Can COVID Anti-Vaxxers Be Reasoned With?

Introduction

I came across some crudely written graffiti recently, spray-painted on a pillar. It read, “ANTI-VAXXERS PIE.” I was like, huh? Another pillar a quarter mile away had the same thing but the vandal’s skill had improved: it read, “ANTI-VAXXERS DIE.” I guess this made a little more sense, but how persuasive was this presumed to be? (This graffito was itself vandalized before I return to photograph it.)

At the other end of the spectrum is an article I read recently in The Atlantic titled “Stop Death Shaming.” I found this article as annoying as the graffiti. In this post I explain my annoyance, and examine the larger question of how we might persuade holdouts to finally get the COVID vaccine.

 Stop Death Shaming

What a stupid title, clearly intended to be shocking so as to attract readers, like clickbait. Of course nobody is “death shaming” because the dead can’t feel shame and nobody is so clueless as to scold a corpse. Meanwhile, the article doesn’t actually provide examples of anybody shaming the non-vaccinated. It does go on to reasonably bemoan the lack of constructive dialogue between those who believe in the COVID vaccine and those who don’t. It also usefully recounts a poll that ranked the top reasons anti-vaxxers list for abstaining:

• Potential side effects (just over half of respondents)
• Don’t trust the vaccines (nearly 40%)
• Don’t trust the government (a third)
• Don’t feel they need it (just under a quarter)
• Aren’t sure the vaccines are protective (22%)
• Don’t see COVID-19 as a major threat (17%)

The author concludes that at least these people show “significant willingness to consider vaccination” (though I can’t figure out how she arrives at this conclusion), and describes a dialogue she had with her uncle about why he and his wife aren’t vaccinated. The uncle asks a few questions, puts his willful ignorance on display, mentions the “little bit of research” he’s done, and concludes, “We’re not, you know—we’re still thinking about it.” The writer wraps up this little vignette by saying, “I felt good about our talk.”

You know what? I don’t feel good about their talk. This guy, and anti-vaxxers like him, have had over six months to ponder this decision. When are they going to get around to their “research”? They’re dithering while people are dying, and this Atlantic writer seems to think that’s fine as long as nobody hurts anyone else’s feelings.

But what really irks me the most about the article is that this journalist misses the biggest point of all: she seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to only ever expect people to act in their own self-interest. Her uncle, and people like him, are failing to understand or admit that this is a matter of public health. In fact, they are failing to realize that there’s even such a thing as the greater good. In short they are thinking selfishly. This is the real crux of the problem.

Really?

Now wait, you might be thinking. If somebody believes the vaccine works, and gets vaccinated because he or she doesn’t want to get COVID, isn’t that also acting in one’s own self interest? Yes, of course. But this is a situation where one’s self interest happens to coincide with that of the rest of the population. This is what makes it so frustrating when selfish people do the wrong thing to the detriment of themselves and everyone else. It’s a lose-lose.

I suppose you might also question whether selfishness is really the core of our dilemma. Given that all these people are fixating on outlandish fictions such as the risks of side effects, a nefarious government, or the idea that the vaccine is somehow unnecessary, isn’t the real problem that they’re all just as dumb as a sack of hammers?

Okay, now that is not constructive, and I don’t believe it’s even true. According to the New York Times, about thirty percent of the adult U.S. population hasn’t had a shot yet. I don’t think 77 million people actually lack the mental capability to understand that the vaccines do work, that there hasn’t been a rash of side effects, that COVID really is highly contagious, and that you can contract and spread it unknowingly. I think the problem is that people are so scared, as they struggle to adapt to this insanely bizarre new reality, that they’re simply not thinking clearly.

Neuroscience and the vaccine holdouts

Perhaps a shallow dip into the literature of social neuroscience can help illustrate what is going on here. According to this article by Dr. David Rock, a cognitive scientist, “Much of our motivation driving social behavior is governed by an overarching organizing principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward (Gordon, 2000),” and “several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks used for primary survival needs (Lieberman and Eisenberger, 2008).”  When humans feel threatened in a social situation, the “resources available for overall executive functions in the prefrontal cortex decrease.… Due to the overly vigilant amygdala, more tuned to threats than rewards, the threat response is often just below the surface and easily triggered.… This discovery that our brain is inherently attuned to threatening stimuli helps explain many disquieting parts of life,” including “why the media focuses on bad news.”

In evaluating how this plays out in social situations, Dr. Rock focuses on “five domains of human social experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness” (which form the handy acronym SCARF).  Understanding how to approach these realms, he contends, is the key to motivating people, particularly when they’re facing the uncomfortable prospect of significant change: “For example, a perceived threat to one’s status activates similar brain networks to a threat to one’s life. In the same way, a perceived increase in fairness activates the same reward circuitry as receiving a monetary reward.”

So what does this have to do with trying to reason with anti-vaxxers? I would argue that just giving them their say, and being a good listener, as the Atlantic writer does, won’t change anything; nor will directly attacking their stated reasons for declining the vaccine (which are really just positions—you could even say excuses—rather than firm beliefs, not that they’re up for discussion). I think you need to cast the entire matter into a new light, that shocks the anti-vaxxer into a reassessing his or her status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

How to reframe the conversation

So here’s what I propose, should you find yourself in a position to discuss the COVID vaccine with, say, an uncle willing to hear you out. Instead of denying the risk of side effects, assume that they’re real, and focus on the utter selfishness that the anti-vaxxer displays when letting other people assume this risk. “So let me get this straight, Uncle Clyde,” you could say. “You’re so concerned about side effects, and the possible meddling of our untrustworthy government, that you’re going to stand by and let people like me take that risk so you don’t have to? So you’re basically looking out for number one? So if you were on the Titanic, you’d be elbowing women and children out of the way to get to a lifeboat? And in an active shooter situation, you might avail yourself of a human shield?” This argument would certainly light up the status, relatedness, and fairness realms described in the SCARF model. I wouldn’t expect the dialogue to continue much longer from here, but you’ll have presented Uncle Clyde’s amygdala with a new series of threats, and he might just start to reconsider the clever stories he’s been telling himself about vaccination. At some point he might even knuckle down and enlist the support of his neocortex.

As for your utterly selfish cousin Clint, who maintains that he’s robust and healthy and could totally kick COVID’s ass, you could say, “Oh, I see … and the possibility that your immune system is so good you could be infected but asymptomatic doesn’t concern you, because spreading the virus to Grandma isn’t your problem? So, if you were a smoker, you’d be the kind who totally blows smoke in people’s faces, and if they don’t like it fuck ‘em? I guess this is fine, until Grandma dies of COVID and me and the rest of the family blame all you for the rest of our lives.” This seems like a pretty decent appeal to the Status and Relatedness realms.

Let’s move on to our brother Bill who conveniently sits out the fight against the coronavirus by pretending COVID-19 isn’t a major threat. “So Bill … If this were a war that killed 670,000 Americans instead of a disease, and you were young enough to be a soldier, would you enlist, or just hope that the evil dictator running amok calmed down and called back his troops because he changed his mind? Or would you find some excuse, like flat feet or microscopic testicles, to stay home and hide out instead of facing the enemy?” His sense of relatedness, fairness, and status would have to be reevaluated. Is this shaming? Yes, of course it’s shaming! But it’s not death shaming, it’s selfish asshole shaming. Shaming is required here because these anti-vaxxers are shameless.

Now, when it comes to the poll about why people were declining the vaccine, there was of course the elephant in the room that nobody wanted to admit to: the pressure to follow their political party’s lead. This wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the poll results, but as detailed here, vaccination rates track closely to political party. This is primarily a GOP thing, obviously, though I blame the extreme right wing media more than the politicians. After all, as the Times reports, Mitch McConnell is encouraging Americans to get the vaccine, as is Mitt Romney, and even Donald Trump says he’s a “big believer.” The anti-vaccine mania is largely the fault of heartless, soulless, utterly self-serving media shitheads like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity who understand that keeping their acolytes’ amygdalae in a state of perpetual frenzy is instrumental in creating the seething, hyperbolic division among Americans that keeps ratings high. I think it’s very telling in this interview that twice Trump brings up the vaccine, and twice Hannity completely changes the subject.

Vaccination behavior shaped by political party can also slop over into the Democrat camp. This article in the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing various reasons locals gave for avoiding the vaccine, describes one person’s viewpoint: “It was bad enough that she felt nervous about the vaccine’s side effects. But it also felt like former President Donald Trump was mixed up in it all. ‘Trump said, “The vaccine is here because of me.” And I was like, do I really want it if he’s behind it?’ Maggin said. ‘But people feel that people who don’t get vaccinated are Trump supporters!’” The article goes on to ask, “What’s a frightened liberal to do?” I’ll tell you want to do: stop worrying about political parties, stop being bullied by biased blowhards, and think for your damn self! That could do wonders for your sense of autonomy.

I’m almost done, but I want to take a little more time to consider fairness, the F in the SCARF model. I think people often do make fairness a priority; as Dr. Rock points out, it “may be part of the explanation as to why people experience internal rewards for doing volunteer work to improve their community; it is a sense of decreasing the unfairness in the world.” Consider how many people, surely yourself included, blithely exceed the speed limit, but how few would illegally park in a handicapped spot. Freeway accidents are one of the leading causes of accidental death in America, but that risk is abstracted so most of us don’t think much about it. But we can easily imagine a person in a wheelchair being inconvenienced because we wrongly took her spot. What would be more embarrassing to you: being pulled over for speeding, or getting caught parking in a handicapped spot?

So to appeal to the anti-vaxxer’s built-in sense of fairness, it would be useful to stimulate his imagination a little. “So, Uncle Bruce,” you might say, “is this pandemic inconvenient for you? Kind of a pain?” You could draw him out on the indignities of endless Zoom calls, etc. Invite him to share a story about the most awful thing that’s ever happened to him at work. Then say, “Hey Uncle Bruce, do you ever chew out flight attendants when your flight is delayed?” He’d say of course not. Ask if he’s ever stiffed a waiter on his tip. “Hell no!” Uncle Bruce would declare. You then reply, “Of course not, you wouldn’t deliberately cause trouble for a working person, you always show them respect.” Then you go on to say, “You might be aware that ICUs at hospitals across the country are filling up with COVID patients. Did you know many of them are straining under the burden of two to three times the normal number of patients? Did you know almost all of these patients need to be intubated? Do you have a sense of how gnarly a procedure that is? Do you know how hard it is to bring a patient back from that? Did you know doctors are having more patients die than at any other time in their careers, and that many ICU docs have now treated more patients for COVID than for any other malady? Can you imagine how hard it is for them to tell the family members of their patient that he isn’t going to make it? Look, I know you didn’t sign up for boring Zoom calls when you took the job with TechCorp, but these doctors didn’t sign up for  a brutal, endless onslaught of their ICUs being inundated with mostly doomed patients either. I’m sure you’ve read how unvaccinated people like yourself are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID … I just want to make sure you can kind of imagine how that pans out. Oh, don’t worry, these doctors would never shame anyone, though I talked to one who said he actually wished the fact of his patients’ non-vaccinated condition wasn’t in their charts because that just reminds him how huge a problem this is, and rubs it in how utterly avoidable all this would be if people just accepted the vaccine. And don’t get me wrong, when talking to the non-vaccinated family member of a terminal patient, a doctor would never say anything like, ‘This non-vaccination policy you have … how would you say that’s working out for your family?’ They have much more tact than that, they’re unfailingly polite despite being overworked and losing so many patients. And if you yourself did land in the ICU with COVID, and your doctor was telling me there’s not much more he can do, and I was begging him to do everything he can, he would never say anything like, ‘Would you say your Uncle Bruce did everything he could?’ Because doctors aren’t about shaming anybody. And I’m not either, believe me, I’m not trying to be a dick or anything, and I know you’re afraid of needles. But did you know that when an intubation goes sideways, a mixture of blood and saliva from the COVID patient’s throat can spray all over the doctor? I’m just sayin’. But hey, take your time deciding, it’s all good. It’s totally your choice, a deeply personal matter. And don’t worry, if you do end up dying of COVID, all of us family members who survive because we’re vaccinated will be very gracious at your funeral. Nobody will say, ‘It’s sure a shame about Uncle Bruce, though this could have been avoided if he hadn’t been such a selfish, stubborn old dumbass.’ We would never say that because that would be death shaming.”

More reading on the pandemic

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
• The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum
• More COVID Chronicles – Baking in Place
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19
• Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

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From the Archives - How to Be a UCSB Student

Introduction

It’s not back-to-school time yet, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the younger generation, it’s they they’re organized and plan ahead. So as a service to them, and because it’s a slow news day, here’s a college how-to guide from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.

(A note on this post: it’s quaint to consider the advice I gave on how to kill time back in 1989, long before the Internet.)

How To Be a UCSB Student - January 9, 1989

Chapter One: Attending Classes

Part One: The Lecture

Don’t leave your apartment until five minutes before the lecture starts. That way, you won’t be the first one to show up. Showing up late has several advantages: 1) you can choose a seat in the back without losing face with the professor, 2) you can choose a seat next to a beautiful girl without looking conspicuous, since it will be one of a handful of seats left, and 3) you waste the minimum amount of time in class, leaving more time for what life’s really about: hanging out.

(A note to this guide: I have arbitrarily assumed the reader is male. If you are female, swap the pronouns and change “beautiful girl” to “gorgeous guy,” etc.)

Pick up a copy of the school paper, the Daily Nexus (which for some reason everybody calls the Daily Necro) on the way to the lecture so you’ll have something to do. Granted, the Nexus is a rag if there ever was one, but still better than the lecture. Hasn’t anybody told these professors it’s pointless to lecture children? That’s like, Parenting 101.

Always bring your notebook. It’s amazing how many notes your neighbor will take if you’re setting a good example by scribbling away like a stenographer on speed. Of course, you don’t have to take actual notes; random doodling will do. If you’re the artistic type, draw; if you’re like me, meaningless scribbles, grids, and designs will do. Or, you can keep a running tabulation of the professor’s tics. Here’s an excerpt from my notebook this morning: 

• Number of times arm tangled in microphone cord:  3
• Number of apologies (e.g., for overhead projector being broken):  8
• Number of times repeated the same thing, broken out by transitional phrase: 
• “As I’ve said . . .” 6 
• “Again . . .” 8 
• “Once again . . .” 4 
• “To repeat . . .” 2 
• “If you will…” 3 
• “As you know . . .” 4 
• Number of times made the following announcement: “Please, those of you in the front, move in so that the people standing can have a seat. Otherwise the fire marshal will come in and kick them out. So just move in closer. I know this lecture hall is big enough.”: 2

Always remember: if you must sleep, don’t snore. You might wake up your neighbor.

Part 2: The Foreign Language Class

Unlike with the lecture, show up to this class good and early. Those back row seats fill up quick. Don’t worry about the professor getting offended; he’s outside smoking and will arrive late. He’ll never know you chose to sit in the back.

If possible, sit behind a tall person. That way, you minimize your chances of being called on (i.e., looking stupid). Or, employ the “zone defense”: sit next to a loud-mouthed teacher’s pet. Since foreign language teachers call on one region of the classroom at a time, you could escape.

Whenever called on, dodge the complex grammatical construction being tested. For example, if the teacher asks the foreign equivalent of “Have you been to a restaurant yet with your roommates?” you can avoid the tricky past-tense structure by responding, “I don’t have any roommates.” And remember, in a pinch ,“I don’t know” or “I can’t recall,” in the foreign tongue of course, is better than nothing.

During downtime (i.e., whenever you’re not being called on), devise strategies for sitting next to the hottest babe next time. Example: remember what seat she’s in today, and take that seat tomorrow, forcing her take an adjacent seat. (Bonus: she’s bound to notice you!)

Part 3: The Discussion Section

For once, you don’t have to worry about the professor calling on you. There’s only the T.A., who’s as anxious to reduce student/teacher impacts as you are. Still, choose a seat in the back. That way you can check out the ladies without craning your neck and looking conspicuous. As with the lecture, show up late, so that you can choose your seat according to where the best girls have situated.

The discussion section was created so that students with questions about the lecture could ask them freely in the more open atmosphere of the smaller class. However, under no circumstances should you actually ask any questions. First of all, the ill-prepared T.A. will only confuse you, and second, your students will hate you for it since it could mean a full‑length section. If nobody asks anything, the T.A. may run out of things to say and let everybody go early. This is the best-case scenario for all concerned.

Part 4: The English Class

This class is an hour and forty minutes long. No advice I could give you could possibly prepare you for what you are about to undertake. Only supreme mental discipline can prevent you from going completely mad.

Never, never look at the digits on your wristwatch. The seconds will seem to be moving in slow motion, as though the liquid crystal were starting to freeze. Do not strike the watch! This is only an optical illusion. Also, don’t look at the clock on the wall. It will seem to have stopped, which is demoralizing.

Try not to think about your situation, about how much time you have left, or how bored you are. Try to think positively: “When I get out of here, the first thing I’m going to do is run around. I’ll find a big field to roll around in and celebrate my freedom!” or, “If I get through this, the rest of my life will be gravy. Just gravy, man.”

Keep your fingernails long. That way, when you’re on the verge of falling asleep for the fiftieth time, you can press them into your palm for an extra few moments of (albeit excruciating) consciousness.

Chapter Two: Attending Parties

Part One: The Party Goal

With a few exceptions, parties pretty much mean the same thing to everybody: mass consumption of alcoholic beverages, accompanied by half-assed socializing and ear-splitting music. But every true party animal knows that to be successful at partying is just like being successful at anything: you must first have a goal. Some people announce their party goals to friends, while some keep it to themselves. Either way, a basic party goal is something like this: “I’m gonna get so f—ing wasted, they’ll have to haul my ass outta there on a gurney!”

Now, I should probably come clean about something: I don’t actually party myself. I just ride my bike really, really hard. It’s cheaper this way, and I don’t vomit so often.

So how do I know anything about partying? I interview the experts. An interview is very easy to get, because party animals love to brag. I don’t even need to ask any pointed questions. On Monday morning I’ll be like, “Dude, how was yer weekend?” and my classmate will be all, “Dude, I was so wasted! Big kegger on DP [Del Playa, the fashionable street in Isla Vista, the student ghetto]. Cops showed up and I was so blitzed I couldn’t even find my bike. So I’m  haulin’ ass outta there on foot and halfway home I’m like, damn, my pants are on backwards!”

Part Two: Training

Training is important in partying. If your tolerance is low, you won’t stand a chance in most drinking games. Certain games, like “quarters”, actually require skill, so the more parties you attend, the higher level you can achieve. Before a three‑day weekend, you should party on Tuesday and Wednesday and maybe even Thursday, to make sure your throat and liver are properly toned. Tapering is a good idea: take Friday off and do something relaxing, like studying or sleeping. That way, you’ll be fresh for the big event. This is what I’m told, anyway.

Part Three: The big night

You don’t want to be weighed down with a lot of food on the night of a big party, because that’ll make it harder to get drunk. Also, more food in the body increases the likelihood of vomiting and of course your output. So load up on chips and stuff, maybe Steak-ums if you must. Travel light to the party; the more jackets, wallets, and jewelry you bring, the more likely you are to lose them or get them ripped off.

Part Four: Being a “Party Animal”

There is plenty of room for self‑expression here. There’s no “right” way to party—just be yourself, only drunk. But don’t overdo it: having to get your stomach pumped is a real downer, and inconsiderate to whoever has to take you to the ER.

Part Five: The Day After

There is, I’m told, no greater bonding experience than being hung over with your friends and neighbors. Stand in a really long line for a greasy brunch place and recount your high jinks loudly enough to be overheard (but not too loud—remember, everyone’s head is pounding!). If you can’t remember what happened the night before, just make something up. I mean, who’s gonna fact-check you?

Part Six: Trophies

In addition to the immediate gratification of partying, you can have material reminders of your glorious night. Beer bottles, wine bottles, rum bottles, and beer cans can be displayed on the windowsill as a statement: “I party hard, and I party often. Come over any time.” If your beer intake is enough to render a mere beer bottle unexciting, just keep the bottles with fancy labels, like “Smirnoff” or “80 proof.”

I have to admit that, although I’m perfectly fine being sober at night and non-hung-over in the morning, I do kind of envy those trophies. But it would be silly to display beer bottles I snaked from somebody’s recycling. So I collect souvenirs from my long bike rides instead. Botts Dots, knocked loose by trucks or fast cars, make excellent trophies from the road, as they are unique to the highway atmosphere without being as messy to carry as roadkill. I have so many Botts Dots now, I can afford to discriminate and keep only the best specimens. Criteria include completeness (absence of chips or cracks), finish, and rarity. A mint, Ohio‑made Ray‑O‑Lite with white and red reflectors is a prime example of a rare find, as it requires the cyclist to ride the wrong way up a highway exit (as I did the other day). I think it’s pretty cool I had the nerve to do that—while stone sober, no less!

Chapter Three: Blowing Off School

Part One: Getting Bored

This step is really easy. In fact, I’m sure your professor will be glad to help. I know mine are.

Part Two: Getting Distracted

Even in the drabbest of classroom environments, a reasonably intelligent student can find distractions. Take that wall over there. Isn’t that texture interesting? And there’s always graffiti. I have whiled away countless minutes pondering “MARK E. IS HELLA GOOD TO ME.” But be only a consumer of graffiti. Getting Distracted does not include writing on desks or walls. I mean, everything really profound has already been scrawled. What makes you think you could contribute anything to the canon?

There is no better place to lose track of a lecture than UCSB. Why? I can answer that in one word: babes. I don’t leer or stare or stalk, mind you, but who wouldn’t appreciate the ladies at this school? Even if I honestly try to pay attention in class, I absolutely cannot resist gazing upon my classmates. This doesn’t mean rubbernecking, though—not at UCSB. At this blessed school, no matter where you look yet another fabulous babe is showcasing her beauty, as if solely for your benefit. This is true in the Liberal Arts department, anyway.

Part Three: Falling Behind

How can you blow off school without falling behind? After all, if you keep up with your classes, you’re really not blowing off anything. You’re just managing your time well, which is totally lame.

If you’re somehow managing to keep up anyway, it never hurts to skip class and go play Robotron at the pool hall.

There’s more to falling behind than skipping class, but not much more. The other step is to not study. If you can’t resist cracking the spine on a fresh textbook, just don’t buy it in the first place. You can save several hundred dollars per quarter this way.

Do cram for your exams, though. Being fried from Dead Week is a quintessential part of the college experience and you won’t want to miss it.

Part Four: Sleep

Although you can get plenty of sleep in class, being tired should be no problem. If your hobby doesn’t wear you out, its aftermath will (be it a hangover, or sheer fatigue). That’s why you need to take a nap every afternoon. Now, there is a right way and a wrong way to take a nap. Closing the window shades, disrobing, getting in bed, and crawling under the covers is the wrong way to nap. This is just too deliberate. Better to flop down on the nearest article of furniture, fully clothed, and pass out. If you aren’t tired enough for this technique, you need to exercise vigorously or drink heavily beforehand, depending on your particular bent.

Go to bed late. That doesn’t mean staying up studying, either. Use your imagination. Make phone calls. Watch TV. Listen to the stereo. Read something worthless, like the school paper. If you can’t waste the evening hours alone, friends are a great help. No matter how lazy you think you are, you’re bound to have an even lazier friend. If you find yourself wired at two in the morning with none of your homework done, you have achieved the highest college calling: you are hanging out.

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Misspelling in Hawaii

Introduction

Earlier this month, my family took a vacation to Kauai.  (There, I typed “Kauai” without misspelling it.  That word, and all Hawaiian words, often trip me up, as “Hawaiian” did just now, and it’s a good thing—perhaps—that  my word processing program instantly flagged the error.)

Where was I?  Oh, right, Hawaii.  I can’t blog about how great a time I had there, because nobody wants to hear about it.  But I also can’t complain about anything, because any complaint that starts out “When I was in Hawaii” isn’t going to generate any sympathy.  And yet, this having been a terribly expensive vacation, I feel like I should somehow get some good blogging mileage out of it (as I have done with an overpriced museum visit and a pricey pair of cycling shoes).  So in this post I’m going to examine the strange sense I got that nobody in Hawaii can spell.

Not that I’m not saying Hawaiians can’t spell.  Somehow, visitors to Hawaii also can’t.

Misspelled food

My family is a foodie bunch.  (Can “foodie” be an adjective?  It can now!)  So perhaps it’s not surprising that the first misspellings we spotted were food-related.  The very first was a section on a menu called “Desert.”  I cut people slack when they (incorrectly) write “just desserts” because when the word “desert” is used as a noun but (correctly) pronounced like “dessert,” to indicate “something that is deserved,” we’re into some pretty arcane English-major territory.  But when a restaurant misses that second “s” in “dessert,” you hope they’re better at hygiene than spelling.  Still, we’d have brushed it off had not another restaurant, a day or two later, made the same error.

Later on, we saw “TACO’S” on the banner for a taqueria called Da Crack, and I decided this wasn’t a deliberate error (along the lines of “da” for “the”) but just an uneducated approach to spelling that treats apostrophes like garnish.  (Too bad Da Crack didn’t have any really good garnish, like cilantro.)

In the case of ethnic food, particularly Asian food, I’m very quick to forgive misspellings, and often count them as a sign of authenticity (along with their cousins, the weird word choices you see like “Fire Burst Stomach Trips” or “Eight Precious Rice Pudding”).  And sometimes Asian restaurant misspellings can be really funny, like “Braised pork in spicy Human sauce.” 

I’m less understanding when it comes to Western misspellings, like we found in our condo.  The hosts had left a handy list of restaurant recommendations, and it had some pretty blatant errors.  For example, a burger place was touted as “a much healthier choose than McDonald’s.”  The name of this burger place?  “Bubba’s Buger.”  This led to lots of corollary jokes (especially popular with my daughters) such as, “Anybody feel like eating boogers tonight?”  But the funniest misspelling on this list was a recommendation for a health food restaurant where we should “order the Acai bowel, full of antioxidants and pure energy.”

Misspelled journal entries

Perhaps you’ve stayed in a bed & breakfast or inn where there’s a nicely bound little journal in which guests can record their feelings about the place.  This journal doesn’t function like Yelp, since you’ve already paid for and occupied the place, so most guests just gush about how great a time they had and how wonderful everything is.  So there’s a lot of gloating, and perhaps some one-upmanship as well (i.e., attempts to be more thoughtful or articulate than the last guy).

Almost every entry in the little book at our Princeville condo had misspellings.  Here is a partial list, courtesy of my older daughter who read them out to me as she went along: 

• beutifil, beutifilly
• foget
• eastun (for “eastern”)
• beatifull
• evere (I had to see this one myself to make sure it wasn’t just a handwriting flourish)
• do able (for “doable”)
• awsome
• well (for “we’ll”)
• what so ever
• cando (for “condo”)
• click our heals (within a “Wizard of Oz” reference)
• use to (for “used to”)

What I found particularly strange about all this is that the people writing in the guidebook didn’t seem slapdash about it; their handwriting was neat and their sentences well-crafted.  None of the entries looked to have been penned by a sloppy t(w)een  (other than that of my own daughter); and there weren’t any LOLs or FWIWs or GR8s or other signs of Gen-Y shorthand.  And yet it costs big bucks to stay in this “cando,” so it’s not like these were uneducated people.  I was, and am, deeply perplexed.

By the way, here is my own condo journal entry, which you can scrutinize for misspellings and/or one-upmanship:

Why so much misspelling?

I suppose it would be very imperialist of me, almost Manifest-Destiny-ish you might say, to judge Hawaiians’ spelling of English words when their native language is so very, very different.  Throughout our vacation I struggled to pronounce the native Hawaiian words that frequently popped up as place names and other proper nouns.  I fared far worse than our GPS narrator when saying, for example, “Ala Kalanikaumaka Street” (though we noticed that the GPS Lady pronounced it a little differently each time).  And yet this is actually pretty straightforward compared to words like “pu’uwai”  and “ku’uipo,” with their surplus of vowels and weirdly placed apostrophes.

Still, I can’t explain away the English misspellings based on the oddities of Hawaiian spelling.  After all, plenty of people are able to master two entirely different alphabets; as a high school student I was pretty good at spelling Russian words correctly.

Could poor spelling be related to the blissful, carefree apathy that comes from drifting your life away in an island paradise?  Well, it is the case that the lovely Anini Beach had been called “Wanini Beach” until the “W” fell off the sign, and rather than fix the sign, the Hawaiians just shrugged their shoulders and let “Anini” become the new name. 

But, as you’ve already noticed, these theories don’t explain why visitors to Kauai, like those writing in the condo journal, can’t spell.  It’s not like something comes over us in the week or two we spend here.   Even my daughter’s journal entry had only one typo—a missing apostrophe—which is exactly the kind of sloppy mistake she makes at home.

And those comical misspellings in the list of restaurant recommendations provided by the condo owners?  Well, the owners don’t actually live in Hawaii.  This is their just guest home.  If memory serves, they live in Texas.

And so, after much reflection, I’ve decided that the misspellings have little to do with Hawaii, and mostly to do with technology—and the lack of it.

Huh?

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the journal in the condo is that it’s the rare example of non-typed text.  Think about this for a second:  how often do you read something handwritten?  The non-typed text I come across generally falls into one of two categories:  1) graffiti, and 2) my kids’ schoolwork.  Do I see misspellings in these kinds of text? 

Why, yes.  Perhaps the only words I see among graffiti that are consistently spelled right are the profanities.  Everything else reflects the fecal-mindedness of the graffitist.  Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old isn’t bad at spelling, but my younger daughter, age ten, still has much room to improve.  A sonnet she wrote recently— which  had very good meter and perfect rhyme, and which was very deep, being a letter to her future teenage self, bagging on herself in advance and promoting nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t “blotet [sic] and lazy”—contained no fewer than twenty-three spelling errors.

Aside from graffiti and kids’ stuff, virtually everything I read is typed, and our modern means of typing have all kinds of built-in technology to (help) eradicate misspellings and typos.  The original tool, the spell-checker, not only identifies errors but arguably helps people learn from their mistakes.  The spell-checker is not a perfect tool—for example, it’ll catch “buger” but not “Acai bowel”—but it’s been masking poor spelling fairly effectively for about thirty years now.  (At least, when it’s turned on.  I’m going to assume that restaurant people just aren’t very good with computers.)

The problem is, the classic spell-checker is losing out to more modern tools that are less educational.  Smartphones have features that enable you to type sloppily, generating character strings that only remotely resemble words; the operating system is smart enough to make good guesses at what you’re trying to type.  I can type “t-y-p” and it suggests “type,” “types,” “typo,” and “typed” and I can touch any of these to accept that word.  This is especially handy with trickier words like “beautiful.” 

When I’m on my smartphone I use the Swype technique, aka slide-typing, where I drag my finger through the letters of a word and, amazingly, the OS recognizes these words, no matter how sloppy I get.  It’s not so good with “Acai” or “mahalo” but does great with most common English words.  If I Swype “beutifil” it seamlessly corrects it to “beautiful,” just as it discreetly turns “awsome” to “awesome.”  Typing in this way, a person could generate readable text for decades without ever learning how to spell.  This is just great, until you’re suddenly forced to use a pen and paper to compose your message.

So, if you think the spelling is bad now in handwritten messages, just you wait.  We’re seeing the mere lack of spell-checker now; in another couple decades, when Gen-Y starts making enough money to rent “candos,” they’ll be even less well equipped to work out tricky words like “bowl” and “awesome” on their own.

Epilogue:  voice recognition

Do people also use voice recognition software to compose messages?  I don’t know.  I suspect that this technology is mainly used for giving instructions to your phone, and that the modern generation prefers the silence of typing and Swyping.  That said, it’s hard to really tell.  When you see a guy walking down the sidewalk yakking on his smartphone, he could either a) be having an old-fashioned voice conversation, b) be dictating a message to his e-mail program, or c) be a crazy person talking loudly to nobody or nothing at all, with the phone held up as a prop.

As it happens, I did investigate the efficacy of voice-recognition for large bodies of text:  because I find Swype typing tedious (and didn’t have a laptop with me on vacation), I dictated a restaurant review to my phone.  Needless to say, I’ll be making that review available on albertnet:  maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.