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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Today, from PopSci, evidence that the US is actually #1 at something other than gun violence and imprisonment: US ranks first in swearing  ‘Some may find it disappointing,’ said the new study’s Australian co-author. I especially love how the article anticipates the Krakatoa-scale explosion of doubt coming from Down Under, and states right up front in the sub-head that one of the authors was Australian. While the headline filled me with great joy, as usual, I can't just take a headline's word for this shit. Congratulations, United States. The nation may lag behind in healthcare, education, and life expectancy, but Americans still reign supreme in at least one way—swearing like a bunch of drunken sailors. My father was very careful, as a sailor, to avoid getting too drunk or swearing excessively. While I respect that, I've traveled a different path. Linguists in Australia recently analyzed the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE), a massive database containing over 1.9 billion words from 1.8 million web pages across 340,000 websites in 20 English-speaking countries. Oh, so they're only talking about written works. It's entirely possible that Australia still has the top spot with spoken cuss words, so calm down, kangaroos. “Rather than being a simple, easily definable phenomenon, vulgarity proves to be a complex and multifaceted linguistic phenomenon,” Schweinberger and Monash University co-author Kate Burridge wrote in the journal Lingua. I know people like to say, "What's the big deal? It's just words." Yeah, well, if words are just words, there should be no problem with ethnic or religious slurs, right? No. Words have power. Yes, we give them that power. But the power is there. “Some may find it disappointing, but the research found the United States and Great Britain ranked ahead of Australia in terms of using vulgar language online,” Schweinberger said in an accompanying statement. Now, I can think of one possible reason why the results skewed the way they did: while, as I noted, words have power, they have different power in different cultures. It's entirely possible that, in the US and UK, we have a greater awareness of the base nature of certain words, so using them signals a breaking of a taboo. The taboo (which is a word introduced into English from Tongan by Captain James Cook, the same guy who was the first European to visit Australia) has different strength depending on location. One of the study authors offers a different hypothesis: “One possible explanation is that Australians are more conservative when they write online but not so much when they are face-to-face,” he said. “Australians really see vulgarity, swearing and slang as part of our culture—we’re very invested in it.” Well, then, I guess someone needs to do a goddamned follow-up study. Despite its limitation (focusing on writing rather than speaking), I find the study amusing. As with most studies of this nature, I wouldn't take it to be the Absolute Truth, but at least it's evidence that the US is actually best at something besides fucking everyone in the metaphorical arse. |
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