In last week’s New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn noted that the Carpathia’s radio operators, the “computer geeks of their day,” responded to the Titanic’s distress call with the insouciant, “What is the matter with U?” [Check out more exchanges here, where the Titanic adorably says they “hit a berg.”] Should the Carpathia’s radio operator have had the decorum to send, “You” instead of “U,” well, we will never know what would have happened. #imjustsayin

Blame this guy, kind of

Only punks interested in wasting everyone’s time would have the gall to say “UR” for your, “NW” for now and “Hee” for nice phallus quip. Why were they in such a hurry? Did they have somewhere better to be? Why did “88” mean “best regards (to a woman)”? Who is this woman and what is the nature of these regards? One can only assume a harlot and seedy.

The first U.S. telegraph line, from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, was completed in 1844, so surely that must have been the start of this silly shortening business. If only that were true.

During the 1830s, an even more insidious trend caught hold. Young, educated fashionable types began abbreviating things not for any practical purpose but just for the hell of it. But these weren’t just any old abbreviations. These were abbreviations based on intentional misspellings. And they appeared in newspapers no less!

It is this trend that birthed one of our most beloved Americanisms, “OK.” Thanks to the work of etymologist and lexicographer Allen Walker Read, we know that “OK” first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839 as an in-joke where “OK,” which was abbreviated from the misspelling “oll korrect,” meant “all correct.” (Contrary to popular belief, the campaign of Martin “Old Kinderhook” Van Buren did not create “OK,” but it did probably solidify its place in language.)

Okay OK, fine. So some kids intentionally started misspelling phrases and then abbreviating those misspelled phrases. But who remembers “K.G.” for “know go,” “N.S.M.T.” for “‘Nough said ‘Mong Gentlemen,” or “K.K.K.” (#yep) for “Commit No Nuisance”? What does it have to do with today?

A simple search at the homepage of Reddit, the perennial purveyor of geek cool, for “kewl” yields a page full of usage. Too bad, according to History, the “kewl” geeks of the 1830s already thought of that one. They can also be credited with an early form of “deez” in “DZ,” though it would take another 160 years and the rise of gangsta rap for the world to see “deez nutz.”

[Image via Wired]

Sadly, entire generations of children will grow up never knowing what it is to plagiarize by hand, their cramped fingers having to copy letter by letter. Some have complained that they’ll miss aesthetic weight the leather-bound volumes lent to their bookshelves. If you find you simply just can’t fill the void, may I recommend a display of laser discs, CDs, cassette tapes, 8 tracks, 78s, 45s, wax cylinders, or classic books series, all of which you can find on eBay. Shelf filled, problem solved.

In honor of the death of this musty old friend, it’s only fair that we take a look back at the type of things we’ll miss. For instance, the entry on asthma from the 1890 Americanized Encyclopedia, Revised and Amended: A dictionary of arts, sciences and literature; to which is added biographies of livings subjects.

You can click here [or the above image] for the full text, but here are a few of the highlights.

• ASHTMA, a disorder of respiration characterized by severe paroxysms of difficult breathing, usually followed by a period of complete relief.
• When the expectorant is abundant, the asthma is called humid, but when there is little or none it is termed dry.
• Morphine should be given in 1/8-grain doses every hour or two till relieved, or chloroform or sulphuric ether inhaled during the paroxysm.
• Tobacco fumes are also useful in some cases to produce a relaxation of the pectoral muscles and afford relief.
• If morphine is administered, no more than three-quarters of a grain should be given unless by a physician.

What at shame it would be if this information could be updated more easily or accessed more instantaneously.

[Image and text via Google Books]

It will also involve footage from a local cable access dance show where people are doing the percolator, which is a song as well as a dance from the ’90s, a decade that has passed, that people didn’t really appreciate much then and will appreciate even less now and, therefore, even more.

But the soundtrack will be King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” which is a weird song very few people knew even when it was likely to be known. It’s the perfect amount of random. I calculated it. I should probably mention that it will also have frequent and perfectly-timed jump cuts to an extreme close-up on an old man with just the perfect number of teeth missing (7), who will be smiling while dressed as Robin Hood. At the bottom of the screen, the text “FAR OUT!!” will flash repeatedly.

As for unexpected physical pain, which is a thing that all people love, there will be a montage of increasingly funny animals kicking men wearing fanny packs (the accessories) in the crotch: kangaroo, camel, bonobo, emu, camel, jackrabbit, wallaby (as this is unexpected after kangaroo), all of which will have large moustaches.

As for the star wipe, it will be used for every transition that is not a jump cut. Actually, I’m only 99 percent sure that you’ll love this video. Which is why there will also be long-haired bovines dancing in a burlap bag while the parody song “Sackety Yaks” plays. Further, the montage of telenovela stars grimacing “Ernesto!” will come at the perfect time (1:47).

See, I’ve been paid to write “viral videos,” none of which went viral, which is a problem with the Internet, I suspect, and not me and certainly not the idea of “making something go viral.” So I should probably bump that 92 percent down to about 89 percent. That’s still pretty good though.

Okay, I’m going to level with you. I have no idea what makes something go viral, but fortunately for the companies who pay lots of money to have their content “go viral,” University of Melbourne professor Brent Coker does. See, he has a formula for knowing exactly what the kids want. It’s science. As for why his formula for what will go viral hasn’t gone viral, one can only assume that people want to keep this secret to themselves, lest everything go viral and therefore nothing.

Here is a funny picture of what happens when you Google “funny picture.”

Let’s say you think this cookie consumption is a problem. How would you get him to stop eating cookies? Would you show him a dramatically shot plate of beautiful, fresh, mouthwatering and glistening cookies? Probably not.

You and Columbia University have differing opinions. Of course, you probably wouldn’t name a drug treatment program “STARS” (Substance Treatment and Research Service of Columbia University) either.

The following 30 seconds have actually been running on actual TV (I saw it on NY1).

And that’s with the sound on. Now watch it muted. It takes on a whole other level of bad. It’s basic rule of ad production that you should watch spots with the sound off at least once just to see how they might strike the viewer. Here, it’s striking alright, what with the black-and-white beauty shots that I’m pretty sure were taken from a never-aired TV movie about Studio 54. “Super Fly” (not the soundtrack) seems more anti-cocaine. If this spot’s goal is to get coke addicts to want to do coke, then it resoundingly succeeds. And for a research program that actually needs addicts to function, maybe it’s just refilling the well.

The following is an inexhaustive list of things that are wrong with this video:

• The word “cocaine” is written in a font resembling cocaine.
• The word “cocaine” that is written in a font resembling cocaine spins (neato!).
• It shows you how to prepare cocaine, a sight that might make you want to prepare cocaine.
• It (visually at least) shows none of the harmful effects the drug can have on your life.
• The word “help” is literally written in lines of cocaine.

This video is indeed a screaming cry for help, if you mean “Hey guys, come help me do all this cocaine!”

Fact: It is not okay to make fun of the dangers of drugs or drug addiction. Fact: It is okay to make fun of anti-drug messages because they almost always get it wrong, especially when targeted at kids.

Scientific American addiction blogger Cassie Rodenberg has a post with a few choice examples. There’s perennial crowd favorite “I learned it by watching you” and a few hidden gems. Check it out and stay off drugs.

One “exercise” involved connecting what were essentially sets of arrow heads (think opposing carets) by drawing the straightest straight line your cramped hand could manage from one to the other. One girl, who was a solid B-plus/A-minus student and later ended up going to an elite private school, decided to cheat. This was where she would triumph. She was determined to be the best at straight-arrow-drawing, which I guess would by extension make you a good draftsperson in a tiny blueprint sweatshop.

How do you cheat at drawing straight lines? You start before the time allotted. I quit shortly after time began (but only after squiggly and wavy lines lost their luster). She gave herself an illegal 7 to 10 second head start. I assume she “won.”

One of my lines (reproduction)

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the nature of cheating. It is the nature of human nature. Contrary to popular belief, cheating was not recently invented by rich kids on Long Island. Indeed it predates those who pursue an unfair advantage in seeking admission to Harvard instead of Yale, Amherst instead of Wesleyan, Duke instead of, gasp, Emory.

Cheating, it seems, is as old as paper. It began over a thousand years ago when one guy decided to pull some trickery to get ahead. Ever since then, people have been copying him (or so goes the just-now-invented old joke). Academics trace the origins of academic cheating to the origin of the standardized test. The standardized test, along with paper, was invented by the Chinese.

For over a millenium, the civil service examination system of China represented a path to the Chinese dream. With little more than knowledge, intellect and a lot of hard work and hand cramping, anyone had a shot at climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Well, anyone provided you weren’t Buddhist, Taoist, a woman or of such low class so as to be labeled one of the “Mean People” (self-fulfilling prophecy much?).

In actuality though, most of the the people who did take the test were already what we’d today call lower-middle class or higher. After all, one had to have access to books and crucial time away from the fields to study. More important still was that the rural student had to master the Mandarin nonvernacular before he could even begin to tackle the Chinese classics. It would be like studying to take the LSAT and learning English at the same time.

Nevertheless, it did provide a path to prosperity for some Chinese. On the surface, it served a two-fold purpose: it recruited people willing to run the vast bureaucracy that kept Imperial china afloat, and, by fostering a sense of loyalty in the civil servants, it helped maintain Imperial power. Everybody wins. Even the failures turned into successes. With the education they had accumulated, those who narrowly missed the cutoff went on to compose music, produce art or invent the precursor to the Hemingway beard.

Han Huang's Literary Gathering, ca. 1107

Those who succeeded were rewarded handsomely with entree to the Imperial elite. Every other year 2 to 3 million attempted the biennial test. Boys who showed promise were drilled for the test beginning at age five. Children in rural areas attended the local school, if it existed. Wealthier families sent their children into cities to attend academies. And the bona fide rich paid for private tutors. By the time they were fully prepared, test takers memorized upwards of 600,000 characters from classic Chinese texts in sequential order.

The exam lasted between 24 and 72 hours. It was held in what were essentially prison cells outfitted with three flat boards. One was a “shelf,” one a “desk” and the other a “seat.” Each student was sealed into his room until the test was over. There was one way to get out though. If you died during the test, they would cut you out.

Students were tested on the Six Arts — music, archery, horsemanship, arithmetic, writing, knowledge of rituals and ceremonies — as well as the Five Studies — military strategy, civil law, revenue and taxation, agriculture and geography and Confucian classics.

Additionally, they were required to compose an Eight-legged Essay, a style of writing that makes five-paragraphs look like a haiku. There was, of course, the opening, the amplification, preliminary exposition, initial argument, central argument, latter argument, final argument and conclusion. In the essay, by the way, the student was expected to quote the Four Books and Five Classics, hallmarks of Confucianism, verbatim and with ease. One incorrectly drawn character in the handwritten essay was grounds for failure. Heaven help you if you decided, in Western terms, to “circle” your “i’s” instead of “dotting” them.

Let it more than suffice to say that this test was really freakin’ hard, damn near impossible. Cheating was severely punished. A light sentence was being banished from the capital. A heavy one was punishment of death. Yet, people still cheated. Lots of them.

The methods of cheating were quite diverse. They included bribery (a rich kid’s favorite), slipping papers to a friend and palm-sized cheat sheets. Cheating became institutionalized with enablers making a living by providing cheating resources. If you knew whom to ask and had the coin, you just might have been able to score my personal favorite, the cheating shirt.

Cheating Shirt, made in China

Over time, the already secure test was made even more secure. The more that the administrators did to prevent cheating, the more creative the cheaters got. It’s a perfect example of Campbell’s Law. When the stakes are high, people are likely to cheat. And the stakes are always high, even when you’re drawing straight lines.

[Sketchfu, SoundSeeChina, Penn State University.]

Indiana's "Fat Boy" Chauncey Morlan

But it might surprise some to learn that in a few isolated cases, there is historical precedence of poor dieting. In the Nov. 21 issue of the New Yorker, Lauren Collins offers us one royally corpulent example: Henry VIII.

The profile (“The King’s Meal“) is about quirky and “twee” historian Lucy Worsley‘s scatological and anthropological exploration of the past, but it takes a left turn at Hank’s third chin. That’ll happen when you consume five thousand calories and twenty grams of salt washed down with ten pints of ale each day, as Collins notes.

Perhaps more impressive though in its sheer scope was the menu of George III. Behold, “Their Majesties Dinner.”

Soupe barley
4 chickens roasted
3 pullets minced and broiled
7 3/4 mutton collop pyes
6 perch boiled
2 breasts of lamb a la pluck
2 salmic of ducks
13 loin veal smort

And “that was the first course.” It’s enough, barely enough, to make Kobayashi weep.

On a related note, 60 Minutes had piece this weekend about the food flavoring industry. That there is an oak tree flavor should come as no surprise to anyone who read Fast Food Nation, but it’s a decent watch nonetheless. Be sure to catch the report about homeless children living in trucks though too. It’s best watched after you’ve learned about the abundance of fake-flavored foods.

[Image via the not-necessarily-endorsed F---YeahOldTimeFatties]

You could say that people didn’t fear youth back in your day when you were young, and you’d be right. The term was coined in 1993 by 4H instructor Kirk Astroth.

“Phobia,” of course, derives from phobos, the Greek word for fear. And “ephebiphobia” derives from éphēbos, the Greek word for punk kids who probably skateboard.

In his article for education publication Phi Delta Kappan, Astroth’s headline asked “Beyond Ephebiphobia: Problem adults or problem youths?” Then he proceeded to write hundreds of unnecessary subsequent words. It’s the youth! End. Of. Story. Let’s go home and lock up our daughters (in a room, so they don’t turn on us).

But since he did choose to ramble on past his obvious premise, let’s see what he had to say.

Young people today are typically portrayed as an aberrant pariah class that suffers its own distinct “epidemics” bearing no relationship to adult patterns of behavior. Are today’s young people really so different?

Yes. Wait, what’s that? Show you an example? Astroth obliges.

Adult claims of degeneration among the young can be found in nearly every previous decade. For example, the cover of the 6 September 1954 issue of Newsweek blared: “Let’s Face It: Our Teen-Agers Are Out of Control.”

From that point on, we need only Newsweek covers to chart a course of the youth’s downward spiral. We’ll let the headlines do the heavy lifting.

1959 — The GOOD American Teen-Agers

“Good,” in case you’re playing along at home, apparently means preppy, sweatered and white.

1966 — The Teenagers: A Survey of What They’re Really Like

I haven’t read the cover story, but one has to assume it’s littered with phrases like “behind closed doors.”

1980 — Teen Age Sex: The New Morality Hits Home

It was fine next door. It really was. And even when it was outside on the patio, but in MY home? This has got to stop.

1999 — Tweens: Are They Growing Up Too Fast?

Yes and no, depending on which aspect of youth we want to fear.

2009 — Is Your Baby Racist?

Well, that’s silly. YES!

2010 — Why Aren’t Teens Buying Our Magazine?

To be fair, I probably could have done this with Time Magazine instead, but Newsweek made it really, really easy. Not to mention all the ones I left out.

It’s helpful to remember, as the American Education History Journal points out, that when teenagers were declared “out of control” in 1954, “Leave it to Beaver” was the moral vanguard and “Catcher in the Rye” was still scaring the hell out of people.

Our attitudes toward youth haven’t relaxed though. They’re probably tightened, and media sensationalism has got to be part of it. Yet, can you blame Newsweek? We need look no further than gold futures and zombies to remind us that fear sells. With an endless supply of youth, there’s an endless supply of fear.

Any time a magazine asks a controversial question, it’s essentially challenging the reader to answer a rhetorical “Yes” or to buy the magazine just to take offense.

Probably because the term was coined in the West, ephebiphobia appears to be functionally limited to the developed Western world, which is also the only world that affords young people the free time necessary to scare the adults (and the only one that coins words like this).

Despite this youth-fearing notion having existed for “time immemorial,” there’s fortunately a cure. Two actually! Hypnosis and, for your inner Andy Bernard, choral singing. For yet another option, there’s always the god-fearing method, where everyone fears everything equally.

[1959 via eBay, 1966 via F--yeahNewsweekArchives, 1980 via DiscardTreasures, 1999 via ASU, 2009 via Examiner]

Sadly, the Times is behind the times. About 260 years behind the times because, according to George Washington’s “Rules of Civility,” we’ve been savages for centuries.

These two men must have been unfamiliar with Washington’s 6th rule: “Sleep not when others Speak, Sit not when others stand, Speak not when you Should hold your Peace, walk not on when others Stop.”

In a move that surely would have gotten the manure kicked out of him were he not over six feet and future-General material, a young George decided to transcribe by hand 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” They were based on ideas set forth by Washington’s Jesuit teachers.

In his treatise on niceties, Washington railed against whispering, spitting into the fire and, oddly, laughing. It’s no surprise given how stern and/or constipated he always seemed.

You decide

A few choice excerpts give us an indication of how far he would think we’ve fallen from grace.

On Laughter:

24. Do not laugh too loud or too much at any public spectacle.

84. When your superiors talk to anybody hearken not, neither speak nor laugh.

On Bread:

91. Make no show of taking great delight in your victuals. Feed not with greediness. Eat your bread with a knife. Lean not on the table, neither find fault with what you eat.

94. If you soak bread in the sauce, let it be no more than what you put in your mouth at a time, and blow not your broth at table but stay ’til it cools of itself.

On Meat:

9. Spit not into the fire, nor stoop low before it; neither put your hands into the flames to warm them, nor set your feet upon the fire, especially if there be meat before it.

107. If others talk at table be attentive, but talk not with meat in your mouth.

Interestingly, Washington made no mention of bloodshed or the overthrow of monarchs, which I’m sure at least a few people found unsettling, if not downright rude.

[Image via Wikipedia]

It was quite customary, indeed proper, for boys age seven or younger in the late 19th century and early 20th century to go all metrosexual. (Are we still using that term, you rightly ask? Apparently, yes. See the military’s eyebrow shaping “craze.”)

I get the baby dresses. (What is a baby, after all, but a really expensive, much more fun and enraging dress-up doll? A baby doll, if you will). Still, the pink thing is surprising. It wasn’t until around World War I that color meant anything for genders, and it was pink for the boys. Why? According to Smithsonian,

A June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

Then it wasn’t until after World War II that we settled into our present pink-blue paradigm and, quite honestly, things got boring. So with that in mind, here are pictures of five famous men (as babies) from when men were men (in dresses) and they wore them with pride.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Ernest Hemingway

Ronald Reagan (right)

Albert Einstein

Clark Gable

[Images: Smithsonian, Fark, Reagan Library, University of Frankfurt, Hollywood Legends]

We can do it privately as individuals or systematically as entire government bureaucracies, like with the Texas Board of Education and its textbooks. We’ve been doing it with youth culture since the beginning of time.

More recently though we saw it with Apple co-founder/savior-of-the-human race Steve Jobs. If aliens had touched down on Earth on October 6, they would have had no choice but to assume he was a deity. Sorry, we can’t take you to our leader. He died. But we can take you to the iTunes store, where thanks to this “free thinker,” you won’t find any porn.

It’s entirely understandable why there has been so much coverage of Jobs. There’s no doubt that he revolutionized multiple industries and simplified a complex digital landscape with consumers, not corporations, in mind. He gave us several of our most beloved electronic devices, which surely must have saved lives at one point. Right?

For quite a long time, the media bias in favor of Apple and Jobs has been worse than anything enjoyed by any political candidate or movement ever. When news of his death broke, media outlets, one after another, gushed and oozed about the “visionary.” It took an entire news cycle before someone, in this case, Gawker, pointed out that, hey, yeah, he was Great, but he wasn’t a great guy.

You’d kind of expect to see it from places like Saturday Night Live, but, surprisingly, even the New Yorker fell prey.

Of course, this cover is a joke, but James Surowiecki’s piece did nothing to bring the humor back down to earth. There was no mention of Jobs’ tyrannical management style or his volatile temper or his hatred of buttons. With more and more excerpts of the Walter Isaacson bio coming out, the coverage is now bending back towards reality.

To ignore the troubling aspects of Jobs’ personality does a disservice to the man himself. Let’s role with the whole god joke for a second. If Jesus had been a god, would his message have had the same impact? I’d expect a god to be able to make alcohol on command. It was the fact that he was human that made him resonate. Same with Jobs. He was an incredibly flawed human, and his accomplishments are made all the more remarkable considering that.

I really would hate to have had Perfectionist Steve as a father. Your science project volcano would never have been foamy enough, your summer vacation essay never quite revolutionary enough, or your sock drawer organization nowhere near elegant enough.

To use the term, since it’s a term that we do use (though perhaps shouldn’t), Jobs was a genius. And like many other geniuses, he was kind of an ass and didn’t do it all himself.

Einstein, like Jobs, fathered an illegitimate child. Edison was a thief. They all were “geniuses” and, though it’s hard to remember sometimes, deeply flawed.

Somewhere I came across an op-ed piece from an Indian newspaper where a columnist had dared not to shed tears for Jobs (Unfortunately, I can’t find it.) In it, the writer drew a stark contrast with another genius, Jonas Salk. The scientist had developed one of the most revolutionary devices of the 20th century, and he gave it away for nothing. Jobs, on the other hand, was noticeably absent from the world of philanthropy (though it’s highly possible he gave immensely in private).

You see, you may love your iPhone or iPad. Don’t be ashamed. It’s beyond your control. You might love Jobs. (I’m writing this on a quite pleasing MacBook Pro.) But you shouldn’t Love your iPhone, iPad or Jobs.

[Image via the New Yorker]