01/30/07
An unsuccessful ironist -
Categories: Natural History and the Sciences, Language -
twv
@ 06:02:21 pm
Edmund Burke wrote a book in his youth, A Vindication of Natural Society, that later came to embarrass him. He said that this treatise on anarchism was irony.
Later anarchists never quite believed him, and they printed the book and praised its insights. They regarded the mature Burke as a traitor to his youthful good ideas.
Many readers have never been quite sure whether Burke changed his mind or was, from the beginning, an ironist.
But I know what it feels like to be an unsuccessful ironist. Sometimes I write what I intend to be an ironic piece, and find that it is taken utterly earnestly. Does this make me a poor writer or the reader a poor reader? Probably it depends. In the case of Lem Bingley, I want to believe the latter, but it's almost certainly a case of the former.
Years ago I came across a scientific term, and wrote about it on Instead of a Blog, in a piece entitled The Good Word: Deconvolve?
Mr. Bingley used the word on his blog, recently, and apparently a reader excoriated him, using my blog as back-up. Later, in a column, the author writes that I had asserted that scientists arrogantly use the word deconvolve when they mean untangle or unscramble.
I came across this and was puzzled. The definitional talk I remembered. But arrogance? I saw the word as jargon, and then wrote a short essay containing what I thought was a pretty obvious clue to its irony. (I devoted most of my attention to the evolution of Herbert Spencer's terminology for evolution. It turned into a flight of fancy, about the evolution of deconvolve in a Spencerian direction, not its current meaning. And then I used the very word in the course of not recommending its use.)
I guess I was wrong. As an ironist, I failed. One of these days I'll have to go to the Instead of the Blog article and add a cautionary note.
I guess my readers couldn't see my odd subtext: I love the word. I've used it since. I've even learned to use deconvolve with some precision! (One website puts it this way: In simplest terms, convolution is the smearing of a data set by a given instrument response function. Deconvolution is the procedure of undoing that smearing in an effort to see what the data would look like had the instrument perfectly rendered it.
) Ah, the perils of the English language.
The context for all this is pretty clear. Scientists who use words that are technical confuse non-scientific readers. This leads to all sorts of vexation. In my goofy little essay (most of my old Good Word
essays were intended to be a bit goofy), I wrote: So when Brown and Trujillo write that they could deconvolve the data, they might also have written that they could unroll, or (better yet) untangle, their data.
They would have gotten their idea across to non-scientists, yes. And had they written, once, the definition of the term in their study, they surely would have taught non-scientists. They could have written, for example, that the data, unscrambled from noise introduced by our instruments -- in a word, deconvolved -- etc.
and been quite clear.
But modern scientists do not write for laymen, usually. This is not the 19th century. This is the age of specialization (which is one reason I brought up Spencer; it was not an irrelevant bit of playfulness on my part; or so I thought.) Besides, when you have a precise word, run with it. In my original squib, I wrote But with deconvolve available, why use anything so common as untangle?
Bingley rightly notes: for precision. I would add: for the sheer joy of it.
I deal with this in economics all the time. Economists use terms with precision (well, most of the time), and non-economists take those terms and make of them very different meanings. (When I helped edit a magazine, I was often given the technical papers to help put into more readable English. This led to many editorial squabbles, and I often unsuccessfully lobbied to include original jargon.) This divorce between the professional and the non-professional is not limited to economics, of course. I bet every scientist has dealt with it. I'm not sure every scientist is prepared to deal with it, though.
I remember watching Bart Kosko on Politically Incorrect. Kosko was pushing fuzzy thinking
(fuzzy logic) at the time. He meant something very precise by it. And he had a good point, about vague sets, fuzzy sets . . . well, good ol' shades of gray.
But the other participants of that episode Bill Maher's tough-talking issues program used the term in a standard pejorative way. And used it repeatedly. You could almost see Bart writhing in his chair.
Is it a coincidence that Bart's current book is about Noise? (His discussion of convolution is on page 121.)
Failing at irony is something I will have to live with. The only thing that bothers me about Mr. Bingley's criticism of my squib (other than discovering that I'm a source for stupidity, no small thing) is one word he chose: arrogantly.
It's not arrogance I see in the desire for jargon. It's not a sense of superiority (though that may come into it) but a need for separateness.
(To use a very clunky word.) An economist must separate his word-sets from others, and so uses distinct meanings for common words, and those words become jargon. A linguist does the same thing, as do engineers and what-have-you.
And there is the pleasure in a good, juicy word. Deconvolve is one. It has a distinct ring to it. It conjures up associations that (not-quite-right) alternatives such as untangle
and unscramble
— or, perhaps better yet, some readily understandable coinages, such as de-noise
or noise-compensate
— do not. And it does have a distinct meaning.
It strikes me, now, that irony itself is akin to convolution, as is delphic speech. It is supposed to be a beautiful noise, skewing the truth but allowing the reader to correct for it.
But there is an esoteric/exoteric level to the very process, and as contexts change (such as the rise of anarchism for Burke, the absence of my original Good Word page history, for me, perhaps) the ability to correct for irony goes.
That is, irony cannot always be accurately deconvolved. (Or should I just say decoded
?)
Too bad.
This is especially the case if the irony was not indicated clearly enough in the beginning.
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