Assorted Afflatuses

Watching this lovely little video last night, I had a brilliant idea.

In the her five-minute talk at TED, Alisa Miller outlines an interesting problem facing America. On the one hand, ever more Americans have an interest in what she calls, "overseas news." Opposite that, the American news media spends fewer and fewer dollars collecting and reporting that so-called "overseas news" because international coverage costs a fortune. In an era when most newspapers struggle to subsist, much less maintain vast numbers of foreign bureaux, this is understandable, but troubling nonetheless.

A little more digging produced an equally interesting cartogram from the Online Journalism Blog, which also provided a little more insight.

As far as I can tell, the amount of coverage a particular news outlet gives to a region is predicated on the language spoken there. It hardly seems surprising to learn L'Humanité, an infamously liberal, once-communist French-language daily, spends much of its time coverage France and French-speaking regions of Africa. Nor does it challenge logic to discover The Australian focuses its coverage on the United Kingdom, South Africa and India, all regions with concentrations of English-speakers.

So, I thought, why not hunt down a glut of polyglots to translate news from foreign sources and repackage the content online in some sort of editorial context? After all, such a model would allow the editors to find the right balance of global coverage, therefore no region of the world would receive a disproportionately small amount of coverage, and, by simply translating existing coverage rather than sending reporters everywhere from Sao Paulo to Shanghai, the huge cost barrier disappears.

Naturally, I failed to take intellectual property rights into account.

For, as I quickly recalled, translations of copyrighted works (i.e., the articles published by foreign news outlets) were not free to commercially exploit. One needs to obtain permission from and, in most cases, pay some kind of royalty to the rights holder.

In many cases, this extension of copyright protection makes sense. Joanne Rowling might have had less of an incentive to publish if she knew any foreign-language translations of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would not net her a penny, while some unknown Vietnamese translator made a fortune with his translation of her work.

Of course, foreign news outlets would only stand to gain from licensing English-language translations of their stories to my theoretical international news aggregation service. But even if they were intelligent and agreed to license their content, I suspect my theoretical start-up firm would be unable to afford the licensing fees.

Which more or less sinks my idea. Without content, I would have no way to amass a following of readers sufficiently large to provide the revenue to pay for the content. A Catch-22 if ever one existed.

After posting my last entry, I realized that my website looks a little off. I apologize! It seems my upgrade from Movable Type 4.01 to 4.1 changed a thing or two. I may have some time this weekend to address the problem.

I will take a moment to break from my frenetic studying to write a word or two about the Cantor Diagonal Method, which one might use to prove there cannot be a bijection between the reals and the naturals.

To this point everything in my five-day-a-week, 5-hour-a-day mathematics course, while not always intuitive, has at least been proven or presented with elegant mathematics. The Cantor Method, though, lacks that elegance. I cannot deny its usefulness, or even indispensableness, however, a proof written with his method, rather than flowing elegantly from one statement to another, relies upon a hideous morass of numbers in an equally hideous table.

I can only hope some other mathematician comes up with a more deft way to do what George managed.

Just under a month ago, I commented on John McCain's loony idea to give the Federal gasoline tax a summer vacation. Since then, the people in Hillaryland decided to support the same nonsensical idea. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, came out in strong opposition to the temporary gas tax hiatus. They cite, among many other excellent reasons, the fact that most mainstream economists do not support the gas-tax hiatus because it makes virtually no economic sense as a basis for their position.

What disturbs me most about the current debate between the Obamites and the Hillaranians, though, is the Clinton campaign's constant dismissal of economists' ideas. (See this excellent post on the Freakonomics blog.) Economists, the Clinton campaign opines, tend to be the sort of people whose incomes make the whopping $30 savings insignificant and unimportant. As the Freakonomics folks note, this is probably true, given that the average economist makes about 85% more than John Q. Employee.

If these economists were taking their positions based solely upon their individual self-interest — that is to say, if economists oppose the gas tax hiatus because their individual financial circumstances make the cost (fewer dollars in the hands of the government for infrastructure) higher than the gain ($30 that would otherwise have paid for gasoline) — then the Clinton campaign's logic might hold. But these economists believe, based upon their apolitical economic analysis, not through an analysis of their personal finances, the broad macroeconomic impact of this absurd gas tax hiatus will have a bigger negative than positive impact. So, in essence, the Clinton campaign discounts the ideas of highly-trained experts (economists) not because their actual economic analysis is somehow flawed or incorrect, but rather because the experts themselves happen to be more affluent than the average person.

That some voters go along with this logic is also worrisome. Of all the people who could make a high-impact decision, a qualified expert in the field — say an economist, in the case of tax policy — seems to me the best choice. Some voters, however, appear to believe someone less-qualified, but more amenable to throwing a backyard barbeque, is the best candidate. By that logic, it would make more sense for a law firm to take a fifth grader, rather than me, as an intern, because the fifth grader is cuter and somehow friendlier. Does this make sense? I think not.

Addendum: Perhaps my favorite politician, Michael Bloomberg, chimed in with an astonishingly insightful analysis of the gas tax holiday: "Michael Bloomberg said giving drivers a break from the gas tax is 'the dumbest thing I've heard in an awful long time.' "

Pardon the brief (and entirely unplanned) hiatus…

One need not look further than France to realize that language is fluid and malleable. While a lexicographer might scoff at a word like "obeausity" or "splendiferous," people will, if the word sticks, call someone obeause or something splendiferous. The Académie française can insist French speakers use the "correct" term for email, "courriel," but, as the French have shown, such mandates can be blissfully ignored.

There is, however, one word whose usage has spiraled out of control recently and that has absolutely no function whatsoever in improving the English language. That malicious word is none other than "oftentimes."

Frankly, I find it astounding just how much the use of oftentimes has exploded. As an extremely corse and mostly unscientific measurement of oftentimes' use, I observed that a Google search for the string, "oftentimes 2008" garnered just over 2 million hits, whereas "oftentimes 2002" produced just over 1 million. Even taking into consideration the fact that, in all likelihood, more writing was published online in 2008 than 2002, the statistic astounds. The year 2008 has not even hit the halfway point in its march to December 31.

Of course, just because more people use a word does not necessarily mean it has no linguistic value. In most cases, a words' increased usage would tend to indicate it had more, not less value, as I implied. But, from my perspective, the word "oftentimes" has, in and of itself, no linguistic merit.

Oftentimes and its linguistic parent, often, have the exact same meaning: frequently. In fact, my dictionary defines oftentimes as often. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to introduce an extra syllable if it adds no extra depth or meaning. It serves only to add extra and entirely superfluous weight to a sentence.

I suspect people use oftentimes for the same reason they employ utilize, rather than use: to sound academic, pretentious and authoritative. It is somewhat ironic, then, to learn that utilize and oftentimes actually have newer etymologies than their more "formal" counterparts. Use comes from the Old French verb user, whereas utilize comes from the much younger French verb, utiliser, which, as it happens is still used today. Often has its roots in Middle English, a derivative of oft, while the painfully long oftentimes comes from what my dictionary calls, "late Middle English," making it at least a few years younger its parent. So much for deriving authority from the ancients.

Even Thomas Jefferson, not someone with a reputation for penning concise or straightforward prose, kept his writing free of oftentimes' infectious presence. A search of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive turned up exactly zero documents with the string "oftentimes." (Often, by contrast produced 21.) If Jefferson managed to live without that extra pretentious syllable, the rest of us can too.