Tweedledum and Tweedledee: alliterating pairs

Some time ago, I wrote an entry on alliterating antonyms. Now it's time to do the same for other types of alliterating pairs that are not antonyms. Here is what I have collected so far.

Two grammatically equal elements, with complementary or related meaning:

• bed and breakfast
• bread and butter
• fad and fashion
• fame and fortune
• forgive and forget
• guts and glory
• murder and mayhem
• poetry and prose
• pride and prejudice
• ranting and raving 
• rhyme and reason
• treachery and treason

Other types of combinations:

• false friends 
• fire-fighting 
• mealy-mouthed
• mild-mannered
• milk maid
• murky management
• pet peeves
• the rat race
• topsy-turvy

Expressions

• busy as a bee
• dead as a doornail
• get your goat
• give up the ghost
• good as gold
• last laugh
• leave in the Lurch
• method to the madness
• out of order
• pleased as punch
• right as rain
• ride roughshod

Names of fictional characters (only the most well-known ones, see this link for more):

• Betty Boop
• Bugs Bunny
• Daffy and Donald Duck 
• Fred Flintstone
• Lois Lane
• Mickey and Minnie Mouse
• Moaning Myrtle
• Peter Parker
• Peter Piper
• Porky Pig  
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee
• Woody Woodpecker   

Names of real people (although some are probably pseudonyms)

• Boris Becker 
• Kevin Kline 
• Jesse Jackson
• Jesse James
• Marilyn Monroe
• Michael Moore
• Mike Myers
• Rembrandt van Rijn
• Robert Redford
• Ronald Reagan 
• Simon Schama
• Simon Stevin
• Sylvester Stallon
• Wim Wenders 

Titles of books (see also here for funny ones), films etc. 

• Sense and sensitivity

Brand names

• American Airlines
• Best Buy
• Coca-Cola
• Dunkin’ Donuts
• PayPal
• Rolls Royce

(See the wikipaedia entries on alliteration for more. )

If, BTW, you happen to have a particular preference for the letter C, you will have to buy "The Fry Chronicles", by Stephen Fry. In it, he talks about addictions, and alliteration is definitely one of his. The Table of Contents consists completely of words commencing with a C!

Another interesting psuedo-factoid (called "pseudo" because my evidence is very sketchy, being limited to my own personal experience and bias): the frequency of letters used to create alliterating pairs is very different from the average frequency of first letters of words. According to the wikipaedia entry on letter frequency, the relative frequency of first letters are as follows: 

t	16.67%
a	11.60%
s	7.76%
h	7.23%
w	6.75%
i	6.29%
o	6.26%
b	4.70%
m	4.37%
f	3.78%
c	3.51%
l	2.71%
d	2.67%
p	2.55%
n	2.37%
e	2.01%
g	1.95%
r	1.65%
y	1.62%
u	1.49%
v	0.65%
j	0.60%
k	0.59%
q	0.17%
x	0.04%
z	0.03%

while in alliteration, we have a clear tendency to avoid most vowels, and a preference for certain consonants, some of which are only used occasionally (in relative terms) as first letters, such as j, d, n, g, and r (k and q are also used more than average in alliteration, but they don't really count because they are phonetically equivalent to the "hard" c).

Species and classification (revisited)

The other day I was reminded of something I worked on years ago, namely what a species is, and how to classify them.

Nowadays, we have a relatively straightforward, "biological" definition of the species based on the capacity to reproduce, which basically says that two life-forms belong to the same species if they can produce offspring that can do the same. The first half of this "definition" seems obvious, the second half is there for cases like mules, which is what you get when you cross a horse with a donkey, but which from a reproductive point of view is a sterile dead-end.

In the not-too-distant past, however, life-forms were often also grouped and classified on the basis of very different criteria. One criterion was mobility: organisms can either be sessile (most plants, some marine animals), passively mobile (plankton), or they can move on their own accord (most higher animals). Aristotle grouped animals according to whether they flew, swam or walked (which basically also coincided with the environment they live in: the air, water or earth). You could also classify lifeforms on the basis of what they eat (plants can absorb nutrients directly from their surroundings plants, but animals are either herbivore, carnivore or omnivore) and/or their place in the food chain.

But by far the most commonly used criterion was morphology. In the beginning, the morphological subcriteria used could be as simple as the number of legs, by which token a life-form with two legs (e.g. Man) could be considered quite different than a life-form with four (cows, dogs, pigs and horses). But it soon became clear that many of these "countables" were not very reliable. If a dog, for example, is born with only three legs, does that make him or her a different species than his siblings? To us, the answer is obvious, but that is because we use the biological species definition, and only use morphology as a quick and easy way to distinguish between species. Not so long ago, before the advent of the biological or reproductive defintition of species, the answer was not obivous at all. And there were other difficulties. Is an arm basically a leg by another name? If so, then the group of legged animals should also include starfish. And what about the neck and head, is that an appendage too? If so, then Man (and cows, dogs, pigs and horses) would have to grouped together with starfish, because they all have five appendages: Man has two legs, two arms, and one head, which makes five. Ah, you say with a mischievous "I got you now" twinkle in your eye, we are different, because upper-echelon animals are all bilaterally symmetrical, and starfish are not. And you would be right in the sense that symmetry is an important difference. So instead of putting humans together with starfish, I would have to put them (and the cows, dogs, pigs and horses of course) together with the millipedes, insects, cockroaches, rats, in a class of bilaterally symmetrical lifeforms. But what about bilaterally symmetrical plants, such as diatoms and some microscopic algae? Do they belong in the same group? Etc. etc. The problems are endless. If you use only morphology, you could easily argue that men and women are not the same species, while in fact (and in spite of the fact that psychologically, they are from different planest - one is from Venus and the other from Mars) we all know that they are not only the same species, but they are both essential to our survival. But that is a different story altogether, and one I will certainly come back to in another entry.

So given that most scientists agree that morphology is not the best way of defining species, what's the big deal? At least one: obtaining proof that two life-forms are the same species can be quite difficult. In most cases, we cannot just put two life-forms in a box and expect them to produce offspring, just because we them to. Even if they are both still alive (99,9% of all species that ever lived are already extinct, so all we have are fossils), they are all kinds of very good reasons that they may not want to perform the deed under our scrutiny. So we use morphology instead, as a sort of shortcut. Speaking of which, I have to cut this entry short.

More later!

How to say YES

In reaction to my last post (on How to say NO), I received a request to write an entry on how to say YES. I'm not sure it's really necessary - saying yes is as easy as falling off a log - but it's a fun request, and in any case, I wouldn't want to say no.

The trick to saying yes is to do the opposite of saying no. So while it is best to deliver a NO as quickly as possible, you can usually delay a YES without much risk. This means, among other things, that it is perfectly okay to get drawn into long discussions about the merits of the request, and all the more so if you are giving off signals that create a positive expectation, a tension which will resolve itself in a mutually satisfactory manner when you finally actually use the yes-word.

You can also pretend that you need to think about something before saying yes, and you can even actually say no at first, then change your mind later, but that does depend a bit on the situation. You could for example be forgiven for yelling "NO! I will never marry you, you are a horrible person and I hate you" during a heated but private argument then changing your mind later, but it is more difficult if you do so after just having been asked "will you marry this woman" at the altar, and you only change your mind after everyone - including the caterer, your family and the driver of the wedding limousine - has gone home.

It is also okay not say anything, and just do whatever is asked of you: actions can speak louder than words.

I would however like to end this entry with a word of warning. Saying "yes" is dangerous and addictive, so please do so with due care. Saying "no" (or mouthing "read my lips" in an attempt to lighten the mood with humour) may have unpleasant side-effects in the short term (a slap in the face, rejection, getting fired, etc.), but overdosing on yes is like a chronic debilitating illness, which ruins your life bit by bit, slowly diverting all your energy into things that other people want, but you don't. If you have doubts - if you are not really sure you want to say yes - don't say yes. And if you really don't want to say no, there's always "maybe".

How to say NO

A friend recently mentioned he has difficulty saying no to requests. I exploited this weakness mercilessly (I was the one doing the requesting), but I feel I should offer something in return, so here it is: my mini-guide to saying NO! to requests made in person.

There are several reasons why we cannot always "just say no" to something we don't want, or don't want to do, but fear of rejection/a desire to please is the root cause. Those of us who have difficulties saying no tend to need to be accepted by others, do not want to disappoint, feel a perhaps stronger than average urge to be polite, etc. So the trick is to take the sharp edges off saying no. Here are a few ways.

1. Acknowledge the request, then quickly change the subject, or better yet, make a counterproposal that is related, but shifts the focus away from the request and towards something you want to do (turn the away game into a home game). This requires quick thinking, so if you are not good at improvising, you might want to try to:

2. Pretend you didn't hear the request*. For this, you need some acting skills, and it is also risky, so you should probably not use this tactic with people who matter, like bosses, spouses and children. (Some parents use this tactic with their children when they are small, only to find that it is used against them much more effectively a few years down the line, when their children reach their teens.).

*This works much better in the case of written requests, as can be seen by the number of times people pretend they "never received the memo/letter/email ...

3. Delay: "I don't know ... let me think about it and get back to you". This is probably the safest and easiest option, allowing you to invent some socially acceptable excuse.

4. Prepare a whole list of excuses in advance, including a fake diary full of fake appointments that you "can't possibly get out of".

5. If nothing else works, use the passive-aggressive approach: say yes without any intention of doing it, and invent excuses later. This works well in certain office situations, especially if combined with other tactics like misdirection and outright lying. Say your boss asks you to write a report on your last visit to a client. You say you will do it immediately. Within the hour, you send him an email with the briefest of summaries of your visit, promising a more detailed report later. In the email you explain that it may take a few days, as something urgent has come up (even if only in your fake diary), which moreover reminds you of some other issues that the boss had promised to do ... a minor disadvantage to this approach is that you will probably get fired at some point, but then, who wants a couchy office job where you actually have to write reports once in a while anyway?

Whatever you do, however, don't allow yourself to be drawn into a discussion of the merits of the request, because the longer you discuss, the harder it will be to still say no.

Dealing with opposites

The previous version of this entry was almost unintelligible, because it was too ambitious: I was trying to explain something that I hadn't really thought through properly. So here is a second attempt. It is still about opposities, and about chosing between them, but I will leave the process of polarisation for another entry, because I realised that you cannot really understand that until you understand the nature of opposites. 
 
But first, some examples of what I mean by opposites. Opposites include things like competition and cooperation (important in biology and economics), change and stability, action and inaction, freedom and restriction, individual and group (social life, politics), tension and relaxation (sport, music), forest and trees (knowledge). Opinions on these issues and prefernces for one or the other have varied through time and across cultures. In modern western society, most of us probably prefer relaxation above tension, and freedom above restriction, but this is only because we already have more than enough tension/restriction in our lives. 

But my point is not to establish what the best choices are, but to have a look at choice-making itself. And to do that, I have to look a bit closer at the opposites themselves, because there are two very different types. The most obvious are either/or opposites: you are either pregnant or you are not, electrical appliances are either on or off, the bits of information in computers are either zeros or ones. These types of opposites are easy to deal with. And then there are the and/and opposites, by which I mean things that are opposite, but whose existence depends on the existence of their counterpart. The best examples of this is the glass which is both half full and half empty at the same time. A zero can exist without an accompanying one, but a glass that is half full is always also half empty and - as Arlo Guthrie put it - "You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in".

And/and opposites are more difficult to get our heads around than either/ors, which is probably one reason we often try to project the simplicity of the either/ors onto the and/ands (probably because society is getting more complex with every day that passes, and we can't keep up), and act as if it were possible to choose one or the other, while we can't. We just have to accept the need for both sides at the same time.

And at the moment, economic theory and practice is placing so much emphasis on competition, that some people seem to forget all about cooperaton. Competition is fine for achieving short-term, individual goals (which are real and necessary) but it should not be allowed to get in the way of the long-term group goals that we can only achieve by cooperating. That would be like pretending you can have a forest without trees. And the same is true of body and mind, or nature and nuture, or style and substance: you need both, and it is not a good idea to insist on chosing one above the other.