Writing and Language | ***Dave Does the Blog

TV Review: “The Book of Boba Fett” (2021-22)

The lovely parts are far greater than the muddled, poorly-structured whole.

So … The Book of Boba Fett.

Sigh.

YES THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE FOR THE SERIES, AND BITS AND BOBS OF THE FINALE. YOU SHOULD WATCH IT FIRST (YES, YOU SHOULD, EVEN IF IT HAS SOME SIGNIFICANT FLAWS).

This was a marvelous, stirring, my-younger-fanboy-would-disbelieve-we’d-ever-see-it collection of incredibly cool, thoughtful, interesting, thrilling, exciting, lore-filled, great bits and ideas …

… that were greater than the eventual sum of their parts.

To start bluntly, dramatic pacing on this show was for shit. Backflashes and presentflashes and huge sidequests and where-the-hell-is-the-titular-character chunks of story dominated the whole series. Loading down the saga with backstory and exposition can be done … but it has to pay off. And inserting massive peripheral tales that have nothing to do with the core narrative would rightfully have any writing group pulling out the torches and flensing knives.

Hey, know that graph of how a novel is structured? Essentially a cascading series of rising actions, ending in a big climax and then a denouement?

This series was just a constant stream of static.

Slow moments. Fast moments. Small moments. Big moments. All thrown into a blender with no actual pacing, aside from the Disney+ “The final episode will be full of pew-pew-pew action.”

And even in that final episode, which was, to be sure, mostly the huge blow-out action sequence that people were looking for …

… we get interrupted mid-stream by an extended sequence of gratuitous Groguness.

Yeah, things are getting unbearably tense in Mos Espa … so let’s break for several minutes of cute Grogu action!

… the titular character, master of a dozen deadly weapons, spends much of his time during the big action sequences not doing much more than hanging with a (beautifully rendered) CGI figure, yanking on chains.

… the denouement is an utterly flat collection of much of the cast, and then some meaningless Mando stuff, and then a mid-credit scene of a supporting character with supporting character and ROLL REST OG CREDITS.

cobb vanth boba fett finale — Honestly, I didn’t recognize him on first watch.

Whu–?

(Okay, I’ll give a shout-out to the secondary characters. The Mod gang. The Gamorreans. The Freetowners. Krrsantan. The Mayor. The Mayor’s Chief of Staff. They were all finely done. But they weren’t the real focus of series, even if I’d have loved to see more of them.)

We ended up in this series spending so much time with fun stuff and cool stuff and interesting stuff and backstory stuff and lore stuff and fan service stuff that … it feels like they forgot it was supposed to maybe … be a story … nay, a book … a book of … well, let’s grab a name at random, say … Boba Fett.

I honestly don’t know if they decided halfway through the plotting that they had run out of ideas and therefore threw in a bunch of other stuff (Sarlacc! Mando! Grogu! Cad Bane!), or if there was never a story to begin with, or if this was a way of sneaking in a Season 2.5 of The Mandalorian past the Disney overseers … but …

Really, truly, the idea of …

a bounty hunter, the coolest bounty hunter (and bodyguard and button man) ever, deciding they didn’t want to work for stupid, short-sighted, inept, venal bosses any more, but wanted to become their own boss, a boss unto themselves, building something that was theirs, and in the process learned the challenges, perils, pitfalls, challenges, seduction, and ultimately oblige of power …

… that is an awesome story. And that’s what the trailer promised us.

boba fett concept art — Boba Fett, and the uneasy head that wears the crown

And that’s what … we got a watered-down half-a-story of, mixed up with a cloudy brew of guest figures, parallel stories, and fan-cruft.

Heck, imagine the difference if we took all that irrelevant Mandalorian time and added in some internal conflict to the Boba Fett story.

For example, Fennec Shand repeatedly bumps heads (if lightly) with Boba Fett about taking a more forceful, bloody, and criminal course of being a mob boss. Hey, Spice is profitable! That could have given us some real conflict. Is she going to argue when he says, “No”? Is she going to consider her options? Is she going to set up a side gig? Is she going to (even seem to) consider betraying him? Will the Pykes approach her, thinking she’s a weak link? Will she show she’s her own person … and ultimately make the right choice for her own reasons?

Nope. A kick-ass character and great actress, she just spends most of her time in the series giving us recaps of the situation (overlapping the “Previously” intros), nodding politely to Boba’s orders, and then being a deus ex assassin at key moments. A huge waste.

Or consider, if you wanted to drag the Mandalorian into the mix (which his own series laid the groundwork for), we could create some dramatic tension from that. Does Din Djarin really support Boba Fett’s ends (or his understanding of Boba’s ends) or is he supporting Boba, reluctantly, out of a sense honor? How far does that go? Does he protest Boba’s course? Does he actually show that possible internal conflict? Conversely, does Boba Fett really trust him? Does his see how his own sense of honor/obligation lines up to Mando’s? What do these two characters have in common, and where do they have differences, and how can we let that actually drive some drama between them?

Nope. Instead, we get “I am Lawful Neutral, so I will follow your orders to the death.” “Dude, you really believe that?” “It is the Way.” Ho-hum.

“Because they’re cousins … identical cousins …”

Hell, as far as that goes, even Boba Fett, the titular character, after getting a burst of character growth in the extended Tuskan flashbacks (very nicely done) … spends most of the series in an enlightened mob boss state. From the time in the present when he sits on Jabba’s throne to the end of the show … he doesn’t actually seem to grow or change. He’s the “I am the boss. I will rule with respect. I will protect my people” guy. He doesn’t get any internal conflicts, he doesn’t clash with anyone but obvious enemies, he doesn’t question his course. He just cruises along. His only challenge is a bit of naivete as to what it takes to run a city as a mob boss. That’s the only internal “conflict” he faces. Which is … a bit boring.

character conflict and growth — Boba really doesn’t tick any of these boxes.

While the Mando 2.5 miniseries bits were a huge gimping disruption, I did enjoy them for themselves. Playing with the Darksaber (when it could do things); running into Luke, and Ahsoka, and Grogu; learning that Luke is, yeah, just like we learn in the third trilogy, going to be a Jedi dick of a teacher … all of that was informative and fun. It was all great.

And it was totally inappropriate to this series. It had nothing to do with Boba Fett. It had nothing to do with the overall gang war of Mos Espa. It was simply a bridge to (we assume) the desired starting point of Season 3 of The Mandalorian.

(It also led to some of the worst telegraphing. “Oh, hey, I, the Mandalorian, am now flying around in a Naboo starfighter, but the little dome area where an astromech droid used to go is now just an empty dome, so very, very empty, I wonder what will ever fill it …?”)

boba fett grogu naboo starfighter — I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find Grogu here!

Sigh.

This series really could have been so much more. So many of the elements are beautiful. The Tuskan sequences were lovely and meaningful both for Boba and for Star Wars lore. (What? The Tuskans aren’t just blood-thirsty, superstitious wogs? Mind-blown!) So many of the figures used — the Pykes, Krssantin, Cad Bane, even call-outs to Mando bits like Cobb Vanth and Mos Pelgo and Peli Motto — were neat in and of themselves, and could have all fit into a rich Boba-focused narrative saga.

For that matter, Boba’s part of the story could have been about the conflicts he felt, his personal urges toward violence, what he learned from his time with the Tuskans, how that intersected with his vengeful motivations dating back to his father’s death, and how those drives still did (and, to his realization, didn’t) apply to the present … maybe his growing uncertainty about his reasons for taking on the role of daimyo of Mos Espa, and how that ultimately translated into his taking on responsibility for the lives of the people there.

But the show decided, for whatever reason, to try to do too much, and too little, to show some lovely lore, and to short-circuit the character growth … and ultimately turned out to be a fun-to-watch, frustrating-to-contemplate, disappointment.

I don’t regret watching any individual element, really. But I definitely consider the series, the Book, as a whole … a fail.

book of boba fett — Cool, but disappointing.

Degendering a gendered language

When a collective noun is fundamentally masculine, how do you include women in it?

I know that the term “Latinx” is meant to be pronounced “La-teen-ex,” but given it doesn’t crop up much in spoken conversation around me, my brain tends to read it as “La-tinks.”

I know that the term "Latinx" is meant to be pronounced "La-teen-ex," but given it doesn't crop up much in spoken conversation around me, my brain tends to read it as "La-tinks".

I do think it's a cool neologism, though. pic.twitter.com/Z77tiCwc07

— ***Dave Hill (@Three_Star_Dave) March 6, 2020

I still think it’s a cool neologism, though. The Boy has been learning Italian and Latin in college, and is being thrown a curve by the gendered nature of those languages. Just as in English we’ve been tackling gendered aspects of our own tongue, languages built around gendered nows (and then verbs and other parts of speech that have to echo them) often incorporate sexual bias and traditional expectations.

“Latinx” is an effort at a collective noun that, unlike “Latino,” doesn’t seem to exclude half the people involved.

Do you want to know more? History of the term and push-back on it from some quarters

Red light! Blue light!

We assume everyone groups colors the same way as we do. We assume wrongly.

In Japan, the “green lights” are colored … well, pretty much blue. The reason has to do with a challenge to the idea that language about so many things — in this case, color differentiation — is some sort of universal constant.

Different languages refer to colors very differently. For instance, some languages, like Russian and Japanese, have different words for light blue and dark blue, treating them as two distinct colors. And some languages lump colors English speakers see as distinct together under the same umbrella, using the same word for green and blue, for instance. Again, Japanese is one of those languages. While there are now separate terms for blue and green, in Old Japanese, the word ao was used for both colors—what English-speaking scholars label grue.

The result? Though Japan adheres to international standards for green traffic signals, they use a very bluish shade of green in the signals themselves, to align with their own linguistic heritage.

Do you want to know more? Why Does Japan Have Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green? | Mental Floss

Cursive! Folioed again!

The return of cursive handwriting might have good reasons, but mostly bad ones.

I am sure there might be good reasons for kids to learn cursive that aren’t “Because I did, dammit!” but they aren’t among those in the attached article (about revanchist efforts, mostly by political conservatives, to push cursive training back into schools).

Among the reasons given:

People who don’t know how to write in cursive won’t seem educated. — That seems very … subjective. Once upon a time people who couldn’t decline in Latin and Greek didn’t seem educated, but we seem to have gotten over that.
“Part of being an American is being able to read cursive writing” — Um … that seems even more subjective, and, yeah, I really don’t buy it.
The Founding Fathers all knew cursive, as demonstrated by John Hancock in that quintessential document, the Declaration of Independence. — The Founding Fathers wore wigs, too (and, as noted previously, had learned Latin and Greek).
Knowing cursive helps you read prominent historical texts in their original handwriting. — Only if you don’t trust the printed transcriptions. Also, there are a lot of prominent historical texts that require knowledge of, dare I say it, Latin (e.g., the Magna Carta). Actually, Louisiana passed a bill requiring cursive education because, in part, the Magna Carta was written in cursive — while not also mandating Latin education. That strikes me as a bit … uneducated.

Magna Carta, from the Bodleian Library. Does knowing cursive help you read and appreciate it?

Signatures are important and require cursive. — Most people’s signatures are unintelligible scrawls, and the need for signing stuff continues to dwindle every year.
“Your cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do” — And your non-cursive writing doesn’t, too?
“The fact that American kids couldn’t do cursive made us vulnerable to the Russian menace.” — We still managed to beat ’em. Maybe it’s because we use a Latin alphabet instead of a Cyrillic one.
“It’s a lifelong skill that is part of a well-rounded education. Why leave it out?” — Because there are only so many hours in the educational day, and it’s unclear that’s a more important “part of a well-rounded education” than math, science, reading, writing, art, music, theater, PE, or all the other demands on kids times. Hell, we’ve already carved out vast swathes of time to teach kids to do well on standardized tests — none of which require cursive — that eating into the remainder to teach how a second way of forming letters that most people will find of minimal practical application in their life seems goofy.

The article does note that there are some studies that seem to indicate that learning and using cursive may have some interesting positive effects in brain development and the like. Of course, it also appears that some of those studies come from … companies that sell cursive handbooks and the like.

I don’t particularly object to cursive. I just want people to be honest that they are pushing for it because they think it’s cool and since they had to learn it they want their kids to, too. Dressing it all up in dubious patriotism or incomplete cultural pedagogy only discredits the argument.

My personal preference, though, may be showing through. I dropped handwriting almost as soon as I was allowed to do so, evolving a block script that served me just as well. (My actual cursive is exquisite, as I never learned any bad habits over years except with my scrawl of a signature.)

That said, 99% of the writing I do, I do at a keyboard. I’d rather kids were getting solid training on that before we bother with cursive.

Do you want to know more? Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. – The New York Times

“Oppression is whatever a body’s obliged to do”

The hijab can be a symbol of oppression or of freedom

The hijab — the scarf-neck-head covering worn by some Muslim women — is not actually dictated per se by the Koran, but is a traditional dress in some parts of the Muslim world that has been tied to religious and theocratic rulings. It’s controversial in a number of places as religious wear, and as Muslim religious wear, but also as a sign of oppression against women in the Muslim world (and, as such, often conflated with other and more restrictive garb to hide, mask, or enforce the modesty of women).

The first article below demonstrates, though, that it’s not a matter of either-or. Some Muslim women (such as Ilhan Omar) wear hijab as a sign of their religious devotion, and celebrate it as a personal freedom. Others, esp. those living in some Middle Eastern Muslim nations, have it forced on them by state law, and consider it as a constriction of freedom.

The conflict seems perfectly understandable to me, analogous to another example of religious identification. I know a number of Jewish people, especially women, who wear a Star of David as a necklace, as an expression of their religious belief. Nobody (aside from anti-Semites) thinks a thing of it, save perhaps observing how cool it is that someone can choose to wear the symbol openly and without government sanction.

But if you had a law (as in Nazi Germany) where Jews were forced to wear a Star of David on their clothing to identify them as Jews … that’s clearly oppressive.

From there, it seems straightforward to celebrate that Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab have the freedom to do so … but to condemn nations who mandate that all women do so (or even more).

Do you want to know more?

Title via Mark Twain, who put it regarding work and play in Tom Sawyer:

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

How DO you pronounce “Buttigieg”?

A lot of people have a lot of (wrong) guesses.

Pete Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is one of the flock of Democrats running for the presidential nomination in 2020. He’s also got the name (of Maltese origin) that’s hardest to figure out how to pronounce.

According to his husband, it’s best pronounced “Buddha-judge”. Or you can just call him “Mayor Pete.”

Do you want to know more? How Do You Pronounce Buttigieg? The Internet Counts the Ways | WIRED

With Malice Toward None

A remarkable speech by a remarkable president. (Full text https://t.co/646JWywaUF). https://t.co/K0Mgjupvxn

— Dave Hill (@Three_Star_Dave) March 4, 2019

A remarkable speech by a remarkable president. (Full text https://t.co/646JWywaUF). https://t.co/K0Mgjupvxn

The concluding passage from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, a little over a month before he was assassinated:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

On “Vegetables”

The word “vegetable” and its history are kind of fascinating, complete with Norman Invasion shenanigans and taxation kerfuffles. Ultimately, “vegetable” doesn’t really have a very clear meaning at all: vegetables are … what everyone at a given time calls vegetables.

Do you want to know more?

Shocking

Seems like false advertising. pic.twitter.com/IXbV9Hip0u

— You Had One Job (@_youhadonejob1) February 22, 2019

RT @_youhadonejob1: Seems like false advertising. https://t.co/IXbV9Hip0u

Bad Words for Good Health!

To the extent that swearing is cathartic, it makes perfect sense that doing it can relieve stress and make you more calm and lead to positive health outcomes.

Unless doing it causes your mother to inflict blunt force trauma about your head and shoulders. So consider that health factor, too.

Swearing has more benefits than you may think — from improving your workouts to bonding with your coworkers
Americans curse about five times every hour. But there can be some benefits from swearing, from improving your workout to bonding with your coworkers.

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Six famous they-didn’t-actually-say-that quotations

You have probably heard / seen all of these quotations, and may have even reforwarded them on to friends and family. If you do so in the future, please attribute them correctly.

6 Famous Quotes You See On Facebook (That Are Crazy Fake)
Most of these people would never said that thing you think they said.

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The Myth and Romance of El Camino Real (mostly the myth)

Growing up in California, I’m quite used to the “bell” signs along highways, marking the route of the “King’s Highway” where missionaries once plodded piously along from one mission to the next.

Except, really, not so much, since the network was largely reinvented in the first few decades of the 20th Century by the automobile and tourism industry — though the marking “El Camino Real” with bells was also quite a boon for a key organizer’s husband, who owned the only bell foundry west of the Mississippi.

How El Camino Real, California’s ‘Royal Road,’ Was Invented
Mission bells along Highway 101 imply that motorists’ tires trace the same path as missionaries’ sandals. But much of El Camino Real’s story is imagined.

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It’s not too late for Planet Pluto!

A new paper says the IAU’s claims around its definition for what a planet should be are flawed, and that Pluto fits the important aspects of planethood.

Stay tuned!

Pluto should be reclassified as a planet, experts say
The reason Pluto lost its planet status is not valid, according to new research.

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What’s that country all about?

A fun world map with the most common word on their English Wikipedia page assigned to it. Some interesting results:

The number one word for the US is “War”
The number one word for Canada is “Quebec”
The number one word for Vietnam is “French”
The number one word for Spain is “War”
The number one word for Belgium is “French”
The number one word for Denmark is “Islands”
The number one word for Macedonia is “Greece”
The number one word for Zambia is “Rhodesia”
The number one word for Cyprus is “Turkish”
The number one word for Mongolia is “Population”
The number one word for the UK is “Ireland”

The Most Frequently Used Word on Each Country’s Wikipedia Page
The United States is “war.”

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Snowflakiness

On the bright side, use of the term in such a fashion is a generally useful way to identify people who (a) probably aren't worth conversing with, and (b) often have reportable material lurking in their profile. So there's that.

Originally shared by +Marilyn D:

Straight to the point !

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Letters and Alphabets

We take writing and language for granted, but there's remarkable history and variability in how it's all constructed across time and space with humanity, and even large variation today — not just in language, but in how we convey it in writing.

Originally shared by +Yonatan Zunger:

This is a great family tree of alphabets — and isn't very conjectural at all, since we actually know how writing spread. The color codes are by kinds of writing.

The oldest forms of writing are true pictograms, not shown here; these are scripts like the earliest forms of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese writing, which are basically pictures (slightly stylized) of physical objects. These aren't full writing systems, in that they can generally only code things like "three sheep, four barrels of wine…"

These quickly evolved into logograms, a few of which are shown here in blue — not only the bulk of ancient Egyptian, but also modern Chinese and part of modern Japanese writing as well. In logograms, a small group of symbols represents a word, not phonetically but conceptually. (This is why the different Chinese languages, which sound almost nothing alike, can nonetheless share a single writing system! The writing codes ideas, not sounds.)

A common extension of logograms is to add sound representations, typically starting with using words to represent homonyms, and then adding logographic marks to indicate "the word symbolized by <X> which sounds like <Y>" to clarify synonyms, and so on. Nearly all logographic writing systems adopted this.

Ancient Egyptian did in particular, and an entire subbranch of its writing system started to adopt this more seriously, starting to use purely phonetic representations — that is, symbols that described sounds instead of concepts. This is one of the earliest forms of alphabetic writing.

This kind of "phonetic writing" then has a history which you can see here.

Abjads are scripts like Hebrew and Arabic, where each letter represents a syllable, but only uniquely describes the consonants; you're supposed to know the vowels from context. These work well in languages where the vowels vary following predictable rules and primarily indicate parts of speech, and so are still used in such languages to this day. (The name "abjad" comes from the first four letters of the old Arabic alphabet, a, b, j, and d.)

Abugidas (green) and alphabets (red) take this further, adding accent marks (in abugidas) or separate letter-signs (alphabets) for the vowels, as well. As Barry Powell argued in Homer and the Origins of the Greek Alphabet, this likely emerged as a pattern whenever abjads reached areas where the local language didn't have the same kinds of rules for vowels as Semitic languages, and the ability to explicitly code vowels was important for telling words apart — and, critically, for recording poetry and verse.

Finally, featural alphabets take the march towards phonetic clarity even further. The classic example of this is Hangul, the script invented for Korean in the 15th century. In these writing systems, symbols go beyond coding for sounds — they code for individual features, like "plosive sounds" (you stop the air and then suddenly release it, like t or p), "aspirated sounds" (with a breath), and so on. So for example, ㅌ can be immediately recognized as a voiceless, aspirated, alveolar plosive, or tʰ.

English is in many ways a strange case in this family. The Latin alphabet that it uses is a true alphabet: someone reading Latin immediately knows how to pronounce any word they see, just like someone reading Spanish or Polish would. But English both assembled its lexicon from a bunch of languages, and standardized its spelling system much earlier than most other modern languages — and unfortunately, did so not too long before a major change in how words were pronounced, which gives it all sorts of oddities like "silent e," how tough it is to cough through a rough slough, and so on. (There are not many languages where "being able to spell things correctly" is a televised sport!) In fact, despite its use of an alphabet, English is in many ways moving back towards being a logographic language, where you have to know what a word is (and which language it comes from) to know how to pronounce it.

Via +John Hardy

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Phonetic Alphabets

I was looking up some info on the subject, and found myself falling down the usual Wikipedia rabbit hole, so I thought I’d share.

What’s fascinating in part is not just the concept of a phonetic alphabet (spelling out letters as words so as to avoid confusion, esp.over radio or phone), but the number of such alphabets over the years, and the research that’s gone into them.

Allied Military phonetic spelling alphabets – Wikipedia

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Inspirational, but Imaginary

This is the cover page of the program for +James Hill‘s graduation. As a quotations wonk, my brain klaxons started whooping as soon as I sat down and saw (a) a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that (b) really didn’t sound like Einstein.

A quick check at the Quote Investigator site (thank you, Internet!) confirmed that this is not something Einstein said. Rather, a gent named John A. Shedd gets credit for it.

Of course, it’s not proof-positive that Einstein never said it. But if someone can come up with a citation that’s not a Pinterest or Etsy page, I’d love to see it.

And all that said, it’s not a bad motto for a high school senior class, even if my friend Mary notes that ships at shore are not necessarily safe.

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On redesigning an icon

I’m fascinated by modern iconography, and reducing information into a compact symbol that is easily understood and universally applied.

This article about the efforts (some of them inadvertent) to redesign the famous wheelchair / accessibility icon, and the emotions and controversy that’s raised, is pretty fascinating, too.