"A Silicon Valley recycling plant is looking for an unidentified woman who dropped off a rare Apple 1 computer to give her a paycheck of $100,000."

$100,000 is half of the $200,000 that the computer sold for as a collector's item. The recycling place has a policy that it splits all proceeds with the donor (and now they have to find her).

When she dropped it off she said "I want to get rid of this stuff and clean up my garage." Asked "Do you need a tax receipt?," she said, "No, I don't need anything."

"New computer-driven research suggests that Supreme Court justices are getting grumpier, according to a new study by scholars at Dartmouth and the University of Virginia."

"This analysis was based on the percentage of positive words versus negative words. In addition, modern justices tend to produce more words and have a lower grade level than their predecessors."

Oh, jeez. Here we go again: If you use more periods and fewer semicolons, the computer will conclude that you are writing at a lower grade level. That's garbage. See how I just wrote a sentence on a dramatically lower grade level than the previous sentence? "Computer-driven" doesn't mean sophisticated. It just means that lots of data was crunched. Things that could be counted and that the researchers wanted to count were counted on a grand scale.

The authors included 107 justices through 2008 and ranked them based on negative words (�two-faced,� �problematic�) and positive words (�adventurous,� �pre-eminent�). The high court�s first chief justice, John Jay, ranked number one with a score of 1.55 percent friendliness rating. Numbers 103 through 106 are current members of the court, including Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito. Antonin Scalia earned the number 98 spot with a score of -0.69 percent friendliness.

Quite aside from whether we should assess a judge's friendliness/grumpiness based on which words he puts in the formal justification of his legal decision that we call an opinion, who determined which words should count as positive and which as negative? Why is "adventurous" considered positive � especially as you look at material that was written over a period of 200+ years? Some of the older meanings of the word are negative: "Full of risk or peril; hazardous, perilous, dangerous... Prone to incur risk; excessively venturesome; rashly daring" (OED). If a justice in 1800 called an argument "adventurous," was he saying something nice?

I suspect that negative words proliferate when justices indulge in writing long dissenting opinions. That doesn't necessarily mean they are grumpy or unfriendly. It might have more to do with feeling free to express oneself in somewhat emotive language, and that may have become more the style as the years wore on. If we feel free to express emotion, we give the language analysts more emotive words to count, and then they can calculate a ratio of positive to negative. But how can we compare that to what was written long ago, when judges may have favored concealed or processed emotion? There will not only be less to count but also a kind of caginess and subtle sarcasm and irony that the computer can't recognize. To take an example from a famous old case, what would a computer do with "the judges of the State courts are, and always will be, of as much learning, integrity, and wisdom as those of the courts of the United States (which we very cheerfully admit)"?  "Cheerfully" is such a positive word, but, in context, it's no, and there's certainly no reason to think that the Justice who wrote it was exuding any sort of friendliness.

But this is the kind of study that gets reported, the kind of is-Scalia-mean stuff the public loves.

"It was premeditated, oh, definitely."

"It was glorious. Angels sung on high.... I reached critical mass."

"I grew up with: midcentury furniture, and I still get a sense of rightness from living with it."

"I don�t think it�s only because of a generational memory; 60 years later, some of these objects still seem unsurpassed. I have two chairs designed by Gio Ponti the year I was born [1952], which are really perfect."

Said the artist David Salle, responding to a prompt (in bold face) from The Wall Street Journal, which includes pictures of various things including a chair, but not the Gio Ponti chair he declared perfect. I'm going to guess � consider the possibilities � it's this:



Salle also praises the book �Several Short Sentences About Writing,� by Verlyn Klinkenborg, which (I see) says things like:

Why short sentences? They'll sound strange for a while until you can hear what they're capable of. But they carry you back to a prose you can control...

Dot dot dot because that sentence actually turns out to be long and I'm transcribing and don't want to transcribe it all. Do you need to learn to control your prose? Did you forget about the usefulness of short sentences? Do you need a book to remind you?

Salle also has this:

A transformative technology can: change how you hail a cab, but I�m not sure it changes the structure of things that are really important to me. When I was in art school, the first portable black-and-white video cameras were introduced and quickly became part of the artist�s tool kit. There was a lot of talk then about how they would fundamentally transform art. And of course they did no such thing.

When I was in art school, circa 1970, we were invited to become entranced with a dot matrix printer that could only print letters and numbers but which could produce a crude image of, say, a face because of the way various letters and numbers read as darker or lighter from a distance. Is this where we were going?

"When standardized tests are shared nationwide � as they now are, under the Common Core system that's been adopted in 46 states..."

"... cheating suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. Especially since teenagers now share just about everything on social media."

Computers are undermining efforts to standardize children. That's a turnabout. You'll have to write exams that can't be cheated on. That's hard to do!

"Clean Reader � an e-reader app designed to ferret out, and block, profanity in novels and nonfiction..."

Anything wrong with that?

Blogger � and romance novel aficionado � Jennifer Porter has drawn up a rundown of the common replacements for words the app deems profanity. Among some of the noteworthies: from "whore" to "hussy," from "badass" to "tough" and, somewhat confusingly, from "vagina" to "bottom."

ADDED: "Chaucer used 'Belle Chose' (Pretty Thing) and 'Quondam' (Whatever) in The Canterbury Tales."

"The answer to #3 is #3."

"So" is the new "well."

So, I wanted to write a post with that title after reaching my tipping point listening to 2 things yesterday: 1. Jeb Bush doing a Q&A at CPAC and beginning nearly every answer with "So...," and 2. The Supreme Court oral argument in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, with the lawyer for the government repeatedly beginning his answers with "So..." (and "So, Your Honor").

So, having conceived of that title for a blog post on a topic that has been stewing on the back burner of my mind, I googled those words and found them in a 2010 essay by Anand Giridharadas (in the NYT) called "Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead":

�So� may be the new �well,� �um,� �oh� and �like.� No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight....

One can dredge up ancient instances of �so� as a sentence starter. In his 14th-century poem �Troilus and Criseyde,� Chaucer launched a verse with, �So on a day he leyde him doun to slepe. ...� But for most of its life, �so� has principally been a conjunction, an intensifier and an adverb.

What is new is its status as the favored introduction to thoughts, its encroachment on the territory of �well,� �oh,� �um� and their ilk.

Giridharadas traces the tic to 1990s-era Silicon Valley, where software-oriented minds visualize  "conversation as a logical, unidirectional process � if this, then that."

This logical tinge to �so� has followed it out of software. Compared to �well� and �um,� starting a sentence with �so� uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Whereas �well� vacillates, �so� declaims....

Too phallocratic? Well... I'm saying "well" like a person of the 80s... consider the theory of the linguist Galina Bolden, who's done scholarly writing on the topic of "so":

She believes that �so� is also about the culture of empathy that is gaining steam as the world embraces the increasing complexity of human backgrounds and geographies. 

To begin a sentence with �oh,� she said in an e-mail message, is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with �so,� she said, is to signal that one�s coming words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.

The ascendancy of �so,� Dr. Bolden said, �suggests that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.�

And then there's Michael Erard, author of "Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean":

The rise of �so,� he said via e-mail, is �another symptom that our communication and conversational lives are chopped up and discontinuous in actual fact, but that we try in several ways to sew them together � or �so� them together, as it were � in order to create a continuous experience.�

So it is written...