A classified ad from the matrimonial columns of the Sunday Times of India

A matrimonial ad from the Sunday Times of India, June 1, 2014 (which my wife brought back from a trip there), under the heading "Matrimonials – Wanted Grooms – General – Caste No Bar":

SM 4 Pretty hindu veg girl

5’6” born 07/09/1985 on the

day of Krishna Janam

Ashtami 03.35 am. wheatish

complexion MBBS pursuing

MD from Roosevelt Hospital

New York affiliated to

Columbia University dollar

60,000/- p.a. in first yr,

handsome tall teetotaler

NRI/HIB/Green card holder,

Dr. MD/Engineer preferably

MS U.S.A interested in

pursuing carrier in 

U.S.A (New York) preference

to boy from defence family

background. Caste no bar,

sorry for ST/SC.

The spelling and abbreviations (some of which I don’t understand) are all as in the original; I’ve omitted only the email address and phone numbers that conclude the ad. This one is unusually long, but it’s one of many matrimonial ads in several long, thin columns of newsprint.

I don’t mean to criticize the woman on whose behalf this ad was placed, or the society in which all these considerations seemed important to spell out. A lot goes into finding a spouse in any society, and the pathways for doing so in one place will likely look quite startling to those in another.

All that I want to say is that there is a lot of human need in these staccato words.

Why does "what the ----" mean what it means?

Let's start gently. If someone says "What the heck are you doing?" we know what he or she means. Adding the words "the heck" to the question "what are you doing?" makes clear that the speaker is expressing at least as much criticism as inquiry.

But why does the phrase mean this? How does "the heck" come to mean something like "madness" or "folly" - so that "what the heck are you doing" means "what folly are you committing?"

I'm not sure what "the heck" is. Is there even such a thing as a heck? Probably not, but there is a thing, or at least an idea, of "hell" and pretty clearly "what the heck" is a softened version of "what the hell."

But what does "what the hell" mean? Just reading these three words, by themselves, it's hard to figure out what they could possibly mean. But I guess they are a contraction of a phrase that would have some meaning: "what in the hell." Then the speaker is saying that what you're doing is something that fits in hell.

Fine. But why "what in the hell?" instead of "what in hell"? No one says "go to the hell" or "not till the hell freezes over." And they do sometimes say "what in hell" - those very words, which seem to do the job precisely. So where did the "the" come from? And where did the "in" go? Somehow, it seems, "in" got traded for "the."

There's another problem. We can understand "what the heck/hell" as a somewhat garbled reference to a locale where bad things are to be found. But what about "what the f---?" (I won't spell it out, this being a family-friendly blog.) "The f---" is not a place. I guess the usual human ambivalence about sex could make being "in" or associated with that activity a bad thing. But I still don't see where the "the" comes in.

Of course, we could explain "what the f---" as just a more surly or sexual version of "what the heck/hell," and that phrase, again, as meaning "what in heck/hell." But I wonder whether the whole location explanation (based on the invisible "in") is just after-the-fact rationalization. Maybe people just like to throw nasty words into their sentences, and like it so much that they happily throw grammar and literal meaning out the window in the process. 

After all, language serves us - not the other way around. The rules of grammar are rules we make. But I still don't get what the heck the rule is that explains "what the heck."

Why fanaticism comes in handy

Why do people believe with such intensity in things that have no direct bearing on their lives at all? Why, for example, would people kill each other because they disagree about the nature of the afterlife?

One answer is that the question of the true nature of the afterlife is important, and I’m willing to agree with that. But it’s still, shall we say, abstract. And someone else’s misconception about it doesn’t have much direct impact on us. So why do we get so upset about questions like this? And isn’t it a big disadvantage for us as a species if we get so irrationally upset?

Another answer is that we don’t actually get upset about questions like this; we get upset about other, much more material and rational questions – wealth, power and so on – and mask them in the language of ideals and abstractions. There’s certainly some truth to this too.

But that answer makes the assertion of our ideals seem like a charade, and a pretty transparent one at that. I think the capacity to believe, sincerely and even fanatically, in ideals is not a charade and not entirely a weakness. If people need to be part of groups to survive, then they need something to make those groups hold together, and hold together even when rational temptations might cause them to dissolve. Holding ardent, shared beliefs is a group-promoting behavior.

So it seems to me that over human history the capacity to become deeply attached to ideals was probably a useful survival strategy. Even martyrdom in the name of those ideals was probably useful – not to the individual giving his or her life, of course, but to the group of which the martyr was a part.

Certainly it might be argued that what was useful to our ancestors, living on the border of the state of nature, is now just dangerous for us. Fanaticism is dangerous for us – not only for the innocent victims of the fanatics’ zeal but even for the fanatics and their causes. To be clear, I'm not in favor of fanaticism at all. But still I fear we have not moved so far from the state of nature that group solidarity, which ardent belief fuels, has lost its value.

Visiting Norway's fjords

My wife and I have just been vacationing in western Norway, a very beautiful place. After I attended a conference of the International Association of Constitutional Law in Oslo, we headed west in a rental car to see the fjords. They were spectacularly beautiful – the sort of place you’d want to stay forever, if only Norway wasn’t so expensive, and if only the wonderfully long summer days weren’t inevitably followed by extremely long winter nights.

What’s more, the fjords are very accessible: Norway has built a network of roads, ferries and tunnels that make getting from place to place quite straightforward. The tunnels, in particular, are quite remarkable – they can be over 20 kilometers long and a couple of them included roundabouts like the roundabouts at road intersections above ground!

But here’s a funny thing: we were interested in learning something of the country, and so we would sometimes ask the employees in the hotels or restaurants we visited to tell us where they were from. The answer, repeatedly, was: not from Norway. We met a Swede, a Finn, and a German.

A few conversations aren’t a study, to put it mildly, but if we did stumble on an actual social phenomenon, perhaps it’s not so surprising. One person told us that Norwegians didn’t like to work in “service”; I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but Norway wouldn’t be the first country whose people delegated less desirable jobs to foreigners. I’m more partial to the theory a second person offered: that some Norwegians didn’t want to stay in the out-of-the-way fjord country. We thought staying there would be great, but we weren’t actually planning to stay, and fjords and mountains for many people don’t offer much of an answer to the question “what can I do on Friday night?”

Human beings aren’t an easy bunch to satisfy!