Eloquence lost

Dork alert: I’m currently reading “Team of Rivals,” the Doris Kearns Goodwin biopic of Abraham Lincoln, on which Steven Spielberg’s movie is largely based. While this admission won’t get me invited to any raging keggers or pill-popping raves, it’s  an intriguing glimpse into 19th century American politics, and an excuse for an avowed history buff to spend some time in that lost, trippy world of faux-silver watch fobs and four-foot-long beards. Hanging out with the ghosts of these bygone gents is like chillin’ at a model railroad convention with ZZ Top.

What makes the book such an effective portrait of the big-shot political players of the day is the way Goodwin integrates her sources, which cover the spectrum from diaries written by the daughters of senators, to the letters and musings of Lincoln himself – including one in which he promises an 11-year-old girl that he’ll start growing facial hair, thus leading him to prove definitively that beards are a source of superhuman powers. Just ask Chuck Norris, who can start a fire by rubbing two ice cubes together.

Working her sources into the narrative must have been a cinch. Those dusty old letters and journal entries were written with an eloquence and precision that would embarrass the authors of modern-day correspondence, who in many cases are hamstringed by 140-character limits.

In fact, when you think of it, future historians are pretty well screwed. Goodwin had access to reams of verbose correspondence to help tell her story. A century from now, what will historians, writing about figures from our current era, have at their disposal to pry into the minds of their subjects? Facebook posts? Twitter feeds? Perfect. When 22nd Century authors write about the exploits of Molly Flutterbuckets, who in 2056 invented a car that runs on rhino tears, they’ll know that in June of that fateful year, she unwittingly ate a cookie that aggravated her gluten allergy. Four friends posted frowny-faces, and her boyfriend Kyle clicked on “like,” because Kyle’s an idiot.

Truth be told, it’s often painful to see what people, especially teens, are posting online; I, for one, am constantly assaulted by grammar that would make the scribes of old weep into their double-breasted vests.

Here’s a little history to illustrate what I mean: In 1837, Lincoln was courting – that’s old-timey for “dating” – a woman named Mary S. Owens, who would later become his wife and the country’s first lady. That August, good ol’ Honest Abe, in an effort to assuage his own anxieties about the relationship, wrote a letter to Mary that essentially gave her an “out,” telling her that she was in no way bound to stay with him if she felt she wasn’t happy. In a display of heart-rending honesty, Lincoln wrote, “I am willing and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will in any degree add to your happiness. This indeed is the whole question with me. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable; nothing more happy than to know you were so.”

Simple. Eloquent. And by today’s standards, totally uncool. Chuck Norris would not approve.

If Lincoln was a young man in 2013, and had grown up hyperconnected in a world besieged by social networks and message boards, he would have sent Mary an e-mail, and it might have read something like this: “Hey Mary, how R U? nice pix, LOL!!! do U want 2 B with me?? i want 2 B with U. herez a cat wearing a fUnNy sWeAtEr. C-ya!!!!!!  xoxoxoxoxo”

Can you decipher that mess? ‘Cause I can’t make heads or tails of it, and I wrote the freakin’ thing.

While bemoaning the current state of grammar, it’s not like I expect, or even want, a drastic resurgence of the Dickensian masterpieces penned by past generations. That kind of antiquated English is charming, and a blast to read, but would be way out of place in the 21st century. Ornate language is rendered irrelevant when you’re at a drive-through, ordering chicken nuggets through the mouth of a plastic clown.

But technology, while fantastic in so many ways, has its drawbacks; one is the gradual degradation of the way people articulate themselves. Future historians will look back on this time period as the dawn of not just a democratic form of communication, but the introduction of abbreviations and smiley faces as legitimate means of expression. While Goodwin sourced painstaking letters and diaries, her successors will have scathing YouTube comments and hastily typed text messages. There’s something lost there.

As consolation, though, they’ll also have access to reams of ridiculous Chuck Norris jokes. So maybe the future’s not so bleak, after all.

The major rager

“Road rage,” aside from being a potentially cool name for a rip-roarin’ Tarantino flick, is one of those phenomena that gets treated rather lightly; it’s become as commonplace as crushed beer cans at Ted Nugent’s house, and yet whenever people reference it in casual conversation, you can almost hear in their voices an offhand dismissal, as if it’s an amusing little condition that has no real import. Meanwhile, as you read this, there’s someone on the shoulder of the interstate, lamenting the wreckage of their vehicle, and wondering why the driver of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile felt the need to muscle them into the guardrail with the tip of their hot dog.

Well, so much for treating it seriously.

In reality, though, most road range incidents don’t result in damage or injury that extreme; in some cases, relatively mild and commonplace behavior can qualify as “rage,” which may explain why Bruce Banner spends so much of his time as the Incredible Hulk. I base this assertion on a road rage entry found on Wikipedia – which, as everyone knows, lets users “edit” its content to ensure “accuracy,” rendering it a beacon of truth and light.

The article lists, in bullet-point form, some of the behaviors that various states consider road rage, and several of them clearly fit the description, including my favorite one: “Driving at high speeds in the median of a highway to terrify drivers in both lanes.” An alarming act to be sure, but thinking of it in abstract terms, it’s a gift from the gods of absurd hilarity; I picture the driver as a drooling, cross-eyed nincompoop blasting death metal and wildly tittering like an insane clown. That’s not road rage, that’s a Will Ferrell movie.

Other behaviors, while obnoxious and generally annoying to other motorists, seem to stretch the concept of “rage” to its extremes. Apparently, “rude gestures (such as ‘the finger’)” qualify as road rage, which means about 95 percent of all drivers should have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, myself included. I don’t think most of us leave the house intending to flash that defiant digit all willy-nilly, but those of us with a low tolerance for automotive idiocy may do so reflexively; properly provoked, it becomes an automatic response, like squinting in a harsh glare, or slipping into a coma during the Oscars.

“Shouting verbal abuses or threats,” on the other hand, is one of those phenomena that starts to approach legitimate rage – although it’s a borderline act, one of those things that needs to be defined in a certain context. I can’t think of anyone, for example, who hasn’t muttered a rebuke at least once in response to the dangerous or otherwise terrible driving of others. Whenever somebody cuts me off, or fails to use a blinker, or jumps out into traffic at the worst possible time (almost daily occurrences all), I’ll find myself having entire conversations with a fictionalized version of the other driver, who I usually picture as being a cross between Mr. Magoo and Bill Murray’s clueless schlub from “What About Bob?” Though most of these fake conversations aren’t exactly family-friendly, they basically boil down to, “Nice one, pal. Didn’t teach you lane-changing etiquette in driver’s ed, huh? Ninny.”

Substitute any multitude of words for “ninny,” and you’ve got the basic idea.

These mild-to-moderate acts of dissatisfaction are unfortunate, taking what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” and submerging their heads in toilet water. It’s hard to feel proud of yourself after verbally blasting another driver from behind the relative safety of your steering wheel. But rage? Actual, honest-to-goodness road rage? I always thought that label should be applied to more extreme acts, ones that actually endanger the lives or safety of other motorists. Like running someone off the road, or, I dunno, shooting them.

Still, while defining such behavior remains an inexact science, the motto “better safe than sorry” compels us to not let these little road incidents inspire Hulk-like anger. Nothing good can come from angry driving. My advice: If someone cuts you off on the highway and you feel yourself overcome with the urge to spew epithets and run them into a guardrail, pull over and take a breather. Chances are the guy in the Wienermobile will do it for you.

The semi-big chill

Last week, during a stretch when temperatures dipped to levels not seen outside of a Russian meat locker, I started thinking abut the first humanoid creatures to make that initial tentative trek out of Africa. Somewhere along the line, early humans decided to venture into cold climates, which means one of two things: They were either extremely skilled at fashioning warm clothing and shelter, or their evolving brains made them all insane.

I’ve got an excuse for putting up with the cold: I was born here. There are people who are wanderers, spending their lives moving from place to place, and then there are people like me, who identify themselves too strongly with a region to set up shop in a far away land – even if the price of loyalty is a set of fingers bluer than a choking Smurf.

Even so, my particular loyalty is due to an accident; I just happened to be born here through no choice of my own. If I had been born in Texas, I would likely have been loyal to Texas, although I would have wondered why so many people ride bucking bulls through arenas dotted with tobacco spit. As it happened, I’m loyal to New England – though I often curse the Puritans for picking a spot in which winters make icy mud virtually indistinguishable from moose poop.

Loyalty’s an anomaly, I guess. When we look at what we know about early humans and their migration patterns, we see a species deep in the grip of wanderlust. Travel, I understand completely; I’ve been to remote corners of the world, and know firsthand the value of experiencing a different culture, a different ecosystem, and a reverse rotation of flushing toilet water. But permanent settlement in a hostile environment? That’s like slamming your thumb in a car door for no reason at all.

Now obviously, humans would have settled in cold climates eventually. They would have had to. Thanks to a combination of medical advances and general horniness, populations have swelled and continue to do so. Setting up camp in northern Canada would have been a matter of necessity rather than choice, just due to space issues. But if technology had blossomed in this alternate version of human history, the crazy population boom would have happened only after the development of things like themostats, space heaters, and Snuggies. Communities could have spread out comfortably without worrying that an unsuccessful deer hunt would spell the end for their intrepid band of loincloth enthusiasts.

It’s strange to think of how we all arrived at our particular place in the world. Those of us in the northeastern United States can do a little digging and, in many cases, find that our roots are in Europe; many Mexicans can trace their ancestry back to Spain, Australians back to the British, and so on. But go back far enough into the muck of pre-history, and we start to lose the thread; with anthropological evidence as our guide, we have only vague notions about early humans’ need to push onto the next frontier. Where they got the tolerance for frigid climes is anyone’s guess. Maybe the first booger-icicled settlers enjoyed snowball fights and not feeling their hands.

Whatever their reasons, it has resulted in you and I being in this place and time, burning found objects to keep the cells in our eyes from crystallizing. It’s funny, really: The whole of human history has conspired to place me at my desk in front of a word processor, you at your laptop reading this blog, and Lindsay Lohan crawling from the wreckage of a car near a California telephone pole. In some sense, we’re leaves carried by a breeze.

And this icebox of a state is where it carried us. Every year, around this time, I get up, gear up, and grit my teeth as a wicked wind whips across my face – and every year, I bear it. Maybe it’s genetics, encoded into me by ancestors, that keeps me here, or maybe it’s just stubborn loyalty. Could be both. But I know I’ve got at least one thing in common with my forebears: A sense of relief come springtime.

The groundhog predicts and early one. Let's hope he's right.