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Authors: Abigail Padgett
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before coffee.
“Nah,” she answered. “This is somebody who’s learned how to push blood pressure dangerously, even fatally high in perfectly
healthy people. That’s not something you pick up from a pamphlet your doctor gives you as she tells you to exercise and cut
down on fat.”
I had managed to stand up and pull on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. My bare feet demanded more complicated behaviors.
Finding socks, tying shoes. Feet are not something I easily deal with at five A.M. I ignored them and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Brontë followed me, clearly wondering how to feign alertness. She
drank some water from her red ceramic bowl and then sat beside the refrigerator with the attitude of a dog on a mission.
“That’s good,” I told her. “Guard the refrigerator.”
I noticed that her eyelids kept slipping downward, but she didn’t go back to bed.
“I’m outta here,” Rox said, taking a lidded car-cup of coffee with her. “You’ll have your stuff to me by ten-thirty?”
“No problem.”
The second Roxie’s car started, Brontë stood and trotted straight back to bed. I wished I could, too.
Three hours later I still wished I could. Entering the texts of fifty-three newspaper article headers into my computer had
given me a headache. But it had to be done manually since the little clips had been pasted all over the page in every direction
and the computer program wouldn’t be able to read the words from a scanned image.
What I found was nothing.
Sword of Heaven had no preference for any particular word or phrase in the article headers pasted on the letter. Certain verbs
did show up forty-eight percent more often than would occur in the normal speech of a native American-English speaker with
a high school education. But these were the “elocutionary” verbs journalists use to describe the speech of politicians. In
newspapers public servants never “say” anything, but rather urge, call, issue, demand, and weigh. In dicey situations they
may also answer, evade, dodge, or deny. I had just spent hours proving the existence of a linguistic usage pattern everybody
knows and accepts without thinking about it. Only its absence would get attention. Something like, “Republican Leaders Clutch
Funding Opportunity.” Everybody knows the right word is “seize.”
Sword, it seemed, had just cut out article headers randomly and stuck them on a page. Except, as every social psychologist
will tell you, the behavior of an individual cannot be random. Never. Randomness is a mathematical concept, not a human one.
People are programmed by species evolution and their own experiences to perform every act as a result of acts which have gone
before it. Put simply, if there is no causal history to a behavior, if we haven’t inherited it or learned how it’s done, we
can’t perform the behavior because we can’t think it. If we perform a behavior, it has an evolutionary or acquired cause.
It is the result of something and is therefore not random.
After feeding Brontë I successfully negotiated the sock-and-shoe sequence and then took her out for a run. The desert was
in morning neutral, nothing much going on. Instead of heading toward Coyote Creek I went south through Henderson Canyon toward
the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation. The terrain in that direction is monotonous, just an expanse of snakeweed and creosote
bushes. I didn’t want to be distracted.
“The choices of clippings made by the author of this letter cannot be random,” I lectured Brontë, who was watching a quail
as it dashed between two rocks. “They
look
random, but they’re not. What is it that I’m missing?”
The quail reappeared above the second rock and said, “Chicago,” which is the only thing California quails say. There’s another
species, the scaled quail, that lives in states east of here and says “Pecos.” I wondered why the calls of both species of
quail
“Nah,” she answered. “This is somebody who’s learned how to push blood pressure dangerously, even fatally high in perfectly
healthy people. That’s not something you pick up from a pamphlet your doctor gives you as she tells you to exercise and cut
down on fat.”
I had managed to stand up and pull on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. My bare feet demanded more complicated behaviors.
Finding socks, tying shoes. Feet are not something I easily deal with at five A.M. I ignored them and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Brontë followed me, clearly wondering how to feign alertness. She
drank some water from her red ceramic bowl and then sat beside the refrigerator with the attitude of a dog on a mission.
“That’s good,” I told her. “Guard the refrigerator.”
I noticed that her eyelids kept slipping downward, but she didn’t go back to bed.
“I’m outta here,” Rox said, taking a lidded car-cup of coffee with her. “You’ll have your stuff to me by ten-thirty?”
“No problem.”
The second Roxie’s car started, Brontë stood and trotted straight back to bed. I wished I could, too.
Three hours later I still wished I could. Entering the texts of fifty-three newspaper article headers into my computer had
given me a headache. But it had to be done manually since the little clips had been pasted all over the page in every direction
and the computer program wouldn’t be able to read the words from a scanned image.
What I found was nothing.
Sword of Heaven had no preference for any particular word or phrase in the article headers pasted on the letter. Certain verbs
did show up forty-eight percent more often than would occur in the normal speech of a native American-English speaker with
a high school education. But these were the “elocutionary” verbs journalists use to describe the speech of politicians. In
newspapers public servants never “say” anything, but rather urge, call, issue, demand, and weigh. In dicey situations they
may also answer, evade, dodge, or deny. I had just spent hours proving the existence of a linguistic usage pattern everybody
knows and accepts without thinking about it. Only its absence would get attention. Something like, “Republican Leaders Clutch
Funding Opportunity.” Everybody knows the right word is “seize.”
Sword, it seemed, had just cut out article headers randomly and stuck them on a page. Except, as every social psychologist
will tell you, the behavior of an individual cannot be random. Never. Randomness is a mathematical concept, not a human one.
People are programmed by species evolution and their own experiences to perform every act as a result of acts which have gone
before it. Put simply, if there is no causal history to a behavior, if we haven’t inherited it or learned how it’s done, we
can’t perform the behavior because we can’t think it. If we perform a behavior, it has an evolutionary or acquired cause.
It is the result of something and is therefore not random.
After feeding Brontë I successfully negotiated the sock-and-shoe sequence and then took her out for a run. The desert was
in morning neutral, nothing much going on. Instead of heading toward Coyote Creek I went south through Henderson Canyon toward
the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation. The terrain in that direction is monotonous, just an expanse of snakeweed and creosote
bushes. I didn’t want to be distracted.
“The choices of clippings made by the author of this letter cannot be random,” I lectured Brontë, who was watching a quail
as it dashed between two rocks. “They
look
random, but they’re not. What is it that I’m missing?”
The quail reappeared above the second rock and said, “Chicago,” which is the only thing California quails say. There’s another
species, the scaled quail, that lives in states east of here and says “Pecos.” I wondered why the calls of both species of
quail
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