Reading the 80s - 1988

They Have a Word for It - Howard Rheingold

I was surprised at how this book has dated - you wouldn't think a book about 'untranslatable' words from other languages than English would, but it has. This actual edition is from 2000, so it's dated in two ways - making reference to things like personal computers and how the vision of them being in every home never quite came off (give it five years Howard, give it five years) and then there's also something around gender. For example it's a given here that women are inherently interested in beauty, and that's treated as just the way the world works, but when men care what they look like it's considered narcissism.

In fact there's a whole section on male/female relationships, called 'Dance of the Sexes' which I'll borrow just one more of quite a few examples from: 'Everybody wants to know what the opposite sex thinks of him or her' - well actually, quite a lot of straight people aren't that bothered, and I should think those who don't consider themselves straight are even less so. 

I don't think it's meant to be offensive, and I'm sure it's not deliberate, but it feels like a whole group of people are just.. not here. Not even in the back of the author's mind. But that's how it was in 1988 I guess. If I cast my mind back to my 15 year old self, would I have noticed this then? Honestly? I suspect not. 

Which I suppose strengthens the premise of the book - that words are what build our picture of the world - the differing language we use around people of different gender doing similar things changes our perception of it (in fact the usual phrase 'opposite gender' is particularly odd, when you think about it. Not complementary, not different, 'opposite', like we're all on a chess board lined up) and the  linguistic gaps and things not discussed leave cultural and conceptual gaps. 

Hence Rheingold's suggestion that we look at words from elsewhere, and see what new to us concepts they can introduce us to. 

I don't have another book for 1988. I started to read Winston Churchill's Afternoon Nap by Jeremy Campbell, which I bought more or less when it was published in one of those bookshops that popped up in the late 80s and early 90s which had books in metal bins and white walls and seemed to sell a lot of design type books at a fraction of the normal price (Taschen, remember them? They're still online). 

I loved it then - it was my gateway drug into popular science, and my poor foxed copy is horribly highlighted in red pen and I suspect has been dropped in the bath at some point. Even starting it though I'm sure some of it must be out of date, and things like circadian rhythms and spacetime were new to me then, and aren't now, and so it doesn't have the same power. I think I need to Kondo it, be grateful for what it meant at the time, and let it go.