HOW SOON WE FORGET

There is an oft-stated assumption that print media, especially books, are more accurate than what appears on the web. In fact you'll often hear it said that any information from the web is automatically suspect.

There's a sense in which that's true. But what the people making those statements forget is that information that appears in books is -- or should be -- suspect as well.

When I was a newspaperman (to resurrect an obsolete term) I was frequently amazed, and usually, appalled at how uncritically people accepted something as true simply because it had been committed to print.

Ah, but that's newspapers, the critics protest. Books are inherently much more accurate because they are written by experts and pass through an editing process.

To paraphrase Mr. Bumble: If the critic believes that, then the critic, sir, is an ass.

I've written books as well and I've seen first-hand how that 'editing process' works. Mostly it doesn't.

There is also the incontrovertible fact that there are a mountain of horribly inaccurate books out there. Some are wrong for political reasons, some are wrong because the information is outdated and some are wrong because they are simply, flat wrong and the writer's didn't know what they were talking about.

Case in point: I was just boxing up some of my library to give to Goodwill when I ran across a shining example I had picked up a few years ago in a fit of optimism. The title was "A Manual of Foreign Dialects For Radio, Stage And Screen", copyright 1943. Since I write fiction I'm always interested in improving my dialogue. And I figured this could help.

Boy, was I wrong!

It is painfully obvious the authors, a husband-and-wife team of dialect coaches, had tin ears and were massively ignorant to boot. While there's some good information in the prefatory parts of the book and they manage, after a fashion, some of the more common (in 1943) dialects, their advice on how to speak with, say, a Japanese accent is utterly ludicrous.

The example isn't chosen at random. I have visited Japan in much more than the usual tourist role, learned to speak Japanese at a kindergarten level and studied Japanese culture in something more than a haphazard fashion for a number of years. I am by no means an expert, but I have listened to a lot of Japanese and tried to reproduce faithfully what I heard.

The authors have no idea what a Japanese accent sounds like and their attempts to guide actors to reproduce it is absurd. Their 'explanations' are even more ridiculous. For example they claim kana (a phonetic syllabary used to write Japanese words) is a separate language.

They claim the Japanese don't like to pronounce two consonants together. It's not a matter of like. The Japanese syllabaries have only one naked consonant, "n". All the other "letters" are consonant-vowel combinations, or worse. Japanese are conditioned to add vowels after consonants, both in loan words (like basubaru -- baseball) and in speaking other languages like English.

Similarly they repeat the sterotype of Japanese hissing when they start to speak. In all the time I have dealt with Japanese, listened to Japanese, watched Japanese movies and television shows to help learn the language, etc., etc., etc. I have never, ever heard a Japanese hiss in this fashion.

Since I also spent some time in Ireland, I checked the section on Irish dialect as well. It is better, but much of it is not-very-good examples a form called "stage Irish" which the Irish abhor. Stage Irish is a phony Irish dialect that actors, mostly English and American, cooked up to 'sound Irish.' It is not at all the way the Irish speak naturally. (Hint: If you hear someone say "faith and begorra", whack him over the head with your shillelagh.)

In short, the book is a wildly inaccurate farrago of nonsense. Yet it was put into print and issued by a reputable publisher. And unlike a similar production on the web -- were one unwise enough to attempt it -- it can't be corrected by counter-postings from the more knowledgeable people. Instead it sits there like some strange insect preserved for the ages in amber.

The real point is that you can't automatically trust anything because it appears on the web or in print. Critical thinking is a vitally important skill and has been practically since the invention of literacy. The difference is that the web not only further highlights the need, it makes it much easier to cross check the information