Snootism

I am a self-confessed nerd. I prefer the "single-minded expert" rather than the "lacking social skills and boringly studious" definition. Nerds are usually associated with computer technology or technology in general. This is certainly a significant subset and I have more than a toe dipped in that pool. But there is more than one breed of nerd. I happen to also be a baseball nerd. Can you name the World Series winners from the beginning of the modern era, 1903 (Boston Americans) to the 2017 champions (Houston Astros), remembering there were 2 years without a World Series? The Civil War. Can you name all the major battles and generals? US presidents? How fast can you name them off? All interesting subjects for me to write about, perhaps not for you to read about.

I also am an English language nerd. I own Lynn Truss' book. I have read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" & "The Stuff of Thought". I know Noam Chomsky has posited a "universal grammar" common to all language. I have taken an online class on the "History of the English Language". I have watched PBS' "Story of English" series. I know that languages are constantly changing, American English perhaps more than any other. Here's a sample of what passed for English in Chaucer's time ..

"The firste vertue, sone, if thou wilt lere,
Is to restreine and kepen wel thy tonge."
[Editor note: Good advice in any language]

And there's the language legend that the English tongue fumbled on "flutterby" and transposed it to "butterfly". And "pot to carry" became apothecary. There are endless fascinations.

So you see I get into this. This is in complete disregard of a warning that appeared in a review of Bryan A. Garner's book, "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (aka ADMAU). From Mr. Garner's bio: "I realized early that my primary intellectual interest was the English language and discovering Partridge's 'Usage & Abusage', I was enthralled." The reviewer's comment on this admission was that Garner failed to acknowledge the significant social cost for an adolescent whose passion is the English language. Swirlies and so forth.

Nevertheless, it is what it is. We obsessives self-mockingly refer to ourselves as "Snoots".  David Foster Wallace (more on DFW later), defines Snoot as "someone who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it. We know we know and how few other Americans do and we judge them accordingly. We are the few, the proud, the more or less constantly appalled."

Snoots tend be inordinately represented in universities, largely older white male, trending toward the bow-tie. Think William Safire or John Houseman in Paper Chase.

Cringe-worthy cases in point:

• "True facts" - perhaps these days, it's not so strange sounding
• "Irregardless" - really
• "Invaluable" - as opposed to valuable I presume
• "Surrounded on all sides"
• "Merge together"
• "Beyond the pail"
• "I thought to myself"
• ".. died in an apartment Dr. Kervorkian was leasing after inhaling carbon monoxide"
• "There are many reasons why lawyers lie, some better than others.

Makes you dig your nails into your palms?  OK, maybe not. (And why is "trough" pronounced troff and "through" pronounced thru?)

So, there's the context. I confess to Snootitude - but ... I almost always manage to suppress its anti-social urges.

I recently discovered the essay "Authority & Usage", one in a collection of essays titled "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace*. Authority & Usage is couched in the form of a review of Garner's ADMAU. The review runs 62 pages. David Foster Wallace considers Garner a "genius". The review delves into highly technical academic approaches to language analytics: Prescriptiveness vs. Descriptiveness,  Democratic Spirit in writing,  ... well beyond the interest level of mere mortals. But there is plenty there to interest the common man, even if you're not a Snoot.

The ADMAU itself is like a standard dictionary in that you look up words, not for meaning but usage. And while it is a serious academic "writing prescription", it also injects humor, be it of the nerd variety. Every Snoot should own a copy. Garner provides word use guidance but also adds commentary. e.g.

•    "There are, of course, many ways writers can get it wrong. So they do."
•    "You'll find more cliches in modern writing than you can shake a stick at."
•    "While you can use contractions to good advantage, you may stumble if you contract recklessly. ... generally avoid 'it'd' ... 'who're'."

The ADMAU is a tome of academia and supports the dialect of the ruling class, the powerful, the prestigious: SWE - Standard Written English - which is the purview of your common Snoot and enforced in college writing classes. There are, of course,  many US English dialects and in fact you are likely fluent in more than one: Black-English, Latino-English, Rural South, Ozark, Boston Brahmin, Boston Blue Collar, Bronx, Maine Yankee, Appalachian, Cajun, Upper Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain, East Texas, Medical School (jargon), Adolescent South-Park, Twitter, Computereze (jargon), Starbuck's barista (jargon), Sports (jargon),  etc ... There may be as many sub-dialects as US communities. People naturally switch between dialects in different situations. You probably don't even notice you're doing it. Many jargons (IMHO) exist primarily to obfuscate and make your particular domain of expertise look difficult and closed to intruders. Who dreamt up ctl-alt-del? And is it dreamt or dreamed?

There's a difference between meaningful and grammatical. English is actually extremely flexible. Most any word order sentence understood can be. "Did you see the car keys of me?" wouldn't pass any Snoot-test but the meaning comes across. A bear attack announced as "That ursine monster does essay to sup upon my person" would pass a grammar test but might fail a survival test.

"Correctness" can be in the ear of the behearer. Winston Churchill famously objected to the ending a sentence with a preposition law: "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put." 

One final topic, perhaps a precarious one, "Political Correctness". PC is covered extensively in the DFW review. Personally, I applaud eliminating terms that are racist or patently offensive to groups of people. You well know those I mean. Skunk words. Long overdue. But to demand a term like "disabled" become "differently-abled" or "economically disadvantaged" replace "poor" seems patronizing, intended principally to demonstrate the speaker's "high moral position" rather than true concern. Terms like these identify real problems in our country and need to be addressed seriously. This language politics changes the focus from the real problems onto language about them and can block (my opinion) actions to address these societal issues. When you spend your time arguing about language, it's easy for opponents of change to maintain the status quo. And that's all I've got to say about that.

So if your are menaced by a "Snoot Curse", take the advice of one of my sage friends. Treat offenders as a "hidden jewels", sent to you by God to improve your character - and bite your lip.

There, Their, They're - you'll be just fine.


Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin

Constructive comments, including grammar corrections, are welcome, but snide Snoot inspired remarks will be suppressed.

* David Foster Wallace was an author, university teacher of English & Creative Writing - and a genius. As with too many so afflicted, he suffered deep depression and died by his own hand in 2008.

Fairview

Weird Jobs Part 2

Fairview

The grease and the sleep deprivation of the Twinkie factory finally got to me and I quit and took a job at Fairview Hospital. Fairview is just across Riverside Avenue from Augsburg so the commute was a walk.


Hospital workers have a pecking order.  As you might expect, doctors are at the pinnacle. They bark orders and expect the rest of the world to scurry. Nurses actually run the place so they are next. Orderlies are down the hierarchy and then come janitorial, but at the very bottom are the laundry workers. My new job. I worked a couple afternoons and on weekends. (Of course, well below laundry workers are medical students.)

The Fairview laundry room is in the bowels of the hospital and the soiled linen, scrubs, surgery drapes and anything washable reached the "receiving room" by laundry chutes, similar to what we had on the 2nd floor of our 2-story house in Lowry - a chute that gravity fed laundry straight to the basement.

The laundry room was a large space, about 40' x 20' and 20 feet or so high. Arriving for work on a Saturday at 6:00 AM, this room was filled to the ceiling with bags of laundry, the bags the size of a duffel. 15,000 cubic feet of dirty laundry.

There were 2 of us to deal with this mountain, Ricky & I. Ricky had seniority so to my dismay, he controlled the radio. But he was cheerful and talkative so that made the day more tolerable. The job was analogous to a coal-miner's. We mined the bags and loaded the dirty laundry into carts which sat on a floor scale. "Normal" laundry loads were 40 lbs. Blue-toned surgery linen were 35 lb loads.  There were no surgical masks or rubber gloves on this job. Lots of the linen was soiled with what you might imagine coming from hospital rooms & surgery theaters - and some things you might not. Surgery linen tended to be a bit "skanky". It now seems to me a miracle I survived without succumbing to some pernicious disease.

We rolled the 2 loaded carts across the hallway to the laundry room where we stuffed the cart contents into 2 industrial washing machines. Visualize Tokyo subway loading. The 40 lbs. of linen filled that washer tightly. We added the prerequisite detergents and kicked off the wash - which basically boiled the linen.

We then retreated to the "receiving" room to fill 2 more carts. The second trip across the hall and each subsequent required pulling the washed linen - hot-hot-hot - from the washer and loading it into dryers. Then pulling the dried linen into carts and handing the cart off to women operating manglers to finish the process. Repeat, repeat, repeat ... (For Fortran programmers , Do until ..)

By 10 AM, we could just about see the floor. That's when the trucks from Fairview Southdale showed up and refilled the room. Fairview deemed it more economical to operate one laundry for both hospitals so they ferried Southdale dirty laundry to the Minneapolis hospital and returned with clean laundry. The arrival of these trucks sent me into despondency. I was living the Greek Myth of Sisyphus, rolled back to 6 AM. By 2:30 the room was empty except for the scattering of drops from above that was pretty much constant and I got to go home to a hot shower.

This job, more so than the Twinkie factory, convinced me I had to finish my college degree. At least Hostess let you eat free pies. I could never have survived an assembly line job.

Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin

Twinkie Factory

I think most college students have "weird summer job" stories. De-tasseling corn, Green Giant creamed corn production, Eklund's tuxedo delivery, ...

Well  - here's my story.







Part 1

While a student at Augsburg College, I worked a couple summers at the Continental Baking Company, located downtown at 11 St. & 3rd Ave in Minneapolis, roughly 20 blocks from Augsburg. My motivation was to earn enough pocket money to take the girl of my dreams to Bridgeman's for Hot Fudge Banana sundaes. (Eventually, she agreed to become my wife saying if I was half as nice as my father she would marry me. She settled for considerably less.)

I rode my rickety bike to the place, which wasn't bad in the summer. 35W wasn't there, so it was a straight shot downtown on 7th St. to 3rd Ave. But I also - for a short time - worked 1 night shift a week during the school year. This had a deleterious effect on my 7:30 Computer Science class attendance. Augsburg's compSci department consisted of one Univac programmer who taught the class before going to work - hence the 7:30 start time. We submitted our homework on paper tape - just to give a reference to how long ago this was. It also meant I rode my bike downtown in the winter for the 10:00 PM - 6:00 AM shift -  and wiped out a few times. That experience and the sleep deprivation drove me to find yet another "weird job" - a future post.

This was Continental Baking's Hostess facility, a 4 story red brick building with an "Outlet Store" on the ground level, where you could purchase discount priced Twinkies. On the 2nd floor, they baked Wonder Bread, made of mostly air with a dusting of flour; and Hostess fruit pies, which were pretty good actually. The 3rd floor, where I spent my time was the assembly line for Hostess products. We called it the "Twinkie Factory" and I had to join the bakers' union to get the job.

The ingredients for all the Hostess cake products as well as the marshmallow for the Snoballs were mixed on the 4th floor. These concoctions were mixed in 300 lb aluminum bowls on wheels and transported down to the 3rd floor in a freight elevator where the ovens and the "assembly line" took over. Twinkies were baked in 30" x 18 steel pans, holding 36 (I think) Twinkies. The two ovens had 8 foot revolving shelves and the "baker's" job was to load each shelf with 6 pans before it disappeared below and then pull them out when the revolution through the oven was complete. I did this job on occasion and still have burn scars on my forearms from reaching in to get the pans in the back.

The pans were then transferred to 7' high cooling racks - on wheels, holding roughly 16 pans of baked goods - and after a proscribed cooling time, wheeled over to the assembly line. One worker fed pans of Twinkies into a machine topped by a hopper filled with "Twinkie goo". This filling was mixed on the 4th floor and transported by freight elevator. Eventually they figured out that a chute from the 4th to the 3rd would be more efficient - except for the marshmallow which lacked the basic flow properties necessary - see below. Each individual pan of Twinkies was fed into the machine which "injected" each cake with the cream filling. You might have guessed this was the process by looking at the bottom of a Twinkie. There are perforations. A second person on the other side of this injection machine took the pan, pivoted 180°, lifted the pan above his head and slammed it down onto a conveyer belt to dislodge the cake from the pan. This usually worked fine but on occasion the pans were not sufficiently "oiled" and it required several slams to remove the cake from the pan. I broke my little finger on one night shift because of this. And you got quite a workout doing this, with a pan coming through the machine about every 5 seconds.  There were times that the operator jammed the machine and broke the dies to get a rest. (I only ever did this by accident, not intentionally).

After the dump, the pan was thrown in to a "pan washer" - a wash machine with a conveyor through a spray of scalding water. The worst job in the place was at the end of the pan-washer - pulling those burning hot pans and putting them on those same cooling racks, hands protected by a pair of Wells-Lamont cloth gloves which were quickly soaking wet.  This was the first job for new-hires and if they survived a week, they moved on to more glamorous jobs, like Twinkie dumping.

Once dumped the cake moved down the conveyer to the packaging machines. Damaged cake - like those that came out in several pieces - see the above multiple slams description - went off the end of the conveyer into garbage bins. However, waste not, want not. This damaged cake served as the base for the "Spice Cake" batter.  Add enough spices and you never know you're eating Twinkies.

Hostess cupcakes followed the exact same injection procedure plus an additional step with the cake passing under a hopper which coated the cake with chocolate frosting and a vanilla drizzle.

Hostess Snoballs were more complicated.  They are the same cake as the cupcakes but they are smothered in marshmallow and coconut. When I was there - this was the process. (I think the FDA forced some changes after I left.) The Snoball process required one additional person on the conveyer line to transfer the marshmallow into the hopper over the conveyor belt. For a time I had the job of manhandling the 300 lb bowls (empty weight) of batters, chocolate, and marshmallow to the freight elevator and down to the 3rd floor. This was a just-in-time process so speed was essential. And the bowls were not that steerable so it was not uncommon to bang into the plaster walls - with the expected result. (I picked the larger chunks out of the bowl.)  The marshmallow being quite thick needed to be transferred from the bowl to the hopper - roughly 6 feet above the floor. This was done "by hand" - I am not kidding. I would scoop handfuls of the warm marshmallow from the bowl into the hopper. Uffda.  I never did put "marshmallow dipper" on my resume. There were only white during my tenure.



The Continental Baking building is no more, the business shutting down in 1987. The site now home to a Holiday Inn Express. In 2012 Hostess filed bankruptcy and it was announced Twinkies would no longer be produced, causing world-wide panic buying. (Urban legend says Twinkies have a 100 year shelf life). One of the "benefits" of the job was all the Twinkies you could eat. I haven't eaten a Twinkie in 50 years.



In 2013, out of receivership, a management company bought Hostess for $413 million and Twinkies once again appeared on the US market. A side note - in 2016 the management company sold Hostess for $2.3 billion. Twinkies roar.


Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin