Perception, Investigation: a Perpetual Imbroglio

Today I want to talk about the difference between two things that are consistently mixed up in D&D 5e: Perception and Investigation.  This is ostensibly a gaming topic, of interest to people who play (or just watch) TTRPGs such as D&D, but I’m going to make an argument that it’s actually rather fascinating from a linguistic perspective as well.  This is one of those rare topics where I can explore language and give gaming advice all at the same time.

So, first of all, what actually is the problem here?  Simply put, D&D characters have skills—certain things that they’re good at, or not so good at—and, when the character attempts to do something (well, something that isn’t swinging a sword or casting a spell), it’s the GM’s job to decide which skill applies.  Sometimes there can be a bit of back and forth on this: for instance, two of the skills in 5e are Athletics and Acrobatics.  Athletics is based on Strength, and it’s what you use when you want to climb, jump, swim, or grapple.  Acrobatics, on the other hand, is based on Dexterity, and it’s what you use when you want to dodge, tumble, or flip.  You could imagine a scenario where a player says what they want to do and the GM says, “great, give me an Athletics check,” to which the player replies: “ummm, can I use Acrobatics instead?” Obviously, they ask this because they have a higher Dexterity than they do Strength, or they’re proficient in the one but not the other.  You could even imagine a scenario where either skill could be used (say, the user wants to negate damage from falling, and they could either employ their jumping skills or their tumbling skills), and the GM might change their minds.  Sometimes the GM just does this not to be a hardass—after all, we’re playing a game here, not trying to outwit each other or trick each other into rolling poorly—but sometimes the GM can see it either way, or the GM is just persuaded of the player’s point of view.  And that’s fine.

What’s less fine is if the GM doesn’t really know which one is the right answer.  As a GM, one needn’t be perfect, of course, but one should strive to understand the things that come up often.  And, if you watch any streaming D&D games (which is easy to do these days), you may see a scenario like I describe above between Athletics and Acrobatics ... but you will almost certainly see one involving Perception and Investigation.

And here’s the thing: once you have a good grasp on the difference between the two, it’s way less common to find a situation where they really are interchangeable.  I can’t count the number of times where I’ve watched GMs—really really good GMs, even—say, “ah, sure, you can use Perception here,” or even (and I shudder to even type the words) “give me a Perception check or Investigation check: your choice.” Now, I’m more of a yell-at-the-screen sort of critic than a post-snarky-corrections-in-the-comments-section one, so, if I want to publicize my opinion on this issue, this blog is where I do it.

Now, I’m hardly the first person to realize this is a problem.  A cursory Internet search will reveal article after article (after article) telling you how to distinguish between the two.  The problem is, most of them give conflicting advice, so they can’t all possibly be right.  This leads to many (many) instances of people on the Internet asking for help ... for which they receive—you guessed it—conflicting advice.  And the problem is, even if you try to find a common thread from all those, you’re probably going to find the wrong one.

See, the general concensus of the Internet is, since Perception is based on Wisdom while Investigation is based on Intelligence, Investigation should only be used to understand the things that you see (using Perception).  Investigation, this line of reasoning goes, is all about drawing conclusions and deductions based on obersvations.  But there’s a fundamental problem with that: it contradicts the actual rules.  Here’s what the rules say about Investigation:

When you look around for clues and make deductions based on those clues, you make an Intelligence (Investigation) check.

So the deducing is part of the Investigation, sure, but so is the looking.  Fine, then: what do the rules say about Perception?

Your Wisdom (Perception) check lets you spot, hear, or otherwise detect the presence of something.

Hmm ... that also seems to involving looking.  No wonder people are confused.

Now, I should first note that neither skill has to involve looking.  You can perceive things with your ears or your nose, and you can investigate things with your hands or your brain.  But those aren’t the cases that confuse us, as it turns out.  If the player says “I listen to see if I can hear anyone following us” and the GM asks for a Perception check, no one is going to try to talk them into Investgation (or at least no one I’ve ever heard of); likewise, if the player says “I want to try to decipher this code” and the GM asks for Investigation, no serious player is going to try to convince them that it should be Perception instead.  It’s only when the visual sense comes into it—and we human beings are primarily visual creatures, so it tends to come into it quite a lot—that people tend to get confused.

As I mentioned, this has been debated a lot.  I wouldn’t want to weigh in if I didn’t feel like I had something new to contribute.  So here’s where I endorse my potentially revolutionary, potentially controversial take on this dilemma: it’s all about the verbs.  And the verb at the heart of this bewildering issue is “look.”

And what’s really fascinating to me is that it reminds me of my high school Spanish.  The way I was taught (and I’m sure it was a gross oversimplification designed to be able to be grasped by teenage brains) is that if you want to say you’re looking at something, you use mirar, but if you want to say you’re looking for something, then it’s buscar.  So when a native Spanish speaker tells you “miré la playa,” you understand that they went to the beach and just enjoyed the view.  But if on the other hand they say “busqué la playa,” then you know that they were trying to find the beach in the first place.  “I looked at the beach” (or “I watched the beach”) vs “I looked for the beach” (or “I searched for the beach”).  This is only hard for us English speakers because we’re so used to having one word for both concepts.  But, when you think about it, it’s actually easier and nicer to have the two different words: avoids any ambiguity.  “What’s the deal with the beach?” “Oh, I’m still looking.” Does that mean you refused to leave the beach because the view is so awesome, or that you can’t figure out how to use the map app on your phone so you never even got there?  No way to tell in English.  But, in Spanish, it wouldn’t even be a question: “todavía miro” and “todavía busco” are two entirely different replies.

I have no way to prove this, but I feel very confident in saying that Spanish-speaking D&D players and GMs have no confusion about Perception and Investigation at all: Perception is mirar, and Investigation is buscar.  Case closed.

But us poor non-speakers of Spanish need some guidance, yes?  Very well then, here’s my advice (to both GMs and players): expunge the word “look” from your vocabulary.  That’s it.  That’s all it takes.  Don’t tell your GM “I want to look and see if I see a clue”; say instead either “I want to try to notice a clue” or “I want to try to search for a clue.” If you can replace “look” with “observe” or “notice,” that’s Perception.  If you can replace it with “search” or “examine,” that’s Investigation.  That’s really all there is to it.

Now, I do want to address another aspect that seems to flummox people: the amount of time taken by the two actions.  One of those links above contains this gem of wisdom:

Often, DMs think that the difference between perception and investigation is simply how long the player wants to take to search. But this is NOT the case.

(Emphasis in the original.)  To which I respond: well, yes ... and no.  What they say is technically true.  The amount of time taken should never be the determining factor in which skill applies.  However, as a practical matter, it really is the case that “noticing” or “observing” typically takes a very small amount of time, while “searching” or “examining” takes much longer.  We could come up with counter-examples, of course: a Perception check to see if you notice anything during your 3-hour turn on watch duty, or an Investigation check to see if you can have a flash of inspiration while examining a puzzle with the walls closing in on you.  But, in general, Perception happens in an instant and Investigation takes time.  Which brings up another thorny issue: doing these things in combat.  See, in D&D a round of combat takes (in theory) 6 seconds.  During those 6 seconds, you can move (up to 30 feet, typically), and take an action, and maybe even take a bonus action (such as hiding if you’re a rogue, or getting in one more punch to the face if you’re a monk), and take a free “object interaction” (such as drawing a weapon or opening an unlocked door).  The main action for the turn thus has to fit in a very small number of seconds, certainly no more than 3.  You are not going to be searching a room in 3 seconds.  Contrariwise, it simply doesn’t take 3 whole seconds to look around and notice something.  I would never charge my player a whole action to take a Perception check in combat, but I would also never let my player get away with an Investigation check in combat, unless perhaps they devoted all their attention to it, and even then it would probably be an astronomically high DC.  Yet making players use their action for Perception is very common in streaming D&D such as Critical Role, and allowing them to do so for Investigation is not unheard of either.  I have to say, these calls don’t make a lot of sense to me.

Of course, several of the links I listed above will tell you that I’m completely wrong about searching for clues being an Investigation check.  Here’s some examples:

... Investigation focuses on interpreting the clues found with Perception checks.

However, the way I think of it is that Perception is to spot something like a clue, and Investigation is to work out what that clue means.

... to draw conclusions from the clues you’ve used perception to gather.

There’s only one problem with this theory: it’s not what the rules say. “When you look around for clues ... you make an Intelligence (Investigation) check” seems pretty clear to me.  I respect the distinction that these authors are trying to draw: a skill based on your Wisdom means you’re using intuition and awareness, while one based on Intelligence means you’re using logic and reasoning.  Unfortunately, trying to get too detailed on things like this is always going to break down.  To return to my first example of conflicting skills, your natural dexterity absolutely impacts your ability to climb, but it’s still an Athletics check; the strength of your muscles is definitely a factor when you’re swinging on a rope like a trapeeze artist, but it’s still an Acrobatics check.  D&D is not a perfect simulation—no TTRPG can be—and sometimes you just gotta go, well, this skill is for this action and this is what ability the book says goes with it ... don’t overthink it.

So, if you play D&D (and especially if you GM it), hopefully this will help you figure out which skill to apply when it seems confusing.  And, even if you don’t, hopefully you’ve had some inspirations as to how the subtleties of language impact every part of our lives: even the most unlikely ones.

Between the Lightning Bug and the Lightning

There is a German word that I’m quite fond of: Weltanschauung.  It means, roughly, “worldview,” although it’s both a little more specific and a little more general than that.  More specific in that, technically speaking, it is a term used in German philosophy with a very particular meaning.  But also more general in that we’ve somehow watered down the meaning of the word in English.  That is, “worldview” is a calque of Weltanschauung, so it really ought to mean the same thing.  But, after we borrowed the phrase, we started interpreting it literally (in English, that is), so that nowadays “worldview” often means (or is taken to mean) the way a person views the world.  But that’s actually too specific for what Weltanschauung means (or can mean, when used outside of its technical philosophical sense).  Weltanschauung, according to Wikipedia, “refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it.”  That is, not just how you (one person) views the world (the physical planet you live on).  But how any person, or even an organization, or a nation, sees and interprets not only their physical surroundings, but also the social and emotional context in which they are living.

This is related to what I learned of as “the fishbowl effect.”  Nowadays, Google will tell you that the fishbowl effect is a feeling of constant scrutiny, experienced mainly by astronauts and reality TV stars.  Which does make a certain amount of sense, particularly if all you know about keeping tropical fish is those little bowls with goldfish in them that you win at the county fair.¹  Slightly less sense if you understand that keeping fish in a small enclosed area with no cover terrifies them so badly that it cuts their life expectancy by an order of magnitude.  But, anyway, my point is this: when I learned about “the fishbowl effect,” it meant something else entirely.  It was the idea that the fish in the fishbowl has no concept of what a “fishbowl” is.  To him, it’s just the world.  You need to be outside the fishbowl in order to comprehend that it is a bowl at all.  For me, “Weltanschauung” encompasses all the connotations of that: that your worldview not only frames your entire outlook, but also limits it in certain ways.

Similar to how it’s difficult for people to understand a concept that their native tongue lacks a word for.  Like how English doesn’t really have a word for “Weltanschauung.”

German has a few words that we don’t have in English, so we just stole them.  “Weltanschauung” is my favorite, but ”Zeitgeist” is also good, as is ”Schadenfreude.”²  These are great words, and remarkably useful.

The other day I came across an online article outlining ten more German words that there really ought to be English equivalents for.  Sort of like the German version of sniglets.  I find very many sniglets to be remarkably useful: I have a friend who’s afflicted with bovilexia, and how can you tell the story of the guy who invented bumperglints getting 10¢ for each one and therefore becoming a millionaire without the word “bumperglint”?³  And the number of times I’ve committed the act of carperpetuation at this point in my life is pretty ridiculous.  So I’m perfectly fine with coming up with new words to paper over cracks in our vocabulary.⁴  So much the better if they happen to already be real words, just in a different language ... right?

So this list of ten German words was pretty entertaining, in my view at least.  None of the ten are are as great as the big three I mentioned up at the top of this post, of course, but there were some keepers there: who hasn’t wanted a word to express the excess weight you’ve put on from emotional overeating (“Kummerspeck”), or, possibly even more useful, a word to describe the feeling of depression you get when you contemplate the world as it is compared to the world as it might be (“Weltschmerz”)?  Two of the words in particular stand out as pretty damned useful.

The first is “Fremdschämen,” which is defined herein as “the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are.”  This words rings a rather large bell with me.  For years now I’ve been experiencing this exact feeling without knowing what to call it.  Because of Fremdschämen, I can’t watch reality TV, or shows like Springer.  And there are entire avenues of comedy that are closed off to me: I can’t listen to the Jerky Boys or their ilk, I didn’t make it through even a single episode of The Office, I regularly have to fast-forward through Stephen Colbert’s “Better Know a District” series ... hell, I couldn’t even properly enjoy a recent rewatching of Fawlty Towers on Netflix because of constantly feeling embarrassed for Basil.  Also, fully half the comic ouevre of Ben Stiller.  Have you ever noticed that Ben Stiller comedies fall into two groups?  On the one hand, he does some great movies where he plays a wacky character, like Zoolander, or Tropic Thunder, or Mystery Men.  Then there’s the other half of his movies—such as There’s Something about Mary, Meet the Parents, and Along Came Polly—where the entire movie is about him doing stupid, embarrassing things, and we’re supposed to laugh at his misfortune.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t find amusement in the pain of others.⁵  So sue me.

The other great word here is “Torschlusspanik,” which the article defines as “the fear, usually as one gets older, that time is running out and important opportunities are slipping away.”  I live in an almost-constant state of Torschlusspanik.  There are many reasons for this.  Probably the biggest one is something I’ve alluded to before: as you get older, your ability to judge the passage time slows down, resulting in time appearing to go faster.⁶  And I’m pretty much right at that point in life where most men my age have already snapped and gone out and bought a motorcycle or a Porsche, or quit their job to pursue their lifelong dream of being a rock-n-roll drummer or performance artist.

But there are other reasons as well.  I’ve never been a very organized person.  My mother’s side of the family is populated with people who overplan everything, and I find it annoying.  Going on vacation with my grandparents on that side of the family was a nightmare of schedules, itineraries, and lists.  Aren’t vacations supposed to be relaxing?  How are you supposed to relax with all that rushing around trying to make your schedule?  So I never subscribed to all that organizational crap.  Which wasn’t a huge burden when I was younger, although I find that the older I get the more I regret never having put much stock in it.  I’ve tried various techniques for keeping track of my todo list(s), but so far I’m pretty terrible at it.  Which only exacerbates my feelings of Torschlusspanik.

There are lots of things I want to do.  Of course I have a family, including 3 lovely children, and I want to spend time with them.  I want to do my writing: not only my ongoing novel, but this blog of course, and my Other Blog.  I have a few CPAN modules that I’m responsible for, and other programming projects that I want to work on.  Then there’s my hobby, and my other hobby.  And my job takes up some time, which of course I don’t mind at all because I love my job, and there are holidays and birthdays and things to do around the house or things to fix on the car and all the ordinary little things we have to do just to keep on functioning in life.  So sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled in many different directions, all of them desireable, surely, but one still can’t do everything at once.  Sometimes I sit down at night, knowing I probably ought to be working on something, but unable to properly fixate on which something I ought to do first.

So I do my best to spread out my activities.  Being someone who puts so much faith in balance and paradox, I believe one should try to do as many different things as possible, and also sieze any opportunity to do several things at once (like playing Heroscape with my kids, or working on one of my CPAN modules for work).  And I try to fight through my feelings of Torschlusspanik so that I can still enjoy things like finding German words for concepts we don’t have in English.  Or deep philosophical ponderings.  Like wondering if euneeblics are really just trying to overcome their Weltschmerz.

1 Although, technically, goldfish aren’t tropical fish.  Probably you don’t care about that distinction.  But I mention it so that I can prove I know the difference in case I’m verbally attacked by aquarium nerds.

2 German nouns are always capitalized, in German.  There is some debate as to whether German loanwords should be capitalized in English.  You can see which side of the debate I come down on.

3 Fair warning: I’m pretty sure that story is an urban legend.  But still a good story.

4 Remember: “sniglet” itself is defined as “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should.”

5 Hey, look: Schadenfreude!

6 I really ought to write a whole blog post on this.  I keep referring to it, but a longer exploration of this interesting scientific theory is probably in order.

What Morris Wrought

So, this week I’m going to talk about the titles I came up with for my 13-part blog series on my relationship to Perl that I did on my Other Blog.  When you do a long series like that, you have a number of challenges: presenting the topic concisely, laying the groundwork for the following week, the simple grind of cranking out the next 1500 words.  But there’s also the issue of coming up with titles.  Naming things is hard.  In my technogeek life, it’s probably the thing that we fight most about.  In fact, there’s a famous quote we’re wont to trot out at times:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton

Sometimes you see people online wondering why this saying is famous: naming things is easy, they say.  These are invariably young programmers who have never had to deal with users who can’t understand why a feature doesn’t (or can’t) work because they’re confused about what it is because it’s so poorly named.  Or the pain of having to use a word in one sense when talking to sales (because they use the industry standard definition) and a different sense when talking to fellow techies (because they use the literal meaning) and an altogether different sense when talking to management, because they use a completely arbitrary defintion that they got from the guy before the guy before the guy before you, who was invariably a young programmer who didn’t understand that naming things is hard.

So, yeah: coming up with good names for things is hard.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things is harder.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things 13 weeks in a row is very difficult indeed, and so hopefully I can be forgiven for doing only a mediocre job of it.

The first two or three came to me fairly naturally, and they established the pattern: quotes, either direct or paraphrased, that referenced different cultural things.  These might be songs, poems, television shows, movies, quotes by famous people, or whatever.  Several of them were as easy as the first few; some of them were so hard that I almost spent longer searching for a good title than I did writing the post in the first damn place.  Some of them are so obsure I don’t expect anyone else to know what the hell I’m on about; some were obscure enough that I didn’t know them myself until I Googled them for the purpose of the series.

Here’s the 13 titles I came up with, along with the hints I gave out last week.  Honestly, some of the hints are fairly obscure as well, but I didn’t want to make it too easy.

1. The Road So Far: a Winchester recap
2. The Power of OOP: Johnny Colla would have done a mean sax solo
3. A Møøse Once Bit My Sister: I apologize for the obscure references; those responsible have been sacked
4. A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read: also, profited in strange concealments ...
5. Speaking with the Speech of Coders: a present from Vietnam
6. Perl is Engineering and Art: what’s to learn? it’s a snake ..
7. The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World: according to Tata, not Perl at all ...
8. Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: there was grandeur in his view of life from the Beagle
9. That’s Why I Failed Recess: it was funnier when Rudy said it to Fat Albert
10. What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM: involving two couples and a bottle of gin
11. Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?: a plea to m’colleague Hugh
12. The End of the Beginning: once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives”
13. Here’s to Future Days: why are they called “twins” if there’s three of them?

Now let’s look at which each one references, as well as discussing its relevance to the particular post it ended up tagging.

The Road So Far

This is what they put on the title card when they do a longer recap on the TV show Supernatural.  The card looks like this, or maybe like this.  The protagonists of the series are the Winchester brothers, thus this is “a Winchester recap.”

This was a fairly natural choice for the first post in the series, which told a highly abbreviated version of my programming life, from age 14 or so, up to the present.  It’s a cool reference if you get it, but it still works well if you don’t.

I think a lot of people think of Supernatural as a teeny-bopper series, probably because it’s on the CW along with other teeny-bopper series like Gossip Girl, or The Vampire Diaries.  Of course, I was watching Supernatural when it was on the WB ... which was the home of Charmed and Dawson’s Creek, so I suppose I’m not digging myself out of that hole very well.  I dunno; I suppose it is a teeny-bopper series in many ways, and it’s probably gone on far beyond when they should have called it quits, but I still enjoy it.  Call it a guilty pleasure.  Besides, every now and again Felicia Day shows up, and that just makes it all worthwhile.

The Power of OOP

My second post in the series was about object-oriented programming, or “OOP” for short, and what makes it so useful.  So it seemed natural to harken back to Huey Lewis & the News’ classic 80’s song, “The Power of Love”.  The hint refers to the great sax player of the News, Johnny Colla (who was also a co-writer of “The Power of Love,” as it happens).

I’m not actually a huge fan of “The Power of Love,” nor its companion piece “Back in Time,” both off the Back to the Future soundtrack.  As far as I’m concerned Lewis & the News peaked with Sports, and it’s all downhill from there.  By the time Huey was declaring that it was “Hip to be Square,” I was embarrassed to admit that I’d ever seen them live.  (But I did, with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble opening, and it was a great show, I gotta tell ya.)

A Møøse Once Bit My Sister

No self-respecting programmer should have missed this one, which is of course is a reference to the ultra-classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  As you probably know, all the credits of the film are at the begining, and the Pythons couldn’t let it get too boring, so they peppered it with lots of moose references (for whatever reason).  The title is a direct quote from the credits, and the hint is a paraphrased version of a later credits quote.

For a post extolling the virtues of Moose, but also lamenting a few of its warts, there was no way I could pass up this title.

A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read

This is one of the ones I spent a lot of time trying to find a good reference for.  The post was about legibility: the idea that a good program should be able to be read like a good story.  After several fruitless Googles, the phrase “well-read” popped into my head.  I wondered what the origin of that phrase was.  Of course, if you’re a native English speaker and you spend any time at all poking at the origins of common phrases, you know what the answer is 80-90% of the time: Shakespeare did it.

As it is here.  I paraphrased the relevant bit for the title, and I used the surrounding context for the hint.  Here’s the full text, from Henry IV, Part 1:

In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read, and profited
In strange concealments, valiant as a lion
And as wondrous affable and as bountiful
As mines of India.

This is Mortimer speaking about Glyndwr, whoever that is.  I never read Henry IV, personally.  Still a good quote though.

Speaking with the Speech of Coders

Every once in a while we Americans wake up out of our egocentricity and remember that not all our blog post readers share our Western heritage.  By this point in my blog series, I felt it was time to pick a reference from the other side of the world.  I spent some digging through the Tao Te Ching, which is normally my go-to source for pithy quotes from the Orient.  I poked around The Art of War and Hagakure, both of which I also like, but they weren’t very helpful for this post, which was about linguistics.  I think I even explored the Analects briefly, but I lean much more towards Taoism than Confucianism, as you might imagine of one so obsessed by balance and paradox.

Then suddenly, after long and futile searching, it hit me: I already had a great source which would be perfect for this.  “The Red Cockatoo” is a short poem by Chinese poet Po Chu-i (also romanized as Bai Juyi), who lived in the Tang Dynasty and is very popular in both China and Japan (at least according to his Wikipedia page).  There are several different translations, but I prefer the one by Arthur Waley, the great British sinologist who gave us excellent translations of both the Tao Te Ching and the Analects.  Here it is in its entirety:

Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.

Beautiful, and piquant.  The hint refers to the fact that “Annam” is an ancient Chinese name for Vietnam (or part of what is modern Vietnam).

Perl is Engineering and Art

This one was obvious to anyone who read this particular post, which spent a good deal of time analyzing a sidebar from the O’Reilly book Learning Python entitled “Python is Engineering, Not Art.”  I almost didn’t use this title, actually, as it’s so much more obvious than all the rest.  But then I decided that this title was just too good to pass up.  The hint is obvious as well, or at least is so in hindsight.

Fun side note: the animal on the cover of Learning Python is a rat.  Write your own joke here.

The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World

Another tough one to title.  This post covered several different subtopics that didn’t really fit anywhere else, so there wasn’t a great choice for a title anyway.  One of the topics I covered was my school experience with programming, so I started looking for quotes on education and ran across this one by Nelson Mandela:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

There’s a bit of contention on whether he actually said this or not (and whether he used the word “which” in it if he did), but overall it seemed solid enough.

The hint refers to one of Mandela’s nicknames: “Tata” means “father” in Xhosa.  His other nickname is “Madiba,” but some have argued that it’s inappropriate for non-South-Africans to use that one.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful

This one was a little easier.  The post was about evolution, so it made sense to peruse the words of Charles Darwin, who was not only a very influential scientist, but also an eloquent writer.  The full quote is:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This is from the conclusion of Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species, and is in fact the only time Darwin ever uses the word “evolve,” in the first edition.  (And, in the second, he added the phrase “by the Creator” to make it clear what he was talking about.)

The hint, of course, is a bit of the quote above, combined with a reference to the famous ship that Darwin sailed on, HMS Beagle.

That’s Why I Failed Recess

The ninth post in my series was about Getting Shit Done, and, when I was trying to think of a title for it, I kept remembering a joke from my childhood.  As the hint suggests, I’m pretty sure the first time I heard it was on Fat Albert.  It might have been Rudy who said it, or then again it might have been Russell—he was always a smartass.  Then again, we’re talking about 40-odd years ago, so I might be misremembering altogether and it was never in Fat Albert at all.

Anyways, here’s how I remember the joke:

A: I don’t play.  That’s why I had to quit school in the third grade.
B: Whaddaya mean?
A: ‘Cause the teacher said “recess,” and I said “no, I don’t play.”

There are countless variations of this joke, including the more concise version I used for my title, used in the common venacular, multiple rap songs, blog posts by other people, Facebook user names, tweets, and Internet memes.  In fact, this is a meme from before we knew what memes were.

Plus it’s really funny.

What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM

Along about Part 10 I wrote a post that was so damn long I had to break it into two pieces.  Originally the title of this post and the following one were going to be switched, so that the title of this one could be a callback to the mention of “m’colleague” which I had dropped into the text.  (Instead, I ended up using that for the hint for Part 11.)  But eventually I made the switch to the titles that we have now because it just made better sense: this post was a fairly long digression in the form of a story from my college days, and this title fit that perfectly.

The title, of course, is a paraphrase of the title of a famous short story by Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as well as the book which contains it.  In the story, two couples talk about everything but love over a bottle of gin (thus the hint), but really love is all they’re talking about.  You see the parallel in my post.

Really, though, I’m not a huge Carver fan.  The best thing about “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is probably the title.  “Cathedral” is better.

Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?

If you are a connoisseur of Britsh comedy, the television series at the very top of your must-see list is of course Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  After that, it should be The Young Ones and Blackadder, although we might quibble over which one should come first.  Next on your list, before Fawlty Towers, before Red Dwarf, and, yes, even before AbFab, should be A Bit of Fry & Laurie.  If you think of Hugh Laurie simply as House, or (even worse) as the insipid father of Stuart Little, you really don’t know Hugh Laurie (in fact, you may not even realize he’s British).  Likewise, if all you know of Stephen Fry is his voice—he’s the Cheshire Cat in the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, the narrator of Little Big Planet, and a prolific audiobook narrator, including the UK version of the Harry Potter books and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—you’re missing out.

A Bit of Fry & Laurie is at once similar to Monty Python and also removed from it.  There’s still a certain amount of the surrealism (perhaps a bit less), but very little of the physical comedy such as the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Gumbys.  Most of it was like taking the best verbal humour of the Pythons (such as the Argument Clinic, or my all-time favorite, the penguin on top of your television set) and cranking it up to 11.  Stephen Fry would often do the heavy lifting in such sketches—playing the Groucho, or the Abbot, role—but Hugh Laurie had many talents other than just being an outstanding straight man.  One of which is an amazing range of musical ability: he plays guitar, drums, harmonica, sax, and, of course, piano.  At the end of every show, Fry would turn to Laurie (who he often referred to as “m’colleague”) and say: “Please Mr. Music, will you play?”  To which Laurie would respond by playing the piano in a loungy sort of way, usually while Fry mixed ridiculously named cocktails such as the Swinging Ballsack.  Occasionally he would elaborate the phrase to enhanced levels of flowery silliness; my favorite of these was:

I say, as I like to on these occasions, those six refreshing words that unlock the door to sophisticated evening happiness. I say: Please Mr. Music, will you play?

If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, I highly recommend it.

The End of the Beginning

Here at Part 12 I finally decided to start wrapping things up.  However, I knew it would take me (at least) two posts to conclude satisfactorily, so I needed a title to reflect that.  “The End of the Beginning” is (appropriately) the final track on the sophmore album of the Darling Buds, Crawdaddy.  Although Crawdaddy came out in 1990, it definitely has that late 80’s sound, including a remarkable similarity to the Primitives, particularly their first two albums Lovely (‘88) and Pure (‘89).  Although technically speaking the Primitives were English while the Darling Buds were Welsh.  But to us stupid Americans that subtle distinction is lost.

Although it was a Brit who made the comparison I reference in the hint: specifically, Dave Kendall, creator of MTV’s 120 Minutes.  He made the clever observation in his review of Crawdaddy, and I couldn’t help but agree, even though I probably like the Darling Buds a bit more than the Primitives.  But it’s a close thing.

The first track on Crawdaddy, “It Makes No Difference,” has one of the coolest hooks of the 80’s.  Too bad you’ve never heard it.

On the other hand, if you want to hear this track, YouTube is your friend.

Here’s to Future Days

And finally we reached the end, and I decided to touch on my thoughts about Perl’s future.  The title for this one took absolutely no thinking or searching at all.  While there can be no doubt that Into the Gap is the pinnacle of the Thompson Twins’ career, Here’s to Future Days is also a great album, the last of the good TT records before they transmogrified into Babble (whose debut was better than the last three efforts from the Twins put together ... not that that’s saying much).

Here’s to Future Days was also (probably not coincidentally) their last album as a threesome: it may not have seemed like Joe Leeway was adding much other than standing around looking cool (much as Andrew Ridgely did for Wham!), but apparently that was an illusion, because they sure sucked without him.  Definitely most people think of the Thompson Twins as a trio, and wonder what’s up with calling themselves “twins.”

But of course the truth is the name has nothing to do with the number of band members.  The first (little known) TT album was recorded with four members, and the second featured a whopping seven, before they trimmed it down to the famous three, who would go on to produce the Twins’ three great albums: Quick Step & Side Kick (known simply as Side Kicks in the US), Into the Gap, and Here’s to Future Days.  Nope, the name was simply a reference to Thomson and Thompson, the detectives from The Adventures of Tintin who only look like twins.

“Future Days” is the track on this album that contains the lyrics “Here’s to future days / Here’s to future ways,” which is what I hear in my head whenever I read this title.  If you’d like to have it stuck in your head as well, YouTube can arrange that for you.

In Conclusion

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I spent quite a bit of time mentally wrestling with a title for this post itself.  Should it be some sort of self-referential thing, being that it would be the title of a post about titling posts?  Should it somehow proclaim to the world that it was a meta-title?  Should it be a quote about naming things, or about clever wordplay?

In the end, I decided to make it a shout out to one of my favorite book-gifts as a child.  I got my fair share of fiction, certainly, but my family also recognized that an aspiring writer must have a love of language, so I got a fair number of dictionaries, thesauri, etc.

I was eleven years old on Christmas in 1977, the year that my grandfather presented me with the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, which had been published for the first time that very year (although much of it was derived from the earlier version, which was similarly titled but without the “Morris”).  It’s a “dictionary” only in the sense that the entries in it are alphabetized.  Lovingly crafted by husband and wife William and Mary Morris, it’s not so much a reference work (although it can be used as such) as it is a mishmash of fascinating tales of how English expressions came to be; I was fond of just opening it to a random page and reading whatever I found there.  I was rarely disappointed.

The Morris’ youngest son Evan carries on the family tradition on the web, writing as the Word Detective.  On his “about” page, he quotes fellow etymologist John Ciardi:

The more words I traced back through time for our readers, the more I appreciated Ciardi’s observation that each word, no matter how humble, was “a miniature fossilized poem written by the human race.”

And that’s what this exercise in naming was like: a verbal archaeology expedition, a paleontologist finding words trapped in amber.  My love for this sort of thing is certainly directly traceable back to the Morris dictionary, and the many hours I spent perusing how words and meanings become bent and reshaped to suit new ends across the generations.  Yeah, I was a weird kid.

So, this week’s installment, while longer than I’d anticipated (and probably longer than you’d hoped), at least may provide some insight into how these titles get here and where they come from, and why I tend to obsess over them more than is probably healthy.  Next week I probably won’t be so garrulous, most likely because I’ll be busy catching up on all the things I didn’t do this weekend because I spent too much time on this blog post.  But it’s been fun.  For me, anyway.  For you ... well, didn’t anyone tell you not to read this blog?