Gongol.com Archives: December 2022
December 27, 2022
How do you say "Happy holidays"?
Perhaps because Hanukkah coincided with Christmas on December 25th this year, we seem to have been spared the tiresome mock outrage that often accompanies the greetings of the holiday season. No reasonable person could deny the overwhelming and widespread appropriateness of the phrase "Happy Holidays", leaving the tired old demands that people say "Merry Christmas" confined to some of the crankier outposts of the Internet. ■ Those cranks will turn up the volume again at some time in the future, artificially hyping warnings that "Happy Holidays" is a means of whitewashing Christmas from the calendar, even though there is scant evidence that Christmas has lost any of its popularity. Regular church attendance may be on the decline in the United States, but Christmas services remain the peak annual attendance events in much of Christianity. ■ It is less important what words are used for a greeting (holiday-related or otherwise) than whether they are offered in goodwill. That's the crux of the matter: If goodwill is in healthy supply, then people can see past what are ultimately trivial differences in the words they use. To be greeted itself is the point, by a greeter who needs not share anything else with the greeted one than their common humanity -- and a broad, humane hope that things will turn out generally well for them. ■ When goodwill is in short supply, people too easily latch on to the message itself, rather than the meaning. If no words were used at all -- if, for instance, a greeting were delivered entirely in pantomime -- the meaning itself would still be detectable. (We issue those messages all the time, to other drivers on the road or to people shopping in the same aisle at the store.) ■ It would do all of us some good if we could come to see that getting hung up on the words themselves is a distraction from the point of a holiday greeting. Wish others whatever greeting you like. Just wish it with goodwill toward all.
Researchers worry we're running out of "natural language" samples to train artificial intelligence
Solution: Train all AIs on the scripts from pre-Hays-Code Hollywood films.
