The Changing Knife

Very small things can have a great impact. Things change constantly and usually it the little details that make things so different. Would you expect old and rudimentary table manners change to the strict and elegant etiquette we follow nowadays due to the impression of one single person? It is rather amazing how the world works and how we don't need a lot to change a lot. For instance, sometimes when you get into an argument with someone who's opinions you value, and they tell  you about a flaw you have: you change. If it someone who's opinion matters a lot to me, and it makes me realize my flaw, I will change it. 

Did you know why we use round, not so sharp knifes to eat? Bee Wilson tells us in her book Consider the Fork that when a Cardinal "witnessed a dinner guest using the sharp tip of a double-edged knife to pick his teeth" (Pg. 59) food manners across Europe revolutionized dramatically. From here on, people started being disgusted at "taking meat from a common dish using fingers" (Pg.60) and many different antique manners that up to the point were considered normal and decent. Knife's tips were now starting to be rounder and having only one side sharpened. It is amazing how the thought of one man changed the thinking of thousands of others too. This tends to happen a lot, and the knife example opened my mind to thought on how people go with the crowd all the time. The common phrase "go with the flow" is true as people's choices are usually influenced by the decisions of others. 

Scimitar (n):
a sword with a curved blade that was used in the past
especially in the Middle East and western Asia.

This reminds me of my AP Psychology class in which we studied conformity. Solomon Asch, conducted an experiment in which he had a subject tell which of two lines was the longest. Usually, when alone he would answer correctly, however when 5 other people intentionally (without him knowing) said the incorrect answer, he conformed with them and "went with the flow." The cutting knife example is non relevant but it is a good example to portray how people conform and go with what others say just in order of not saying the contrary. How a priest thought revolutionized table manners all around the globe. The idea of one man changed the idea of millions. Interesting how humans work isn't it?  

Cooking Chemistry

I love cooking and it's one of my favorites hobbies. The cooking books I am used to are all about recipes and when I saw the cover of Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, it really called my attention. I had never seen something about the history of cooking and how things have changed until bring modern cooking.  Nevertheless, I had never paid much thought on how we came to know cooking as it is nowadays. I always imaged people in middle ages with copper pots, cooking more rudimentarily than us, but never gave much thought to the details of cooking.  This first chapter has brought me with a lot of insight on how pots and pans came to be today, and specially what called my attention was the discovery of stainless steel.

 Chafing(n):  a dish that is used for cooking
or warming food at the table

Have you ever thought the chemistry behind why our food sticks to our pans? I absentmindedly add oil or butter to my non-teflon pans so my food doesn't stick. This book made me realize why my food sticks to the pan. Thing that really opened my mind. Proteins from our food bond with molecules from the metal in our pans not only making it stick to the metal, but also gain that metal after taste to it. According to Wilson, "stickiness happens when food bonds with the surface of the pan" (Pg. 32), so in order to prevent food from sticking you have to "stirring [the food] it so vigilantly that it doesn't get a chance to stick, or by introducing a protective layer between the food and the pan" (Pg. 32). Only after Teflon was found this problem was solved. Teflon is short name for a molecule made solely from carbon and fluorine atoms. Their attractiveness is so high that they rather bond to themselves than to other elements, making it non-stick, and providing the food with an insulation layer to prevent the metal aftertaste. I had never in my life though about this before. I never thought it had to do with chemistry, but now I do. 

Science is everywhere, and without it we wouldn't be where we are nowadays. I had never realized how important it was until I realized it affected very ordinary things like cooking. To people cooking is something common and mandatory; it is everything but technological. To some it is primitive and we cant live without it, but cooking is a science as much as it is an art. Cooking pots as simple as they look have their science, and chemistry. Without science, we would still be cooking from pits in the ground. 

Creativity in Scarcity

Sooty (Adj): Covered with or as if with soot. 

The human race has amazed me with its innovative ideas through out history and how the world as we know it nowadays is due to crazy people with crazy ideas. This comes to when I first came across pit cooking and my mind wandered of thinking "who came up with that idea?" I mean, when most people look at a pit oven they think of the the stone age, and how people were so primitive. However, when I look at it, I just wonder that if someone was so primitive how come they invented something so creative and innovative for their time? Think about it. Who on earth would have thought of cooking in the ground thirty thousand years ago? 

All of this thinking made me think that when people have the least, they are the most creative. This is true for various situations. When you have everything, or well almost everything, you are lazier and don't have to be so resourceful as when you have nothing. For instance, this old proverb says " give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Here, when the man is given everything (the fish) why would he bother to learning how to fish, but when the man has nothing (no fish), he will learn how to fish and consequently come with a more ingenious idea. Those living centuries ago had almost no technology, and didn't live with abundance. Therefore, being resourceful was their only salvation and way to advance to the future. The author of Consider the Fork, Bee Wilson makes note of this. Here she says that "no method was as ingenious as the technology of hot-stone cookery practiced across the globe, starting at least 30,000 years ago" (Pg. 6). 

To our eyes creating the pit oven was a very small achievement, but the amount of thinking and creativity was much more than we give them credit. It is more important nowadays to find a cure for cancer than a new way of cooking a long time ago. However, we have a lot more resources and tools to use therefore making the process easier for us and faster, consequently requiring much less thinking. It is like using a calculator and not using it. The amount of thinking we need is less, therefore  a stone age man creating an over out of stones is a much greater achievement than many things nowadays. It is truly a relative matter and it has to be seen through objective eyes, but their accomplishments are truly amazing. If humans could still use their thinking like they did before, we would be a lot more advanced than we are right now. 

Expensive Apps

Link to fallacious commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6wTlw298To&feature=youtu.be

Security or Government?

I was reading the OP-ED article by the mother of an autistic child, Lori McIlwain in the New York Times, in which she encompasses the topic of autistic children wandering around and getting lost. She commented on how this happens in between classes at school. She recalls different cases in which autistic children left school, wandered into a highway and were tragically hit by the passing cars. She not only takes a position against the government for not funding enough for these common incidents, and doing so for elders with Alzheimer's. I know it is unfair that the government doesn't pay that much attention to this cases, but I couldn't help and think about security. 

There is no way in hell I can run away from school without vandalizing the school gates and not getting caught. In order to leave school I have to pass through one of the main gates, and they security guys are not going to let me out just because I want to. In other words, my school is a jail. There is no way I can escape from it. This led me to think how children can escape their schools? Isn't there a front gate? Isn't there some sort of entrance they have to cross in order to get out? Maybe the difference relies on the fact that these children live in America. The place were there are no gates in schools, probably because it is not dangerous and necessary, unlike here in Bogota, were children are at risk of being mugged. Furthermore, being a school that accepts autistic kids, and is away of their common occurrences why don't they implement gates? 

The root of the problem is the government, I know, but there are others ways to prevent unwanted deaths and missing children. The government though being the cause for lack of funding, isn't the only one that can potentially help autistic kids. For instance, the school (a private one in this case) may help by installing a closed perimeter or circuit, and taking the usual security measures to keep children away from lakes and pools. I understand this article was written by a suffering mother, who lives to tell the unfairness of the issue. However, there are different ways of solving the problem. 

Not So Clever

Jargonistic: Nonsensical, incoherent, or meaningless talk.

Hahaha. I recall all of those childish fights I had with my friends when we were younger. One, they didn't make sense at all, and two they were for everything but important things. They used to go like this: "You're stupid. Oh yeah. Well you are more stupid." Pathetic isn't it? Well that's what tends to happen a lot of times when we are in an argument and you're out of clever retorts and ways to snap back at your opponent. This not only happens to young naive children that don't know how to argue, it might also happen to grown up me. In chapter 20 Heinrichs teaches us about snappy and astute comebacks when we are out of thought. He might have not realized that his tips might tip the other way and make his readers fools out of themselves. 

According to Heinrichs these figures of speech will "arm you with systematic thing and prefab wit so you never find yourself at a loss again" (Pg. 208). This techniques are very cliché, but somehow they work. Rather than mumbling idiotic retorts and losing the battle. Nevertheless, this can come the other way, and rather be portrayed as defenseless and foolish. For instance, the "speak-around" technique, which "substitutes a description for the proper name" (pg. 210) may be wrongly interpreted and  be something like my innocent argument above.  Likewise, this is very common. For example this past weekend I watched a lot of TV to relax and take a break from school. I opted for watching The Simpsons, one of my favorite shows that make me laugh a lot. I found this priceless argument between Homer Simpson and the Alien Kang: 

Homer: You, one-eyed, two-timing (beep, beep)! I'm gonna (beep)!
Kang: Oh yeah?! Well (Beep) you, hyperbolic parabaloid! (bleep) yo mama!

It is kinda funny, and it is the perfect way to exhibit how Heinrichs tips might go wrong. They are a great way to win arguments, but they are also a great way to make you look like an idiot. Hopefully you make a good arguer and don't make yourself the former. 

Over Estimating Ourselves

After reading chapters 15-16 from Thank You For Arguing and being introduced to the fouls and fallacies we tend to make in our everyday lives. Funny enough, we use them in ways that harm us rather than help us. Likewise, I think there are two main reasons on why we tend to make these mistakes while arguing: 

1. We don't know the basis of rhetoric. We don't know how it works and much less we don't know the methods it employs in order to be a good arguer. 
2. We overestimate ourselves; we think we know how to argue when we really don't.

Consequently, we lose arguments or these turn into fights many times due to this. In this chapter we learned about Heinrich's first and only do-not-do. According to him, "never argue the inarguable" (Pg. 158). Out of this single rule different mistakes (he likes to call rhetorical fouls) branch out. Using any one of the fouls in a discussion will take you nowhere, and "simply make the deliberative argument impossible"(Pg.170). The problem is that we tend to use fallacies and this so called fouls in our daily lives more than we think. Rhetoric comes almost naturally to us  and we tend to follow a rudimentary pattern in the way we discuss and talk. Nonetheless, rhetoric is the art of organized and consice persuassion. Without proper education in rhetoric we can't develop our skills and won't be able to develop our instinctive argumentation methods.

Innuendo: (n.) an allusive or oblique remark or hint,
 typically a suggestive or disparaging one.

One typical foul or fallacy we tend to make in our everyday lives is the one of authority. Older people tend to abuse of their power and try to use it against its opponent (incorrectly). Not they only commit a fallacy of ommiting a choice, but they make a foul by using the incorrect tense. This is the classical father and 5 year old daughter "eat your vegetables because I say so" scenario: 

Dad: Eat your spinach

Me: No, I don't like it. 

Dad: Well eat it anyhow. I say so.

Me: Who are you to tell me what to do?

Dad: Your father. You live in my home, under my rules, now you have to eat them.

Me: Daddy, but I don't like them! (Starts crying) 

In this case the persuader, also known as  the father threatens me to eat my  vegetables without providing me with another choice. Furthermore, he employs the incorrect tense, the present. According to Heinrich's "it is more difficult to use the present tense to make a choice about the future." (Pg. 163) He should be using the future tense rather than the present or past tense. Nevertheless, instead of trying to ease me, persuade me, or seduce me into eating my food he tries to abuse of his power trying to force me. Instead of convincing me, he made his five year old  daughter cry. He didn't give my any choices to pick from, and he used the present tense. Two strikes in one. One more to go, Dad. 

"Que Sí, Que No, Que Sí, Que No y Punto"

 Stop, stop, stop and stop. After reading chapters 10-12 from Thank You For Arguing I could only think: "wait there a tad Heinrichs, I need some time to digest everything you're saying." I had to control the urge I had to take out my notebook and scribble notes about everything he had to say about rhetoric because my post-its just weren't enough. I knew rhetoric was a complex topic that contained many information, but I never knew it was going to be like this. Fine, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but it is still a lot of information to process. 

Heinrichs talks about this and that, and then this and that, and how you can do this but not that. It is very interesting (not to say useful too), but it's simply too overwhelming to take in all over at once. We were introduced to very handy concepts indeed. I already knew about passive voice, but I learned about facetious humor, wit, urbane humor, banter, backfiring, labeling, The Rejection, The Commonplace Label, The Advantageous,  redefining, babbling, framing amongst others.  

I was rather impressed when Heinrichs mentioned "babbling", which is "when your audience repeats the same thing over and over"(Pg.107). I never knew this silly argumentation technique (that the most pathetic arguers employ) is rather useful. I used to argue with my sister like that when I was younger and she was trying to convince me to wash her dishes, and rather than trying to persuade me or seduce me she just begged me. Clearly that didn't work out very well: 

 Facetious: (Adj.)  treating serious issues
with deliberately inappropriate humor; flippant.

Her: Wash my dishes.

Me: Pff, no. 

Her: Why not?

Me: Because I don't want to. 

Her: Why not?

Me: Because I don't feel like doing so.

Her: But why?

Me: I don't want to. I'm busy.

Her: Please? 

Me: No 

Her: Pretty please with a cherry on top? 

Me: No is no. Bye. 

Would she had known about Heinrich's book, she might have tried to persuade me in a different way. When you or your opponent babble, it is most likely that their/you are "probably mouthing a commonplace"(Pg. 107). A commonplace, according to Heinrichs is "the ground the audience currently stands on" (Pg.107), that means the audience's "beliefs and values, the views it holds in common"(Pg.100). Therefore, if my sister would have understood what my commonplace was and tried using it in her favor, she might have won what she wanted. Not even, if she would have offered me a reward I would've washed the dishes happily without having to go through all that rhetoric.

Even though there is too much information and many of it is confusing it is the only way to master rhetoric. I have to suck it up and learn about argumentation methods instead of complaining about being overwhelmed. With only following some of Heinrich's rules one can do wonders to persuade or seduce or people. We can not only win huge and very important arguments, but we can also win little arguments that could give us a night off dishwashing.