our nation’s leaders. They reassure us that everything is fine, that we don’t need to worry. That only the vulnerable will die.

Wildfire, Hundred Acre Wood

Tonight A. A. Milne’s beloved forest
is burning, tall flames overtaking
the very small animals, smoke choking
rabbits as they flee. No one knows
how it started, and no one
saw the owl emerge. Either he’s still in there
or he got away.

Tomorrow experts on the news will tell us
this is not a tragedy. All’s not lost, says one forest ranger,
indicating the destruction behind him. Within four weeks
we’ll have grass growing. In six months you probably won’t know
too much has gone on here.

*

Image via Unsplash. You can read more about the fire here. A version of this poem was originally published in SIREN.

the lake

By: | February 23, 2022

Snow-dusted lake.

There is a lake not far from where I live now. I’m not a person who has ever invested deeply in place; I am a child of immigrants and I have always been somewhere temporarily. I don’t know the place where I was born, and as much as I love my hometown, I always knew I would leave it. In college and grad school, I knew I was just passing through. But after almost eight years in Seattle, I’ve finally accepted that I live here. I am here with no plans to leave. While friends have come and gone, breweries opened and closed, politicians elected and disgraced, the lake has been here all along.

Getting to know her has been an honor. Like any other friend, I have become acquainted with her in steps. I met her through friends, and at first, I only spent time with her every once in awhile, and usually briefly, shallowly — just passing through, just saying hello. Now I am there almost every day. Sometimes I am there with others, but most of the time, I’m there just to see her. I have kayaked in her waters, walked and run her perimeter countless times, picnicked on her banks, eaten ice cream on the docks. I’ve seen her many moods: hopeful (daybreak), mysterious (a fog at dusk), moody (grey and misty), furious (driving rain and wind), festive (cross-country skiers gliding new paths into snow), murderous (icy, and bitterly cold), glowing (summer sunsets). Even when she is at her worst, I know it will pass; her emotions are literally the weather. By the same token, she has seen my moods. Some days, I’m euphoric, and the runs feel easy. Other days, I’m pounding the ground, running out my frustration. On the worst ones, I plod along slowly, and the loop I know so well feels impossible, even though I know it hasn’t changed.

She has rewarded my loyalty by introducing me to her friends. There’s the heron that everyone stops to photograph. There are the resident geese and the fearless seagulls, as well as the guy who feeds them baggies of torn-up bread, holding out his arms so they land all over him. There are the cottonwoods, right next to the alcove where hobbyists launch their remote-controlled sailboats. There’s the writer who sets up a table in the summer, asks you for three themes, and handwrites poems while you wait. There’s the round man who always shuffles along at a half-run, half-walk in a dirty white t-shirt and grey shorts. There’s the abandoned payphone by the basketball courts, and the tree that just fell a few weeks ago over by the amphitheater where the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin once played. There was, until about a year ago, a tree stump halfway between the amphitheater and bathhouse, which I still look for every time I run.

In the local library, I saw a whole book about her and the plants that grow there. This spring, once everything is lush and green again, I’m planning a heart-to-heart with her where I walk the loop with the book in hand, looking even more carefully at each thing I have passed a million times. Time and attention, I’m realizing, is the only way to show care, to build a lasting relationship with place. For the first time in my life, I am finally committed to staying.

The meaning of patience

By: | February 21, 2022

What parent hasn’t felt this grim determination at some point during the marathon that is modern, village-less childrearing? I instantly fell in love with this statue on a visit to Moscow (en route to the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to visit a physics lab under a mountain). I can’t seem to find any information about the sculpture or sculptor, and though it has some stylistic features of propaganda art, I choose to take my inspiration where I can find it.

This week, I encountered a tweet that claimed “The CDC just quietly lowered the standards for speech in early childhood development. Now children should know ~50 words at 30mo rather than 24mo. Instead of highlighting the harmful effects masks and lockdowns have had on children, the CDC just lowered the bar for milestones.” Tens of thousands uncritically amplified the tweet and added to the outrage, but it only took a minute or two to find the real story, if you were actually interested.

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Science Metaphors: Hysteresis

By: | February 18, 2022
etching of a person fleeing from a skeleton
My future self runs from the mistakes of my past self

This post originally appeared April 19, 2019

My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.

Wait! Don’t go! What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any particular stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future capable of more human behaviours.

But what did that actually mean? Even after months of editing this thing with several of the world’s best electrical engineers at my disposal, I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept. They explained it to me every way they could, including comparing it to the behaviour of a synapse: the connections between neurons can become stronger or weaker depending on the number of electrical signals they’ve traded in the past. They sent me this graph of a bowtie.

a ;inched hysteresis loop on a graph
Pinched hysteresis loop, courtesy of R. Stanley Williams

It was unedifying. I finished the edit without ever coming to grips with the meaning of hysteresis. But over the next decade, thoughts of that maddening bowtie would come to me unbidden. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It gnawed at me because, even though the math was far beyond anything I could handle, there was something familiar itching just under the surface of that shape.

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