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I was once in a meeting at work where we were trying to manage a runaway engineering project.
The various players were discussing this or that aspect when one of the more senior guys—and one who was pretty discouraged about the prospects of ever getting control of the project—said “and how do you plan to manage entropy?”
That stopped the conversation for a while.
Entropy is the tendency of things to disorder.
In a moment this will bring me to the comments of John Simpson the Chief Editor of The Oxford English Dictionary but first I’ll give you the etymology of entropy.
A guy named Rudolf Clausius is generally credited with coming up with the second law of thermodynamics. He was German physicist and in 1856 he refined the thinking on how matter behaves as relates to heat and disorder down to a mathematical formula.
He also invented a word for it, entropy from Greek and meaning “in turning” the turning being interpreted as “transforming”—as to disorder.
I don’t know what John Simpson has to say about entropy, but he recently had something to say about H. G. Wells.
Simpson pulled two quotes from the 1914 novel The World Set Free in which H. G. Wells makes a few predictions about the development of the English language. Almost 100 years on we can see how those predictions fared.
The first is that our vocabulary would swell. Wells predicted that the OED would be bursting with a quarter of a million words defined. Moreover, with all these new words, a person with a vocabulary of 100 years ago would have a hard time reading a newspaper; there would be too many words in there they’d never seen before.
It turns out that the author who wrote of time machines, invisibility and utopia was too conservative in his estimation of English.
The OED entered 2010 under the weight of almost 2½ times Wells’ estimate of word count. That’s 597,291words.
But what has that to do with entropy?
Wells also got his general direction right in predicting that English would become increasingly an international language. But he forecast more rules and regulation would be imposed on English.
The English language is very democratic. Words and their use flourish not by official approval but by popular usage. More users, more words, more creative usage.
Not exactly entropy but it got me thinking.
Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces
Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of several books including his latest
History of Wine Words – An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology from the Vineyard, Glass, and Bottle.
Gah! It's almost day's end, and in a sudden forehead-slapping moment I remembered that today was Sunday, and Sunday is quoteskimming day, and I hadn't yet done it. Never fear, however, I am squeaking under the limbo pole. Heck, I'm still able to make it without serious contortion.
About poets and other solitary writers
A word about the woman whose book of poems I'm still wending my way through, the lovely Miss Emily Dickinson, from an interesting source, TV character Lisa Simpson. Yes, from The Simpsons:
"Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon."
About first drafts
According to Bernard Malamud, a Jewish writer described as a sort of human version of Eeyore by Jay Cantor (the quote can be found in this article, although use of the name Eeyore is mine, and not Cantor's), a first draft is:
"the most uncertain——where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better."
According to John Dufresne, who wrote an article for The Writer back in October of 1992, which got reprinted in September of 2007:
Writing a first draft should be easy because, in a sense, you can't get it wrong. . . . You have nothing to prove in the first draft, nothing to defend, everything to imagine. . . . You write the draft in order to eread what you have written and to determine what you still have to say. . . .
You must have the courage to allow yourself to fail. The first draft is where the beginning writer most often finds himself blocked, to use a conventional, though perhaps misleading, verb.
I highly, heartily recommend that everyone get their mitts on a copy of Dufresne's article, entitled "Write a first draft to FIND YOUR STORY: If you allow for spontaneity and surprise, a story will reveal itself to you in the writing" (yelling bit of the title as in the original). I've not yet read his book, The Lie That Tells a Truth, but I rather suspect that a version of this article (or its information) is contained therein. Particularly since GoogleBooks was able to give me an excerpt that confirms that bit of info.
I know lots of you writer sorts are big fans of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and myriads of fans quote her advice to allow oneself to write a "shitty first draft." What Dufresne does a bit later in the article I've cited and quoted above is tell you how to write a shitty first draft:
Do not try to write beyond what the first draft is meant to accomplish: Do not demand or expect a finished manuscript in one draft. The worst thing you may do in writing the first draft may be to focus on the form or content of the story. Do not even consider technical problems at this early stage. And do not let your critical self sit at your desk with your creative self. The critic will stifle the writer within.
Along those lines, a quote from Jane Austen
". . . why did we wait for any thing?—why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!" Frank Churchill in Emma.
