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New Indian Express
3 days ago
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Death of the dictionary
Samuel Johnson, the dictionarist Creative Commons Opinions Death of the dictionary The written word is no longer the most efficient way to store knowledge. Thanks to a glut of enabling software and hardware mankind is turning back to its earliest mode of encoding culture: audiovisual media. Dictionarist Dr Johnson would've tutted at how we treat language today Pratik Kanjilal The Gutenberg revolution appears to be waning as the written word, the defining mark of civilisation—whether on Babylonian stelae or in racy detective novels—recedes in the face of the ever-compelling power of images and voice. The written word is shaking off the grip of regimentation, which had tightened over the centuries since printing caught on in Europe and later, dictionaries formalised language. Young people no longer read editorials to learn hieratic language. Instead, they are at ease with creoles, pidgins, slang and memes. But ironically, high feelings persist about language as a political and cultural marker of identity, purity and authenticity. Notable exception: at the press conference after signing the India-UK free trade agreement, a struggling Hindi translator was told to feel free to use English words. Meanwhile, Maharashtra is upset about the three-language formula. Governor C P Radhakrishnan has weighed in on the problem of 'linguistic hatred', and recalled seeing a north Indian man in his home state of Tamil Nadu being beaten up for not knowing Tamil. Language politics in Tamil Nadu, an element of the Self-Respect Movement, was a bulwark against the Union government's promotion of Hindi, which sought to flatten cultural diversity and make the states politically accessible to Delhi. Many states in the east, west and south didn't enjoy being pushed around, and Tamil Nadu made it an enduring political issue. But it is rare for someone from the state to admit that linguistic assertion has an unpleasant side. An extreme example: the Second World War was triggered by Hitler's determination to connect German-speaking populations in East Prussia and Austria with the German nation—'Ein volk, ein Reich, ein sprache', to rip off a Nazi slogan concerning the Führer. That was over 80 years ago. In the mean time, the world has globalised at a speed not seen since classical times. This could have been an era of bridge languages like Urdu. Instead, machines, the internet and their users are beating down the formalisms of language, and what was unthinkable is now doable. When Kemal Ataturk switched Turkish from the Arabic-based Ottoman script to the Roman alphabet in 1928, it was a radical act. The measure, intended to bring Turkey closer to the West, was denounced by critics as a 'cultural rupture', as older texts became inaccessible to younger people. Perhaps it worked only because 6 percent of Muslims were literate at the time. But ever since Usenet launched group communications over the internet, before most languages had digital fonts, phonetic communications in the Roman alphabet have been commonplace. And now, AI-powered translation is the norm. When Tony Blair's Britain asserted multiculturalism in the late 1990s, the road sign of Bangladeshi-intense Brick Lane in London was rewritten in two languages, English and Bangla. When Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane became a bestseller, it felt like borders were dissolving. Decades later, in the US, which has become multicultural without quite preparing for it, machine translation is creating weirdness. Public institutions like hospitals and transport have signs in multiple languages including Hindi and Bangla, but what they say sounds inhuman. Naturally, because this language is machine-made. Across borders, there is concern that young people do not read these days; but let's focus on what they do read. YouTube loyalists read closed captions generated by a machine. These are frequently incorrect, but it doesn't bother anyone because the world's language purists have either given up the ghost or the struggle. The dictionary is just another book and books are archival legacy media. If Samuel Johnson were around, the dictionarist who said that language is the dress of thought would have dismissed us as ragtags, with bobtails barely concealing our modesty in scanty hashtags. Why is this happening? Information storage and retrieval began with visual and auditory media—cave paintings, dance performances, oral epics and songs. But why are they regaining salience? Because the written word was the most efficient storage medium for about five millenniums, from the clay tablet libraries of Babylon to Dewey Decimal via the Gutenberg press. But over the last three decades, magnetic and optical data storage has scaled up so rapidly that the contents of a refrigerator-sized magnetic tape bank of the 1970s now fit on a microSD card. With AI, it is normal for data processing to use as much power as small towns. The written word is no longer essential for storage, and the human race is again embracing the audiovisual media with which it had begun to encode culture millenniums ago. Ironically, it's a step back—there is now room enough for all the misbegotten utterances that the race can dream up. In a strange case in bilingual Belgium, an attendant in a train running through Dutch-speaking territory greeted a passenger in French and faced proceedings right away. The proceedings have just ended, and the harassed attendant has turned language activist—he is selling coffee mugs bearing greetings in both languages to promote linguistic amity. The resurgence of audiovisual media at the expense of text is starkly visible in politics. From West Bengal to Washington, visual media personalities are prominent in legislatures, and few of their most important associates can be accused of learning, or even literacy. Win some, lose some, say the Americans, who are postmodern—in the sense that they have never respected linguistic formalisms very much. Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, The Fletcher School, Tufts University (Views are personal) (Tweets @pratik_k)
Observer
5 days ago
- General
- Observer
Don't throw dictionary away
Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you'd probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they're used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas. In today's universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries? Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While AI assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don't have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world. Dictionaries aren't merely long lists of words and meanings; they're also instructions for how best to use those words. Since the debuts of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, English dictionaries have reflected the language of particular populations — the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster don't quite say the same things. Simultaneously, by codifying the meanings, uses and connotations of words, those same dictionaries have shaped language. Lexicographers look to the public to determine words' meanings, and we in turn look to lexicographers to verify that our understanding of words is shared and mutually understood. The parameters of English are formed both top-down and bottom-up. Dictionaries amalgamate and standardise these two linguistic influences and, in doing so, define our most fundamental cultural medium. Standard English doesn't exist today the way it did as recently as the late 20th century. Thanks to the colloquial tone of ubiquitous internet-based communication, formal English has become essentially absent from most people's lives. Where my parents' letters to friends and colleagues would have adopted genial but brittle tones and structures, the vast majority of my social and professional correspondence is informal. Smartphone messaging conventions — like using exclamation points to indicate pleasant normalcy and ellipses to evoke impatience or indifference — routinely seep into follow-ups from artists and lawyers alike. It's almost as if the more informal one's writing is, the more capable, authoritative and trustworthy it reads. The profusion of digital writing assistants like Grammarly and Microsoft Editor gives greater urgency to debates about what a dictionary should be. In 1946, George Orwell described good writing as 'picking out words for the sake of their meaning', a practice that dictionaries catalyse and writing programs stifle. Writers consulting a dictionary make a choice — writers guided by an app like Grammarly have their choices made for them. Grammarly brags that its users can 'rewrite full sentences with a click', while Orwell notes that 'the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them'. It's a fight between robotic consistency and human creativity. The digital-native approach delivers hands-off, derivative communication. The analog approach requires leafing through pages without knowing exactly where you'll end up. One cedes the conviction of writing to a machine. The other bestows the crucible of thinking critically about what and how to write solely on an imperfect writer. Without dictionaries to provide us with a manual guide to English's potential, writing that way is nearly impossible. Web dictionaries like Wiktionary and Google Dictionary — whose contents are often derived from existing works by actual lexicographers and resources such as Google's Ngrams — empower writers to some degree, but they can be lexicographically lax. I'm not convinced, for instance, that listing 'amazeballs' as a synonym for 'astonishing' helps clarify the scope and potency of the English language. Codifying English as it is spoken requires not just itemising neologisms but making deliberate choices. It's traditional dictionaries' human scrutiny and advocacy that make them catalysts for exploration rather than aggregators of information. Our ability to express ourselves is critical — it helps us define our culture and our being. Dictionaries aid us in achieving this: They catalog our unique ways of thinking through language. I'm a Canadian; my feeling of pride and belonging in my native land is elevated by small linguistic Canadianisms (not many Americans say 'eaves trough' or 'serviette' — nor do AI chatbots, for the most part). The new Canadian English Dictionary — still a work in progress, it will be the first of its kind in over two decades — is a critical part of constructing that identity. It takes a novel stance on describing the usage and orthography, or spelling, of particularly Canadian words — especially those derived from Canada's mosaic of Indigenous and immigrant cultures. This approach privileges not the popularity but the heterogeneity of words, and it is equally descriptive and prescriptive, teaching a word's origins and suggesting a better future for it at once. It's a choice — like the choices we make when we use a word in our writing. As digital writing — AI-generated, spell-checked, its words suggested for us — extends deeper into our lives and minds, we need dictionaries more than ever, not to write efficiently or correctly, but to cultivate relationships with the words we use. Abandoning dictionaries and embracing mechanised writing would erode our capacity for collective identity quite as much as the ability to express ourselves. We need these books on our shelves to flip through, animate, and surprise ourselves with. Without the impetus for self-expression and lifelong learning, we have to ask ourselves, why write at all?
New York Times
20-07-2025
- General
- New York Times
Why Dictionaries Still Define Us
Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you'd probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they're used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas. In today's universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries? Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While A.I. assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don't have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world. Dictionaries aren't merely long lists of words and meanings; they're also instructions for how best to use those words. Since the debuts of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, English dictionaries have reflected the language of particular populations — the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster don't quite say the same things. Simultaneously, by codifying the meanings, uses and connotations of words, those same dictionaries have shaped language. Lexicographers look to the public to determine words' meanings, and we in turn look to lexicographers to verify that our understanding of words is shared and mutually understood. The parameters of English are formed both top-down and bottom-up. Dictionaries amalgamate and standardize these two linguistic influences and, in doing so, define our most fundamental cultural medium. Standard English doesn't exist today the way it did as recently as the late 20th century. Thanks to the colloquial tone of ubiquitous internet-based communication, formal English has become essentially absent from most people's lives. Where my parents' letters to friends and colleagues would have adopted genial but brittle tones and structures, the vast majority of my social and professional correspondence is informal. Smartphone messaging conventions — like using exclamation points to indicate pleasant normalcy and ellipses to evoke impatience or indifference — routinely seep into follow-ups from artists and lawyers alike. It's almost as if the more informal one's writing is, the more capable, authoritative and trustworthy it reads. This acceptance of vernacular in contemporary mainstream English is new, but by no means uniform. English-speaking societies have always used an array of dialects, but until relatively recently, lexicographers arbitrarily viewed nonstandard Englishes as unsophisticated and therefore unworthy of regular inclusion in dictionaries. Today there is a general awareness that particular nations, for instance, speak not one but a group of different Englishes. Dictionaries are therefore no longer confronted with the task of defining a prestige dialect but rather with describing and legitimizing the contrasting ways people use words, a task for which they, unlike less deliberate digital alternatives, are well suited. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
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Travel + Leisure
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Travel + Leisure
A 7-day Sailing on Queen Mary 2 Made Me a Cruising Convert—and Taught Me the True Meaning of Slow Travel
For the longest time I couldn't figure out why anyone would take an ocean liner. Look what happened in the movies. Shelley Winters walks gaily up a gangway ( The Poseidon Adventure ) and the next thing you know she's swimming through the ballroom of a ship turned upside down. Passengers on the Britannic book a jolly holiday ( Juggernaut ) and, faster than you can say 'lifeboat,' discover there are bombs below deck. Or try this: Kate Winslet is a snooty debutante in first class who falls for a poor artist in steerage ( Titanic ). Things look promising for the star-crossed pair until … well, cue the iceberg. Canapés served on a silver platter aboard the Queen Mary 2. Ill-fated love, terrorists, con men—like the grand hotels that were also once staples of cinema and stage, ocean liners are reliable backdrops for every cliché known to the machinery of melodrama. 'Being in a ship,' as the English writer Samuel Johnson once remarked, 'is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.' What Dr. Johnson could not have predicted, however, is how an ocean liner would one day prove to be a bastion of luxury—a rarefied and little-appreciated means of getting from here to there. As it happens, this has never been truer than now, when the scores of ocean liners that once plied the seas between New York City and Southampton, England, have dwindled to a solitary vessel: the Queen Mary 2 . A view of the North Atlantic Ocean. Of course, you can fly to England in five hours, but that is not the point. The point is taking the time to relish the passage. The point is to slow the pace so each day is something more than a temporal framework for a never-ending list of tasks. The point is to prove that the physicists were right: time is elastic. There is no valid reason for going through life feeling like a rubber band ready to snap. The Britannia Restaurant. That, anyway, was my thinking when, one sweltering July day, I summoned an Uber to whisk me from my apartment in Manhattan to Pier 12 at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. There I found uniformed attendants—the staff were attired in an impressive array of garments, including jumpsuits worn by dockhands and the crisp nautical garb of senior officers—standing by to check me in. My bags were then hoisted onto number-coded trolleys that presumably would find their way to my stateroom. It was my considerable good fortune to be booked into a Queens Grill suite, the equivalent of first class. One perk of this status was bypassing a check-in scrum that called to mind the intake hall at Ellis Island. Simply by flashing a barcode on my smartphone, I was whisked through customs and onto a gangway, waved through the bowels of the ship, and guided to the generically grand Grand Lobby. From there, I was directed to the Kings Court buffet, where my fellow passengers and I would sit through a requisite safety drill before being shown to our cabins. Although it was barely past noon, I felt the need to order a glass of Chablis. Taking a chair near a window, I cast my eye on a parade of excited strangers—the people with whom, for the next seven days, I would be sharing this 1,132-foot vessel. Lounging on Deck 7. Who among them, I wondered, would shoulder me aside to reach a lifeboat? Which is the unstoppable windbag destined to monopolize conversation at breakfast? Where, among the roughly 2,450 passengers and 1,249 officers and crew members, would I encounter a cinematic life story? I thought about these things, and also about the relief I felt, after having just published a memoir, at being able to escape the demands of contemporary book publishing and disappear from the grid for seven glorious days. Nautical artwork on Deck 7. Inevitably, I also found myself thinking about the last time I spent so much time out of reach of land. One summer afternoon back in the 1970s, I boarded a very different kind of vessel. I'd been invited by a yachtsman friend to join his crew aboard a 45-foot sloop, built by the venerable Sparkman & Stephens, to sail from Three Mile Harbor in New York to Labrador, Canada. There were five of us: one woman and four men, including the captain—a man so meticulously old-fashioned he navigated by taking daily sextant readings. From left: Richard, a shipboard florist, in an elevator; maître d' Osman Pingaroglu flambéeing a crêpe suzette in the Queens Grill. While the two voyages could not have been more dissimilar, they shared a common route along the Eastern Seaboard, up to the Gulf of Maine. Instead of continuing north to Canada, as we did back then, the Queen Mary 2 would rev up its two 30-megawatt gas turbines and head east to England via the frigid North Atlantic. During the golden age of ocean liners in the early 20th century, dozens of vessels plied these sea-lanes. In those days, the sailings were cause for celebration: I can vividly remember accompanying my parents to the Cunard pier on the Hudson River to see relatives and friends off at bon voyage parties, jolly events featuring wicker picnic hampers and the clinking of flutes of champagne. This may be the place to note that I had sailed on the QM2 once before, as a reporter joyriding on a trial run in 2003, before the ship was christened by Queen Elizabeth II. (Cunard, despite having been acquired by Carnival a quarter-century ago, remains the most British of companies, and clings to a storied heritage implicit in the names of English monarchs emblazoned on its vessels.) On that trip we powered out of Southampton and spent two eventless nights at sea before looping back to port. What I best remember is running into chef Daniel Boulud, who had been hired to create signature menus for Cunard—a collaboration not much longer-lived than the trip itself. From left: Ballroom dancing in the Queens Room; the Grand Lobby. Menus have shifted since I took that voyage, and a ship that took 3,000 craftspeople an estimated 8 million hours to build has also been redesigned and redecorated from stem to stern. At some point a splash pool was removed to make space for extra staterooms, glass-walled elevators were furloughed, and kennels were expanded to accommodate 24 dogs (cats are also welcome), although just 18 canine travelers were aboard on my voyage. These included two strapping Irish setters, whose owner was relocating to London for work and did not want to risk shipping her pets as airborne cargo. Despite its cosmetic glow-up, the essentials of the seagoing colossus remain basically unaltered. Major public rooms occupy the lower levels, with passenger decks stacked above—a fact that held no particular meaning for me until I realized how the ship's stratified social order is subtly enforced by this design. While Queens and Princess Grill passengers dine in small, well-staffed, and sumptuously appointed restaurants, the majority of the shipboard population takes its meals at the buffet or on a lower deck in the vast Britannia Restaurant. From left: A splash of pink; afternoon tea in the Queens Room. Staterooms are similarly hierarchical. Mine was substantial and came with a king-size bed, a spacious balcony, a lima-bean-shaped desk, an easy chair, a full bath, and many service perks—as well as a closet that seemed far too large, until I unpacked all the 'smart attire'' required for evening meals. Dress-up, of course, is a traditional element of ocean voyaging. The theme of an evening gala on my trip was 'Roaring Twenties.'' Someday I will figure out where my fellow voyagers unearthed all those gangster suits and feathered aigrettes. Or not. What matters, it quickly became clear, was that the one thing everyone could indulge in was the ease of slow travel. When I say slow, I should qualify the observation by noting that the QM2 moves at a brisk 26 knots (or about 30 miles an hour). Considering the ship is three times the length of a football field, that is rocket pace. Still, being conveyed across the surface of the planet in sync with the cycles of the day, and the movement of the tides, is an experience radically different from the bodily insult that is commercial air travel today. A Queens Grill Grand Duplex Suite. For seven days and eight nights, I luxuriated in the stately movement of the ship, and the feeling that I had voluntarily excommunicated myself from the world. Yes, there was Wi-Fi. Yes, I maintained a semblance of my work life. Yes, I scrolled. Yet as it gradually dawned on me how leisurely and long a day can be, I began slowly to relinquish my more compulsive work habits and—of all the unexpected things—relax. There are miles of public hallways to explore, huge public spaces in which to indulge in people-watching. That's not to suggest there was a lack of shipboard activities, should I have wished to partake. Like most cruise ships, the QM2 is designed as a boredom-fighting machine. There are miles of public hallways to explore, huge public spaces in which to indulge in people-watching. There is a casino. There is a shopping arcade. There is an Olde England–style pub and a champagne bar. There is a nightclub and a planetarium. There is a full-service spa and swimming pools of varying sizes on different decks. There is an upper-deck room near the bow where card sharks can hole up playing contract bridge for the entire trip. There are restaurants serving both the endless buffet meals that are one of the enduring tropes of cruising, and 'fine-dining' options with appointment seating and pricey à la carte add-ons like lobster and filet mignon. From left: Raddish, a uniformed Cavalier King Charles spaniel; passengers on the lookout. The library was stocked with 8,000 volumes of Everyman Classics and airport pulp. I had hauled along a bag of hardbound books, but could have saved myself the overweight charge. I checked out Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust to reread, as well as a ghoulish history of famous shipwrecks. From left: Dinner service in the Britannia Restaurant; inside the ship's bridge. Briefly, I tried convincing myself to take part in sedentary activities like bingo, afternoon trivia, and high tea, but I could not surmount the Golden Girls associations. One morning I stumbled into the planetarium and found myself unexpectedly entranced by a lecture on black holes given by Dan Wilkins, a guest speaker. Another time I sneaked onto the balcony of the 1,100-seat Royal Court Theater to watch my friend, the biographer Brad Gooch, talk about the artist Keith Haring, the subject of his new biography. Though Brad was his usual charming self—equal parts professorial and conspiratorial—I could not quite shake the strangeness of being surrounded by a bunch of white-haired retirees while hearing anecdotes about a renegade queer graffiti artist from 1980s New York. From left: A photo moment at sea; strolling the Promenade Deck before dinner. This is probably the place to confess that the greater percentage of my time aboard the QM2 was spent doing nothing. Fresh off book publication and after working nonstop for close to five years, what appealed to me most was having time to stare out to sea and empty my head. Where better to do this than on a vessel where the farthest you can venture is a loop around the promenade deck? For the first day or so, dense fog kept me confined to my cabin or to a lounge chair in the library. Then the sun broke through, and I developed a routine that I kept up for the rest of the voyage. After an early breakfast of poached eggs on toast, which I find impossible to order anymore in Manhattan, I would set out on my peregrinations around the big ship. I enjoyed the routine in part because my coveted window table was adjacent to that of a sharply intelligent widow in her 80s who kept up her end of a polite conversation throughout the voyage. From left: Passenger Christine McSwaney, with Koko and Ming, outside the kennels on Deck 12; soaking in the whirlpool. Prowling the layered decks and hallways, I became a voyeur: peering through stateroom doors left ajar for cleaning; inventing narratives to explain the 12 pieces (I counted) of Globe-Trotter luggage one passenger brought, the dream catcher another hung on her door, the cabins that looked like the aftermath of a rave, and those so obsessively tidy it was hard to believe they were even occupied. Then I would hide out in my handsomely appointed stateroom, lolling on its broad private balcony and gazing at the limitless ocean. That, after all, was what had compelled me to take this cruise in the first place. From left: The Queen Mary 2 docked in Brooklyn; reading on a private balcony. I also partook of the onboard luxuries that draw people to premium class. I found it amusing when the liveried butler showed up at sunset with champagne and caviar canapés. Yes, it was good theater when the fussy maître d' theatrically swept me to my seat and offered off-menu delicacies (more of the aforementioned caviar). And the good French wine available at a modest surcharge on my 'beverage plan' was entirely welcome. Keeping a respectful distance, I also enjoyed the conversational company of my shipmates, who I found unusually mindful of social boundaries. These mealtime companions were people of varied professions: a British magistrate and his solicitor wife; an archetypal Texan rancher couple who looked like extras from the classic movie Giant ; and my recently widowed seatmate. This woman, I learned over the course of the voyage, was on her way to take a second cruise, through the Norwegian fjords. The voyage had been long-planned with her spouse of many decades. When he died just months before embarkation (and after the couple had lost their beloved California Wine Country ranch to wildfire), she decided to set out on her own. 'I haven't taken a trip by myself since I got married,'' she said, adding briskly: 'It was time.'' From left: Relaxing on Deck 7; Cunard attendants at the ready. If there was a common thread among those I encountered on board the Queen Mary 2, it was the tacit agreement not to overshare. Just as passengers kindly stepped aside to let one another pass in the long corridors, those I met tended to skirt the messy particulars of their lives. This felt therapeutic, an antidote to the toxic diet of overly personal information that we are fed daily by our phones. And it allowed me to indulge a luxury that is not hyped in travel brochures or Instagram stories: as the immense vessel powered along through an illimitable and indifferent ocean, I was temporarily free to relinquish the illusion of controlling fate's direction. For once in my frenetic life, I could let go and float. Transatlantic sailings on the Queen Mary 2 from $1,350 per person. A version of this story first appeared in the August 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Long Live the Queen ."
The Guardian
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Meet the members of the Dull Men's Club: ‘Some of them would bore the ears off you'
The 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson once wrote, 'He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others'. It's a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men's Club. Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis. In this club, they wear their dullness with pride. The duller the better. This is where the nerds of the world unite. 'Posts that contain bitmoji-avatar-things are far too exciting, and will probably get deleted,' warn the rules of the Dull Men's Club (Australian branch). Maintaining standards of dullness is paramount. Alan Goodwin in the UK recently worried that seeing a lesser spotted woodpecker in his garden might be 'a bit too exciting' for the group. In the same week, a flight tracker struggled to keep his excitement to an acceptable level when military jets suddenly appeared on his screen. This is the place for quirky hobbies, obscure interests, the examination of small, ordinary things. It is a place to celebrate the mundane, the quotidian. It is a gentle antidote to pouting influencers and the often toxic internet; a bastion of civility; a polite clarion call to reclaim the ordinary. Above all, it is whimsical, deeply ironic self-effacing and sarcastic humour. There is an art to being both dull and droll. 'It's tongue-in-cheek humour' says founder Grover Click (a pseudonym chosen for its dullness), 'a safe place to comment on daily things.' Exclamation marks, he says, 'are far too exciting.' (On his site, ridicule is against the rules, as is politics, religion, and swearing). There is, says Bt Humble, a moderator for the Australian branch, 'a level of one upmanship. It's sort of competitive dullness.' Dull people trying to out-dull each other. Are there people who are just too exciting for the club? 'There isn't actually a mandatory level of dullness,' he admits, although some of the members he has met 'would bore the ears off you.' It all started in New York in the early 1980s. Click, now 85, and his friends were sitting at the long bar of the New York Athletic club reading magazine articles about boxing, fencing, judo and wrestling. 'One of my mates said 'Dude, we don't do any of those things.'' They had to face it. They were dull. They decided to embrace their dullness. As a joke, they started The Dull Men's Club, which involved some very silly dull activities. They chartered a tour bus but didn't go anywhere. 'We toured the bus. We walked around the outside of the bus a few times. And the driver explained the tyre pressures and turned on the windscreen wipers.' In 1996, when Click moved to the UK, his nephew offered to build a website for 'that silly Dull Men's Club.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Today, Click's copyrighted Dull Men's Club Facebook group has 1.9 million members. There is an annual calendar featuring people with peculiar hobbies, a book – Dull Men of Great Britain – merchandise and not one but two awards: Anorak of the Year in the UK and DMC Person of the Year for the rest of the world. There are also numerous copycat Dull Men's Clubs, including one that has 1.7 million members. Click is 'very surprised' that so many people identify as dull. The Australian club has 8,000 members. Comparatively small but definitely holding its own in the dullness department. Much of the minutiae of life gets on members' nerves, as does poor workmanship. Five hundred amused comments followed a post about coat hangers inserted into hoops on rails in hotel rooms. 'That would keep me up all night,' said one person. The over or under toilet paper debate raged (politely) for two and a half weeks. Then there was the dismantling of electronic appliances. Or photographing post boxes, the ranking of every animated movie from one to 100 – 100 being 'dull and pointless'. Members judge the speed of other people's windscreen wipers against their own, or in the case of Australia's Simon Molina, stuff as many used toilet rolls as possible inside another. 'It's extremely dull.' There was the late John Richards who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society and 94-year-old Lee Maxwell who has fully restored 1,400 antique washing machines – that no one will ever use. Australian member Andrew McKean, 85, had dullness thrust upon him. He is, dare I say it, an interesting anomaly in the Dull Men's Club, a shift in tone. Three years ago, he had a heart attack. He recovered but the hospital's social workers deemed him unable to care for his wife, Patricia, and they moved to a nursing home in NSW. There is nothing droll or amusing about being stuck in a nursing home. But he has elevated the dull institutional days into something poetic and poignant by writing about them and posting 'to you strangers' in The Dull Men's Club. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion His life before moving into a home had been anything but dull. An electronics engineer, in 1967 he was connected to the Apollo moon mission. Then a career in the television broadcasting industry took him to the UK, Malta, West Africa and Canada. Once a traveler who lived in a sprawling house at Pittwater who spent his days in the sea, now his life is reduced to a single room, 'every trace of my existence is contained within these walls.' Sitting in his worn, frayed armchair by the window 'watching the light shift across the garden,' he writes about ageing and 'the slow unfolding of a life.' He is surrounded by the 'faint hum of machines and the shuffle of slippers … the squeak of a wheelchair, the smell of disinfectant.' With the club, McKean has found his people, his tribe, within this ironic, self-deprecating community. At 85 he has found fans. Even if they are proudly dull. He lives for the bus and a few hours of freedom in a life that has shrunk. On the bus 'something stirs in us, a flicker of youth perhaps.' He treats himself to KFC, 'the sharp tang of it a small rebellion against the home's bland meals.' He sits on a park bench, an old man with a stick, invisible and inconspicuous to the people rushing past 'watching the world's parade, its wealth and hurry.' He observes it all and reports back to the Dull Men's Club. 'Though the world may not stop for me, I will not stop for it. I am here, still breathing, still remembering. And that in itself, is something.' While he usually posts daily, other dull people get concerned if he doesn't post for a while. They miss him, his wisdom and his beautiful writing. In his introduction to the 2024 Dull Men's Club calendar Click wrote, 'What they [the dull men] are doing is referred to in Japan as ikigai. It gives a sense of purpose, a motivating force. A reason to jump out of bed in the morning.' Here is a radical thought. Dull men (and women) are actually interesting. Just don't tell them that.
