Commonwealth v Cooke (Full text)

This case was reproduced in part in my Religion and the Constitution textbook (p 527). I tried to find other references to it, but couldn't find much in a readable format. Since it is public domain and interesting I wanted to put it here for others to find. All emphasis other than page numbers in original.

Source here (7 Am. L. Reg. 417 (Police Ct. 1859)).

In the Police Court of Boston, Massachusetts — April, 1859. COMMONWEALTH, ON COMPLAINT OF WALL VS. McLAURIN F. COOKE.

1. The regulation of the School Committee of Boston, which requires that pupils in the public schools shall, among other things, " learn the Ten Commandments, and repeat them once a week," is not a violation of the constitutional provision which secures to the citizen liberty of conscience and of worship.

2. A teacher in the public schools has a right to enforce that regulation, by the corporal chastisement of a child refusing to repeat the Ten Commandments, though that refusal proceeds from a conscientious objection on the part of the child to the particular version of the Bible used, and is made by the direction and under the authority of his father.

3. The authority of a parent cannot justify the disobedience, by a child, of the regulations of a school.

4. [418] A teacher in the public schools is not liable, criminally, for the infliction of corporal punishment in school, if in severity it does not exceed the nature and magnitude of the offence, and is not inflicted in haste or with malice.

The opinion of the court, in which the facts fully appear, was delivered by Maine, J. — The complaint in this case was made on the 16th day of March last, and charges that " McLaurin F. Cooke, teacher, on the 14th day of March, 1859, committed an assault and battery on Thomas J. Wall, son of the complainant, under circumstances of aggravation ; that Thomas was eleven years of age, a pupil in the Eliot School, and defendant a teacher, and that defendant struck, beat and wounded Thomas with a stick for the space of thirty minutes, inflicting serious wounds."

Upon this complaint a warrant was issued by order of court, the defendant Cooke arrested, and in open court pleaded not guilty to the complaint.

Upon this issue, evidence was introduced on the part of the Com monwealth to prove the assault, and by the defendant explanatory of the matter, and from the evidence so introduced, the following facts appeared:

 That the defendant was the first Assistant Teacher in the Eliot School, Samuel W. Mason, Principal ; that Thomas J. Wall was a scholar in said school, and had been for six or seven years last past. That during his attendance the Bible in the common English version was read in the school, and that the scholars sufficiently advanced were required to read or commit to memory the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments.

That by the rules and regulations of the school, the Commandments were repeated by the scholars every Monday morning, and that the boy Wall had repeated them without objection until Monday, March the 7th, when he refused, and was discharged from the school. That an interview was had between the father of the boy and the Principal of the school, and the boy returned to the school.

That on Monday, the 14th of March, he refused again to read or repeat the Commandments, giving as reasons for so doing, that his [419] father had agreed with Mr. Mason that he should not say them. That his father had told him for his life not to say them, and that his priest had also told him not to say them, and that on the Sunday previous to the 14th the priest (Father Wiget,) while addressing nine hundred children of St. Mary's Church, of whom Wall was one, told them not to be cowards to their religion, and not to read or repeat the Commandments in school, that if they did he would read their names from the altar.

That Wall came to the school on Monday with the determination not to read or repeat them.

That before the 14th, Father Wiget had promised to give him a medal, blessed, and that since the 14th he had given it to him ; that he had given them to other boys, and he knew no reason for his giving it to him ; that Father Wiget said at the time he was a good boy.

It further appeared, from the evidence, that there was a concerted plan of action on Monday, the 14th, between many of the boys to refuse to obey the orders of the school, if required to read or repeat the Lord's Prayer or the Commandments, and that two-thirds of the scholars composing the school where Wall attended, and numbering about sixty, declared their intention not to comply with the rules of the school in that particular. And from all the evidence it was manifest that Wall was one of, if not the principal actor. He refused to repeat the Commandments for the reasons given. He was told by Mr. Mason that his father had requested him to make him repeat them, and that if he did not, to punish him severely. Wall still refusing, was punished by the defendant with a rattan stick, some three feet in length, and three-eighths of an inch thick, by whipping upon his hands. From the time when the punishment commenced to the time when it ended, repeated inquiries were made of Wall if he would comply with the requirements of the school. Some thirty minutes' time was occupied in the whole. During this time there were several intervals, at two of which the defendant was absent from the room some little time. The blows were not given in quick succession, but with deliberation. During the [421] chastisement Wall was encouraged by others, who told him not to give up. This was while defendant was absent from the room. The master ceased to punish, when Wall submitted to the requirements of the school.

From the effect of the punishment Wall's hands were swollen, he was taken to the sink by the defendant twice, and his hands held in water. The physician who saw his hands in the afternoon of Monday, and prescribed for them, after describing their appearance, says that he did not think the injury very severe ; that at the time he thought he would recover from it in twenty-four hours.

Now, was the punishment so inflicted without justification, and in violation of the constitutional rights of Wall ? and was the punishment excessive ? Before considering the constitutional rights of the pupil while in school, it may be proper to see by what right or authority the schools themselves exist.

The constitution recognizes the existence of schools, and declares that " all moneys raised by taxation in the towns and cities for the support of public schools, and all moneys that may be appropriated by the State for the support of common schools, shall be applied to and expended to no other schools than those which are conducted according to law, under the order and superintendence of the authorities of the town or city in which the money is to be expended ; and such moneys shall never be appropriated to any religious sect, for the maintenance, exclusively, of its own schools." The schools recognized by the constitution are those which are to be conducted according to law, under the order and superintendence of the authorities of the town or city where the moneys are to be expended.

 The statutes by which our schools are established and governed, provide " that it shall be the duty of the President, Professors, and Tutors of the University at Cambridge, and of the several colleges, and of all preceptors and teachers of academies, and of all other instructors of youth, to exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of children and youth, committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry, and frugality, chastity, moderation, and temperance, and those other [421] virtues which are the ornaments of human society, and the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded."

By statute it is also provided, " that the School Committee of each town and city in the Commonwealth, shall require the daily reading of some portion of the Bible in the common English version, and shall direct what other books shall be used in the public schools."

The School Committee for the city of Boston, in their published regulations, direct and recommend as follows : —
" The morning exercises of all the schools shall commence with reading a portion of the Scripture in each room by the teachers, and the Board recommend that the reading be followed with the Lord's Prayer repeated by the teacher alone, or chanted by the teacher and the children in concert, and that the afternoon session close with appropriate singing, and also that the pupils learn the Ten Commandments, and repeat them once a week."

Do these laws and regulations, when carried out, conflict with the constitutional rights of any pupil ? It is claimed that they do, and the constitution is cited, or that portion of it supposed to apply to the case, which is as follows : —

" That it is the right as well as the duty of all men in society publicly and at stated seasons to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshiping God in the manner and seasons most agreeably to the dictates of his own conscience, or for his religious professions or sentiments, provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship."

Can the position assumed be a correct one ? Our schools are the granite foundation on which our republican form of government rests. They were created and are now sustained by our constitution and laws, and the almost unanimous voice of the people. But a pupil in one of them has religious scruples of conscience, and cannot read or repeat the Commandments, unless from that version of the Bible which his parent may approve. Now what is to be done in such a case? If he has a constitutional right to refuse to read or to repeat them from books furnished for the [422] school by statute law, then to punish him in any way would be a great wrong. He could not be expelled from school for standing upon his constitutional rights. Neither could he be punished by corporal punishment ; and if the plea of conscience and his constitutional rights would protect him from reading the Bible, is it not equally clear that he could not be compelled to hear it read ?

If, then, these are constitutional rights, secured to the children in our common schools, at any time when one pupil can be found in each public school in the Commonwealth with conscientious scruples against reading the Bible, or hearing it read, the Bible may be banished from them, and so the matter of education may be taken from the State government and placed in the hands of a few children.

Not Roman Catholic children alone. For if the plea of conscience is good for one form of sectarian religion, it is good for another. The child of a Protestant may say, "I am a conscientious believer in the doctrine of universal salvation. There are portions of the Bible read in school which it is claimed by others tend to prove a different doctrine ; my conscience will not allow me to hear it read, or to read it." Another objects as a believer in baptism by sprinkling. " There are passages in the Bible which are believed by some to teach a different doctrine. I cannot read it, conscience is in the way." Still another objects as a believer in one God. " The Bible, it is claimed by some, teaches a different doctrine ; my conscience will not allow me to read it or to hear it read." And so, every denomination may object for conscience sake, and war upon the Bible and its use in common schools.

Those who drafted and adopted our constitution, could never have intended it to meet such narrow and sectarian views. That section of the constitution was clearly intended for higher and nobler purposes. It was for the protection of all religions — the Buddhist and the Brahmin, the Pagan and the Jew, the Christian and the Turk, that all might enjoy an unrestricted liberty in their religion, and feel an assurance that for their religion alone, they should never, by legislative enactments, be subjected to fines, cast into prisons, starved in dungeons, burned at the stake, or made to feel the power of the inquisition. [423]

It was intended to prevent persecution by punishing for religious opinions. The Bible has long been in our common schools. It was placed there by our fathers, not for the purpose of teaching sectarian religion, but a knowledge of God and of his will, whose practice is religion. It was placed there as the book best adapted from which to " teach children and youth the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, and a universal benevolence, sobriety, moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornaments of human society, and the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded."

But, in doing this, no scholar is requested to believe it, none to receive it as the only true version of the laws of God. The teacher enters into no argument to prove its correctness, and gives no instructions in theology from it. To read the Bible in school for these and like purposes, or to require it to be read without sectarian explanations, is no interference with religious liberty.

If the plea of conscience is good against the reading or use of the Bible, why is it not equally good against any other book, or the language in which the book may be printed ?

 The Jew, for conscience sake, will only read the Scriptures from the Torah,1 and why may not the pupils in our schools refuse to read the Bible, until they are sufficiently learned to read it in the original Hebrew ? If tender consciences may rightfully claim such unlimited power, what constitutional injustice is daily done in our courts of law, by swearing the Protestant by the uplifted hand, the Roman Catholic upon the Evangelists, the Jew upon the Pentateuch, while facing the East, with his head covered, and refusing to admit the Infidel as a witness at all !

 There is another part of the case, which should here be considered. It is the argument, that in disobeying the commands of the school, Wall was acting under the lawful authority of his father.

 Can the authority of the parent, and that of the teacher, over the pupil, exist at the same time, in and during the hours of school ? That school approaches nearest to perfection that most resembles [424] a well governed family, where nothing is required excepting that which is believed to be for the best interests of every member, and where all requirements are obeyed, and where all are subject to one head. If "a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand;" so will it ever be with our schools, if the authority of the master and that of the parent enter the school-room together. The master is there by authority of law. He is also there by the implied authority and consent of the parent, who sends his child to him for instruction, knowing at the same time the duties of both master and pupil. By sending his child to school he surrenders so much of his parental rights over the child as would, if exercised, conflict with the reasonable rules and regulations of the school. If this is not so, why may not the parent command his child while in school to read from one book and to reject another. And what are the rights and what the authority of the master in such a case ? What becomes of the power of the School Committee, whose business it is to direct what books shall be used in the public schools ?

From the argument it is understood that in this case there are conflicting rights, the rights of conscience of the scholar, the rights of the parent over him, and the rights of the defendant as master, and that these rights are to be upheld by compromises. What the compromise is to be, the court is not informed. Can it be that those pupils whose religion teaches them that the Douay version of the Bible is the only true record of the Scriptures, shall be permitted to read and repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments from their own Bible? Giant the request, and what follows ?

 It is enacted by the statute "that the School Committee shall never direct to be purchased or used in any of the town schools any school books which are calculated to favor the tenets of any particular sect of Christians." So by such a compromise, we see the very thing would be done which is now complained of, that of favoring the tenets of a particular religion.

Is the compromise to be that of a division of the school moneys, allowing separate schools to be carried on in accordance with religious [425] views ? Our Constitution declares that no money raised by taxation for the support of schools shall ever be appropriated to any religious sect for the maintenance, exclusively, of its own schools.

 The last point for the consideration of the court is, was the offence one which required punishment? Had the master the right to inflict corporal punishment ? and, if he had, was the punishment excessive, or inflicted through malice? The apparent magnitude of the offence depends somewhat upon the stand-point from which it is viewed. From one aspect, it appears to be of the most innocent and simple nature. A child desired the privilege in school of reading the Commandments from his Bible, the only one that his religion would allow him to read. It would seem to a generous mind tyrannical, to deny so simple and innocent a request ; and it would indeed be so, were that the whole of the matter.

That most wonderful specimen of human skill and human invention, the Suspension Bridge, that spans the dark, deep waters at Niagara, with strength to support the heaviest engines with cars laden with their freight, and defying the whirlwind and the tempest, is but the perfection of strength from the most feeble beginning. A tiny thread was but safely secured across the abyss, and final success became certain. Thread after thread were interchanged, until iron cables bound opposite shores together. May not the innocent pleading of a little child for its religion in school, if granted, be used like a silken thread, to first pass that heretofore impassable gulf which lies between Church and State, and when once secured, may not stronger cords be passed over it, until cables, which human hands cannot sever, shall have bound Church and State together forever ?

As for the right of inflicting punishment in schools by the teacher, it has been conceded ever since our schools were established, if in severity it does not exceed the nature and magnitude of the offence, and it is not inflicted in haste, or with malice on the part of the teacher. The case finds that the father of Wall had requested that he should be kept in school and made to repeat the Commandments, and that he should be punished severely if he refused. It was not [426] necessary that the father should give his consent for the inflicting of reasonable punishment, neither can the teacher justify an excessive punishment by authority from the father. The parent cannot delegate a power that he does not possess, and as he could not punish his child severely without a sufficient cause, neither could the teacher do it without sufficient cause. The nature and extent of the punishment have already been considered. It now becomes necessary to look at the provocation.

The mind and the will of Wall had been prepared for insubordination and revolt by his father and the priest. His refusal to obey the commands of the school was deliberate. His offence became the more aggravated by reason of many others acting in concert with him, to put down the authority of the school. The extent of the punishment was left as it were to his own choice. From the first blow that fell upon his hands from the master's rattan, to the last that was given, it was in his power to make every one the last.

 He was punished for insubordination, and a determination to stand out against the lawful commands of the school. Every blow given was for a continued resistance and a new offence. The offence and the punishment went hand in hand together. The punishment ceased when the offence ceased.

By this the court is not to be understood as justifying the inflicting of punishment upon a scholar so long as he holds out against the commands of the school. The punishment must not be extended beyond the limits of sound discretion, and this every master must decide at his peril. In this case the punishment inflicted, when compared with the offence committed, and all the attendant circumstances as they appeared upon the trial, was neither excessive, nor inflicted through malice by the defendant.

The defendant is discharged.

Love Letter

My girlfriend gave me this great book called 642 Things to Write About. I'm going to use this blog to type up some of the more worthwhile pieces as they happen, mostly as a way to force myself to fine-tune some of them. Here is the first.

Love Letter

Mike finally pressed 'send,' and, within a second, knew he had ruined everything.

He had spent the past few months working on it, gathering his feelings and slowly composing an earnest message to the love of his life. He had spent the morning proofreading it, taken a break, given it one last look and sent it off. Everything had been perfect. He had thesaurized every adjective and massaged every clause until the note read exactly as it was meant to.

Mike had dredged the annals of love from Catullus to Twilight, searching for just the right sentiments to express how felt and just the right arguments to elicit reciprocation. From "Dearest Clara," to "Yours Truly," the email was, truly, a modern masterpiece of amorous affectioneering.

But there was one mistake. He hadn't sent the letter to Clara. He had sent it to his wife.

Fire Part 1: A Story

This ended up being way longer than I planned, so I split it up.

In the summer between Freshman and Sophomore year of high school I went on a ten-day, eight-person canoeing trip to Boundary Waters in Minnesota. It was an amazing trip, but there was one day that almost ended in disaster.

First, some back-story.

Part of going on a long canoe trip is the difficult process of portaging between lakes. This involves emptying out the canoe, loading all your gear onto to your boat-mates' backs, flipping the canoe onto your shoulders, and then slogging through the mud and rocks to get to the next lake. Ending up with the canoe on your head means you must have gotten the short end of the stick (paddle?). A three-person aluminum canoe weighs about 110 pounds, all of which is placed squarely on your shoulders via a wooden yoke that doesn't do all that much for comfort. I weighed about 150 lbs (or "a buck fifty soaking wet" as my granddaddy would say) at the time, so a hundred-pound canoe was quite a load.

Even worse than the sheer weight of the canoe was balancing it. A canoe's mass is pretty evenly distributed across its 16.5 feet in length. Balancing it while standing still is a chore in itself, but walking with it over any sort of uneven terrain is a nightmare. Add to that knee-deep (sometimes waist-deep, once armpit-deep) mud, soggy tree stumps, and little boulders you can't see because the freaking canoe is blocking your vision, and it's easy to see why avoiding portages was a major goal in our trip planning. The default measurement for a portage is the "rod," which, conveniently enough, is the length of a canoe. It makes sense because every time you get another 16.5 feet along the trail it feels like a huge accomplishment.

I only made one or two portages the entire trip without dropping the canoe. Whether it was a collision, lost footing, exhaustion, or impossible terrain, there were many things standing in the way of a clean run, and making through a whole portage without the canoe leaving your shoulders was a triumph. One of my most vivid memories is of the second longest portage on our trip, where I had the canoe and was determined to make it through in one go. There wasn't much mud, and the route was fairly straight- the only real obstacles were a series of oblong rocks jutting out all over the trail. Usually you walk behind and in front of someone carrying gear who can help you avoid protruding intruders like rocks and stumps, but this time there was some sort of problem with one of the packs that was slowing everything down. I was really bent on making it through this portage without dropping the canoe, so I hurried on ahead in a bid for a perfect run.

I hit my first rock. *gongggggggggggggggggggggggggg* Hitting a rock at high speed with your head in a metal canoe is of the loudest, most infuriating sounds in the world. You know the feeling of getting whacked in the nose, or stubbing a toe, or hitting your head on something sharp? The pain is annoying, but even worse is the sheer anger you feel at whatever caused the sleight. And there are very few things in life that aren't made significantly worse by having a 110 lb canoe on your head, and in this case it was many, many times worse because your head would ring as the initial peal faded into a minute-long metallic sigh, which made you feel like the canoe was smirking at your troubles for trying to make it fly through the air in such an unnatural way. In my mind the canoes always had a haughty French accent, which might have been due to the French Voyageur theme of the base camp. "Put me down to silly American, don't you know zat I was made to sweeeeeeem? Sweeeeeeem like the feeeeeeeshes. Let me sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemmmmmmmmmm."

Without my guides to help me avoid the rocks, I got gonged over and over again. Each time I got closer to losing my balance; each time my shoulders were burning a little bit more; and each time I hated that canoe just a little bit more. Finally, after one last collision with a rock I would have sworn wasn't tall enough to be a problem, I stumbled, regained my balance (just to assert my dominance and control over the situation), shouted "fuck you canoe," and threw the boat off of my shoulders. That act of violence and anger brought immediate relief, but it didn't last very long. Without my guides to tell me about the trail, I also had not been able to gauge how far I had left to go. I looked up, and not more than 100 feet from my discarded canoe was the shore line. My rage immediately came back, but it quickly faded into stupid numbness at how close I had been to conquering the second-longest portage of the trip, only to give up out of sheer spite. I remember all of my anger and frustration immediately sublimating into disappointment and defeat. I don't think I finished a perfect portage for the rest of the trip.

Errrrrr, I really didn't plan to write that much there, but the moral of that story is that portaging sucks... really, really hard. Anyway, one day on our trip we came to a set of long but relatively tame rapids leading from one lake to another. The portage would have been a far one and been made more difficult because a decent rain  had been building throughout the day, meaning more mud and slipperier footing. Our planned campsite was on the lake beyond the rapids, making the prospect of a tough portage seem even more painful, especially since there was an alternative. The rapids were too rough to take safely with our fully loaded canoes, but, our guide explained, we could walk our canoes through the rapids instead of portaging around them. This process is pretty much exactly how it sounds- everyone hops out of their canoes and slowly guides them through the rapids by hand. It was something new to try and obviously anything had to be better than lugging canoes through the mud in the rain, so we decided to go for it. This ended up being a mistake.

The water in Minnesota lake country, especially running water on a cloudy day, is extremely cold, even in the summer. It was cold enough that I remember my toes going numb about halfway through the rapids, which was a problem since walking through rapids is not something you want to be left-footed about. We made it through, though, and quickly got back in our canoes to reach our campsite in order to warm up and, hopefully, dry off a bit.

There were eight people on this trip sharing three 3-person canoes. This meant that at any one time two people would not be paddling. After the rapids these two people just happened to be two girls named Betsy and Kaylin (it was a co-ed Venture Crew). While the no-paddle position was usually coveted as a chance to relax and enjoy the ride, on this particular day is was not a good spot to be. After getting soaked in cold water, then battling rapids, and then having to sit still in a wet boat on a sunless, rainy day, Betsy and Kaylin ended up getting very cold. By the time we set up camp, Kaylin was visibly shivering, so we told her to sit and rest while we set up a place to dry off and warm up. But by the time we had set up camp, Kaylin had slowly gotten quiet and then stopped responding to her surroundings all together. Kaylin was a outspoken, outgoing person and not the type to sulk, so when she wouldn't even turn her head when you talked to her we knew something was very wrong.

Kaylin's body temperature had fallen enough after the rapids that she had become hypothermic, which had the potential to be a serious problem considering that we had no immediately available source of heat or dryness. It was still raining, and it is the nature of a canoeing trip for everything you own to eventually become permanently damp. The "dry socks and underwear" bags we all kept were our most prized possessions towards the end, and even those were fairly moist. The nearest medical attention of any sort was miles away, and the nearest real hospital was probably at least 25 miles as the crow flies. If the situation got more serious than our combined first aid knowledge could handle, our last resort was an emergency radio we could use to call for a helicopter medivac, and that belonged to our guide, who, by the way, was on his very first excursion.

While were assessing the situation and getting Kaylin into the handbook-prescribed dry sleeping bag with another warm body, we had overlooked the other girl who had been a no-paddler, Betsy. When we had settled down a bit from the first spell of concern about Kaylin, we noticed the Betsy was just standing out in lake. Someone shouted to her, "Betsy? What are you doing out there?" She responded, "Trying to stay warm," which should have been the first sign of trouble. However, Betsy had something of an odd sense of humor and we were all so worried about Kaylin that we brushed it off and told her to come and help start a fire. She walked into camp, came across a clothesline and just... stood there. She stood there for a good few minutes, staring at it without moving while we finished setting up camp. I asked her why she was just standing there, and she said without inflection "I.... can't figure out... how to get around... it." At this point we knew Betsy must be developing hypothermia as well.

Having 2 out of 8 people in a crew get hypothermia is a scary thing. Each sick person essentially needs another person to share body heat with, leaving four of us to start the fire, which we needed in order to get some warm fluids into the hypothemic bodies to help raise their core temperatures. Another person coming down with it would have left only two of us, not to mention the teenage awkwardness of having to have mixed-gender body heat sharing (obviously not a huge deal if it's medically necessary, but to a 15-year-old, never-been-kissed mind about as terrifying a prospect as dying of hypothermia). We decided that if anyone else even started to show symptoms, or if either of the two girls didn't start responding soon, we would immediately call for a medivac. Meanwhile, we set about building a fire.

If you've ever built a fire from scratch, you know how delicate of a process it is. Even in ideal circumstances, you want to start with the thinnest, driest, most delicate tinder, and the process of getting that to light your kindling is often gingerly and painstaking. Now imagine it's been raining for half a day and your success might determine if your crewmates will have to be airlifted to a hospital or not. It should have been an extremely stressful hour, and looking back on it - the whole situation was pretty scary. But at the time I observed that my mind was completely calm and at peace.

It is a hard thing to explain why panic seemed so easy to keep out. It has happened a handful of other times, and thing that has tied those experiences together is the fact that there was simply nothing else to do but what I was doing. The only thing I could do at that moment to have any effect on the situation was to help build the fire, so that's what I did. Our Venture leader was in charge of the fire, and luckily for us he was incredibly skillful at it. He would tell us what he needed and we would go find it. "Go find a big tree stump, rip away all the wet parts, and find me some dry bark, or maybe some fuzzy moss or lichen from the dry side of a rock." or "The tiniest, driest twigs you can find." Eventually we got to the point of "I need really green twigs, pine if you can find it." and "Some sizable branches, no wetter than moist." It took a while, but eventually he got a decent fire going and we had collected enough fuel to keep it hot for a few hours. The whole time my mind was completely calm, empty aside from whatever fuel I was looking for. When I noticed how quiet my mind was compared to how it "should" have been, I vaguely worried that I was getting hypothermia. But all my mental faculties were checking out fine. It was just some sort of zen-like state I had slipped into because it was the most useful place for my mind to be at that moment.

Once the fire was going and Kaylin was responding and drinking warm Tang sludge- that was when my brain turned back on and all of the appropriate, stored up emotions came rushing in. I suppressed them, of course, since the last thing we needed was somebody panicking or freaking out, but it was a very different thing from what I had felt (or not felt) earlier. Now I was feeling things and pushing them aside as unproductive. Before I had simply not been feeling anything at all. I felt a bit guilty later, because I realized that in some strange way I had very much enjoyed that feeling. Not the danger, or the teamwork, or the importance of my task, just that blank state of mind that seems impossible to bring about on demand.

I wish I had something more insightful or explanatory to say about that state of mind, but I don't. I just find it  strange that one of my "favorite" memories from the trip involved such a miserable set of circumstances. I bet that that state of mind is somewhat similar to one sought by practitioners of mediation and its related disciplines, but I can't say for sure, because it was such a negative (in the very literal 1a sense of the word) experience for me.

Kaylin and Betsy recovered fine. Kaylin ended up with a 2-3 hour gap in her memory, starting even before we got to camp. Betsy seemed to very hazily remember most of it. By night-fall the rain had stopped and both of them were completely healthy. We stopped walking through rapids after that, and decided to switch out no-paddlers when it was raining to keep everyone warm.

I don't have a very good ending so I'll just say it was on that trip that I saw my first moose in real life. Also, a friend from college was in a scouting troop that had stopped sending trips to Boundary Waters because two scouts had died, from separate causes, on the same trip. I had started to think I had been overestimating the danger Betsy and Kaylin were actually in until I heard that.

Part 2: A Metaphor soon.

The Dullard's Wisdom

Some thoughts I had today about Utilitarianism:

Pop quiz: train speeding down the tracks towards a junction; innocent toddler on one side, ten convicted murderers on the other; you determine who lives and who dies. What do you do? What do you do?

Every intro-level ethics class will have some variation this scenario posed to them in the first few weeks, at which point some philosophically disinclined student (the dullard) will propose a solution, "tell them to get off the track." No, they are too far away and there's no time. "Tell the train to stop." No, it's going too fast and would crash. "How many people are on the train?" Eleventy billion. "What if the murderers were wrongfully convicted?" And so on and so on for the entire semester. It quickly becomes obvious that this student is maybe a bit slow to catch on and is completely missing the point. His persistent queries are really just a way to get out of thinking about a difficult question by circumventing the tricky bits. This will be a cause of much frustration in the future, but, I realized today, in a way he is actually the smart one.

Utilitarianism is in many ways the fall-back ethical framework when making ethical choices. It is never the first thing you look to in order to figure out "should I give up my seat to this old lady" or "should I plagiarize this paper." Its role is much more to provide some sort of ethical justification or calculus in order to make morally testing, complex, or otherwise difficult decisions. In fact I would say that in most cases, if a utilitarian justification for an action is the primary one being given or considered, the actual decision that the person wants to make is "make this decision or the circumstances surrounding it go away."

Morality seems somehow more fundamental than Utilitarianism in that the latter, for most people, is a tool used to figure out the former. While there are probably militant Millsians out there, it generally a much more widely accepted notion that that Utilitarianism is a useful framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas than that Utilitarianism is the underlying principal that "causes" decisions to be right or wrong. Aside from the discomfort with such a consequentialist theory, I think a major reason for this is that Utilitarianism is very susceptible to the sort of bargaining and dithering that the misguided student from the first paragraph was attempting. Say, for instance, A will cause $1000 of damage to 1000 people, and ~A will cause $100 to 10,000 people- a utilitarian wash. Subtract a dollar per person from A and it is the clear winner. Subtract a dollar/person from ~A and suddenly that option is the correct one. It feels wrong somehow to have moral conundrums be so sensitive to such small changes in details. Adding or subtracting 1% or .1% to arbitrary numbers shouldn't flip the morality of a decision. Morality should be more concrete than that, more stable, which is ironic since Utilitarianism is often though of as the ultimate objective ethical measuring stick.

And this is where the class dullard turns out to have had some important insight. The obvious solution to the A/~A problem above is obviously to just deny the Excluded Middle and say the whole thing is dumb. When presented with such an esoteric, clinical scenario, it actually seems to be the correct response to give a pedantic, technical response. His resistance to playing along with the philosophical game reveals a deep underlying issue with Utilitarianism. It is never something you want to have to use as a sole justification for an action because it rests on such shaky supports in our subconsciousness. And I would say that one aspect of a good leader/policy maker/public figure is to always be looking for ways out of scenarios like that. You wouldn't want your president to just flip the rail switch one way or the other and then feel satisfied that he made the morally correct choice as the train pulverizes a little girl. He should try everything he can to change the parameters of the problem or cheat his way to a better solution.

And that is why you shouldn't play in railyards. Not because you may get hurt, but because you may be forced into making a purely utilitarian snap decision, or may inadvertently force someone else to.

Coordinating Conjuctions

Just a quick exercise I thought up to justify the comma-conjunction rule when coordinating two complete sentences, even when they have the same subject.

A) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop, and I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

B) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop and I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

C) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop and bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

D) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop. I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

E) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop. And I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

This story can have two endings. Had I managed to find a chocolate rose or not? Had I bought the flower  at the candy shop, or was it simply something I did afterward?

1) "She would have to wait another year."

2) "It would be my one ticket out of this mess."

Obviously I wrote these intentionally being unclear, but it is interesting to consider the different situations such  small changes might imply. To me, 1 most easily completes A, while 2 most easily completes B. B is technically not a grammatical sentence according to the style guides I learned, but I think it would be acceptable if you were finishing with 2, especially if you wanted to create a bit of dramatic tension in the reader.

C is the clearest. It could only with 2 unless you wanted to intentionally mislead the reader. D seems to be the most neutral between 1 and 2. It is also jarring enough that you would have to have a pretty good reason to use it. D and B are opposites most ways, but they are similar in that neither is a sentence you would write if you only wanted to convey simple meaning, which is why they are the most interesting.

E is grammatically correct, but stylistically bad according to many. I have no problems with starting sentences with conjunctions. But doing it too often generally leads to sloppy writing, so it something I tended to encourage my students to avoid if possible. 1 is the most natural ending to E, with the added implication that the speaker was especially worried about his girlfriend's wrath.

As a side note: fleshing this out has been a perfect example of how pointless questions like these are on standardized tests. It would be funny if the rise of emoticons came from people slowly becoming less proficient with style/grammar as a tool because it was made a painful end goal by the addition of the writing section to the SAT.

Literally Ironic Prescriptivism

These thoughts have been stirring around for a while, and this XKCD inspired me to write them down. This is essentially a summary of my feelings towards linguistic prescriptivism, and when I think certain trends in language should be resisted. All of this is concerned pretty much exclusively with normal conversation, by the way, and not with formal writing, writing instruction, or school standards.

Like many smart kids, I was a little shithead when it came to grammar and usage throughout middle and high school. I think it must be the process of learning and mastering stuff for the first time that makes teenagers so arrogant and eager to show off their skills and knowledge. Rules were rules; definitions were definitions. Everything was written down and spelled out, and if you didn't conform/understand, you had proven yourself lacking.

It took until about junior year of high school to realize that constantly trying to prove oneself is a crappy way to be, and I finally turned into a decently tolerable human being in time for college. I still felt very sure in my ever-improving understanding of language, but at least I wasn't correcting the 'mistakes' of others all the time.

Then I took Intro to Linguistics in college, and on the first day of class the professor went over the difference between descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics and my mind was blown. I slowly came to realize the obvious fact that the entire point of language is to communicate, and that if two people are communicating effectively then to call their communication 'wrong' is fundamentally wrongheaded.

However, there are a few things I still bristle at, although I still rarely correct them, and I have managed to categorize them into two major groups. I'll give examples of what does bother me, what doesn't, and try to explain why. (Note: with all of these examples I have intentionally left out a lot about context and audience, considering instead what the words mean in every day conversation to most people, since that is obviously where most communication happens)

1) Usages that can genuinely lead to confusing semantics.
Both of these examples spring from the XKCD comic mentioned earlier.
It really doesn't bother me that few people know how to use the subjunctive correctly. The reason is that is very very rarely leads to any sort of confusion about meaning. "I wish I was a little bit taller" doesn't really make sense as an indicative statement, and, even if it did, few would misunderstand the sentiment of wanting to be taller than one actually is in the present. Most people know the usage well enough to make themselves understood to 99% of people 99% of the time, and that's good enough. There has only been a handful of times I've seen incorrect usage cause problems here, and I'm pretty sure all have involved time travel and/or alternate dimensions, which are generally tricky subjects anyway.

On the other hand, people using 'literally' to mean 'everything but' often annoys me, mostly because they don't do it very artfully. The editors at Merriam-Webster have a great video explaining why they list 'figuratively' as a possible definition of 'literally,' so I won't go over the descriptivist argument for it, which I think is valid. However, it can be such a fine line, especially when mixing uses. For instance, if you say, "The movie was so funny I was literally dying," I know exactly how you're using the word and why. But if the next movie "was so funny I was literally crying," then I start to wonder. The problem is that 'literally' is at its strongest when it's being used to either convey obvious hyperbole, (urging the listener to picture exactly how funny a movie would have to be to kill someone), or when it's being used to signal the fact that something is explicitly*not* hyperbole (assuring the listener that tears were actually being produced). Any time 'literally' is used in the middle, which you can think of (maybe unfairly) as high-school-girl-usage, things can get ugly and clarification is often needed.

2) Shifting words' meanings' in such a way that we lose easy naming of concepts and ideas
One word I am ok with shifting is the ever-controversial 'ironic.' It has gone from meaning "contrary to appearance, intention, or reality" to "a situation that is coincidentally tragic in a metaphysically humorous way." Both are meaningful, rich concepts to have names for, and ideally we would have unique words for both, but I feel like the latter is a more useful idea to more people, and so it's a net gain to replace one meaning for the other. My solution, by the way, would be to keep ironic meaning 10,000-spoons-ironic and use ironical to mean the more traditional definition, which some people already do.

A word that I am sad about losing, though, is 'addicting.' As I understand it, it used to be that things that caused addiction were 'addicting' and people or situations that were prone to addiction were 'addictive,' a distinction that makes a lot lexical and semantic sense. However, now 'addictive' means 'addicting' and we are left with no word that strongly means the same as the old 'addictive,' which is a useful concept to have a single word for.

Another classic example of losing a good word is 'awesome.' Whenever I read it in old books it is an extremely powerful and complex word, with undertones of fear and timelessness and wonder. Now it is just one of a long line of words that means 'generically positive,' and that's sad, because we've lost a word with rich meaning and replaced it with a limp, impotent one. 'Terrible' is another example here.

So yeah, I think all this pretty accurately summarizes my thoughts on selective prescriptivism. I don't like losing good words, and I don't like ambiguity of meaning. I'm fine with language changing, simplifying, and consolidating, but I think there are some changes that are objectively for the worse, and I'll keep resisting those as much as I can.

Deletion

I have a very sensitive soul, and I can rarely bring myself to do things like kill spiders or bugs without just cause. This deep, inextricable sissiness, combined with the intellectual maturity of a younger me, lead to some pretty odd behaviors that went largely unobserved. I had many stuffed animals and other vaguely anipomorphic (50 hits on Google, good enough) objects in my room as a child. Somehow I always felt their cold, beady and/or buttony eyes on me, and so always had to leave my room and go to the bathroom to change. Middle school gym class was quite a shock to me.

Even stranger: when I first started using a word processor to type papers and other things for school, I felt inexplicably bad about deleting letters. I don't know what it was, but I started getting into the habit of just copying and pasting unwanted text to the end of the document and only printing out the first n-1 pages to spare the poor unwanted letters' lives. When I upgraded from my AppleIIe to a proper PC with Word on it, editing and formatting became a lot easier, so I was sometimes compelled to be even more creative in my Schindler-esque efforts. Because I felt sad about banishing the letters to the lonely last page ghetto, a began to cut/paste them into a separate word document where they all lived and could be happy among their own kind. I remember being nervous about that, wondering if the cut/paste function was somehow deleting the letter and putting a copy of it at the target destination instead of preserving the essence of the letter. (Funnily enough, we spent an entire week on this subject in my Metaphysics class ten years later.) The height of the absurdity, I think, was when I would keep the string of unused letters just in front of the cursor in my document, and would drop them off in new words where appropriate. Foster words for the abandoned letters.

I honestly don't remember what broke me of these odd habits. I know I accidentally included the strings of gibberish when turning in my assignment a few times, and I remember one horrific accident where I must have hit the 'insert' button on my keyboard and I overwrote a whole two lines of them. I think the stress of writing papers in high school just made me more comfortable with the idea that letters are were my little slaves, and that I could deal with them as I wished.