One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There’s not a whole lot to say about this book. It’s pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: A popular history of the screwdriver and (somewhat necessarily) the screw.
Unfortunately, as important as the screw is to our modern civilization, there’s not been a lot of academic work around it. So the majority of the book’s prose is the author’s descriptions of his visiting museums and libraries to try to find out as much as he can about the the history of this little marvel of the simple machines.
The best way to say it might be that this book reads like a travel book recounting the adventures of a traveling historian. It’s a short, easy read and it passes the time wonderfully on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not a deep literary work or a serious piece of nonfiction. But, it never claimed to be so I certainly won’t hold that against it.
I drove out of the parking lot at work and my phone reminded me to call my dad to tell him “Happy Birthday”. So I did.
We hung up and I started playing a playlist of Final Fantasy music. I was curious about a particular track, so I asked my phone about it. It told me that it was “Holding My Thoughts In My Heart“.
Since it was raining, I didn’t want to have to lug the trashcan around to the front of the house once I got home. If it probably wasn’t going to rain tomorrow, I could just put it off until the morning. So I asked the phone if it was going to rain. The phone told me that it probably won’t rain tomorrow, so I asked it to remind me about it when I go to bed tonight. That way, I can get up early to make sure I don’t miss the trash collectors.
I did all these things on my way home and I never had to take my eyes off the road.
On Sunday, my mom and I used FaceTime to talk to my cousin who lives out-of-state. We got a tour of her new house and got to say hello to my grandmother who was visiting. It was nice.
While riding [in the passenger seat, don't worry!] to meet Bran somewhere, I used Find My Friends to keep up to date on where we were in relation to each other. I could plot each of us on the map and see when we’d meet up. I was able to tell that I’d get there first by a few minutes.
I am living in an Apple commercial and it is fantastic.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
People love this book. According to Wikipedia, the New York Post credited it as “the best novel by an American writer published in the 20th century.” — however, a citation is needed. Citations or not, a trip around the Internet quickly shows that this book is very highly regarded.
So when I ended up thinking that it’s merely okay-to-good (or, in the parlance of our times, “Three Stars”), I have to wonder what went wrong. Am I even dumber than I thought and I just didn’t get it? Were my expectations too high going into it? Or is it something else altogether?
My best theory is that this book is the product of its times. Published in the 1960s, it’s a book about the Cold War and arms races. It’s a book about the fears of the world ending from a single cataclysmic mistake involving a super-weapon. It’s a book, as near as I can tell, about counter-cultural religious experimentation on the leading edge of…whatever happened in the 60s and 70s. Honestly, I’m sort of grateful to have missed it.
But with all of that wrapped up in these pages, it turns out that the book doesn’t really have anything to say to someone like me who was born in the early 80s. I’m not terribly concerned about a nuclear war between the United States and Russia (though I’m frightfully concerned about states like Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea). The religious experimentation of my peers ends up as “None for me, thanks.” more often-than-not these days. So, whatever thoughts or emotions Vonnegut’s original audience had when reading this just don’t get transmitted to me.
I don’t think it’s terribly special as a work of literature either. The writing style is very short and choppy. It’s all short,simple sentences building up to short, simple paragraphs. (An aside: This sounds like roughly the same criticism I leveled against Feed, but it’s not. Feed was just written incredibly poorly whereas Vonnegut knew what he was doing and was simply writing well in a particular style. I don’t know how to explain the differences, but they’re readily apparent when reading either.) This didn’t make the book bad in any sense; but it also didn’t help to make it interesting.
It was almost written from the perspective of someone who was a bit stoned — which, again, didn’t necessarily appeal to me since I’m not from the 1960s.
It’s not a bad little book. It’s short and easy to read. It’s relatively important in the world of American literature for some reason. From a distance, it’s got some interesting plot hooks. But it ends up ultimately being merely good instead of great and it never stops feeling like it should have been better than it actually is. Kind of a shame.
Note: I am not a grammarian or an English major. But I do find language fascinating, I try to read a bit, and I was well-trained on Standard English for twelve years of schooling. Some quick Google searches didn’t turn up anything on this particular subject (although, that’s probably because it’s a difficult thing to search for; I’m under no delusions that this is remotely close to being original research) so I haven’t been able to check my work against what actual linguists say. Still, I think I’m mostly correct on the broad strokes but it would be foolish to cite this in your schoolwork.
I recently found myself considering the phrase “Screw you!”1. It’s an elegant construction: concise, yet emphatic. Worthy of some admiration if only for the emotions and meaning it packs into two small words.
And then I tried to diagram it.
And then I found that it’s actually far more interesting than it first appears.
“Screw” is obviously the verb of the predicate. At first glance, it appears to be in the imperative mood so the subject of this sentence must be an implied “(You)”. That leaves the final “you” of the sentence which must be the direct object. Thus, we have a basic subject-verb-object sentence. Done.
Except…that’s a little weird, isn’t it? English doesn’t tend to use “you” as the direct object of an imperative sentence with an implied subject. It’s always “Help yourself.”, “Calm yourself.”, or “Know yourself.”. The alternatives (“Help you.”, “Calm you.”, “Know you.”) are just strange.
It seems perfectly grammatical, of course. “You” is a delightfully versatile pronoun. “You saw the teacher.” (Subject!), “It’s you!” (Predicate nominative!), “The teacher saw you.” (Direct object!), “The teacher brought you the assignment.” (Indirect object!). And so on. “You” isn’t like “he” or “she” which take different forms (“him”, “her”) as they move around in the sentence. So using “you” as the direct object seems as reasonable as using “him”. And “Screw him!” is fine (like “Help him!” or even “Calm him.”2).
And yet, at some point, English decided that “you” just doesn’t work here. I’m not sure why.3 Perhaps someone decided that having the word “you” on both sides of the verb looked silly. But, at some point, English picked up the reflexive pronouns and we have to live with them.
And so, “Screw you!” cannot be an imperative since such a thing would require a reflexive “yourself” to match the implied subject. So it must be something else.
My guess? It’s the tail end of a sentence that goes something like “May all the powers of the universe work together to screw you!” That is, it seems to be an actual curse4.
Fortunately, if our intent requires an actual imperative command, we can manage it with just a little rearranging. “Go screw yourself!” works nicely. Together, these forms give us some options when we need to express just the right sentiment. Do we want to curse someone with an epic universe-sized screw? Or do we want to encourage them to enact a somewhat more personal screwing upon their own person? We can make a choice and add a little subtlety to our invectives.
And then there’s “Screw him!”. Without the reflexive hint, this could go either way. As a command, the subject would still be “You”; so a reflexive object is not required. But, this sentence would also fit into our curse construction from above. So where we gain subtle distinctions in the second-person case, we overload the meaning of the third-person case.5
English. It gives and it takes away.
Screw it.
-
Please feel free to substitute “screw”‘s stronger and more versatile older brother. ↩
-
A phrase which I find slightly sinister. ↩
-
Like I always do when I find something in English strange or silly, I’m blaming the French. ↩
-
A curse a mere subset of the larger field of profanity. Presumably, “cuss word” derives from “curse word” but I don’t have access to a dictionary good enough to tell me. If nothing else, I think it’s somewhat interesting that most of our cuss words aren’t actually curses and find it refreshing to come across one that is. ↩
-
Of course, I think it’s rare for the third-person case to be used as an imperative since that implies that there’s yet another person to do the screwing. And it’s not clear if they’re expected to enjoy it or not. Still, acknowledging this in the article proper would have ruined my punchline. ↩