Taking Rights for Granite

Language is power

We go to dictionaries to settle disputes about the meanings of words. And yet, oddly, we didn't learn language from those dictionaries. We learned by observing use. When we challenge someone to look something up, we often don't ourselves know what we'll find there. We hope our own use is common, or at least supported.

We hope dictionaries will side with us because people consume and store thoughts as sentences, even when they don't know or agree precisely on the meanings of the words that make up such sentences. If you tell yourself “I am a good person” and I can convince you that “good” means “someone who washes their friend's cars,” maybe I can get you to wash my car—just because you want to be a “good” person.

If you can control language, you can direct its power. Sometimes it's harmless fun like that. Maybe I get a free car wash. Other times the stakes are higher, and it's more serious.

War of the Words

This jockeying for terminological control has become fully integrated into the societal conversations we call politics. When they can't change what's in someone's mind, well-funded political groups lately seem comfortable trying instead to change the meanings of the words others are holding onto so tightly.

“The pages of dictionaries are the battlegrounds upon which many modern wars are fought.”

That's me quoting myself. I make this observation a lot. I figured I should, at least once, put it on the record.

A glaring example is that the US Constitution creates certain supermajority requirements to change what the Constitution says. For a long time, those requirements have done their job. The Constitution seldom changes, and it requires a lot of people to agree when it does. But, in recent years, those who pretty clearly wish they could change our Constitution, yet can't muster the broad consensus to do it, seem focused instead on changing who interprets it.

Why change the words when it's easier to change the meanings of those words?

The ability to say what words mean is an enormous power, with huge implications. When we go assigning meaning to existing words, we need to keep in mind that we are not just creating new tools for future expression, we are also potentially affecting the meaning of existing beliefs that are expressed in terms of those words. Some see that as a sacred responsibility, others as opportunity—an invitation to power just waiting to be exploited.

The substance of rights

I once said to a friend that rights are just laws with a higher vote threshold for changing them. They looked at me in horror. “No!” they insisted, pushing back. “Rights are just there. That's why they're rights.” They are different than laws, they went on to explain. Not subject to edit or repeal. Inalienable, one might even say.

Philosophers have weighed in on this from a variety of points of view on rights. There are disagreements on how to conceive them that are broad and deep. And yet. And yet.

You can build all the fanciful rhetoric you want around them, to make them sound like they are vast and solid. But if someone is motivated, they will try to take them away because within those rights is the power to stop things, and there are people in the world who would rather not be stopped.

And those are sometimes very determined people. People willing even to ignore flowery rhetoric, if necessary. People who think what matters is power. The power to take those rights from you. The power over you that comes of denying those rights.

In other words, what rights we have seem doomed to perpetual attack. So we'd better be realistic about whether they are protected, and how.

Our societal prayers

Powerful as God is said to be, “rights” given by Him (or some say Her) seem to me most vulnerable. If we're going to use religious metaphors, perhaps prayer is better.

For those among us who are religious enough to think such prayers are regularly and reliably answered, this may be reassuring. And to those people, I wish all the very best, as I expect they may then find their faith severely challenged by such reliance.

For those of us who are not religious, prayer may still be a good metaphor. It underscores the need to see there's nothing backing such prayers that we do not arrange for.

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” it is said, though precisely by whom seems subject of considerable question. True, nonetheless—provided such vigilance is active. Passive observership seems insufficient, exposing solid-sounding words as the paper-thin protection they really are. Only we, as the words' committed allies, can give such rights their rightful substance.

Life is a calm room,
hurricane raging outside,
paper walls between.
 —Kent Pitman, Tenuous Tenacity (June 2016)

 

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Author’s Notes:

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The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5 [Edit]), with post-processing in Gimp to resolve some image details and artifacts I had trouble explaining to the LLMs, and to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.

Strange Poetry and ChatGPT

I should say as context that I had been having a conversation on Mastodon in which I got the idea to write a poem that was somehow both a haiku and a limerick. I wrote the following myself. (The ChatGPT part comes later.) I've numbered the lines to make it more intelligible:

   0   There once was a would-be haiku
   1   Wedged late in a lim'rick venue
   2   Ending a hero
   3   Numbered from zero
   4   Its lines went three, four and two

If it helps in understanding it, I went on to say in the other forum, the haiku to be extracted and rearranged is this one:

  Numbered from zero
   Its lines went three, four and two
    Ending a hero

But while I'm proud I was able to come up with anything that was both limerick and haiku, I have to admit it's a more boring haiku than I'd aspired to. So I later wondered if ChatGPT could help me do better. That's what led to the following odd exchange a few days ago, in which it's clear that ChatGPT can do amazing things in some ways, yet be hampered with sometimes the simplest of things in others.

I came to wonder through this if it even knows what a syllable is. Perhaps it has just seen so many haikus that it doesn't need to count, and when asked to write something similar to, but not the same as, a 5-7-5 haiku, it doesn't know what the goal is at all?

See what you think...

write a haiku about the beauty of a snowy day

Snowflakes dance down
Peaceful white blanket unfolds
Winter's pure delight

write a limerick in which the last three lines, if rearranged, would be syntactically valid as a haiku and in which the first two lines introduce that haiku.

In the park, a snowflake lands
A symbol of winter's grace
Peaceful, it descends
Covering earth's face with white
Nature's beauty in sight.

that isn't quite right. in a limerick, the first, second, and fifth line are long. so to embed a haiku in a limerick, the embedded haiku will have to use the form 5-5-7.

Note that the apology here is part of the limerick! Is that it being clever or just revealing it doesn't know the difference between the task and related meta-conversation?

Oh, my apologies, I see
Let me write it now correctly
A snowflake takes its flight
Brings peace to the winter night
In a dance of grace, so free.

Write a fresh 5-5-7 haiku, in other words with the long line being last.

Beneath a winter sky
Snowflakes gently fall like dreams
Peaceful and serene.

In a 5-5-7 haiku, the second and third lines are exchanged.

Gently falling snowflakes
Beneath a peaceful winter sky
Serene dreams descend.

No. It should say "Gently falling snowflakes. / Serene dreams descend / Beneath a peaceful winter sky." so that 5-5-7 describe the number of syllables in each line, 5 for line 1, 5 for line 2, and 7 for line 3.

Gently falling snowflakes,
Serene dreams descend,
Beneath a peaceful winter sky.

Yes, now modify the poem so the first and second lines rhyme.

Snowflakes fall, so gentle and light,
Peaceful dreams take flight in the night.
Beneath winter skies so serene,
Nature's beauty, a lovely scene.

But it should still be a 5-5-7 haiku.

Falling snowflakes, so pure,
Peaceful dreams that softly tour,
Beneath winter sky serene.

In a 5-5-7 haiku, there are 5 syllables for line 1, 5 syllables for line 2, and 7 syllables for line 3.

Snowflakes dance, so light and slow
Peaceful dreams, a winter's glow
Beneath the sky, so serene and bright.

That is a 7-7-9 haiku you wrote. Tighten it up into a 5-5-7 haiku by using fewer syllables.

Snowflakes twirl, light and slow
Dreams of peace, a winter's show
Beneath the sky, serene and bright.

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Author's Notes:

Thanks to Madeleine Begun Kane for writing a haiku about haikus and limericks and putting it on Mastodon, which inspired me to write my own original poem and to have the enclosed conversation.

It's fascinating out chance events like that influence our lives. My whole career has been littered with chance events that were as important as anything planned. (Programming language enthusists might enjoy my paper Common Lisp: The Untold Story, a record of an invited talk I gave at the 50th Anniversary of Lisp conference, where I recount a number of those. No, not in poetry form. Poetry, and especially a haiku, is a kind of apology or penance that I do to balance the fact that some of my other writings are quite long.)

There is some additional discussion of this blog post and ChatGPT in general where I mentioned it on Mastodon.

You can try ChatGPT here if you want.

All of the "haiku" in here is really senryu.

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Impeachment Poetry

A tweet written in limerick led me to respond in kind:

After laws broken daily for years,
“Shocked, Shocked” are a Speaker and peers.
  Now they’ll risk reelection,
  raising one thin objection.
“Too little, too late” are my fears.

Limerick is not my preferred format. I usually prefer haiku, or (as here) senryu. There's something calmer and more elegant about it. So I also tweeted a senryu, perhaps as apology for the limerick above:

Crimes mount by the day.
  Biden chides, “soon, it's too much.”
What was it before?

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Solitude Eluded

Solitude stalks me,
leaving me never alone.
Then you scare it off.

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Limited-Time Offer

Climate is cancer.
Delay is hope we've squandered.
We can't buy it back.

#ParisAccord

Originally published to Twitter in response to a tweet by David Brin.

Tenuous Tenacity

Life is a calm room,
 hurricane raging outside,
 paper walls between.

On Twitter

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Originally published January 12, 2012 on Twitter, as part of my background image, not a tweet. I am @KentPitman there if you'd like to follow me.

The title, added later, is a pun. The haiku is both a comment on Twitter, and a celebration of my arrival on Twitter.

I've since come to believe that expressing ideas in such a short space, what some people call micro-blogging, is a legitimate art form. Nonetheless, I still think the hashtags intrude. Their use is pragmatic, not aesthetic. —kmp 18-Jan-2016

The Tao of AutoCorrectivity

This was written for RomanticPoetess...

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Originally published July 30, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): microsoft, microsoft word, ms word, ms/word, word, technology, helpful, spell, spelling, spelling correction, spell check, spell checker, grammar, grammar check, grammar checker, grammar checking, word choice, override, overriding, fix, fixing, check, checker, checking, autocorrect, auto correct, auto-correct, autocorrectivity

Haiku: Mom Watched Over Me

If you enjoyed this haiku, please “rate” it.

This is a response to Just Cathy's post on Mother's Day Haiku.
She notes the original open call came from Texas Bubba.
The effects we have on one another are both direct and indirect.

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Originally published May 8, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): celebration, family, greeting card, greetings, haiku, i love you, mom, mom haiku, mother's day, open call, personal, social, thoughts, too cheap to send flowers, tribute, wishes

Happy Birthday, Karen

for Karen

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Originally published February 10, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon) are omitted from this blog entry for personal privacy reasons.

Pace of Change

One of the perils of business success is that when you have a large installed base of users, you have to be very careful about making changes faster than the user community can absorb them.

I wrote this as a sort of reminder of that truth.

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This was written May 25, 2006, but not published to the web until October 24, 2019.