"Ever wished you could hear the Wonkbloggers just…talking?"

Mmmm. 

No.

I wish I could unhear you just... talking?

Quit talking like that!

What the hell is going on in our culture?

Speaking of being called to a higher law and speaking of speaking....

In the previous post, we're talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand and what he said out loud, in the New Testament story where the scribes and Pharisees present Jesus with the question of what to do with a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. In the Gospel text, we're told Jesus that wrote on the ground, but not what he wrote, and we're told that he subsequently spoke and said "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

I'm putting up a separate post because I found the scene that sydney said he loved in the movie "The King of Kings." Made in 1927, it's a silent movie, so no one is saying anything out loud. We see what Jesus says written out on the intertitles, and we also see what he writes in the sand.



Beautiful filmmaking, particularly as the sand-words, not written in Roman letters, transform into our English words, naming the sins that the men in the crowd realize they've committed, and that's why they all turn and walk away.

That's not an accurate depiction of what happens in the biblical text though. The movie shows a mob on the verge of stoning the woman and Jesus intervenes and announces his rule about casting the first stone. Only thereafter, does he write the names of the sins in the sand. But in the Bible story, there is no angry mob with stones in hand. There are scribes and Pharisees demanding that Jesus deliver a legal opinion. Jesus bends down and writes on the ground instead of answering the question.  Only after they persist does he stand up and pronounce his new rule, which causes the scribes and Pharisees to walk away — "beginning with the older ones." The movie would have you see the members of the mob acknowledging their sins and their consequent lack of qualification to cast the first stone. But the text has intellectuals trying to box Jesus in on a question of law, and Jesus getting the better of a conversation he didn't want to have in the first place.

It's not surprising that a movie plays up the visible drama, and it's also not surprising that when I — a law professor — read the text, I see something akin to a law school class. The professors try to stump the student and the student transcends their tricky game. To me, the part where Jesus bends over and writes in the sand is like what happens in a law school class when the lawprof poses a difficult hypothetical and the students bend their heads down and go through motions of writing. They don't want to answer. It's not that they're writing something magically revelatory and startling. But if the lawprof keeps pushing and calls on someone, an answer will be spoken out loud.

I guess the law-professorly interpretation of the text isn't terribly cinematic. It's no wonder the movies present an angry mob with stones in hand and Jesus miraculously knowing and changing the hearts of the sinners. (And the adulteress is an actress evincing exactly the form of sexiness that was fashionable in the year the movie was made. I love the eyeliner!)

But to me the lawprof interpretation is thrilling and dramatic. The professors think they've got the upper hand. They know the legal text and it's tough. And then the brilliant student who will soon be the greatest professor of all gets on top of the dialogue and says something they must accept as correct: If you're going to have strict rules and severe mechanisms of enforcement, you must apply them equally to everyone. This is the structural safeguard of equal protection of the laws that is the necessary component of a democratic system. If there can't be exceptions and special treatment for preferred people, legislatures will resist imposing harsh rules and painful punishments.

In this context, let me give you my favorite Justice Scalia quote, which happens to include one of the key words of Christianity: "Our salvation is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones what they impose on you and me."

What did Jesus write in the sand? (Or: things I should have learned in church that I figured out from the Althouse comments.)

Yesterday, when many blogs were talking about the Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to stone a person who had committed adultery, I added the New Testament story, from John 8, in which Jesus said: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." Jesus had just been teaching some people, and the scribes and the Pharisees, looking for a way to trip him up — they wanted to bring charges against him — present Jesus with a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery and remind him that the Law of Moses commanded that she should be stoned. "So what do you say?" Instead of answering, Jesus bends over and writes in the dirt. They keep pushing for an answer, and it's only then that he says: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

I didn't include the next few sentences, but the story was very familiar. After Jesus makes his brilliant remark — which finds a new way into the question — the crowd disperses and Jesus tells the woman to "go and... sin no more."

Some of the commenters focused on what it was that Jesus wrote on the ground. I'd always assumed that what Jesus was writing was irrelevant and that he was simply gesturing I'm not going to talk to you. He invoked his right to remain silent, as we say in the United States of America. He knew whatever he said would be used against him. Later, when he arrives at the New Testament doctrine — the higher law — he speaks up and articulates it pithily. He doesn't write it. Jesus isn't the put-it-in-writing type. The scribes are the bad guys here, and he's about talking to the people. The Word is spoken. (It's only written down later.)

But, reading the comments, I see interest in the subject of what Jesus wrote.

Sydney says: "In the movie The King of Kings, each accuser comes up to Jesus and sees written in the dirt his own sin, and turns and walks away. I love that scene." Is that the standard theory of what Jesus wrote?

And Chip Ahoy, linking here, says: "But what did he write in the sand?" At the link, we get added details from The Urantia Book (which I'd never heard of). There, the idea is that Jesus knew the woman's husband was a "troublemaker" and "perceived" that he'd forced the woman into prostitution and that the husband was now cooperating with the Pharisees to get Jesus to say something that could be used to arrest him. In this version of the story, Jesus doesn't just bend over and write in the dirt right where he is. He walks over to the troublemaker husband and writes something in front of him that makes him rush off. Jesus comes back to his original place and writes on the ground again, and the men, "one by one," leave. Last to go, is "the woman's companion in evil," who gets his own special message written in the dirt.

Kentuckyliz gives us the Old Testament quotes (the law of Moses, which is what the Pharisees threw at Jesus to trip him up):

Deuteronomy 22:22 "If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die."

Leviticus 20:10 "If a man commits adultery with another man's wife — with the wife of his neighbor — both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death."

Kentuckyliz adds:

What's interesting about the Jesus scene, is that the law had become misogynistic in practice. The man is not being stoned according to the mandates of the law. In fact, I suspect he was standing in the crowd holding a stone.

Note that even in the extremely concise story told in John 8, we hear that the woman was "caught in the act." Whether he was in the crowd or not, the adulterer was known. Why aren't the authorities proposing to stone both the man and the woman? Kentuckyliz doesn't refer to what Jesus wrote in the sand, but this made me imagine that Jesus wrote "the man and the woman." And if the woman was a prostitute, all of the men who had ever slept with her would deserve stoning too.

In this scenario, Jesus acknowledges the written law of Moses by writing it. That's the Old Testament, which Jesus won't reject, even as his enemies are trying to lure him into rejecting it. He's showing that he knows the law, and in very few words, he's made it obvious to the legal experts that they are getting the law wrong and making them see their own faint-heartedness about equal justice, applying the strict law strictly on its written terms and to everyone. Then Jesus speaks, and the spoken word is the New Testament, calling us to a higher place, above the strict rules, under which we are all sinners. The New Testament demands that we look at our own sins. Go and sin no more.

That ought to keep you busy for the rest of your life. Now, leave other people alone.

ADDED: A second post includes the "King of Kings" clip and more.

Joe Lieberman on censoring pop culture and reporting "troublesome" young people.

On "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace got Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman talking about the Sandy Hook massacre, specifically the question of violence in video games, movies and TV. Lieberman said violence in popular culture "does cause vulnerable young men, particularly, to be more violent," and "We’ve got to ask the entertainment industry, what are you going to do to try to tone that down."

Wallace asked whether this would be voluntary, and Lieberman said:

In our society we try to do it voluntarily. But I think we’ve come to a point where we have to say, if not, maybe there are some things we can do to tone it down.

So, in other words, not voluntary! Having let his authoritarian side show, Lieberman shifts to talking about "the mental health system" and says:

I think we really have got to ask ourselves, first, off, this is like the slogan that we use in Homeland Security -- see something, say something.

See something... like what?

We’ve got to ask parents, friends, school officials, if you see a child, a young person, that really looks like they are potentially... real troublesome, get them mental health help and we have to ask ourselves, as a society, is there enough mental health help available for these kids?

Troublesome! He should have said troubled, if he meant to talk about mental illness, and he paused before he said the word. A fascinating slip. Troubling!

"Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd?"

"Listen to your own speech. Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references?" 

What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style?

The voice of Gumby and Speedy Alka-Seltzer, Dick Beals...

... dead at age 85.

“I’m the voice of little babies to 15-year-olds,” Mr. Beals told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. “In cartoons, I have also been the voice of all kinds of animals — parrots, chipmunks, birds, rabbits, you name it.”...

In commercials, he was a Campbell Soup kid, and he sang, “Oh, I’d love to be an Oscar Meyer wiener.”.

“Once directors found there was a college graduate who could do children’s voices, they didn’t have to call those nutty mothers anymore and ask them to get Junior to do the part,” Mr. Beals told The Lansing State Journal in Michigan in 2007. “I could do any voice, boy or girl.”

"In A World Where..."

"... One Teen's Voice Is An Internet Hit."

"Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun... that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters... away."

"... At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling."

The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions.  Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations....

Admit it: You just thought of somebody you know. Oh, it's chilling all right. And yet....

At a political rally, an audience member could completely lock down Santorum, Romney, Paul, or Obama from speaking. On the flip side, a totalitarian state could point the speech jammers at the audience to shut them up. Likewise, when a celebrity or public figure appears on a live TV show, his contract could read “the audience must be silenced with speech jammers.”

Once you silence the crowd, what do you want them for?
Why go out at all? Now, as you know, I actually think the President should never leave the White House. But if they're not going to take my advice, and they decide to go and do the big cult-of-personality thing, they're going to want to hear that crowd noise. But the speech jammer might be laser-focused on an individual heckler. It's a much nicer image — as long as we're aiming guns — than don't tase me, bro.

Then there’s Harrison Bergeron, one of my favorite short stories by Kurt Vonnegut.

Ha. I thought of Harrison Bergeron too. (If you want to read it, it's in "Welcome to the Monkey House."

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Read the whole thing! Or hang out here and talk about speech jammers and other ways we might create a better, fairer world.

"Pink noise" — a remedy for the annoying noise of a cubicle workplace?

It's "a soft whooshing emitted over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices."

Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. 

Every solution brings its own new problem, but then you can solve that problem, and get a new problem.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

The trite phrase is "babbling brook," and here's an instance where using the the trite phrase would have been greatly preferable to the deviation ("burbling brook"). The point is that speech is distracting because it is understood. A brook sounds like speech, which is why we've got that cliché "babbling brook." This is the perfect notion in this paragraph: The brook is speaking but we can't understand it.

Now, I think playing speech-like sound to people all day long is a dangerous thing to do to the brains in the room. Hearing voices is a symptom of insanity. Perhaps the endless barrage of almost-speech will make people insane or make them feel as if they are going slightly insane. One could become paranoid that the managers are actually inserting messages in the indecipherable babble, and — who knows? — maybe they are!

This new noise is supposed to be the solution for the way all the real-person talking in the cubicle office is making everybody crazy. But, don't worry. If the solution is a new kind of crazy, there will be a solution for that.

"10 Communication Secrets of Great Leaders."

Excerpt:

4. Focus on the leave-behinds not the take-aways: The best communicators are not only skilled at learning and gathering information while communicating, they are also adept at transferring ideas, aligning expectations, inspiring action, and spreading their vision. The key is to approach each interaction with a servant’s heart. When you truly focus on contributing more than receiving you will have accomplished the goal. Even though this may seem counter-intuitive, by intensely focusing on the other party’s wants, needs & desires, you’ll learn far more than you ever would by focusing on your agenda.

"If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid."

"The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships."

Yes, yes, remember the old rule: Whenever researchers find something to be true of females, they will interpret and report it as evidence of female superiority. As I've pointed out many times, this rush to patronize women reveals an underlying fear that women actually are inferior. It’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid. Wow. That linguistics professor openly stated the impermissible belief that impelled her to figure out how to say that women really are superior: They take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.

See the tell? Power tools. What's more associated with the male than power tools? To make the female seem superior, the professor expresses herself with a decidedly masculine metaphor. Power tools. Also: building.

I'd like to see what she'd say if she found a vocal tic more prevalent in men. Perhaps: If men do something... it’s immediately interpreted as confident, rational and smart. The truth is this: Men take linguistic features and use them as Barbie Dolls for ruining everything.

Disparaging Obama's SOTU because it "was written at an eighth-grade level."

Eric Ostermeier relies on the Flesch-Kincaid test, which calculates the readability of written text, based upon the length of sentences and words. He notes the prevalence of sentences like:

"There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let's agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay."

Hey, it would be on an even lower grade level if it weren't for that colon. You see my point? The punctuation says nothing about the difficulty or ease of the material in a text written for oral delivery. It's a signal to the speaker, indicating the length of pauses, the degree of flow. But I could just as well have written the previous 2 sentences as one sentence, with a colon in the middle, so quite aside from the oral/written distinction, the Flesch-Kincaid test is a pretty simplistic device to leverage an argument that a text is simplistic.

"A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry."

"Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad."

Science Magazine has a big article — and Metafilter's talking about it — but the Althouse blog nailed this topic back in 2007.

"A Curious Case Of Foreign Accent Syndrome."

Hmm.

ADDED: Listen to the audio so you can hear the accent — some British-Scottish-Irish concoction. The woman likes the new accent and says it's made her "more outgoing." Compare it to the case of the Norwegian woman during WWII who acquired a German accent and was ostracized.

"It's not that Obama can't speak clearly. It's that he employs the intellectual stammer."

"Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you're a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president's stammer doesn't bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!)."

Meghan Daum explains it in the LA Times. And, righties, quit mocking:

[T]he godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr.... In fact, if the people critiquing Obama's meandering speech patterns were to see an old "Firing Line" segment, I daresay they would think Buckley was drunk or otherwise impaired.

"The tumour that will destroy me is in the proximity of my speech area. But I am also a word-earner."

Says the art critic Tom Lubbock:

I have been doing this all my life as an adult. And I still survive as a language-user – speaking, listening, reading, writing – over the past two years. Or, rather, I survive in fluctuating ways....

I'm no longer fluent. I've forgotten how to do it. I can't do it automatically. I can't hear whether a word that I say has come out right or not. It's as if it's not me that's speaking, but some kind of inefficient proxy forming the words. It's like there is a time-delay between speaking and hearing your own words, or if you were speaking a language whose phonetics and semantics you don't properly know. And when I speak or write, the words do sometimes come out wrong, slightly nonsensically. 

Ah! The decline! But it is not the saddest decline — this painless fade-out.  If this happened to me, I believe — I hope — I would write my way through to the end, like this. Would you not embrace the end of life as a writer and crumple, visibly, into the diminishment of your powers?

"And yet in her perfection, she actually sounds hood to me."

Ta-Nahesi Coates assesses Sotomayor's enunciation.

Hmmm. I'll just note that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor also over-enunciate. It actually sounds judge to me. Perhaps lady judge.

UPDATE: I've misspelled Coates's first name, and he's cursed me and connected me to racism because of that. Maybe spelling to him, like pronunciation, rubs a sore spot.