Is in the Eating

I’m not sure when exactly I started hearing the words, “The proof is in the pudding”, but I don’t think it was as far back as twenty years ago. Obviously a corruption of the old saying, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”, the words “The proof is in the pudding” are frequently used despite making no sense. They also make my teeth grit.

The saying, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” goes back to the days when the word “proof” meant “test”. The test of the pudding is in the eating. No matter how pretty it looks, or who made it, or how rich the ingredients are, if it doesn’t taste good, it’s not a good pudding. So by extension, the test of anything is how it performs its given function.

I say that the words “The proof is in the pudding” make no sense, but that is not strictly true. They obviously make sense to the people who use the phrase, and even I know what they mean. If you parse the sentence “The proof is in the pudding”, then it makes no sense. What pudding, where, has this mysterious proof? How would it have got in there? And why pudding, for Heaven’s sake, even if we grant that the usage is the British pudding, what we here in the U.S. call dessert, and not some form of blancmange. True, if you made some kind of brandy sauce for the pudding, the proof would be on the pudding, but that’s a different kind of proof. The logical way to shorten the old saying would be to take out the words “of the pudding” and say “The proof is in the eating”, but I’m sure if you did that, the response you would get is “Huh?”

No, I think the words “The proof is in the pudding” function as what the late Laura Lee (a speech pathologist and professor at Northwestern University) would call a “superword”. Dr. Lee derived a method of scoring syntax development in children, and noted that children who spoke at the word and phrase level would sometimes use sentences like “I don’t wanna”, or “I can’t [do that].” Her explanation was that children learned these sentences as “superwords” even before they had the ability to construct sentences using the independent elements. They knew what the sentences meant, but not how the individual words combined to construct that meaning. 

So it makes sense to me that a nonsensical sentence can function just as well as a superword, and I do indeed know what people mean when they say “The proof is in the pudding”.

I wish I had the talent to write books though. I’d love to write a mystery story in which a chef is murdered while preparing the final course on Chopped - Great Britain. The chef would naturally be in the full sight of the judges and audience when zie has a seizure and dies. At first it is taken as death by natural causes, but one of the judges is an amateur sleuth and finally unmasks the killer.

It turns out the proof is in the pudding.

Kitty Cat

“Catercorner” (also written “cater-corner”) is one of those words that spawns a lot of variants. It originated in the mid-19th century from the word “cater”, meaning the four on dice, derived in turn from the French “quatre”. It means “diagonally opposite”, and is quite a useful word.

It is pronounced “catty corner”, and that pronunciation has led to the mistaken association with the animal, and that of course has led to the variant “kitty corner”. In fact, if you look up “catercorner” on merrian-webster.com, it defines “catercorner”/"cater-corner" as a variant of “kitty-corner”, even though it then goes on to give the derivation as “alteration of cater-corner, from obsolete cater four + corner”.

The English language (and probably others as well), has a number of consonant sounds that are voiced and voiceless cognates: that is, sounds that are produced the same except that one of the pair is made using the vocal chords and the other is not. The sounds of “t” and “d” are cognates. Almost all speakers, at least here in the U.S., replace each of those sounds in the middle of a word with something called an “r-tap”. (Why it is called that, I do not know.) The word pairs “latter”/“ladder”, “mettle”/“meddle”, “matter”/ "madder” tend to sound alike and need to be distinguished by context. It’s quite common for phonetic spellers, therefore, not to know whether to spell an unfamiliar word with a “d” or a “t”. (Think of how often you see “congradulations” written for “congratulations”, or “congrads” for “congrats”.)

So we not only have “catty corner” and its sister “kitty corner”; we also have “caddy corner” and “kiddy corner”. Which one you say or write often has to do with where you grew up, but it could just depend on which variant your family uses. I grew up with “catty corner” and write “catercorner”, but a neighbor and close friend of my mom’s used “kitty corner”. They each grew up in different places.

So if you were wondering which version is correct, apparently one can use “catty-corner” or “kitty-corner” in place of “cater-corner” with propriety, but leave the caddies and the kiddies out of it, unless  the caddy is standing catercorner from your kiddy on the putting green, yelling at him not to touch the ball.

Brave

Brave was my husband’s choice of movie to see. “You do know that’s a Disney cartoon?” I asked. Yes, he knew, but wanted to see it anyway. I don’t mind watching Disney cartoons, either, although I was more prone to do so back when I worked with children and it was useful to know what they were watching.

The earliest showing we could get to was at 12:05. It turned out to be the 3D version, which is more expensive than the regular 2D version, but that wasn’t showing until 2:20. “What do you want to do?” asked hubby. I had actually never seen a 3D movie in a theater, other than the Muppet movie at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios, so I was okay with the 3D version. Besides, he was paying. (I paid for lunch.)

We had a few moments of buyer’s remorse during the previews. Everything looked slightly blurry with the glasses on and even blurrier with them off. Fortunately, the projectionist got the focus right in time for the short animation, La Luna, which preceded the main movie. La Luna was charming, and did an amazingly good job of characterization even though none of the three characters spoke a word. 

Brave was also delightful. Tomboy Merida with her wild hair left me almost hearing my mother’s voice, “Get that hair out of your face!” I hadn’t read much about it at all before seeing it so the main plot point came as a surprise. From that point on, the movie was pretty predictable and the message trite, but I say this from the point of view of a 65 year old who has seen the original release of Disney movies like Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp as well as early re-releases of Cinderella, Snow White, and Bambi. Walt and I go back a long way. For the film’s target audience, the message that you can’t change your fate by changing another person is fresh and new and worth repeating.

Besides, the characters are delightful, the animation is spectacular, and the lack of a handsome prince is a refreshing change. 

One note about the 3D. As my husband noted, for a lot of the movie it didn’t make a difference. It was like looking at a 2D movie with occasional 3D interpolations.  You might prefer to save the extra money for popcorn.

Down By the Water

Every year on Independence Day, there’s a big fireworks display down on the river*. Literally down on the river, since the fireworks are set off from barges near the U.S.S. Kidd. The fireworks are at 9 PM, but there’s a day long festival with bands, activities for children, food vendors, and whatever else organizers can come up with.

July 4, 2008

This year we had a mock air raid on the Kidd staged by World War II vintage airplanes. The planes put on quite a show, complete with wing waves and a flyover in the missing man formation. A Navy cadet group manned the guns on the Kidd.

I missed the Baton Rouge Concert Band this year. Years ago, they held Independence Day concerts on the steps of the State Capitol Building. When Baton Rouge first got the U.S.S. Kidd, the band moved its concert to the area near the Kidd. They played their signature piece, The 1812 Overture, using the carillon from the First Baptist Church and the guns from the Kidd for the cannons. 

U.S.S. Kidd

I hope that if you haven’t so far, you someday get to hear The 1812 Overture played using a real carillon and real cannons, or the equivalent (not firing live ammo, of course). There is nothing to compare.

Since then, the band had played its concerts on a stage on the levee near the Kidd, but this year they went back to the State Capitol. We could have done both, but it would have meant a long walk.

The fireworks were accompanied by a sound track that included Celine Dion singing God Bless America. Nobody should ever be allowed to sing God Bless America except Kate Smith. Especially not Celine Dion, but really, nobody else. I’m serious about this. Yes, I know Kate Smith is dead, but there is You Tube. Make do.

*What do you mean “what river”? The Mississippi River, of course. Is there another one?

This Is Your Last Chance

Every week, or even more often, I get the same phone call. It’s a robocall telling me that this is my last chance to get a more favorable rate on my credit card. You would think that a last chance would come about only once, instead of for weeks on end, but in the word of telemarketing, that is not so. It’s like particle physics, completely counterintuitive. 

I used to get a version of this call that allowed me to push the number 3 if I wanted to discontinue future calls (a strange option given that this is already supposed to be my last call), but now the only option I get is to talk to a live operator. I have toyed with the idea of connecting to the live operator and asking to be taken off their call list, but I worked as a telemarketer once, between my senior year and the start of college, so I try not to make their lives hard. 

Yes, before you ask, my number is on the Do Not Call list. It doesn’t seem to help. Twice in the past I mailed in a request to that address you send to to get your name taken off junk mail lists and I swear both times my junk mail increased. That may have been pure coincidence, but I’m not going to risk it again, or the telemarket equivalent.

Today I got a variation of the "this is your last chance" credit card offer. To take advantage of it, I would have to have at least $3,000 in total on credit cards and at least one card in good standing. I have zero dollars on my credit card at the moment and my husband has the tickets for an upcoming trip but that’s it. I’m really not their target market.

What worries me is that there must be people out there who respond to these calls, otherwise the companies that use them wouldn’t be doing it. The scare tactics (this is your last chance), misleading wording (making it seem like there is a problem with a card you already have rather than an attempt to sell you a new one) and sheer relentlessness work on somebody, and probably the somebody who can least afford to fall for these tricks.

Some people have no shame.

What You Pray For

I’m not the only menace to society I know. The good people of St. Anonymous have done their own share of trouble making, at least as far as my life is concerned.

It started years ago when my son was in his teens. I remember a gloomy week when a friend of my husband’s and mine died abruptly of a ruptured aneurysm in her bowel. While at her funeral, we heard that another mutual friend had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The next day, I developed a sinus infection, which must be why my son decided not to bother me with the news that he had been given his first traffic ticket, leaving me to find it in his room when I put away laundry. I was surprised because up until then I was sure the only way my old car could have reached that speed is if you had hoisted it up to the top of the State Capitol Building and dropped it.

The day after that I received a letter from the then pastor of St. Anonymous, informing me that during the week he had “lifted up [our] family in prayer.” When I next saw him, I told him what had happened that week and suggested that next time he felt the urge to lift my family up in prayer, he could just put us right back down on whatever dusty little shelf he found us on and pick on someone else instead. “That’s funny,” he said. “Usually when I tell people I’ve been praying for them, they tell me good things have happened to them that week.”

Pastor R left in a swirl of rumors, to be replaced by Pastor Steve and then Pastor Larry. Pastor Larry’s habit was to select a prayer family of the week for the whole church to pray for. Sure enough, the time came when our family was selected. I grumbled to my friends at work about how unlucky I had been the last time anyone at St. Nonny’s decided to pray for me. “It sounds like it’s even unluckier to be one of your friends,” my friend E observed.

So that week, the acid reflux that had been gone for a whole year returned. Our new foreign exchange student, Erick, decided he hated us on sight and wanted to go home. And E’s car air conditioner, which she had just spent $800 fixing, broke the second it was out of warrantee. 

It gets worse. A few weeks later, the church prayed for all the teachers at the start of the school year. Hurricane Katrina hit, schools were closed for two weeks and when they reopened, it was with an influx of students from New Orleans whose records had mostly been lost.

Okay, once again, I understand none of this happened because of the prayers. I am well aware of the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. True, back when Pastor R was praying for us, I didn’t know about it until after all the sad events had occurred, but it’s unlikely I would have remembered most of them by now, let alone that they had occurred the same week, if it hadn’t been for the coincidence of that being the week R was praying for me. But when we were prayer family of the week, I knew about it in advance and was on the lookout for bad stuff.

And as anyone at St. Nonny’s would be happy to point out, we always pray for teachers at the beginning of the school year and rarely get hurricanes as a result.

So yes, what we have here is a chain of coincidence amplified by confirmation bias. I won’t argue about that.

What if things had been different, however? What if the first friend had had a stroke instead and been rushed to the hospital in enough time for treatment to give her a full recovery? What if the second friend had been given news that the biopsy showed that the lump in her breast was not cancer, but a harmless cyst? What if my son had noticed the speedometer and slowed down? (Okay, that one would have required divine intervention.) What if Erick had woke up one morning and said, “I think I was just homesick. I’m happy to be here”? What if  Katrina had taken a turn to the northeast as Camille did in 1969 and left New Orleans alone?

I suspect then no one but cranky Gnu Atheists would blame me for chalking all those events up to the power of prayer. Pastor R would have had another notch in his belt (not of the sort that got him kicked out). We would still have a chain of faulty logic based on post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning, plus confirmation bias, not to mention a willingness to ignore all the people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who would have been hit even harder by Katrina. Yet it would have been socially acceptable to indulge in all that bad thinking.

That bothers me. I’d like to think that I am clear headed enough not to be tempted into fallacious reasoning by peer pressure, but I’m not that special. I’m well aware of all the times I wake up determined to eat healthy food, only to catch a glimpse of a print or TV ad for junk food that sends me scuttling off for cookies. I’m aware of how often I buy a shirt or skirt or pants I don’t actually need because of how it looked on the tall, skinny twenty-something model when I, although a nice looking old broad with good legs, am none of those things.

I know I can be had.

So if I seem to be on the lookout for bad things to happen anytime the St. Anonymous prayer warriors are looking for ammo, I have a good reason. Reason.

A Cure for Bad Analogies

‘What if I had the cure for cancer?” DP, the evangelizing history teacher, muses in the video In God We Teach, shown in the previous post. He goes on to ask rhetorically if he should keep it in a closet in case he ever needs it, or share it with others. The point he is trying to make, of course, is that he has knowledge as valuable as the cure for cancer would be, and so the only ethical thing to do is to share it.

So what is the problem, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t, because maybe you spot it as quickly as other people, myself included, have.) 

Think about what has to happen for DP to have the cure for cancer. He has to have the idea for something that could conceivably cure cancer. Once he has the idea, he can’t just spring it on the world and say, “I have the cure for cancer!” He has to test it, to be sure that it is in fact the cure for cancer. He has to test it first on animals and then on people, using double blind trials of sufficient sample size to be certain that his cure 1) kills cancer cells and 2) doesn’t kill patients in the process of killing the patients' cancers. He has to get FDA approval of his drug as a cancer cure. Unless he does, he can't call it a cancer cure. It’s an idea for a cancer cure, or a treatment that is in the experimental stages, or an old herbal remedy passed along to him by a shaman in a dream (in which case, keeping it hidden in a cupboard somewhere is the ethical thing to do, IMO), but it’s not the cure for cancer yet. That’s how science works.

All this costs money, a lot of it. DP will in all likelihood have to get this money through grants. I doubt very much that the people giving DP large grants to research his cure for cancer are going to give DP exclusive rights to patent and market it when he’s done. Tucking it away in a cupboard for his use alone is not going to be an option.

But let’s say that DP is a wealthy mad scientist who has the resources to carry on all the research and testing on this drug by himself. He still cannot legally test it on people without the approval of an Institutional Review Board. That means by the time he has established that this is indeed a cure for cancer, the secret is out. If he announces that he is not releasing the cure or the formula so that others can manufacture the cure, people will be begging him to change his mind. 

So let’s get back to the point of the analogy - if DP has knowledge as valuable as the cure for cancer would be, should he share it? Well, yes, if people are begging him for it, like they would be for the proven cure posited in the mad scientist scenario above. But DP was being accused of evangelizing to a captive audience of students in a public school history class, so not the same thing. No one ever said he couldn’t preach to the youth at his church where he is youth pastor.

What if DP has found the cure for cancer and decides not to hoard it all for himself? First of all, he cannot administer it to anyone. Even if it gets FDA approval, it’s not going to be sold over the counter at Walgreen’s under “Cancer Cures, for Reals”. It needs to be prescribed by a doctor, preferably an oncologist.

Second of all, what if an oncologist prescribes it for a patients and the patient says, “Nuh, uh. I’ve read up on the side effects and there’s no way I’m going to take that stuff” or “I’ve decided to try diet and herbal therapy instead” or “I’m 93 years old and you can’t keep me alive forever”? Unless it can be established that the patient is not competent to decide, the patient does not get the treatment. Even if it is The Best Stuff Ever, Proven to Cure Cancer in Five Minutes, the patient does not get the treatment.

None of this means I think DP's analogy is completely worthless. I think if he thought it through, he’d learn something about why he was being criticized for promoting his religious views in class. 

Which brings up a question for me. If I find the cure for lack of self awareness, should I keep it in a cupboard for myself, or share it? I know I need it, but I’m not the only one.