Month: December 2013

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The Zugzwang and the Zwischenzug

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Chess analogies are always fun to make to life, and equally exciting to dissect as they typically reveal something about the person who made them.

These two chess terms were chosen because, taken together, they account for nearly all of one’s success or failure in chess, with outright blunders making up the other portion. That, and all of those Z’s look pretty impressive in the headline.

First, a zugzwang (German term meaning compulsion to move) is a situation on the chess board where a player would prefer to make no move at all. Moreover, upon moving the player is forced to yield a decisive concession that leads to either defeat or a draw if one actually had the upper hand in material and winning opportunities. This can frequently occur in the endgame when both kings may be fighting to take the opposition. It goes without saying that one would want to avoid being put in a zugzwang as it is strongly associated with failure.

Secondly, a zwischenzug (German term meaning in-between move) is an intermediate move done before an anticipated response (i.e. before recapturing a piece) and can swing the outcome of a situation in one’s favor.  One would want to find a zwischenzug if it will lead to winning opportunities, compel one’s opponent to move into a zugzwang, or force a draw if one’s winning opportunities are slim to nothing. It is strongly associated with success.

These terms probably won’t make their way from the chess world into mainstream lexicon anytime soon. I might be surprised though. While people are not necessarily chess pieces that can be moved around to suit one’s whim, there are some who would beg to differ.

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The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

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This piece of knowledge I have to initially tribute to my high school, freshman year, English teacher, Dr. Lane. I don’t know why I chose to remember this, as she only went off on this tangent for what seemed about a minute or two before continuing with the lecture. Maybe it chose to be remembered by me, sticking out like an intentional detour that a tour guide might take to promote the local vendors.

The gist of her commentary was that the vast majority of people inappropriately use the term jealous when they really mean envious. Moreover, she lamented, because so many people (students and professors alike) were misusing the term jealousy, it was becoming synonymous with the term envy.

That was news to me at the time. I had thought they were cousins all along…

She went on to explain that envy means to covet something owned by another, whereas jealousy was more akin to the fear of losing someone’s loyalty and/or resentment of a rival, before returning to the topic at hand… something about parts of speech or Les Miserables, I can’t recall. My brain was still downloading content, I guess.

Sure enough, while working on Affect Engineering and pouring over hundreds of entries in psychology dictionaries I discovered that she was right, but that’s not really the point I want to make here.

If I could be mistaken about one interpretation of one word, then what other words might I be using incorrectly? What other tools of the trade might I be bending, warping, or breaking through their incorrect usage? Though no language is indestructible, some, it would seem, are clearly hardier than others.

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Living in the Shadow of Creativity

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Creativity has long been the buzzword of choice for entrepreneurs, inventors, and visionary types looking to market themselves. It has become nearly synonymous with genius. There appears to be no shortage of creativity anywhere; a steady stream of articles on improving one’s creativity can be found in just about every nook, corner, and cranny imaginable. For instance, a Google search on improving + creativity will churn up some 85,000,000 results.

Yet, a search of creativity’s lesser-known twin sibling, improving + destructivity, will only yield about thirty-five thousand results.

I’m not talking about the garden variety nihilist here, but the selective kind of destructivity that permits someone to cut through the endless swath of backward metaphors, hyperboles, oxymorons, and figures of speech in our world to find out what truly matters, what doesn’t, and where the path of least resistance lies.

The sculptor does not look at a block of marble then start decorating it with ribbons and paint.

The whittler does not look at a block of wood and start gluing more stuff on it.

The destructive genius wields Ockham’s Razor as if it were… Ockham’s Razor.

Consider the following two sentences:

1) “Jimmy grew from 5′ 11” to 6′ 6” in three years.”

2) “Jimmy’s a skyscraper of a man who shot up like a rocket in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

One may have been written by a destructive genius while the other by a creative one.

One has substance and the other has flair.

One is all icing and the other is all cake.

One genius is living in the other’s shadow.

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To Catch a Literary Agent

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With this last round of major editing coming to a conclusion, I now feel fully equipped to play the waiting game (a.k.a. hunting for a literary agent). Agent… it’s one of the few words that just seems to inspire an aura of confidence. Agents carry about them an ineffable mystique; they can instill fear among world leaders or assert their power as catalysts for destruction. Here are some examples:

Literary Agent
Secret Agent
Double Agent
Agent Orange

They are men, women, and things of action! Catching one of these elusive creatures, the literary agent, will necessarily require a tremendous amount of effort, craft, and stealth (i.e. my posting may go on hiatus until I wrestle one into signing a contract, figuratively speaking).

Also, have you ever noticed how any word instantly becomes hip, cool, and fierce sounding if it precedes or comes after the word agent? For instance:

Agent 50%

What exactly is being implied here? Would this agent only do half the job that you paid to have done in full? Maybe, but I’d be willing to bet that half of the job would be top notch with a moniker like that. Other examples include:

Butterfly Agent
Agent Cupcake

I rest my case.

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The Bridge Is Still the Barrier

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Some words convey ideas of such magnitude that one can never forget the circumstances under which they were learned. For me, that word is ineffable.

I first came across it while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby in high school; it was paired with an equally interesting word in the context of ineffable gaudiness. The latter I was already familiar with, i.e. something ostentatious, showy, or tastelessly ornamental and extravagant. But ineffable, that one was new, intriguing, and sent me sprinting for the dictionary.

The main entry for ineffable, an adjective, implies that something is incapable of being expressed in words, for instance, on account of being too great or extreme.

A word to describe the indescribable? My first reaction was horror… no self-respecting writer, poet, artist, etc. should even have that word in his or her vocabulary, let alone use it in a work of fiction meant for publication. We can explain everything!

However, recently I’ve asked myself, “What is language?” Not just English or Latin, but math too. Are they just a collection of symbols used to re-present physical objects in the world, like an emotion? Are they mere substitutes? “Yes,” the answer would appear. Language is but a tool at our disposal to help us organize the world. Though, if this is forgotten, then I would reason that one can easily become dominated by it just like any other tool that one is not masterful at using.

Two can never be one,
One can never be two.
The floodgates may open,
But if the dam holds true,
Then the bridge is still the barrier.