Monthly Archives: September 2011

nocebo

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 2 comments

You probably know what a placebo is: an inert medication, a “sugar pill”; they’re used in clinical trials to give a basis of comparison with the medicine being studied (the patients don’t know if they’re getting the drug or the placebo, and in the best studies the researchers don’t, either, until after).

A common idea people have is that a placebo is something that simply doesn’t and can’t produce effects, and any perceived effect is all in your head. This is not actually true: the placebo effect is quite real – given the right stimulus, the mind actually can cause real improvements in symptoms, and not just self-reported improvements. The placebo effect typically wears off over time, but, then again, so do a lot of drugs. And of course in order for a drug to be considered effective, it has to produce significantly more benefit than a placebo would. (There’s a nice article on the power of the mind in healing in the August 27, 2011 issue of New Scientist, complete with references to several studies published in journals.)

Now, how about something that, instead of stimulating your mind to help heal you, instead stimulates your mind to help hurt you? That would be no placebo! Instead of the great “yes” of healing it would give the great “no” of decline. What would we call it? Hmmm… how about nocebo?

Does that look like a really stupid English-Latin amalgam, a portmanteau of no and placebo? Do you want to say, “No, that’s out of place”? Well, guess what: just as placebo is Latin for “I will please”, nocebo is Latin for “I will harm”. The noc root shows up in words such as innocent, innocuous, and (mutated) noxious.

But who would create such a thing? And who would take a pill that they are told would harm them? It seems senseless, and yet many people swallow bitter pills every day – figuratively speaking. Nocebo usually shows up followed by effect, for the point, in the main, is that negative expectations tend to produce negative results. A therapy is more likely to fail, or to have weaker effect, if the patient expects it to fail.

Oh, and there are those drug trials – it is not only a drug’s positive effects that are measured against placebo; it is also its adverse effects, commonly called “side effects.” Placebos also produce side effects, just as drugs do (and of course people sometimes ascribe unrelated sensations to treatments too). And if a given side effect is produced no more often by a drug than by a placebo, it can be assumed not actually to be caused by the drug’s active ingredient.

Now, this word nocebo – does it seem especially nocent, nocuous, noxious? It begins with no, and that is indeed a strong effect, as it is such a foundational word. I am put in mind of NoHo, a New York neighbourhood north of Houston street (SoHo is south of Houston): it gains for a me a sense of negativity and inferiority from that No, though of course the reality of the neighbourhood does weigh against that.

But aside from that, the word nocebo has a certain sweetness – it is not itself such a bitter pill. It has that lovely sequence of rings, five in various transformations o c e (bent in) b (with a line) o – it just cries out for modernist typography. Its beginning may make French speakers think of noce (wedding); the bo may bring out beau, or a bow, or a guy named Bo. The /o – i – o/ of the vowels brings forth Romeo, rodeo, Oreo, do-si-do, and perhaps torpedo. It also sounds like it should be the name of a city – it has tastes, perhaps, of Nogales and Toledo, among others (there is a Nødebo in Denmark, but the pronunciation of that is somewhat different).

But of course that’s how it tastes to me. You may get something quite different from it – one person’s food is another’s poison, and, yes, one person’s placebo may be another’s nocebo.

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alethic

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 1 comment

You have reached the river, the lethal river, the river Lethe. All that you have been is behind you, all your memories, the house you have constructed of yourself; ahead is the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: oblivion. Metempsychosis requires not merely mental lethargy but deletion of the cargo. Be reassured: the erasure is of the chalk, not the board. But you have no choice: you must drink the cup in order to persist; were you not to, you would become nothing but memories.

But what is the real ethic of this? Who is the true you? Is your self the graffiti on your wall, or is it the wall? Are you being turned on the lathe of time in your formation, or are you the hands and instruments that carve? Are the memories mere illusions, a narrative of distraction from being? Or are they the only truth? Are there two mutually exclusive truths? Is a person who has forgotten who they were the same person?

We know, at least, what the ancient Greeks thought: truth and forgetfulness are opposites, just as sleep and intelligence are. “Intelligent” in Greek, after all, is εξυπνος exupnos, “unasleep”. And α a “not” plus λήθη léthé “forgetfulness” gives us ἀλήθεια alétheia, “truth”. And is death forgetfulness? No, lethal comes from Latin lethum “death” and is unrelated. It is rebirth, not death, that requires forgetting.

From alétheia we get (aside from the female name Alethea) our word alethic, a lithe word with its liquid and soft fricative, a word not necessarily for thelemites but one for philosophers and linguists. It refers not to ethical considerations but to questions of truth.

And yet what is truth? How well do your memories truly serve you? You close your eyes only for a moment and the moment’s gone. If someone says you did such-and-such or saw so-and-so last week, past a certain point of specificity you may only say that it probably happened or probably didn’t, or that it must have or couldn’t have. So, too, in reference to things that have not happened, you may talk about whether they could have or could not have; and in reference to determinations of present reality not known from experience, you may talk of what must be the case and what can’t be the case.

All of this is in some sense alethic, but just as we have two parallel universes for the truth of who you are, so too do we have two parallel universes for alethic. You see, in linguistics, the alethic modality is when you make a statement of logical necessity, possibility, or impossibility in relation to the world you are in: “Because every moment of being is an unrepeatable combination of circumstances and time, and change is unceasing, the person you were at time x cannot be the person you will be at time x+y.” “As you may not remain in the past, and as the present instantly becomes the past, you have no choice but to proceed into the future, to be what you were not before.” This is what we know is; by contrast, when you talk of things the way you know they are not or have not been, that is certainly not alethic; it is subjunctive, it is counterfactual.

But in modal logic, the subjunctive mode, the counterfactual mode, is what is called the alethic mode. It is the question not of how things are – they are as they are – but of how things could be, or would have to be, or could not be, if they were otherwise than what they are: “If you could stop becoming, you would never be anything other than what you have been.” “Were you not to drink the cup, you would become nothing but memories.”

So you are at the river, the river Lethe, one of the rivers of Hades, and you have no choice – do you? All your dreams pass before your eyes, a curiosity. Could you make a lithe, graceful, athletic leap, and like Thalia write your own comedy or idyll? Oh, no, your idyll is only an empty idol, an idle fantasy. The truth is what must be, and the truth is that, from where you are now, you must have been what you were, but you must become something you never have been before. You bend to drink from the stream… and then you realize that you are, and always have been, nothing other than a wave in the stream, and your bending is no more than you, the wave, subsiding again, the same water but no more wave, nothing lost but nothing there. The world of the surface versus the world of the substance: parallel universes, Lethe and aletheia. And which is true?

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venture, adventure, misadventure

Posted on September 1, 2011 | 1 comment

photo by Kerry Williams

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? So you put a bit more on the table in hopes of increasing your return. But be careful you don’t put too much on the table – you may come to ill chance.

That seems a natural enough progression for these three words, doesn’t it – by length? Venture – set forth; adventure – things get wild; misadventure – things turn ugly. Sometimes when you choose to take what comes to you, you end up saying “That it should come to this!”

One’s tolerance for adventure varies, of course; Kerry Williams, who suggested this triad for tasting, recalls hearing an elderly tourist embarking on a whale-watching trip remark that she did not want an adventure. Aw, but who doesn’t want a whale of a time? Heh. Well, it’s good to have a swell time, as long as the timing of the swells does not run against you, and the whale does not whale on you. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. What looks brilliant to one person may look hellish to another.

These three words – venture, adventure, misadventure – are obviously related, and all three have been in English a long time – since the medieval era, two of them around by 1300 and the other by 1450 – but they have developed different flavours, and have had their own adventures or misadventures over the course of time. Their source is Latin ad “to” and venire “come”; it referred to something about to happen – the future, French avenir. The French word we got our English word from was aventure, and our aventure referred first to something that happens without design, by chance or luck or what have you.

Yes, that’s right: aventure came first. And then two things happened: it lost something, and it gained something. First (around 1450) it lost the a – probably reanalysis: aventure became a venture. But the original form also persisted, and a fad for returning to Latin roots brought in (around 1500) the d that French had dropped, so we got adventure. And misadventure? Actually around nearly as long as adventure, and starting out as misaventure, gaining the d at the same time as adventure did.

And of course the meanings and usages changed over time. Words are known by the company they keep, and these words have come to run with different crowds. The Corpus of Contemporary American English bears this out: joint venture, business venture, venture capital, venture into; a great adventure, sense of adventure, adventure travel, outdoor adventure; tragic misadventure, death by misadventure.

Misadventure is a rather less common word than the other two (and death by misadventure usually means “made a fatally stupid error”); books you’ll find with “misadventure” tend to be in politics, culture, history, and biography – and perhaps mystery. We know very well that venture is now a business word, even the name of a TV show focused on business ventures; no surprise that searching for books with “venture” gets you a lot of business books. Adventure, on the other hand, is not something that provokes the adult business sense, the careful wager; rather, it calls to the kid in us, who really does want to walk on the sun and so much more. And so many of the books that you’ll find with “adventure” are kids’ books, from Mark Twain to Hergé and beyond.

Not that everyone retains their childlikeness (or childishness) to the same extent, as already observed. It’s true that some people are more risk-averse than others. But where would humans be without a sense of adventure? Not humans, really, not as we know humans. All apes have some sense of adventure (it’s required for hunting, for one thing); people just take it farther. How far? To the moon! Indeed – and giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon. But, to continue the song lyric: I hope my legs don’t break, walking on the moon.

Hm. Might as well be walking on the sun. Or walking on sunshine. The latter sounds brilliant; the former, hellishly hot. But perhaps still worth venturing forth for? Kerry Williams, who lives in Alaska, organized an event last New Year’s Day for the Anchorage Adventurers Meetup group called “Walking on the Sun.” Now, obviously, while Alaska is relatively close to the Far East (where the sun rises!), and while the warmth of the sun might seem very welcoming there, it’s not actually all that close to the sun. But, yet again, it’s a matter of perspective – as Kerry’s photo, above, demonstrates. The adventurers, walking on a ridge, photographed from a distance with a long lens, take on a timeless aspect, and seem embarked on a great adventure that might have taken place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

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vinculum

Posted on September 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

I like to think of Sesquiotica as a sort of verbal wine bar, a locale of Lucullan delicacies with lexis for liquor and syllables for syllabub. I do not approach words with the conqueror’s mindset – veni, vidi, vici. Nor am I some Dracula who drains the blood out of words one by one. I prefer rather to inculcate appreciation, to cultivate not division but a common bond. For language, after all, is a grand conspiracy, a group-mind phenomenon: a language operates just by common consent and will of all, and since that “all” is constantly in flux and is made of so many diverse parts, language too is in flux. And we all bring different things to add to it, and it assimilates.

This verbal wine bar is also open to bring-your-own, no corkage fee involved. And today’s vin du jour has been brought by Doug Linzey: it is vinculum, a delicious word that uses fricative, nasal, stop, liquid to get the parts of the mouth working in cooperation from front to back and back to the front.

Well, how fitting an addition to our curriculum. As Doug points out, this is indeed a bar with a vin. You see, in math, a vinculum is a bar drawn over two or more terms to indicate that they are to be handled as an ensemble – rather like putting them in parentheses. It is from this function that it gets its name, for it comes from Latin vincire “bind” and the diminutive noun suffix ulum – so it’s a little bond.

But there are also other uses of the vinculum; a plain horizontal line can come in handy. It is used to indicate a repeating decimal, for instance (as over the 7 in the decimal for 7/9), and can signify negation in Boolean algebra. It is also what one calls the line between numerator and denominator in a stacked fraction. Ah, what binds divides – you can’t have one without the other. Good fences make good neighbours, and you need a good problem for a good solution.

A bar is all about solutions, of course: solutions of ethanol, mainly. But we escape such dissolution and dissipation when our consumption is words. The cups we want are the u and u, and we can cap them with the n and m. And then, still able to keep it in civil terms, we get down to the numbers: v, i, c, l – five, one, a hundred, fifty. Put a line in the middle and it’s vi over cl, 6/150, which is a twenty-fifth. Actually there are 26 ounces in a fifth, but 25 thirtieths in a 750, which is what fifths are at today’s bars – 75 cl.

But, really, at today’s bar we can have whatever fraction we want, and repeat. And if we have more than one vinculum? We have vincula or vinculums – seven or nine letters.

Or we can have Seven of Nine, a character in Star Trek: Voyager, a human who had been assimilated by the Borg and partially re-humanized thereafter. She was a repeating character – actually, a regular crew member. She provided insights into the group-mind of the Borg, who assimilated others and added the others’ distinctiveness to their own (a little like an intellectual-cultural incubus – or succubus, perhaps). Not that the Borg are exactly like language, even English: English is too free-for-all and heterogeneous to be Borg. But they are also united by a common bond, and that gets us to the heart of the matter: the heart of a cube-shaped Borg spaceship is also called the vinculum.

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