THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS (7 page)

Best "Little" Invention of the Millennium.

Punctuation. It is perhaps the epitome of what should be regarded as a "little" invention (a category whose criteria I am forming as I write this, assuring that it will be exactly so): It's something you almost certainly do not think about on a day-to-day basis, but whose presence you would also almost certainly miss if it were to disappear tomorrow. without
punctuation
and that includes capital letters nottomentionspacing things would become substantially more difficult to read its amazing that civilization managed to get through a couple thousand years without it at all or managing it haphazardly at best

Or perhaps not. Punctuation assumes people want to be able to read things; the desire to read assumes literacy. For most of our time here on Earth, most people couldn't read (even now, I'd guess global literacy hovers at the 50/50 mark); for these people punctuation is beside the point, like a slide rule would be to 13th century Bedouins. 

For those that
could
read, what punctuation there was, up until the 17th century, was used exclusively for pacing oratory. Up until that time, most things written down were meant to be declaimed in some manner or another; punctuation marks told you when to pause or to take a breath (people who declaim for a living would otherwise tal
k until their lungs collapsed. C
onfirm this by chatting up a stage actor sometime). A comma was a short pause, a semi-colon longer still; and a colon the longest pause of all: It still works that way, of course, though each of these marks carries added responsibilities. Should you ever riff through your Shakespeare, use these marks as your guide as you orate. You will instantly become a better Shakespearian actor (this does not mean you will become a
good
Shakespearian actor. Just better).

Thus some mild irony in the fact that our current understanding of punctuation comes from a contemporary of Shakespeare, and indeed, his closest literary competitor at the time:
Playwright
Ben Jonson, whose posthumously published
English Grammar
codified the concept of syntactical punctuation. Beyond allowing actors an infusion of oxygen, it also allowed for clarity in the written language though use of punctuation to demarcate important stops, detours and reroutings of thought. One wonders how Jonson would feel knowing that hardly one English speaker in five hundred could name one of his plays (
Volpone
-- there, now you're one of them), but that every time one of us scrawls a sentence, we're doing it according to his basic precepts. Literary immortality is a strange and fickle mistress.

But you take immortality where you may. And in this case, it's a practical immortality; these days a writer measures his or her punctuation as much as he or she measures words. Indeed, how one uses punctuation is often as indentifiable a mark of a writer's personal style as how he or she strings his words together. The famous San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was famous for his ellipses....which gave the impression that his collection of random sentences were somehow related to each other...even when they were not....meanwhile, Hemingway rarely used anything but a period because his terse biting prose so compactly entered the mind that other punctuation was not necessary. (Or so he thought.) Readers may be able to discern some habits of punctuation even in my own writing; for example, I am inordinately fond of semi-c
olons (not to mention parenthese
s). 

This is not to say punctuation has been set in stone since the 17th century. Just as we don't wander about speaking Shakespeare's English on the street (unless we're theater geeks, in which case we should prepare to be beaten on by the jocks during lunch break), neither do we punctuate exactly as we did in the past. Punctuation is still on the move, as each era and medium places its own mark (get it? Huh?) on the format. In the 18th century, for example, every subordinate clause, and separable phrase, was separated by a comma, whether, in fact, the sentence, as a whole, needed that many commas, or not. This may explain why so much writing of the time gives modern readers a headache; reading it is like driving a car
solely
by popping the clutch. 

During the first part of the 20th century, no less than George Bernard Shaw suggested an overhaul of punctuation, advocating the abolishment, for example, of apostrophes in contractions. That's one idea we haven't moved on very much. It's a shame, ain't it.

The online medium is a perfect example of how punctuation is transmuted and added to: Online, the traditional indentation at the beginning of a paragraph has all but disappeared, replaced by the new method of entering a line break after each paragraph (This only makes sense. Paper costs money to print on, so indentation rather than line breaks in print is an economic consideration. Electronically, of course, there's no worries on that score). 

And then there are "emoticons" and "smileys," the sideways representations of grinning faces
:-)
. Many people (myself included) believe that the emoticon is a sign of the apocalypse, as well as further proof that outside of snarky television commercials, we're living in an increasingly irony-free world where fake-happy little expressions aim to rob us all of our dignity. It's only a matter of time before the first layoff order with emoticons is sent to some poor white collar drone ("Due to budget constraints, you've been terminated. Sorry!
:-(
") in an attempt to forstall the subsequent disgruntled shooting spree. God forbid the North Koreans ever figure out what emoticons are for. We'd all be dead meat ("We've just sent a nuke into Seoul!
>;-P
").

Even so. One stupid use does not the whole category condemn; the advantages of punctuation on the whole outweighs the emoticon, asinine as it is  (or using the
exclamation
mark excessively! Which happens more often than it should! Because people want to make their sentences seem more exciting than they are! It's a hateful thing!). You might disagree that punctuation deserves this honor; certainly the paper clip, or Pez, or the mute button, deserve due consideration. On the other hand, think of it this way. If there was no such thing as punctuation, would you actually bother to sit through an entire essay on
any
of those subjects? 

Neither would I. And I
write
the stuff.

Best 15 Minutes of Fame of the Millennium.

Monica Lewinsky. And if you don't think she deserves it, let's see
you
provoke a constitutional crisis using only a pizza, a thong, and an oral cavity. 

Yeah, I didn't think so. Besides, and this is the point that tips the award in Monica's favor, she wasn't looking to be famous. This is opposed to most
recipients
of a quarter hour of limelight, whose lives up to that moment of dubious glory are often tales of grotesque hunger for adoration,
the back and shoulders of all who've known them bearing the claw marks of where they were grabbed, hooked and used for climbing
. In contrast, all Monica wanted was a job at a cosmetics firm and a boyfriend. Sure, that boyfriend just happened to be the (married) President of the United States. But that's not
her
fault. Anyway, Harold Ickes wasn't interested. What else could she do.

Monica's main problem wasn't that she was a gold digger, or a backstabber, or yearned for fame at any cost, but that she was needy and naive. Her naiveté is amply documented in her choice of friends; Linda Tripp was a friend to her like Neville Chamberlain was a friend to the Sudetenland. 

As for the needy aspect, thanks to the emergence of that really icky pony-tailed former teacher of hers, who seemed to appear purely to enter his name publicly in the Bill Clinton "Six Degrees of Penetration" game, we're all intimately aware of Monica's "daddy" complex, her unfortunate need for intimacy with older guys in a position of authority (Child of divorce? Oh, my, yes). The thing about daddy complexes, however, is that while the younger women are looking for intimacy, the older men are usually just looking to have sex with someone who doesn't sag  (Why did Bill Clinton have sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter? Because he
could
, you silly). Monica was either too young or idealistic to clue into that; she really thought Clinton gave a damn about her thoughts on education.

(The other option is that Monica was simply too dumb to figure out, but I reject that. I don't think she's dumb; the White House, whatever other flaws it has, doesn't hire chimps as interns. There have to have been some brains in the package, just not ones that were working very clearly. In any event, in the
realpolitik
grand scheme of things, who was showing fewer brains: The woman who had sex with the most powerful man in the world, or the man who had sex with an
intern?)

None of Monica's flaws should have been enough to launch her into the spotlight. Certainly there are millions of needy folks with bad friends who live in terminal obscurity, and in retrospect Monica would probably have been happy to be one. But as they say, location is everything. Had Monica stayed in Los Angeles and become the pet of a movie executive, no one would have cared; she might have got a production deal out of it. Had Monica been in New York, her relationship might have been treated in an equally
blasé
style; it might even be considered a trophy wife tryout. 

But it happened in Washington, with a President that the opposing party hated with a passion that not only bordered on irrational, but in fact colonized that emotion and sent out armed emissaries. Gone were the days when President Harding could boink his mistress in a closet, or FDR could fool around with a mistress, with only Fala standing guard against an untimely Eleanor appearance. The Republicans were gunning for bear, and if that meant punting Monica into the limelight, it was a small price to pay to get Clinton. She was quite obviously a Democrat, anyway. There was no downside.

There's no point in rehashing the details of the actual political scandal, since everyone, and especially the Republicans, knows how it went. Focus instead on how Monica handled her newfound and unwanted fame: By shutting up and, as much as possible, keeping to herself. For most of the first year of her fame, no
one
even knew what her voice sounded like. This is not the
modus operandi
of a fame monger. Others dined nightly at her expense; that odious first lawyer of hers trotted her out to restaurants like a trained horse, in hopes of gaining entree into the talk-show level of fame. Everyone was relieved when they canned his ass. 

Monica did eventually cash in, of course, with the book, and the Barbara Walters interviews, and the appearance on
Saturday
Night Live. But think of all the things she
didn't
do: The paid interview to the National Enquirer. The Donna Rice-like ads for blue jeans. The nude spread for
Penthouse
(which offered $2 million for it). The special appearances in B-movies. God forbid, the pop album. Instead she's living a relatively modest life, designing handbags or something, and accepting with reasonable grace that fact that her name has become a synonym for oral sex. 

The funny thing is that Monica Lewinsky is probably now a pretty interesting person to know; anyone who can go through the wringer as she has and not come out of it certifiably insane has got something going for her. Almost certainly she's ready
not
to be famous, which is also not something that most people are willing to do after their fifteen minutes are up. I just hope this time she has some better friends. After everything she's been through, that's the least the world can do for her.

Best Use of the Brain of the Millennium.

Cryptanalysis. Because it's harder than it looks, and it looks damned difficult. Also because, up until the advent of the Web, in which 128-bit algorithms encode your purchase of the most recent Michael Chrichton book or the Pokemon Yellow Gameboy cartridge from prying eyes, the only people who used codes were armies and bankers and spies. Crack an encoded message, and trust me, you were on to something. The Nazis were not purchasing Korn CDs with
their
encrypted messages, you know.

Cryptanalysis is the best use of the brain because cryptology (the science of encrypting information) is nearly as difficult. People have been coding information for as long as there's been a reason to hide news from someone, of course, though early methods were almost charmingly simplistic. The Greeks did it by writing messages on a piece of cloth spiraled down a stick of a certain thickness;
unraveled
, the cloth strip was gibberish (it was all Greek to them). The Romans used letter transposition, shifting all the letters by a certain amount, not unlike you would do for your Lucky Charms Secret Decoder Ring. Although in this case, it would be Julius Caesar and not some fey leprechaun telling you how many letters to click over, and the secret message would be to take Masada rather than to eat more sugary cereal.

Serious coding had to wait until this millennium, and the 15th Century, when the Arabs (who had been caretaking and expanding on Western knowledge while Europe festered in that unfortunate dark age it had going) codified fundamentals of both cryptology and cryptanalysis. They were the first people to figure out that certain letters (such as vowels) appear with more frequency than others, and that you could crack a simple code based principally on frequency counts of certain letters. I know, you're thinking, "
Duh
, who
doesn't
know about letter frequency distributions and probable plaintext in cryptanalysis?" But remember, this was a simpler time.

Cryptology in itself probably never won any wars, but
cryptanalysis
certainly helped to win them, and it was enough of a priority that combatants would often go to desperate measures to crack the enemy's codes. Take the Confederate army (please). The Confederate army had such a difficult time cracking the Union's codes that they actually published encoded Union messages in newspapers to encourage the folks at home to play along. Sort of like a Word Jumble, where the unjumbled message would be Sherman's request for torches, the better to burn his way from Atlanta to the sea. The Union had no problem cracking Confederate codes, incidentally; the Rebs were using a relatively unsophisticated cipher. Stupid Confederates.

Probably the most famous example of the importance of cryptanalysis comes from the Second World War, and the vaunted British "Ultra" program to crack the German encryption code, known as "Enigma." Spearheaded by the famous mathematician Alan Turing, the Ultra project gave the Allies an immense advantage in terms of knowing what the Germans were up to -- even if they couldn't take advantage of all the information. If Allied forces just
happened
to show up where the Germans were, the Germans would figure out their code had been broken, you see. The Nazis were genocidal curs, but they weren't morons.

This made for some torturous maneuverings: The Brits would decrypt the location of a German convoy, for example, and then send out a plane that would "discover" the convoy, after which they would blow it up right pretty. Be that as it may, sometimes sacrifices were made: The British once discovered that the town of Coventry was going to be bombed, and rather than evacuate the town -- and risk exposing their knowledge -- the bombing was allowed to happen.

A little-known secret about the British Ultra project, however, is that much of the heavy lifting in that effort came not from the British but from the Poles. During the 1930s the Polish government,
which
had a justifiably dim view of the Germans, assigned Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rózycki and Henryk Zygalski to crack the Enigma code. They did it the old-fashioned way: First they procured expired Enigma codes and a booklet that explained how to set up an Enigma ("So You Want To Send Secret Messages: A Beginner's Guide"). Then they built a replica of the Enigma machine. Then they whacked away at the codes and the rewired the Enigma machine until they got actual deciphered messages. 

In 1939, realizing Poland was about to be sliced up like an Easter ham (they had the German's messages, after all), the Poles set up a secret meeting with a Brits and handed over all their research on Enigma up to that point. The Brits were dumbfounded, to put it mildly. Did they let Rejewski, Rózycki, and Zygalski on to Ultra project? Of course not. They were
foreigners
, you see. They had enough problems sharing information with the
Americans
. 

(Who, incidentally, were busy cracking a code of their own: "Purple," an Enigma-like code used by the Japanese. It was no small task -- the lead researcher on Purple suffered a total nervous breakdown -- but it yielded very positive results. Thanks to cracking Purple, an American fighter planes "just happened" to shoot down a plane carrying Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan's naval forces. He was the guy who suggested attacking Pearl Harbor, you know, so there was probably very few tears shed over what was, in fact, a bald-faced assassination by aeroplane.)

It's not an exaggeration to say that the need to crack the Enigma code expanded human knowledge considerably. Much of this expansion took place in the rarified field of
mathematics
-- by the time of WWII, cryptanalysis was indistinguishable from higher-order math, and today it's even more so -- but other fields also got their share. The first programmable computer was not constructed in the United States after the war as is generally presumed, but in Bletchley Park, home of the Ultra project. The computer, called "Colossus" (because it was) was designed to crack codes quicker than any human could. You're reading this on the
spiritual
descendent
of that first computer, "spiritual" because the machine, secret during the war, was destroyed just as secretly afterwards -- the Brits were nothing if not paranoid, and by extension, thorough in covering their sneaky little tracks. The world didn't find out about Enigma or Ultra until the 1970s. At which time, the Argentine air was filled with the sound of former Nazis smacking their foreheads in aggravation.

As mighty an intellectual feat as cracking the Enigma and Purple codes were, the tale is also an example of how when it comes down to it, people with big brains often have to rely on people with teeny brains making really dumb mistakes. The Enigma code was broken partially because German army
soldiers
, confident the code was invincible, got sloppy and used simple "initial" codes -- a three letter code at the beginning of a transmission that allowed the guy at the other end to "tune" his machine to receive the message -- that allowed the Brits a window of opportunity (The German navy was more circumspect with codes and who sent messages -- as a result, the naval codes were cracked years later than the army codes). It's proof that the biggest problem with any perfect system is the imperfect humans
who
use it.