Lockhart is the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We are first introduced to him at Flourish and Blotts, the bookshop in Diagon Alley where Harry, Hermione and the Weasleys are shopping for textbooks for their second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.^[1]

A prolific author, repeated winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award, and widely considered a heartthrob (looking at you, Molly Weasley), Lockhart is obviously vain but also appears – at first – to be reasonably competent. His books detail his many great achievements: his defeat of the Wagga Wagga Werewolf, his triumph over the Bandon Banshee, and so on.

Alas, the shine quickly wears off, and as the year progresses his ineptitude becomes obvious.

But if he’s so inept, why consider him a killer? He didn’t bludgeon the banshee, or whack the werewolf. Indeed, none of his adventures actually occurred! He’s a liar, maybe, but a murderer?

Let’s step back from Gilderoy for a moment.

In an earlier article, I wrote about persistence and personal identity:

What makes you, you? What could be changed or removed and still leave the ‘youness’ intact? …[W]hat is it that enables you to persist, despite the changes you’ve undergone, from one day to the next?

One of the possibilities I considered was material continuity: in short, that having the same body – or the relevant bits of the same body – is what makes you, you. But early in the Harry Potter series we see that, in the lore of the world Rowling has created, drastic changes to one’s body don’t undermine persistence. For instance, Polyjuice Potion allows one to assume the form of someone else, even if they are of a different gender or a drastically different age.

But we don’t think that Harry-and-Ron-polyjuiced-into-Crabbe-and-Goyle stop being Harry and Ron.  We’re not confused as to what’s happening, or worried that our heroes have disappeared. And this isn’t limited to swapping body parts for other human ones: at one point a Polyjuice mishap has Hermione turn into a catgirl.

So if it’s not material continuity that matters for persistence in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, then it must be something else. A plausible alternative is psychological continuity. The idea, roughly, is that it’s some feature of our psychological makeup that makes us the same person from one day to the next: what feature/s varies by account, but usually it involves some sort of inheritance of beliefs, preferences, dispositions and/or – crucially – memories. Whereas some might locate these features in the brain, in Harry Potter memory is located in the soul:

"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self any more, no memory, no...anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever...lost."

Remus Lupin, in JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

(I take it that the ‘you’ Lupin is referring to is merely Harry’s body. And as we’ve seen, the body isn’t what’s relevant for full ‘youness’ in Harry Potter. We see another example with those summoned back from death with the Restoration Stone: despite not having physical brains or bodies, they retain the power to think and remember.)

Now Lockhart doesn’t remove souls, but he does tamper with memories. Lockhart has cultivated a single magical skill: Memory Charms. He entices people to tell him their stories and then takes those stories and passes them off as his own. Usually he is selective in which memories he ‘obliviates’ (and there is debate in the fandom about whether memory charms, properly cast, suppress or erase memories).^[2] But when confronted by Ron and Harry towards the end of Chamber of Secrets, his attempted erasure is much more significant:

'The adventure ends here, boys!' he said. 'I shall take a bit of this skin back up to the school, tell them I was too late to save the girl, and that you two tragically lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body. Say goodbye to your memories!'

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

If what Lockhart is attempting is to erase Harry and Ron’s memories such that that they ‘lose their minds’, and if memories are crucial for persistence, then what he is attempting is tantamount to murder. Harry and Ron – as we know them – wouldn’t survive such a loss.

Thankfully, the spell backfires, and so the murder is merely attempted. In backfiring, though, the spell hits Lockhart instead, erasing – seemingly permanently – his own memories, and leaving behind a body with wavy golden hair, the knowledge of how to write in cursive and a penchant for signing autographs. If these are not enough for persistence, then Lockhart’s final victim was himself.

Further Reading

For more on the persistence question, including further reading, see "On Persistence and Memory"

If you're interested in Harry Potter more generally, we have both philosophical and linguistic musings on the matter.

Flyting – examples of which can be found throughout Northern European literature, from Irish and Scots to English and Norse – was a performative exchange of insults between poets that celebrated their wit, eloquence, and general capacity to be a Bad Bitch. These verbal (and textual) duels typically comprised insults focussing on a foe’s sexual perversion, their lack of courage in battle, or their physical ineptitude, and were frequently, joyously vulgar. Think Christmas dinner conversation with your favourite drunk aunt.

An early example can be found in the Lokasenna (or The Flyting of Loki), a poem from the Poetic Edda which depicts the poetical invectives between Loki and the Æsir (the main pantheon of Gods in Norse mythology). Below we have an excerpt from an exchange between Loki and Bragi (the god of poetry and music no less):

Bragi spake:
"Now were I without | as I am within,
And here in Ægir's hall,
Thine head would I bear | in mine hands away,
And pay thee the price of thy lies."

Loki spake:
"In thy seat art thou bold, | not so are thy deeds,
Bragi, adorner of benches!
Go out and fight | if angered thou feelest,
No hero such forethought has."

Bellows (1936): 151-152.

“[A]dorner of benches” – is there a more devastating accusation of cowardice? The first line is Loki essentially decrying Bragi as a keyboard warrior: sweating Mountain Dew and explaining comedians’ jokes back to them on Twitter. 

Bragi, conversely, does seem somewhat less well-stocked in the ol’ wit department: “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” he says: “Don’t make me get off my chair! I swear, if I have to stand up! Mum! He’s doing it again!” I squared up to  my grandma in this fashion once; she punched me in the throat.

Which brings us to Valhalla (2020). Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018) was a phenomenal recreation of the ancient Hellenic world – just ask this archaeologist – and they’ve taken a similarly well-researched approach to Valhalla: from silver coinage to longship design. “But it was wildly historically inaccurate: that’s not how kings were chosen!” I hear you shout from your basement, dribbling soda. I don’t care: back to the bench with you! (I will concede, however, that male Eivor is not nearly as hot or funny as Odyssey’s Alexios, and no I will not surrender the tannoy in Tesco until everyone shopper knows this).

For me (and therefore for you), the most notable historical inclusion was, of course, flyting. These stats-boosting poetic duels are common throughout the map in both Norway and England, and will test your ability to detect rhyme and intuit metre. Some bold-as-brass NPC drops a phat insult against you, and you – absolutely raging by this point – have to select your response from three available choices. The correct one is that which complements both the NPC’s end-rhyme (final sounds which rhyme e.g. 'I serenaded the old woman who lives across from my door | She bade me “shut the fuck up” and called me a whore') and its number of feet.

Feet, for the unfamiliar, are a basic unit of measurement in poetry: collections of stressed and unstressed syllables which structure the rhythm of a poem. For example, the word unite is comprised of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Typically, these are characterised as dee – short, unstressed – and dum: longer, stressed. Whether a syllable is stressed or not is dependent on the emphasis placed on it during an utterance: for me, the emphasis is placed on the second syllable when I say ‘unite’: dee-dum. This may not be the case for everyone: heretics undoubtedly live among us.

“[A]dorner of benches” – is there a more devastating accusation of cowardice?

Now, there are all kinds of feet (beyond nice ones like mine and everyone else’s gross ones). ‘U-nite’ for example, is an iamb: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Byron’s She Walks in Beauty is a nice example of iambic metre: “She walks in beau-ty, like the night.” A trochee, conversely, is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable e.g. Gar-den. Poe’s famous The Raven is primarily written in trochaic metre: “Once u-pon a mid-night drea-ry, while I pon-dered, weak and wea-ry.” And you certainly aren’t limited to two syllables. An anapaest is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one e.g. O-ver-come. You’ll find an example of this type of foot in Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib – absolute banger if you haven’t read it: “When the blue wave rolls night-ly on deep Gali-lee.” And they said an undergrad in English literature was a waste. I may have debt and limited job opportunities but behold! My mountain of incredibly google-able knowledge!

 Armed with this understanding of Valhalla’s flyting victory conditions, let’s consider this early encounter with Manning, Fighter of Wolves. A burly type, I was initially surprised by his eloquence – shame on me. His opening volley is: “Have you ever seen muscles as massive as mine?” And to be fair, his muscles are sizeable and inspire in me unclean thoughts. Our task is then to select from the three options the ending which best complements this line and, of course, delivers a devasting riposte. Listening to the museful Manning, he is using iambic metre: unstressed syllable, stressed syllable. Our three options are:

“You have the form of a very large swine.”

Wrong: this is in fact a savage put-down from my mother when I’m just trying to enjoying a swim at the pool. And it’s not entirely iambic – I’m hearing a couple of cheeky trochees in there – and there certainly are not enough feet (said the cannibal to the chef). 

“I’m not awed by your muscles, but shocked by your pride.”

Also wrong: a yearbook entry from my favourite PE teacher. “I’m not awed” reads as anapaestic to me, and “pride” doesn’t work as an end-rhyme.  

“What you make up in muscles, you’re lacking in spine.”

Boom! We have a winner! “Spine” compliments the end-rhyme of “mine,” and you can comfortably read it aloud as iambic. Also a direct quote from my concerned chiropractor. 

...these kinds of poetic and literary pursuits are steadily finding their way into more games...

Beyond Valhalla, we can find numerous examples of flyting in modern media. In the final installation of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy, The Ship of the Dead, the eponymous protagonist flytes to the death with Loki (an event involving body-shrinking and walnuts, I don’t know).

In the Monkey Island video game series (and especially The Secret of Monkey Island), flyting is integral to victory in sword-fighting: as in Valhalla, you must counter your opponent’s invectives with insulting (and, in the sequel, rhyming) ripostes. A sufficiently stinging jibe will throw your enemy off and give you the upper hand in battle, which, if maintained for long enough, secures you the win. Memorable exchanges include:

“I once owned a dog that was smarter than you!”

“He must have taught you everything you know!”

And:

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”

“How appropriate. You fight like a cow!”

Perhaps most heartening is that these kinds of poetic and literary pursuits are steadily finding their way into more games with meaningful narratological and ludological function: see also the haiku quests in Ghost of Tsushima.

And if you’ve an interest in the ritual insulting of others (and if you don’t: why do you hate fun?), I would recommend The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (the earliest example of flyting in Scots: c.1500 baby), which has been suggested to possess the earliest recorded use of the word ‘shit’ as an insult. A particularly delightful line is Kennedie’s accusation that Dunbar is: “a shit without wit, only cheap tawdry tricks.” The perfect Twitter bio, frankly. 

References

• Bellows, H. The Poetic Edda (Bibliolife, 2011).
• Dunbar, W. & Kennedie, W. The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (OUP, 2021).

The Epicurean Cure is a celebration of thinking critically and robustly about the media we love. Further down you’ll find a selection of works by BAME authors: those that sit with worn spines on our bookcases; that we’ve read to the children in our lives; that we’ve pressed into the hands of friends; that we’ve sat up into the wee hours consuming. We’ve also included a series of links to other media created by BAME people or that give context to the current protests (those aren’t mutually exclusive!). Buy them from your local bookseller, borrow them from your local library, watch them, play them.

However, that’s not all you can do. We can’t speak to the lived experience of BAME people so must defer to those who can, and the overwhelming message we’re hearing is to donate, so that’s what we’ve done. Here are some resources with suggestions of where you can direct your time and funds:

• “Dear White People, This is What We Want You to Do”
• “A list of resources for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement”
• “How to donate to anti-racism charities after George Floyd’s death and how else you can show support”
• “Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay, But They’re Not”
• “Performative Allyship is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead)”
• “5 Racist Anti-Racism Responses “Good” White Women Give to Viral Posts”
• “How to protest safely during a pandemic”
• “5 points to consider before going to a black lives matter protest in London or the UK”

Our favourites

Poems by Maya Angelou

The philosopher’s well-worn copy collects four volumes of Maya Angelou’s poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well; And Still I Rise; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?

Her 17-year-old self marked favourites with dots in the corner of the pages, but every time she opens the book something new resonates. Zen Pencils' Gavin Aung Than illustrated “Phenomenal Woman”, and it’s well worth a look.

Young, Gifted and Black by Jamia Wilson, illustrated by Andrea Pippins

This gorgeous picture book depicts fifty-two black legends – one for each week of the year. It’s brightly coloured, uplifting and covers musicians, politicians, athletes and other important figures from all over the world.

You can find more picture books celebrating BAME people in Quarto’s "Anti-racist books for kids” list.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

The first in a trilogy of stories about Binti, the linguist defies anyone not to read it in a single sitting (also it’s a novella, so you really don’t have an excuse). Tense, textured, thoughtful – Okorafor’s gift for characterisation keeps this story in your thoughts long after the last page.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

The first of a sci-fi trilogy set in Nigeria, Rosewater is widely acclaimed and it’s not difficult to see why. Both the philosopher and the linguist amongst us read and enjoyed it, and we tend to disagree about books, so that speaks for itself.

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin

These are excellent, simpliciter. The trilogy is described as ‘science fantasy’ and has fascinating world-building and multi-layered female characters. Jemisin was the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, which she did for the first in the trilogy: The Fifth Season. She went on to win the Hugo for both sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.

The only reason our own copies don’t feature in the image at the top of the page is that they’re constantly being loaned out to friends. The web dev waxes lyrical about how great they are – the rest of us agree.

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

This is a phenomenally easy-to-enjoy read. Oyeyemi took time off school to finish it and the linguist is glad she (temporarily) said screw you to maths. A coming-of-age (sort of ghost) story set against the background of cultural upheaval; it was a pleasure to read.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge and The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla

We’re grouping these two together for two reasons: (1) they’re both accessible, important insights into current society, history, and the lives of people of colour in the UK; and (2) there’s currently a petition to have them added to the GSCE reading list (which you can sign here). There’s an American version of the latter – The Good Immigrant USA – edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman.

The Fat Black Woman’s Poems by Grace Nichols

We’d be remiss not to include Grace Nichols’s poetry: often hilarious, regularly moving, and always powerful. It was, and continues to be, an important joy to read.

More Options

• “Twelve books that give context to current protests [reading list]”
• “10 documentaries to watch about race instead of asking a person of colour to explain things for you”
• “7 games by black developers you can support right now”
• “More Black bookshops and publishers you should know about”
• “Here are four things that you can do to de-colonize your bookshelf this year”
• “Anti-racism resources”

If anyone has further suggestions we’re happy to share them, and if there’s anything in particular we can do, we’d appreciate hearing it.

Those who ascend to rulership become Philosopher Kings^[1]:

It is a more enlightened age. Perhaps a future, or a past long forgotten, when rulers are noble and just, and rule for their people, not just for themselves. Perhaps it is an Age of Reason, in which older, barbaric measures of manhood such as war and business have been phased out, and replaced solely with pure, unclouded Thought. Only those who have the capacity to Think have the right to Rule. In this realm, the Philosopher King is found.^[2]

In this short but sweet piece of pop(culture)corn, we highlight some gender-inverted instances of the Philosopher and Philosopher King. Let us know your favourite, or other characters deserving the mantle of Philosopher Queen, in the comments or on Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook.

"Eternal life for those who can afford it means eternal control over those who can’t."

Quellcrist Falconer

Quell is an academic and political revolutionary in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. The Netflix adaptation presents her as a fighting philosopher rebel queen, whose actions against the ruling elite are underpinned by her eponymous political philosophy:

Quellism is the political theory created by Quellcrist Falconer for the establishment of a hi-tech social democracy, having elements of socialism and anarchism. Quellism was an expression of Quell’s exasperation with both the inherent self-serving, elitist, corruption of right-wing politics and the back-biting, self-absorption of the left.^[4]

Technological developments have allowed the rich to prolong their lives indefinitely, ‘resleeving’ their consciousness in new bodies – in the Altered Carbon universe, Quell notes, “Your body is not who you are.”^[5] The political ramifications of this motivate Quell’s revolution:

The ebb and flow of life is what makes us all equal in the end […] We aren’t meant to live forever. It corrupts even the best of us…Eternal life for those who can afford it means eternal control over those who can’t.

Quell (S01E07)

Tallis

Tallis is an elven, Qunari assassin, from Dragon Age II’s “Mark of the Assassin” DLC. A convert to the Qun, Tallis engages in both epistemology and moral philosophy, contemplating her faith and her moral obligations.

In classic trope-philosopher fashion, she delivers pithy one-liners as she accompanies the party:

He who wishes to walk on water must first learn to swim.

She who swallows wisdom in tiny chunks avoids choking.

It’s not always meant to end in violence. There are other paths. They do not all need to lead to the same destination.

Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith. To leave the path is to embrace blindness, and abandon hope.

Princess Bubblegum

A literal philosopher queen – or at least, philosopher princess – Bubblegum rules the Candy Kingdom in Adventure Time, a prosperous land of sweet creatures with a tendency to explode when frightened. A metaphysician and philosopher of science, Bubblegum champions invention and empirical endeavours while denying the existence of magic:

Listen, all magic is scientific principles presented like “mystical hoodoo” which is fun, but it’s sort of irresponsible.

Princess Bubblegum, Wizards Only, Fool

In the course of the show, Bubblegum attends and organises conferences, fashions a potion to revive the dead, and creates a variety of creatures (including her own subjects) out of candy biomass:

As princess of candy kingdom, I’m in charge of a lot of candy people. They rely on me, I can’t imagine what might happen to them if I was gone… I am not going to live forever Finn, I would if I could, but modern science just isn’t there yet, so I engineered a replacement that could live forever.

Princess Bubblegum, Goliad

And, in true tropey fashion, Princess Bubblegum acts as a guide to the show’s adventuring heroes, Finn and Jake, sharing her wisdom and providing exposition:

Finn, sometimes you want someone and you want to kiss them and be with them, but you can’t because responsibility demands sacrifice.

Princess Bubblegum, Burning Low

"Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith. To leave the path is to embrace blindness, and abandon hope."

Mary Malone

Mary Malone is a physicist and the inventor of the eponymous device in Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass. Like Bubblegum, she is foremost a scientist, but Mary plays the role of the philosopher in guiding (and tempting) Lyra and Will. Drawing on her background as a former nun, she espouses her philosophy of religion as part of this process:

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

Mary Malone, The Amber Spyglass

Sha'ira, the Asari Consort

Sha’ira appears in the Mass Effect series, offering “personal services as well as entertainment and conversation”^[6], but she is particularly sought after for her advice. After providing assistance to the consort in the first Mass Effect instalment, Sha’ira offers the player character Shepard a ‘gift of words’: “an affirmation of who you are, and who you will become”. Shepard observes that, from description, the consort sounds like an oracle; in this and her advice she is much like the classic trope instances. Another character rejoins that Sha’ira is merely a woman, “with remarkable compassion and a generous spirit”.^[7]

Sha’ira has been likened to a Greek hetaira – in both cases, depending on who you ask, they are described as sex workers, escorts, and/or elite, educated women.

 Want to philosophise about other examples? Do so in the comments, or on twitter/tumblr/facebook.

Nonetheless, I normally think that the rest of you have minds too, and sometimes I even think I can know what’s going on in that mind of yours. I can’t peer into it, but based on your behaviour, and by analogy to my own experience, I predict what you’ll do, respond to how I think you’re feeling, and so on. Presumably you do that too. After all, if you don’t have a mind – if you don’t feel, or think, or want, or believe – then my efforts to ensure I’ve stocked up on your favourite tea before you visit seem rather pointless. The attribution of minds and mental states to others is ubiquitous: here are a couple of examples from Zusak’s The Messenger^[2] (emphasis mine):

She looks up at me, and for a moment, we both get lost in each other. She wonders who I am, but only for a split second. Then, with stunning realisation clambering across her face, she smiles at me.^[3]

[...] He’s still groggy but his eyes grow wide. He thinks about a sudden movement but understands very quickly that he can barely pull himself out of the car.^[4]

The problem of other minds is an epistemic one: how are we justified in attributing mental states to others, given the possibility that their minds may be very different to our own, if they have them at all? How can we know that others have minds, and what are they like?

These are questions too big for a single article, so here I just want to highlight two things: firstly, that we do attribute minds and mental states to others (whether or not we are justified in doing so, or whether we can know that they have them); and secondly that one argument for doing so is, as I hinted at above, the argument from analogy.^[5] Even if I don’t know what your mind is like (or even if you have one), can’t I still reasonably suppose that your mental life is much like mine? Can’t I use myself as a model for you and everybody else?

This sort of argument was put forward by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, among others. Here’s Mill’s version:

I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because, first, they have bodies like me, which I know in my own case to be the antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings.^[6]

Of course, there are always problems with induction from one case, and one case is all we have, as my mind is the only mind I can be sure about. So, there’s a difference between a generalisation like ‘If a person exhibits human behaviour then they have a mind’ and ‘If you encounter a koala in the wild then you’re in Australia’, because in the latter case we have lots of evidence it’s true (there are lots of instances of people encountering koalas in the wild, and all have taken place in Australia)^[7] and in the former I only have on instance: me!

If I was the only philosopher you had ever met, you might come to think that all philosophers were 5ft2, interested in time travel and spoke with an Aussie Accent...

The reality is sorely disappointing.

Can’t I use myself as a model for you and everybody else?

As Simon Blackburn puts it,

The mere fact that in one case – my own – perhaps as luck has it, there is a mental life of a particular, definite kind, associated with a brain and a body, seems to be very flimsy ground for supposing that there is just the same association in all the other cases.

If I have a box and it has a beetle in it, that gives me only very poor grounds for supposing that everyone else with a box has a beetle in it as well.

Perhaps worse, it gives me very poor grounds for denying that there are beetles anywhere else than in boxes.

Maybe then things that are very different from you and me physically are conscious in just the way that I am: rocks or flowers, for example.^[8]

Even if we can move past this worry, there’s another: even if the argument from analogy works for people similar to me, what about creatures who are dissimilar? And how different is too different: people with behaviour or bodies different to mine? Animals? Aliens?

And thus we arrive at Mass Effect. One of the things I like most about the series are the aliens. Less the humanoid aliens – although they’re fun too – but the truly alien aliens. Two are particularly of note (I’m borrowing the descriptions of TVTropers for these, as they’re priceless). First there are the Hanar, who

look something like dog-sized pink jellyfish with seven feet long tentacles, speak through bioluminescence (using Translator Microbes to communicate with other species), and have the tendency to refer to themselves as “This one” (because to the hanar, using one’s name in public is egotistical).^[9]

The elcor, by contrast,

resemble elephants without trunks that have been crossed with gorillas and stand about two metres tall at the shoulder. As their communication relies heavily on body language and pheromones (both too subtle for other species to decipher), they lack the ability to talk in anything but a flat monotone, which they compensate for by beginning their sentences by stating [their emotional states]…even when it is “With barely contained terror: Fine have it your way.”
However, except for their body size and unusual speech, they appear perfectly normal when interacting with other species.

The bodies and behaviour of the Hanar and Elcor are very different to ours – much more different than many of the aliens we see in science fiction.

Nonetheless, it seems, they think, feel, desire, believe. Putting aside their being fictional, there is presumably something it is like to be a Hanar or an Elcor. And we have reason to believe that at least some of what’s going on in their minds is similar to what goes on in ours. The Hanar merchant Opold displays concern for the impatience of one of its^[10] customers, and depending on the player’s actions can become angry. A particularly devout Hanar on the citadel argues to be allowed to preach on the basis of its desire to share the truth of its Gods. The Elcor too make reference to recognisable mental states states when speaking – exasperation, shock, horror, worry, delight – in contexts where we might feel the same: concern for guards that haven’t slept, shock at someone discovering a secret, the desire to move on from one’s job to something new.

A lot of the philosophical discussion of the problem of other minds has focused on what we can conceive, what’s possible, and the link between the two. If nothing else, the Mass Effect aliens make it easier to conceive of beings very different from us that nonetheless seem to have minds and mental states, not so far removed from our own.

References

• Blackburn, S. Think (Oxford: OUP, 1999).

• Mill, J. S. An examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 6^th edition (London, 1889).

• TV Tropes, Starfish Aliens/Video Games. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/StarfishAliens/VideoGames (Accessed: 21/02/2020).

• Zusak, M. The Messenger (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2002).

Further Reading

A good starting point is the SEP’s article on Other Minds.
Russell also offered an argument from analogy, which can be found in his Human Knowledge: Its scope and Limits (Allen & Unwin, 1948).

Finally, for more on Mass Effect aliens, see the fan wiki.

The highest compliment I can pay Carry On, my George Cross or Légion d'honneur, is that my childhood (a somewhat more distant realm than I’m currently prepared to recognise) would have been immeasurably improved by its presence. Fantastically well-written and edited, Rowell’s prose is hypnotising – such that it renders a dissolution of borders between the reader and the world she offers, an amorphous state interrupted only by the end of a chapter or being twatted by one’s hungry cat.

Of course, the premier pleasure of this novel is the burgeoning romance between the eponymous character and his arch-nemesis, Tyrannus ‘Baz’ Basilton Grimm-Pitch: paced with exquisite insufficiency, each encounter (or collision) between them nuanced and wonderfully imprecise, it is, without doubt, one of the most enjoyable and – crucially – satisfying same-sex relationships in literature I’ve encountered.

Of course, I could fanboy with abandon for the rest of this review but, alas, time isn’t as charitable as it used to be: places to avoid, colleagues to undermine, you understand. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to two points that most captured my attention. Firstly, Rowell’s magic-system: it’s unlike any other I’ve encountered in fantasy literature (although I’m sure comparable systems exist and no doubt you’ll haughtily helpfully remind me of that fact via email or twitter).

I’ll be frank: Rowell’s magic-system gies me the thirst. A philologist’s wet-dream, it’s developed around the principles of language change and evolution:

“Magic words are tricky,” Snow informs us,

“Sometimes to reveal something hidden, you have to use the language of the time it was stashed away. And sometimes an old phrase stops working when the rest of the world is sick of saying it.”

Rowell’s magic-system: it’s unlike any other I’ve encountered in fantasy literature.

Isn’t that fascinating? I suppose we might think of a word like goldwine – often translated as the Old English term for Lord – it means ‘gold friend’: a kenning, or compound expression, that was deployed specifically to reference a generous leader. For example, in the poem Beowulf, the eponymous hero is referred to as goldwine G__ēata – the gold friend of the Geats; and Hrothgar, king of the Danes, is described as goldwine gumena – gold friend of warriors.

In the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, the narrator ruminates on his past happiness in service, feasting with his comrades and enjoying the generosity of his lord, all now dead:

siÞÞan geara iu / goldwine minne / hrusan heolstre biwrah

Since long years ago / I hid my lord / in the darkness of the earth.

Spells, like language itself, lose efficacy with popular decline but regain a measure of value when historically contextualised (perhaps the modern incarnation of goldwine, having been processed through some considerable semantic shift, might be toryprick?). “The best new spells are practical and enduring,” explains Penelope, Snow’s formidable BFF:

“Catchphrases are usually crap; mundane people get tired of saying them, then move on. (Spells go bad that way, expire just as we get the hang of them.) Songs are dicey for the same reason.”

What makes the magic-system in Carry On especially charming is the arresting tension between descriptivist and prescriptivist thought extant along the demarcations of institutional attitudes and broader society. On the one hand, as Penelope mentions, spells develop, change and die with use (or lack thereof) – we might consider, as an illustration of this process, the word nice. A French loanword into Middle English (around the 14^th Century), it has throughout its history meant (sometimes concurrently): foolish, stupid, ignorant, lascivious, wicked, extravagantly dressed, scrupulous or punctilious (in terms of reputation or conduct), fastidious or fussy, careful, strict, refined or cultured, discerning in terms of literary taste, virtuous, conversationally appropriate, timorous or cowardly, lazy or slothful, pampered or luxurious, strange or rare, shy or coy (affectedly so), requiring close consideration, subtle or exact, slender or thin, trivial, meticulous, tastefully discriminating, dextrous, doubtful, requiring careful handling, restorative, satisfactory, pleasant-natured. See the OED entry for the full extent of the wild ride that is nice.

Now, of course, it seems to be undergoing pejoration – one tends to use it ironically. If we describe something as ‘nice’, it’s code for ‘tolerably shit’. For example:

Me: Oh hey, Barbara – Timmy’s such a nice kid. I’d be happy to look after him more often.

Me to self: Infant mortality, don’t fail me now.

On the other hand, Simon describes ‘elocution’ lessons students undergo to correctly execute spells:

“Words are very powerful,” Miss Possibelf said during our first Magic Words lesson. No one else was paying attention; she wasn’t saying anything they didn’t already know. But I was trying to commit it all to memory. “And they become more powerful,” she went on, “the more that they’re said, and read, and written, in specific, consistent combinations.”

Spells, like language itself, lose efficacy with popular decline but regain a measure of value when historically contextualised.

“…speaking out, hitting consonants, projection” – even amidst the acknowledgement of linguistic change and development, there’s a need to fix, to attach ‘correctness’. Rowell’s magical system is a superbly-apt, and self-aware, paradigm for the struggles between prescriptivist and descriptivist attitudes to language, between conservative and transformation, stasis and flux. There seemed to be the inkling of a comparable approach emerging in The Philosopher’s Stone (recall the “It’s levi-o-saa” incident between Hermione and Ron) but that somewhat degenerated into a system of ‘this sounds Latiney enough, right? Cool. Boom. Magic’, ignoring the issue of prescriptivism altogether.

The second point that struck me in the novel was Rowell's handling of the ‘Chosen One’ trope. Carry On is often regarded as an ode to fanfiction, being as it is something of a Harry Potter pastiche. This wasn’t the case for me: I read Carry On as a response to the failings of Harry Potter (cue a thousand screaming Potterites jamming the postal system with envelopes of dog-shit destined for my door).^[1] For example, the inescapable fact that Harry Potter was based in an exclusively heteronormative universe. “But Dumbledore was gay!”, I hear you whine. No – if it wasn’t clear in the books, it’s not the case. I’m intractable on this point.

Rowell creates a world where not only can gay people do magic (which should be obvious to everyone – Scottish gays historically rode unicorns into battle), they can even be the protagonists.

Even if we were to accept the tiny homo-crumb Rowling flicks to us (after her books are published), Rowell creates a world where not only can gay people do magic (which should be obvious to everyone – Scottish gays historically rode unicorns into battle), they can even be the protagonists. As such, Rowell takes Rowling’s tried-and-tested ‘Chosen One’ narrative wherein the hero of the story is predestined for great things (by, you guessed it, a prophecy!) and subverts it beautifully. Simon is bio-magically conceived for the sole purpose of fulfilling a prophecy that, as it turns out, was misread, resulting in a hero attempting to fulfil an ill-fitting destiny as best he can. All the while, the true subject of the prophecy, Ebb, happily tends her goats throughout, having opted-out of the system despite her supreme gift for magic. So subversive is Rowell’s treatment of, and so conditioned am I by, the established framework for the ‘Chosen One’ trope, I found myself suffering incredible frustration during my first reading. Only several completions later have I accepted the fact that Ebb isn’t going to be the magical saviour of Britain – it’s been a journey of personal development and awkward afternoon erections.

Carry On is undoubtedly one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve encountered – if, like me, you’re of a certain age where you’re not old enough to recall a youth before mainstream m/m romances but not young enough to only know a youth where mainstream m/m romances exist (though still in unsatisfying numbers), Carry On feels especially important, a poignant notice of how much sweeter things could have been. Aside from Rowell’s innovative exploration of language and magic, it’s a book that features protagonists who are gay and acknowledges the attendant issues they have to face but doesn’t confine its narrative scope to those issues. It’s a book that’s technically proficient, often hilarious and always intelligent. I’m indifferent as to whether you enjoyed it but it’s important that you know it made me very happy indeed.

Further Reading

For more on the prescriptivist/descriptivist dichotomy, see:

• Prescriptivism v Descriptivism: A Very English Affair
• Part 2 of our interview with Catherine Sangster, from Oxford Dictionaries.

And, for his take on the Chosen One and Prophecy tropes, see our interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Fiction and philosophy alike have offered various ways to answer this question. They tend to approach the problem in similar fashion as well: they ask us to entertain some pretty strange hypotheticals – be they thought experiments or fictional scenarios (what’s the difference, really?) – and then see what intuitions fall out.

One of the classic personal identity thought experiments is called Theseus’s Ship. It goes like this:

Over a period of years, in the course of maintenance a ship has its planks replaced one by one – call this ship A. However, the old planks are retained and themselves reconstituted into a ship – call this ship B. At the end of the process there are two ships. Which is the original ship of Theseus?^[1]

People differ in their response: some think ship A – after all, it’d be the one they’d insured – and others think ship B (including those looking for forensic evidence of the bloody murder you committed before deciding to overhaul your ship). Some think there isn’t a clear answer one way or the other, or that they’re both the original ship (whatever that means).

We find variants of Theseus’s Ship throughout our fiction. In the Doctor Who episode Deep Breath, the Twelfth Doctor asks,

If you have a broom, you replace the handle, and then you replace the brush, and do it over and over, is it still the same broom?

(We might, of course, ask the same question of the Doctor).

And in Westworld (which is full of interesting musings about identity, but here’s just a small example) we hear of Dolores:

You know why she's special?

She's been repaired so many times, she's practically brand-new.

Don't let that fool you. She's the oldest host in the park.

Westworld, S01E01

I am inclined to think that Dolores continues to be Dolores, despite her modifications and repairs. Likewise, I can accept that each incarnation of the Doctor is, in some sense, the same continuing Time Lord (your intuitions might differ from mine – in which case, tell me in the comments!). Perhaps the Ship of Theseus example is extra tricky because there are two ships: if the old planks had been left to rot, rather than reassembled, maybe our intuitions would be clearer.

Many people would write off these questions as idle speculation: a matter best left for sci-fi, or philosophers in their ivory towers. But I am confident that you, dear reader, know better. After all, your cells die and are replaced. Your thoughts change – you’ve gained and lost memories over time, changed your convictions, developed your dispositions. The planks that make up you are no more permanent than those in Theseus’s Ship. So what is it that enables you to persist, despite the changes you’ve undergone, from one day to the next?

“If you have a broom, you replace the handle, and then you replace the brush, and do it over and over, is it still the same broom?”

Material Continuity

We might answer the persistence question in terms of material continuity:

You are that past or future being that has your body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like.^[2]

That body can undergo change, but so long as there is some physical continuity between the different stages of you – baby, toddler, misunderstood teen etc. – there is persistence. In fiction we’re willing to believe that a person can undergo a great deal of change and persist. Upon seeing Hermione’s failed Polyjuice Potion transformation in Chamber of Secrets, did you stop, in outrage, and exclaim ‘Oh my god they’ve killed Hermione! A giant cat-person has taken her place!’

Of course you didn’t. Just like you don’t worry that Bruce Banner has died when the Hulk appears, or that Jacob has ceased to be when he leaps into wolf-form. And remember that kid from Sky High who could turn into a guinea pig?

The whole premise of Animorphs is that people can drastically change their bodies and yet remain fundamentally the same person. The body can change a great deal – indeed, undergo full metamorphosis^[3] – and yet we’re still willing to believe the person remains intact.

That’s not always the case though – sometimes we can go too far. You might believe that your BFF has turned into a beetle, a werewolf, or a luminescent green beefcake, but you mightn’t be so optimistic about their continued existence if they had been transformed into a tea cosy.^[4]

In fictional worlds without magic – including, perhaps, the world we live in – the brain is often the limit. We can survive losing a few limbs, organs, even everything below the neck, but it’s the brain that makes us who we are. Thus we can make sense of brain swap stories, where characters wake up in new bodies.

But is the brain really the limit?

Psychological Continuity

In more recent fiction, the brain swap has been superseded by the brain scan, where it isn’t the brain meat that matters (the hardware) but rather the mental content (the software), frequently thought to include memories, beliefs, desires and so forth – all the stuff thought to make up our personality. There are both sci-fi and fantasy variants of this idea: the brain upload/download in the former case – think the baddies in The Sixth Day, the avatars in, well, Avatar, or the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica – and the Freaky Friday flip in the latter.

What exactly is required for persistence – even of the psychological variety – differs between accounts, both fictional and philosophical. One common but contentious possibility is memory. A particularly pervasive trope is the Quest for Identity, which occurs when a character

wakes up stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no recollection of who he is. The plot involves, at least in part, his efforts to discover the identity he cannot remember.^[5]

We are used to characters exclaiming, ‘I can’t remember who I am!’

See? But there is a difference between knowing who you are and being the same person over time: the former is an epistemic matter and the latter a metaphysical one. When thinking about persistence, it is the latter that we should have in mind.

Here are two strikingly different takes on the importance of memory for identity:

1. In the film version of Allegiant (which proved, if nothing else, that sometimes it’s better to write just one book rather than making everything a trilogy), Four discovers that some children are going to have their memories wiped. He is horrified by this, and pleads,

If you take away what they know, you take away who they are.



2. When the Dollhouse’s madam Adelle Dewitt discovers Echo poking about some files, she says:
   

   This is Caroline. Minus the memories, but it’s her and this is exactly what Caroline would do.

In the first case, memory maketh the man (or small child). Consistency in memory is crucial for persistence. That’s not to say that all of our memories must remain intact – that would be such a high bar to meet that Heraclitus (and Pocahontas) would have been right in their insistence that we can’t step in the same river twice…

… not just because the river has changed, but because we have too. None of us would persist for very long at all.

Instead, what is commonly thought to be required is some sort of continuity. Memory is a bit like a rope: not one continuous thread, but a series of short overlapping fibres wound together. My ten-year-old self remembered the antics of five-year-old me, my fifteen-year-old self the angst of ten-year-old me, and so on. If we suddenly underwent a total memory wipe, then, according to at least some views of persistence, we’d no longer be the same person.^[6]

“If you take away what they know, you take away who they are.”

In the Dollhouse case, by contrast, what matters is still psychological – Adelle doesn’t think that the blank-slate dolls are their former selves in any meaningful way, so bodily continuity isn’t enough – but something other than memory: dispositions, perhaps, or some feature of personality that guides behaviour at an instinctive level.

In consuming fiction, we seem to adapt to whatever account of persistence the text throws at us: Wolverine loses his memories but keeps his claws, astonishing muscles, and aggression; Lindsay Lohan loses her entire body in Freaky Friday, but is still easily embarrassed by her mum; Buffy remains Buffy despite coming back from the dead. Twice.

But finding the right answer to the persistence question matters, not only because it’s nice to know what sort of things make us ‘us’, but also because with new technological developments we might need to make tough decisions about what counts as surviving: if my brain is transplanted into another body, do I – the very same me – wake up in their skin? If I am vaporized in a teleporter in true ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ fashion and then reconstructed at the other end, do I survive the trip? If time travel involves disappearing at one time and instantaneously (from the perspective of the voyager) reappearing at another, can we be sure the time traveller is the same person? A time turner is a much scarier prospect if in using it I cease to exist.

And if all of this seems far-fetched, then think about the more mundane, but hugely significant, ramifications persistence has for punishment and praise: what sense does it make to punish someone for a wrong they committed two weeks, years, or decades ago, if we can’t be sure they are the same person today? Is there any point to praising someone for the good they’ve done, or encouraging them to pursue such acts in future? We think that people do persist, at least some of the time, and perhaps that’s true... but if we’re going to be justified in attributing blame or credit, we better figure out how, and under what circumstances.

What other interesting personal identity examples can you find in the games you play, books you read, or shows you watch? Let me know in the comments, or on facebook/tumblr/twitter.

References

• Clark, M. Paradoxes from A-Z, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 2007.
• Olson, E.T. Personal Identity, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/identity-personal/

Further Reading

If you're interested in the teleportation cases or psychological continuity, see Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, especially Chapters 10 and 12.

Otherwise, for a comprehensive reading list, see the bibliography in Olson's Personal Identity.

“Wingardium Leviosa!” he shouted, waving his long arms like a windmill.

“You’re saying it wrong,” Harry heard Hermione snap. “It’s Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa, make the ‘gar’ nice and long.”

“You do it, then, if you’re so clever,” Ron snarled.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

The above quote is, of course, a rather innocent display of prescriptivism, and certainly contestable. “But – but it’s a spell! Referring to page 16 of Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling, spells have to be pronounced correctly or else the magic won’t work!” Alas, lonely creature, no. For all J. K. Rowling’s many virtues, her work experience programme for unnecessary adjectives to name but one, she, like the rest of us, is not immune to the impulses of correct grammar (always, of course, said through gritted teeth). It seems odd that the individual acoustics of one’s voice, its tone, cadence etc. have no bearing on the effective execution on a spell – no, it’s pronunciation and specifically whether or not one is using that most majestic of sociolects, Received Pronunciation. It’s a telling comparison that, in the same novel and film adaptation, those blundering, back-firing attempts at magic are reserved for speakers of regional dialects – notably Ron Weasley and Seamus Finnegan. “Yes, but they weren’t real spells those two were trying, were they? Let me direct you to Miranda Goshawk’s Standard Book of Spells: Year One and –” You’re being ridiculous and I’m ignoring you.

We ought to clarify this most contentious of binaries, prescriptivism and descriptivism, and in the process of doing so, expose the illogicality of the former and reveals the delicious sense of superiority so craved by self-anointed ‘Grammar Nazis’ that attends the latter. The OED lists prescriptivism thusly:

1. Linguistics. The practice or advocacy of prescriptive grammar; the belief that the grammar of a language should lay down rules to which usage must conform.

Prescriptivism passes judgement on (perceived) deviant use of pronunciation, word-choice, spelling, syntax and even aesthetic value. Notably, the first example offered in support of this meaning reads:

1948, I. Poldauf On Hist. Probl. Eng. Gram. 118, “Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English, not Scottish, grammarians of the latter half of the 18^th century.”

Authoritarianism. How unsurprising to see this word connected with prescription. And the disparate visions of Scottish and English grammarians, whilst arguably not representing the whole picture, is hardly surprising – we Scots are a noble and beautiful people whose understanding of language is matched only by our excitable appreciation of the occasional dram and your maw. I will, of course, descend a little from Ben Olympus and treat this unfortunate heritage of our barbarous Southern neighbours with all the sensitivity and objectivity it merits.

So a bunch of bastard Sassenachs in the 17^th Century decided the language was being mishandled, carelessly fondled and inappropriately squeezed by negligent stewards – povvos, if you will, to import a choice term from Aussie English. Regulation was the word of the century – and, to be fair, not without cause: it’s an oft-repeated legend in undergrad language lectures that there once was 500 ways to spell ‘though’ (yes, I can only think of 348 too). In days of yore, you’d regularly find orthographic variation in the same text (often the result of more than one scribe adhering to different spelling variations, though possibly the result of a single fellow trying to cover all bases). Par exemple, the opening prologue of Tomas Off Ersseldoune (forerunner of the later ballad and fairy tale, Thomas the Rhymer) found in the Lincoln Thornton manuscript (though here from Murray’s 1875 printed edition) reads:

“Bot jhesu crist Þat syttis in trone, ꞁ Safe ynglysche mene bothe ferre & nere… Bot jhesu crist, Þat dyed on tre, ꞁ Saue jnglysche mene whare-so Þay fare”

Murray, 1875: 13-14, 23-24.

(But Jesus Christ that sits enthroned,ꞁ Save English men both far & near…But Jesus Christ, that died on the tree, ꞁ Save English men where so they fare.)

Note the disparity in spellings between “Safe” and “Saue”, and “ynglysche” and “jynglysche”. Before wide-spread literacy, which is to say until the 19^th Century, spelling was much more closely aligned with speech insofar as it reflected regional variations.

And when it came to punctuation, the self-conscious author or scribe might sprinkle it hither and thither for aesthetic effect rather than anything approaching function. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the eponymous protagonist sarcastically remarks of his relationship with the lately-enthroned Claudius, “I am too much i’ the sun.” Whit? There’s no functional reason for Shakespeare to replace the n with an apologetic apostrophe – he did it simply because he coul’.

The example from Shakespeare is supremely pertinent, because it leads me to the crux of the argument against prescriptivism: it’s hysterical nonsense that prioritises unpractical idealism over functionality, and has the utility of a recycled turd-sample. I imagine you’ve heard the now-infamous line: “One must never split an infinitive.” Christ. Well, if Latin happens to be your first language, then yes, that statement has some merit – at least in the basest terms of pointing out the shitting obvious. You can’t split an infinitive in Latin because the language’s infinitives are a single word e.g. amare – to love. The prescriptivists of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries were so enamoured with the perceived superiority Latin that they began transferring its grammatical rules to English so that our own language was be raised up to loftier heights (for most of its history, English has been something of a middle-child in its own homeland). Alas, what’s good for the goose is not, in fact, always agreeable to the gander (incidentally, where does that proverb come from? I feel like only people called Cyril or Mildred repeat it).^[1] Because infinitives in English are already split – e.g. to love. And that’s one of the many wonders of the English language: its flexibility. Where other languages are shackled by irrelevant structures such as the Académie Française or whatever the fuck the one in Spain^[2] is called, the success of English, its abounding richness and dimensional texture result from, acknowledged or not, its freedom. Attempts to control and regulate language based on proper social convention betray a failure of understanding of what language is and how it functions, and are inevitably doomed to failure. So there.

Before wide-spread literacy, which is to say until the 19^th Century, spelling was much more closely aligned with speech insofar as it reflected regional variations.

Prescriptivism is a notion created, disseminated, and inextricably bound to Received Pronunciation (spoken by only 2% of the UK, according to the British Library) the standard by which all other variants of English are judged by (see articles on the apologetic apostrophe and the glottal stop). It’s responsible for such timeless phrases as: “That’s not how you pronounce it,” “Well we didn’t spell it like that in my day,” and, my personal favourite, “It’s you, not you’s.” If only systemic regulation was a sexier subject. Prescriptivism is all about prestige, positioning itself in antipodean opposition to stigmatised variants, which just so happen to be non-RP varieties of spellings and pronunciations, and you needn’t look far to witness celebrations of prescription through popular culture. Looking at you My Fair Lady – bleedin’ ‘ell…

A good example of the relationship between prestigious variants and prescription is found in the brilliantly-written, hilarious (“Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion”) and occasionally infuriating Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. It’s an excellent defence of the effective use of punctuation – see the story of a misplaced comma resulting in military catastrophe for the Boers – and yet it falls into the same old traps. Denouncing a theory that possessive apostrophes once signified a contraction of his (e.g. Sejanus, his fall = Sejanus’s fall) by pointing out that it doesn’t quite work with female application e.g. Elizabeth, Her Reign = Elizabeth’r Reign, she notes that the latter sounds “a) a bit stupid, b) a bit drunk, or c) a bit from the West Country” (2003: 39). Would she have associated stupidity and drunkenness with RP? Call me cynical (but don’t, because I’m correct), she wouldn’t. She carries on in much same strand across the next few pages – explaining how the apostrophe can indicate omission, her examples read:

It’s your turn (it is your turn)

It’s got very cold (it has got very cold)

It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht (no idea)

Truss, 2003: 43.

HAHAHA! ISN’T SHE FUNNY? I’M LAUGHING! WHY AREN’T YOU LAUGHING BARBARA? THIS IS WHY THE KIDS DON’T WRITE. Ahem. I promise she is funnier than this in the book. The trouble is Truss seems to confuse a defence of effective use of punctuation with correct and proper, and seems unconscious of the fact that her coming to the aid of punctuation is founded on privileging RP over all other varieties. The conclusion of her book claims that, if we as a society abandon punctuation, “the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable” (2003: 202). She’s most probably being tongue-in-cheek but it is worth pointing out that this, most definitely, is not true. Language does not lose, it doesn’t crumble or weaken: quite simply, it lives or it dies. If a language is not changing, not adapting, it means people are no longer speaking it, not as their first language anyhow – they are speaking something else. Language does not tolerate vacuums – if we stop using the apostrophe or the comma, something else will take its place. Have you heard of punctūs? Distinctiones? They too were once the popular kid at the party.

So what is descriptivism? To the OED!

1. The practice of describing the way a language is actually used, without prescribing rules or referring to norms of correctness; belief in or advocacy of such an approach.

Descriptivism is to prescriptivism is what scientific observation is to religious dogma: it’s the difference between “Oh my, what an interesting bug – I ought to take pictures” and “JESUS TOLD ME THIS BUG SHOULD BE BLUE AND IT’S YELLOW! BURN IT, BARBARA, BURN IT ALL! BARBARA? I’M IN THE FUCKING GARDEN BARBARA, BY THE SWEET POTATOES!”

Why, however, is descriptivism a preferable approach? It certainly makes sense for academics – no good ever came from making conclusive judgements before extended, soul-wearying, work-life-balance-destroying research (not that it stops some). That said, the issue is somewhat convoluted with regards to the muddy-waters of language-revitalisation: prescriptivism is often a necessity in order to rescue a dying lingo. Suzanne Romaine, in her wonderful book, From Klingon to Elvish, recounts various efforts across the globe to recover (a word I use tenuously given so much of revitalisation involves invention) marginalised languages, from Hawai’ian to Hebrew to Irish to Breton to Cornish (and oh dear god don’t ask the latter how to correctly spell ‘welcome’ – blood will be spilled). But I’m digressing. Descriptivism recognises that language is a complex, amorphous entity of which there is no singular ‘correct’ version – that our individual language systems are the result of the families and communities, urban or rural, we were raised in (or moved or fled to), our gender, age, class etc.

And prescriptivism can make people do very odd things. A fellow of mine, who is an otherwise brilliant linguist, recently accused me of pronouncing the name of my birthplace incorrectly and proceeded to offer an elocutionary lesson on its inflectional ending. After some minutes willing the universe to inflict viral meningitis on her, I realised: it’s conditioned in all of us, including my otherwise immaculate self. Watching the news, a man pronounced conduit as con-doo-it and I found myself automatically correcting con-dwee. Except I wasn’t correcting – I was being full of shit. And, besides, the OED agrees with the former, the traitorous bastards.

...for most of its history, English has been something of a middle-child in its own homeland...

I should make it clear: effective communication – making oneself understood – is important. Within certain environments, commonality can be vital – by requiring all students to write their essays in more or less the same variant of English, there is a level playing field (or is there? Our individual experiences of literacy, determined by various social and neurological circumstances, will have an impact and god-fucking-damnit, is nothing universalisable!?). But it’s perfectly possible to understand and engage with someone using an alternate variant of English that we don’t speak ourselves – issues arise when we give in to prescriptivist tendencies conditioned in us from an early age (and make no mistake, prescriptivism, not unlike other forms of prejudice, is an easy weakness to enjoy) and resort to tired, unempirical frameworks of right and wrong. We need to respect the fact that language is NOT an autonomous entity: it is and always has been a social phenomenon whose evolution is predicated on regional and social innovation. We need to remind ourselves that there is more than one way to shit down Nigel Farage’s chimney– we aren’t always the intended audience, and someone’s use of language is determined by their unique experience of it.

So I say unto you Grammar Nazis – unite and convert! That’s the inherent beauty of descriptivism – you can still be the puritanical, self-satisfying wanker you delight in being, and still condescendingly guffaw like the inbred you probably are – only this time with justice and evidence-based practice at your helm. When your friend whines, “I hate when people spell your when they mean you’re,” you snidely respond that context will compensate for the lack of contraction and pettiness won’t bring their Dad back. When you ask your neighbour who he went with to the concert and he replies with faux contempt, “You mean whom I went with,” throw your head back theatrically and laugh, stopping only to accuse him of employing charming archaisms to galvanise his feeble social standing and set his bins on fire. And when your sister’s friend, Gracey (not ending in -ie because her parents are 'creative') says, “Um, you don’t pronounce the P in pterodactyl,” you say, “Pfuck you.”

References

• Murray, J. (1875), Thomas of Erceldoune, (London: N. Trübner and Co.).
• Stuart-Smith, J. (1999) Glottals past and present: a study of T-glottalling in Glaswegian, Leeds Studies in English, 30, pp. 181-204.
• Truss, L. (2003) Eats, Shoot and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, (London: Profile Books LTD)

Further reading

This Buzzfeed article from 2013; it’s funny.

Near the beginning of The Six Thatchers, Sherlock tells a story. It’s a retelling, in fact, of W. Somerset Maugham’s own retelling of an old Arab fable. Maugham’s version goes like this:

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks, and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. The merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd, and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture”, I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”^[1]

Commonly this tale is cited as an exemplar of fatalism: no matter what the servant does, it seems, death will find him. Inevitable, predestined – two words that the Holmes brothers use in their discussion of the tale. The villain of the episode references it too:

“I’m just like the merchant in the story, I thought I could out-run the inevitable. I’ve always been looking over my shoulder, always expecting to see the grim figure of… Death.”

But it’s not that the servant is doomed to be taken that evening no matter what he does; he is doomed because of what he does. He sees Death, believes he’s in trouble, and acts on that belief – his death is the result. We might think that if he had not been so certain – or if his Master had refused to lend the horse, or he’d been slower on the road – his fate may have been different.

This isn’t unusual in fiction: characters giving weight to a prophecy is often what makes it come true. In Kung Fu Panda, Master Oogway has a vision in which the villainous Tai Lung escapes from his prison. To prevent the vision coming true, Shifu sends a bird to the prison to increase security, thereby providing Tai Lung with the means of escape: a feather for a lock pick. It’s not that Tai Lung’s escape was inevitable, although we might feel fatalistic were we in Shifu’s shoes (well, closed-toe sandals). (There's more to say here, but we’ll investigate other common features of self-fulfilling prophecies in a future instalment.)

Throughout The Six Thatchers we return to the story of the servant in Samarra. We learn from Mycroft that Sherlock doesn’t put much stock in the fatalistic conclusion:

M: You always hated that story as a child. Less keen on predestination back then.

S: I’m not sure I like it now.

M: You wrote your own version, as I remember. Appointment In Sumatra. The merchant goes to a different city and is perfectly fine.

S: Goodnight Mycroft.

M: Then he becomes a pirate, for some reason.

(Vague hints that might constitute a spoiler follow)

I’m on the side of young Sherlock – Samarra was a choice, not an inevitability. To deny this cheapens the very important choice made at the climax of the episode, and the character who made it, riding to Samarra with eyes wide open.

There’s a sense in which we all get to Samarra eventually, of course. But until then I’m with Rincewind from Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, who, upon being told by Death that he’s expected soon in Psephopololis, simply declines to be there:

“But that’s five hundred miles away!’

YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME, THE WHOLE SYSTEM’S GOT SCREWED UP AGAIN, I CAN SEE THAT. LOOK, THERE’S NO CHANCE OF YOU-?

Rincewind backed away, hands spread protectively in front of him…

‘Not a chance!’

I COULD LEND YOU A VERY FAST HORSE.

‘No!’

IT WON’T HURT A BIT.

‘No!’ Rincewind turned and ran. Death watched him go, and shrugged bitterly.”^[2]

The grandfather paradox has been discussed in countless places. but usually proceeds as follows:

If I could travel back in time, I could kill my grandfather before my father was conceived, thereby preventing my own existence. But if I was not born, how could I travel back in time to kill my grandfather?

Here are just a couple of examples. First, from Doctor Who:

In the Futurama episode Roswell That Ends Well, Farnsworth warns Fry not to interact with the latter’s grandfather, lest he kill him and prevent his existence (but that’s not quite what happens...).

A common variant of this paradox is the ‘auto-infanticide paradox’, except instead of killing my grandfather, I try to kill my younger self. (Of course, our time traveller doesn’t have to be murderous to erase their existence: take Marty McFly in Back to the Future. All the time travellers who try to kill Hitler – a trope for another day – may, if they really could change the world, bring about a future they were no longer a part of. And so on.)

In all of these cases, it is argued, a contradiction ensues: I both could and could not kill my grandfather (or my earlier self). I could, because it’s tragically easy to kill people; provided I had the time machine, knowledge of where my grandfather was, sufficient training, a weapon, and so forth, I could carry out the murder. But I couldn’t, given that my existence – and thus my being there to perform the killing attempt – depends on my grandfather’s surviving to produce my father (or my younger self growing up to be me). This apparent contradiction has regularly (and I mean regularly) been employed as ‘evidence’ for the impossibility of time travel. As Lewis so pithily puts it,

If a time traveller visiting the past both could and couldn’t do something that would change it, then there could not possibly be such a time traveller.^[1]

But Harry seems to be such a time traveller.

(“What?!”, you exclaim. “I don’t remember Harry trying to kill his grandfather! He briefly tried to kill his godfather, but that was a mistake, and…”

“Sshh”, I say, calmly, and then make you a cup of tea.)

Harry doesn’t kill his grandfather, it’s true. Instead, he saves a life. The ‘first’ time around – or from Harry’s perspective, prior to his travelling in time – Buckbeak seems to have been killed by the executioner Macnair. Harry hears the swish and thud of the axe, and Hagrid’s sobs. But the ‘second’ time around, with the time turner on their side, Buckbeak is saved. If that’s true, then at the very same moment in time Buckbeak is both killed and not killed. Schrödinger aside, that can’t be right.

In the philosophical literature, attempts like these to change the past and thereby generate a contradiction are called bilking attempts.^[2] In order to avoid contradictions, either time travel must not occur, or bilking attempts must fail. Contradictions – especially the kind that allow people to be both existing and not existing at the very same time – are bad. Not ‘aaargh the universe will explode bad!’, despite what some fiction would tell you. Instead they’re impossible, and so if time travel led to contradictions, time travel would be impossible. And that would be a tragedy.

So, Harry’s bilking attempt (i.e. his attempt to save Buckbeak) must fail, if it’s a genuine bilking attempt…

So we know that he must fail, given the logic. But why does he fail? In other words, how do we explain his failure? What causes it? (And likewise, what causes me to fail every time I try to kill my baby self? What saves Hitler from the onslaught of time travellers?)

The short answer is that Harry doesn’t fail. It’s not a genuine bilking attempt. Harry might think he’s changing the past, but given all the other clues from the film (which is more explicit than the novel) – Hermione’s howls, the rock thrown through the window – the most charitable interpretation is that Buckbeak was never killed. The axe hit the pumpkin all along, and Hagrid’s tears were always joyous. This is the only possible version of the event that avoids contradictions and keeps the timeline consistent. Harry is filling a role he always played; he hasn’t changed the past, just precipitated the future he remembers.

But you mightn’t find that very satisfying. Generally, it’s easier to answer this in fiction than in life. It’s all very well in a story to wave a magic wand (literally, in Harry’s case), but what about if you had a time machine right now and tried to change the past? What would stop you? Do we need to posit some temporal guardian or unlikely consequences to prevent the impossible from occurring? And is it really logically impossible to change the past – would it always result in a contradiction? Are there theories of time which allow it? And if you can’t change it, how does that affect your free will?

These are all sensible questions. Well done, you. We’ll tackle them (cough, cough) in time.

If you have any time travel texts you’d like me to talk about in future instalments, or burning questions/comments, do let me know below.

References

• Max Black, Why cannot an effect precede its cause? Analysis,  Vol. 16 No. 3, 1956: 49-58.
• David Lewis, The Paradoxes of Time Travel, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 13 No. 2, 1976: 145-152.