Benjamin T. Milnes – Author of On The Subject Of Trolls and Zolantis

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The Book of the Order of Chivalry – One of the greatest books I have ever read

Almost every week nowadays, I marvel at the things not taught to me when I was in the education system.

It’s a common refrain – ‘Why aren’t they teaching this?’, ‘Why aren’t they teaching that?’ – but I mean it in an even deeper sense. It’s not just that there are certain things that are not taught – they’re not even mentioned. An example of this is Anglo-Saxon history. I was taught nothing about Anglo-Saxon history when I was in school. This is astonishing given that the Anglo-Saxons were the start of the English – all of the history of the British Isles before that is British history but not English history. But even more than that, in the entire five years I spent at secondary school, I don’t think the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was mentioned even once.

There are also many examples of things not being taught or even mentioned from my university education. I could write hundreds of blog posts (not an exaggeration) about how low quality my university education was – there’s no point trying to cover it all here. But in addition to many utterly bizarre choices in course structure, there were hundreds of important things that were never even mentioned. In physics we were not taught the conceptual framework around waves properly to understand radiation pressure or the derivation of the black-body spectrum curve; we were not taught Minkowski diagrams properly; we weren’t taught measurement and uncertainty properly. In mathematics we were not taught matrices properly, or the principles of limits. We didn’t even really do complex numbers properly, though we did do a lot with them. The way we were taught quantum mechanics was utterly abysmal. And we were taught absolutely nothing about the history of physics.

I could go on and on and on, but that’s not what this post is about. It is in the time since leaving the education system that I have learned about these things. Everything I know about Anglo-Saxon history – which, of course, went into the writing of On The Subject Of Trolls – I have learned myself.

If you have grown up in Britain around the same time as me (I am a millennial), you will have heard the word ‘chivalry’ thrown around from time to time. You of course know that it has something to do with mediæval knights – it was some sort of practice that they had or ideal that they strove towards. You will have heard the word ‘chivalry’ used to refer to certain kinds of behaviour in the modern age – usually things as drab as holding doors open for people. You will also have heard the word used by feminists. Over the last 30 years, they have typically used it in a derogatory sense, referring to actions or behaviours that they consider to be outdated and offensive to their belief system.

All of this – everything that has been said of ‘chivalry’ in popular culture in the last 30 years (at least) is wrong. Not only is it wrong, it is completely wrong. It doesn’t even get the basic ideas of what actual chivalry is right.

I have recently been reading a book on heraldry. This book makes reference to other works as it goes along, and at one point – quite early on – it describes a book called The Book of the Order of Chivalry. This book was written in the 1200s, and it describes exactly what chivalry was supposed to be, and what knights were supposed to do. I had no idea that there even was such a book. What’s more, The Book of the Order of Chivalry was apparently considered to be the standard text describing what chivalry was for a very long time. What an extraordinary thing – that there is a definitive text telling those who aspire to be knights what a knight was and what chivalry was!

When I saw this a few weeks ago, I was already complaining in my head of how this wasn’t ever mentioned to me while I was in the education system. I looked around online to see if I could read it – for old texts, very often you can read a scan of them somewhere online. I went onto Amazon to see if I could buy a modern copy of the book – and I could – there was a modern translation of the book available. (Not so modern as to be affected by the rot that is currently creeping through academia.) I bought it.

The Book of the Order of Chivalry is not a long book – in the translation that I have, it doesn’t even pass fifty pages. But when I was reading through it, it was nothing short of enlightening. And I don’t mean that in an exaggerative sense – reading it was as though the light of knowledge was shining into my mind.

Chivalry is an entire system for producing persons of good character – persons who are well trained in the various martial arts of a knight, and so are very physically capable, but who are also learned, and so very mentally capable. It is a system that, through the production of such persons, produces a good and orderly society. It also contains methods of self-regulation – necessary for when someone comes along who tries to subvert the system.

Although The Book of the Order of Chivalry was written in the 1200s and is specifically about knights, and those who wish to become them, many of the prescriptions it gives about how knights should be could apply to anyone, in any time period, who wants to be a good person or build a good society. That’s one of the things that was so fantastic about it – huge parts of it are completely relevant to life today. Some of it appears to be astonishingly prescient – there are problems that exist in the world today that this book has the solution to. And this is what makes it downright outrageous that this book has seemingly been hidden from us in the modern age – the solutions to many problems that exist today – sometimes very specific problems – have been known for centuries.

Take the following paragraph from the translation by Noel Fallows:

The king or prince who unmakes the Order of Chivalry itself not only unmakes himself as a knight, but also the knights who are subordinate to him who, because of the bad example set by their lord and so that they will be loved by him and follow his evil ways, do what does not pertain to Chivalry or its Order.
Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

In other words, if any knight acts in a way that is not in accordance with true Chivalry, he not only unmakes himself as a knight, but also all of the knights he trains or is in command of.

This is a principle that is relevant not only to Chivalry, but to any organisational structure, in any time period.

Take another paragraph:

If the squire should be dubbed a knight because of fineness of features or a well-built, well-proportioned body, or because he has fair hair or carries a mirror in his purse […] you debase and diminish the Order of Chivalry.
Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

What an amazing thing to read! Don’t just reward people with status and power because they are good-looking – it’s a principle that can apply to every society in every time period.

Take another one:

The prideful, ill-mannered squire who speaks and dresses crudely, has a cruel heart, is avaricious, mendacious, disloyal, slothful, irascible, lustful, drunken, gluttonous or perjurious, or who has other vices similar to these, is not suited to the Order of Chivalry.
Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

To how many people does this apply today! Every week there seem to be more and more people who could be described in this way. And not only are they not suited to the Order of Chivalry, they are not suited to any position where they have any influence – particularly positions of cultural influence, which they seem to currently occupy.

Here’s another:

Do not seek nobility of courage in the mouth, for it does not always tell the truth, and do not seek it in resplendent vestments, for beneath many a resplendent cloak there is a base and weak heart filled with evil and deceit.
Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

I would like to give more quotes from the book, but I fear I could very easily pass the threshold of fair use. This book is filled with good advice on how to be, how to act, how to live, how to learn, how to teach, how to train, who to trust, who to grant status, how society should be.

Chivalry – true Chivalry – is not just a few trite mannerisms – it is not just a set of pedantic rules for small actions. It is an entire way of life – and one designed to improve society. It is a tragedy that we have forgotten what it is.

It’s worth mentioning that Llull is adamant that you cannot be a knight unless you are a Christian – nothing truly chivalrous can follow without that. I am a staunch atheist. In the era of New Atheism, I was a more combative one (which was of course a big part of what New Atheism was), but nowadays I am not, and I find those who retain that combativeness towards Christianity to be rather cliché and tiresome now – it’s not needed anymore. So I can appreciate the value of the ideas in this book without being a Christian. At the same time, it’s interesting how Llull often writes about the importance of using reason and scientific knowledge (‘scientific’ perhaps not quite in the modern sense), and of avoiding superstition. Such ideas would have been very pleasing to the New Atheists of 2007-2012.

It is outrageous that modern popular culture – and modern feminism – lies to us about what true Chivalry is. It is outrageous that the modern education system does not tell us what it is. It is outrageous that the modern education system doesn’t even tell us about the existence of this book. And it is outrageous that wisdom that has been around for centuries is hidden from us – wisdom that we could use today.

Reading this book was enlightening – not because I didn’t know or believe many of the ideas that are in it – a lot of them are actually ones I already knew and agreed with – it was enlightening because I was realising just how long this knowledge has existed for. It was there. It was always there.

It was also remarkable just how much the ideas overlapped with ideas from another part of my life: Taekwondo. I have done Taekwondo for more than 20 years – it’s been a huge part of my life. Taekwondo has a moral dimension. What was amazing reading this book was how mediæval Chivalry (from Europe eight hundred years ago) and Taekwondo (which developed in Korea in the last century) have produced many of the same ideas. Two completely unconnected cultures produced the same ideas. Extraordinary.

True Chivalry is, in many ways, the antidote to the poison that is modernity. It is the balm that could heal many today. It is not something to be contemptuous towards – it is quite possibly the very thing that we, the English, need at this moment in time.

I have not shown you the very best part of the book – that should be saved for when you read it yourself. And I think you should read it yourself. There are very few books that I would say that everyone should read, but this is one of them. Every Englishman should read this book.

You can get the version I read here: https://amzn.to/3HDxmmT (affiliate link).

P.S. While I have tried to be very clear here as to the reasons why I like this book so much, in time the reasons will become clearer still.

Threads vs. Twitter – The Jury’s In

I’ve been wanting to write this post for at least the last six months, so the jury’s been in for quite a while.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I was sceptical. I heard tales that he was compelling the remaining staff there to work extremely long days – introducing an extremely brutal culture. I don’t know how true this information was, and I don’t know how true it is now – maybe Musk has taken his foot off the pedal a bit – but I am very against this kind of culture at technology companies, and didn’t want to use a platform that was built by it. I had no intention of deleting my account – that makes it possible for someone else to take your username and impersonate you – I was just going to leave it there and not tweet very much.

Conversely, when Threads was created I was very optimistic. Being an author, I am naturally more inclined to social media platforms that are word-based, rather than those that are image-based, like Instagram, or video-based, like YouTube, and I hoped that Threads could be all of the things that Twitter hadn’t been over the years.

It is almost two years since Threads was released, and the jury is in. Threads is absolutely shit, while Twitter has become possibly the best social media platform on the internet.

Even within the first few days of Threads being released, I could see that those people who were famous, or who already had large followings elsewhere, were able to get much further ahead on the site than anyone else, replicating and reinforcing the kind of celebrity-non-celebrity class structure that existed on Twitter prior to Musk buying it. What’s the point of starting a new social media site if you’re just going to do that again?

But that was far from the worst of it. One of the worst things about Threads is that it appears to be filled with absolutely insufferable cunts. Sometimes I will post something incredibly mild – almost banal – and I will get random people from across Threads – people I don’t know, people I’ve never interacted with, people I don’t even have common interests with – going on a crusade against it. And the most obnoxious instances of these are when they decide to ‘quote’ (or whatever it’s called on Threads) the post, complaining about it, rather than saying anything directly in response – as though to say ‘Look!!! See this disGUSTing thing this person has said!!! What a disGUSTing person!!!!!’.

It’s difficult to decide which aspect of this is most obnoxious. When I see a post online that I disagree with, if it’s by someone I don’t know or someone who isn’t generally well-known, I just ignore it and move on. It’s the refrain that sane people have been saying since the start of the internet: ‘You can always just not watch it / not read it.’. Why is Threads filled with people without this ability? But just as obnoxious is that it is an insane way to interact with someone you don’t know and have never interacted with before. You would never do this in real life.

Related to this is that Threads seems to be filled with people who are surprised that they will be blocked if they are cunts. If someone is acting high-and-mighty, and rather cancel-y, over a very mild post, I will block them. And yet endlessly these people say ‘uGH!!! I can’t beLIEVE that OP blocked me?!?!?! i GuEsS tHaT sHoWs ThAt He DoEsN’t ReAlLy HaVe An ArGuMeNt!!!1’ – no, it’s because you’re being a cunt – and you’re still being a cunt by discounting the possibility that your very obviously cunty behaviour might make people think that you’re a cunt.

But possibly even more annoying about Threads is that the algorithm has a very obvious left-wing bias. I mean it’s more than that – it’s a woke bias. If you post woke shit on Threads, you will do well; if you post anti-woke stuff, you will not do well. You can see how many views a post gets on Threads, and I can tell, before posting something, whether the algorithm will like it and boost it, and how high that view count will be. Oh, you used a swear word? Demote. Oh, you referred to something from traditional culture? Demote. Oh, you talked about how you didn’t like something? Disliking things is hatred, and we don’t allow hatred in our hugbox. Demote. Oh, you suggested that there’s a right and a wrong way to do something? That makes people feeeEeEel bad. Demote. Meanwhile it will push the sloppiest slop from content farms in Vietnam to millions of people.

Twitter, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength. There is endless self-congratulatory consternation from mainstream media types and Leftists these days about how Twitter is ‘oooooh it’s … it’s a very dark place now … it’s … there’s … there’s a lot of “””hateful””” stuff on there’. Quite frankly anyone who says this has either become so used to their mind being numbed by the fluffy, microfibre cushions of moderation that exist on other sites, or they don’t use Twitter.

Are there some awful people and awful opinions on Twitter? Yeah. D’you know what you do about it? You just ignore it. You keep scrolling. You don’t, in fact, have to absorb every opinion you see. If you think otherwise, that suggests that you are lacking in a vital cognitive ability – and your lack of ability to form your own thoughts is not a justification to limit what the rest of us can do.

Twitter is the Wild West. You’ll find crazy people there, idiots, and some people who are just downright evil. But guess what? You find all of that on Threads too, but it’ll only be the crazy, idiotic, and evil from the political left. What you’ll also find on Twitter is some of the greatest insight and in-depth discussion you’ll find almost anywhere on the internet. You won’t find that on Threads, or Instagram, or Facebook, or Reddit, or BlueSky, or in YouTube comments – all of which are heavily policed by wokescolds and whingelords – be they biological or electronic ones.

You can tweet on Twitter knowing that it won’t receive more or less attention just because it has the ‘wrong’ ideological bias. You can see the analytics for a tweet on Twitter too – and Twitter shows you far more than Threads does – and you can easily see that the algorithm does not wildly vary how much attention it gives a tweet based on whether some super-Sharon thinks it has the right ‘tone’.

I was sceptical about the change to ‘verification’ on Twitter – making it so that anyone could buy it. But actually this change has been brilliant. The old system – where verification was for journalists, celebrities, and politicians – created a class structure on the site. If you were in the ‘verified’ class, you could actually use Twitter to promote things. If you were in the ‘unverified’ class, you were just the audience – you would never have any reach or say or influence – you were there simply to applaud and cheer on the exalted few. The new system is actually far more meritocratic.

I have also been impressed by how Twitter now will pay you to tweet, if you have a premium account. It was absurd that, for so long, Twitter and so many sites like it would make money off of your content without paying you. We do not accept this from YouTube, so why do we accept this from other social media sites?

Twitter is actually enjoyable to use. Threads is not. Threads is suffocating. You cannot do well unless you resign yourself to pushing endless multicoloured slop – but even if you did that, there would be no benefit anyway, since you don’t get paid, and you can’t put links out to other things on the internet because Threads will pummel those posts into the ground too. And at any moment, a haughty non-person may decide to make complaining about you to their three followers their life’s purpose just because you asked a question about the origin of a word.

So here we are, two years later. Threads is vile. It has no reason to exist. Twitter remains the champion.

Therapomania – The near-religious belief in the infallibility of psychotherapy

Rick and Morty was mid.

I seem to be one of the only people who has this opinion. Most people, it seems, either haven’t seen the show, or think it’s absolutely brilliant.

I actually didn’t see the show for many, many years. It was only last year, I think, that I watched it all. (Well, up to the end of season six – I dislike changes in voice actor.) I had tried to get into it several times previously – because people had said that it was a great show – but I just found the first three episodes unbelievably dull.

Having now watched it, I’m confused as to why people think it’s so outstandingly brilliant. The show is nowhere near as funny as I was expecting it to be based on what people said. (It is funny – it’s just not that funny.) It’s also quite slow – there is much that could have been cut out. I actually far more enjoy clips of the show as YouTube Shorts than the show itself, because the clips cut out the dead time. I’m concerned that people like it as much as they do simply because it is whacky. It’s off-the-wall; it’s random. It’s weird and it’s cool, and it’s cool that it’s weird. ‘Whackiness’ like this is actually quite easy to produce in an artistic work. (I think people think it’s hard to do, but it’s not.) And if it’s not paired with true humour or insight, it’s cheap.

Anyway, one of the tangents of the show that is quite funny, is that of the therapist character – Dr. Helen Wong. The idea of the Smith family going to therapy is intrinsically hilarious – partly because of the contrast between their space-faring, multidimensional lives involving the most grotesque, unsettling, and downright bizarre aliens, and the HR-style banality of psychotherapy, and partly because the problems the Smith family face are not ones that can be solved by psychotherapy. But the therapy scenes are also hilarious because of the way they mock the trite ruminations and kum-ba-yah-ism of therapy – in a way that dozens of shows have done before.

At the end of the episode of Pickle Rick, where Rick tries to avoid going to a ‘family therapy’ session by turning himself into a pickle, Rick stumbles into the therapist’s office, where the rest of his family (minus Jerry) have been sitting and being intellectually harassed by the therapist. Rick asks Beth to give him the serum that will turn him back into a human, which she has held onto for the entire episode. The therapist then directs Beth to ask Rick why he needs the serum, knowing that it will force him to say that he didn’t want to come to a family therapy session.

Rick ends up giving a monologue about why he doesn’t like therapy – most of which is correct. Dr. Wong then responds with a monologue.

Dr. Wong’s monologue is part psychoanalysis, part life-coaching speech. Her psychoanalysis of Rick is incorrect based on what we know from all the previous episodes of the show, and the monologue overall is incoherent – making points that do not logically follow on from each other – but it contains the kind of pretentious language and lilt that all successful life coaches use.

It’s actually quite funny, because it’s an excellent mockery of the kind of beatification that therapists, life coaches, business coaches, consultants, megachurch pastors, and certain influencers sometimes receive. Here is someone who has mastered the aesthetics and cadence of insight, while having absolutely nothing profound to say. Very funny.

This is how I understood this moment in the show when I first saw it – and how I thought everyone understood it. However, when I watch this clip on YouTube, and I scroll down to the comments, I am mortified to find that there are seemingly a large number of people – thousands of people, based on the likes – who treat this scene as actual, genuine, real psychotherapy, and Dr. Wong’s analysis of Rick as being nothing short of perfection in profundity.

This baffled me when I first saw it. How do these people not know that this is a joke? How do people not know that this is mocking the character of Dr. Wong? The entire setup for this scene is a textbook example of the humour of contrast – the extremity of Rick and Morty’s multidimensional life against the mundanity of a therapist’s office in a shopping mall. We have seen this kind of contrast humour – between the extraordinary and the mundane – hundreds upon hundreds of times in media over the last 25 years – how are these people not able to recognise it again here? But no, apparently these commenters believe that everything Dr. Wong is saying about Rick is absolutely true, and can be applied to real people in the real world.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that these kinds of comments on the video and the likes they have received may be entirely fake. I have noticed a change recently in the kind of comments that appear at the top of YouTube videos. They’re sort of all like this – right across YouTube, but particularly under comedy videos – people taking the content of the video far too seriously, as though it isn’t comedy. I’m not the only person who’s noticed this either – I recall that there’s even a Twitter account dedicated to overly-serious comments under Family Guy videos. In a world where it is possible to generate readable text very easily (AI), it is entirely possible that all of these comments are from fake accounts.

However, the reason why I am not entirely convinced that these comments are fake is because I have noticed a similar attitude towards psychotherapy in real people – either commenters on certain kinds of podcast or even friends in real life.

There is a common refrain that you will see right across the internet. It’s a kind of text-based meme. ‘Men will do anything except go to therapy.’, or some variation of that. You see this refrain anywhere that tells of or shows a man who has done something seemingly incomprehensible to the commenter.

A good 80-90% of the time I see this refrain, I think ‘Yes, because most men intuitively know that what’s done in “therapy” will have absolutely no capacity to solve this problem.’. There is an assumption, held by some people – a belief, even – in the infinite power of ‘therapy’ to fix everything. They seem to believe that therapy can fix every problem. I have even heard, over the years, these people express that they believe everyone should be in therapy – all the time.

As I say, the reason why therapy is less popular with men than it is with women is because men realise that it will not solve their problems. This is not to say that it is never useful – there are certain problems that it can solve – but psychotherapy is treated by some as a panacea. It is not. And not only is it not, it can also create problems. Psychotherapy can encourage excessive rumination and the acceptance of non-agency – and even worse, the near-worship of psychotherapy that seems to exist among a small proportion of the population can promote both of these things.

Psychotherapy is not neutral. We are encouraged to think that it is – that the psychotherapist comes with no biases. But actually they do – and sometimes they have very strong biases. Psychotherapy is not neutral – not morally, not philosophically, not politically. They have replaced, in some ways, a task done in previous centuries by vicars and other religious figures – except that while you likely know the approximate moral, philosophical, and political positions of a Christian vicar before talking to them, with a psychotherapist, you don’t.

Psychotherapy is not infallible. This should be obvious, but apparently to some it is not. One of the clearest and most topical examples of this is the complete capture of the profession of psychotherapy by Gender Ideology that we have seen over the last decade or more. When an entire field can make that big of a mistake, one should not only not consider it infallible, one should consider it to be highly fallible.

Yet there are people who seem to believe in the complete infallibility of psychotherapy. More than that – they won’t have a word said about it. If you try to suggest that maybe – just maybe – psychotherapy is anything other than salvation, they will try to shut you down – cut you off mid sentence. No wrong word may be said about it. It is a religious-like zeal, and I have observed it enough times now to need a name for it.

Psychotherapomania – or just therapomania for short – the near-religious belief in the infallibility of psychotherapy.

The Harry Potter Television Show – Dead Before Arrival

They’re making a Harry Potter television show – you might’ve heard. Specifically, it’s a reboot – they’re just going to redo the entire film series as a television series.

Most people, when this information and idea is thrust upon them, just respond ‘Why?’. What’s the point of making a television show of the series? The films were pretty much perfect. Sure, they had a few issues with them, but what film doesn’t? The issues with the series are quite minor, and overall the films are very good. They’re even better when you consider that most attempts at an eight-film series fail (most don’t even get to the third one without going horribly wrong), and the Harry Potter films are remarkably consistent in style.

So why? Why bother making a television series? Some have suggested that it will allow them to include elements from the books that weren’t included in the films. Films tend to be less than 2 ½ hours, and they often aim for 1 ½ hours, so there are just things you can’t include from a book as long as The Goblet of Fire. The total runtime of a television series is, of course, much longer – particularly if it’s one of those 24-episode series’ that the US likes to do.

But the problem is, the films are iconic. Even if you manage to include all of the elements of the book that were missed out from the films, you are never going to beat the music of the films. You are never going to beat the music of John Williams. You are never going to beat the aesthetic of the films. You are never going to beat the perfect casting – there just isn’t better casting than Richard Harris, Dame Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Jason Isaacs, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall, Kenneth Branagh – it’s not just that Hollywood is unable to cast such talented actors anymore, such good actors don’t even really exist anymore – there isn’t a new generation of actors that have come along that can match the last one.

The films were also all made before Hollywood went insane. We’re in a post-Last-Jedi world, where every film and television show to come out of America seems to have been written and directed by demented sociology professors. ‘There is no good or evil; there is only power’ is a line spoken by Voldemort in the first film – how can Hollywood possibly make a television show with this guy as the primary villain when so many of them actually believe this idea to be true? Are we going to get told that Voldemort isn’t actually evil, he’s just misunderstood? Is he only evil because ‘society made him that way’? Is he going to be made ‘morally grey’? Hollywood cannot adapt a story it does not understand. Hollywood will be unable to match the charm of the films. Almost every line from the first two films is memorable – I predict that none from the television show will be.

So there is no point. There is no point to making this television show. It cannot possibly outmatch or even just match the films.

If this wasn’t enough to render the show a waste of time and money, the few details that have been revealed about the show so far have been an absolute car crash.

Among these is the casting of John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore. Now don’t get me wrong – Lithgow is a brilliant actor. But he’s American. For the films, I recall that J. K. Rowling had insisted on only casting British actors for the British parts. At the time I instinctively understood the reason for this. American actors act with a different style to British actors. It is, much like the Americans themselves, more brash, more over-the-top, and overconfident. These are not qualities that British people themselves typically have, and so when Americans try to play British roles, they stand out like bird shit on a chip. Also, American actors are rarely able to do a British accent well.

Now, John Lithgow neither has this brashness to his acting style nor an inability to do a British accent – his rendition of Churchill in The Crown was fantastic. He may even do quite well as Dumbledore. But I think the principle of not having American actors playing British parts is still a good one to follow. Every American cast will have an obstacle to get past which is their lack of familiarity with the British way of being. They will stand out in a story that is quintessentially British.

By far the most tweet-worthy detail to have been released, however, is the casting of a person named Paapa Essiedu – a Ghanaian actor who grew up in London – in the role of Severus Snape, played iconically in the films by Alan Rickman.

Essiedu is not the same ethnicity as Severus Snape, and this is yet another example of ‘blackwashing’ from Hollywood – changing the ethnicity of characters from a European ethnicity to an African or Middle Eastern ethnicity.

Hollywood keeps doing this. And it’s infuriating because all of the Leftoids who scream bloody murder when ‘whitewashing’ occurs (even though that’s usually done just to put a big-money celebrity in the main role) are completely silent when it’s done the other way round – or even worse, they egg it on. It’s also infuriating because, as I’ve mentioned when Russell T. Davies did this in Doctor Who, it is always done for ideological reasons. Hollywood, like much of the political left today, has a deep hatred of Europeans – most of all the British, most of all the English. The reason why Hollywood does this is because they truly hate what they call ‘white’ people (a deeply flawed term) and want to see them erased from both history and art. Hollywood would call it ‘Anti-Racism’ – but it’s the deep irony of the ideology of ‘Anti-Racism’ that it is actually just racism with a different name.

Why would I watch a show about a classic British story when the makers of the show are indicating that they subscribe to an ideology that hates everything that is British?

So this show is dead on arrival – dead before arrival. There is simply no reason to watch it – it can do nothing but fail.

I’m not sure why J. K. Rowling keeps greenlighting these projects. I think she should be more concerned with the failed Fantastic Beasts series. That series was cut short at three films – it was supposed to be five. The three films we got weren’t very good. It just wasn’t a good story – nothing on par with the story of Harry Potter. In fact it didn’t even feel like they took place in the same universe. Rowling should have written that story as a book series first, and then allowed them to be adapted into films. And if she wants that story to exist as anything other than a failure, she should go back, write it as a book series, ignoring everything that was done in the films. That is probably more important and worthwhile than supervising another adaptation of the original books.

The absolute trash fire that is Facebook

I remember first hearing about Facebook. I was in secondary school at the time. I think at that time it was still exclusive – you could only create an account if you were at a certain educational institution.

Making it exclusive in that way certainly worked to make the site enticing. When finally we could create accounts, me and everyone I knew did so. We’d all already had accounts on Bebo and MySpace, of course – a story almost every millennial will tell you – but that’d never really gone anywhere.

Facebook was so different in the early years. It seems bizarre, looking back to 2009-2010, that it did mostly consist of talking – in a very indirect way – with your friends – that was mostly who and what you saw on there. And it was such a simple website too. (At least, that’s how I remember it. I think there were groups and direct messages at the time, but for the most part what you saw when you went to the site was your ‘wall’.)

Having a Facebook account wasn’t an essential part of life at the time, but nor was it an irritant.

Jump forwards in time to now. My goodness is Facebook an absolute trash fire now. The site is barely useable. I mean that in two senses – firstly in the sense that the site breaks – A LOT – and secondly in the sense that the site is filled with a blistering concoction of useless, unrelated, and inconvenient features.

I mean, let me go to the main page (I can’t remember what they’re calling it nowadays – the ‘news feed’? – I don’t know). I am immediately presented with about a thousand different things, absolutely none of which I want. The first thing I see is a post from a page that I don’t follow and have never followed and which none of my friends are following. The reason I don’t follow it is because I’m not interested in it and this post is shit. This post is the most generic piece of ‘content’ I’ve ever seen – derivative, banal – it’s not even formatted correctly. Why are you pushing this shit, Facebook?

I scroll down, and the next thing I see is – oh – another post from a page I don’t follow – no, wait – it’s from a group I’m not in. For some reason Facebook has both ‘pages’ and ‘groups’, even though they seem to do the exact same fucking things. This utterly demented post is showing me what is quite obviously an American McMansion, but describing it as some kind of architectural gem. What the fuck is this, Facebook? Is this rage-bait? Are you showing this to people because you know they’ll comment about how ugly the house is? Why are you even showing me this in the first place – neither I nor any of my friends are in this Facebook group, and I have never shown any interest in being in this group.

I scroll down again. What’s next? Oh, it’s some shorts videos. Fantastic, Facebook – because I haven’t been bombarded with those enough from every other website. One of the videos is about cutting a fish. Look, one of those is interesting, Facebook – two is excessive. Another seems to be about making boiled sweets. Again, Facebook, one is interesting, two is excessive.

The next item? Another post from a page I don’t follow. The one after that? An advert from a clothing brand. And it goes on, and on, and on. More posts from things I don’t follow; more shorts videos (or whatever stupid name they call them on Facebook); more covert adverts.

And what if I divert my gaze away from the endless diarrhœa? On the left there is a list of … things? ‘Memories’ is one of them. I’ve never clicked that. I don’t need to, Facebook, I have memories in my head. ‘Saved’ – I’ve never clicked that, either – I don’t think I’ve ever ‘saved’ anything on here. ‘Video’ – what even is that? All video? Or just short videos? If I want videos, Facebook, I’ll go to YouTube. Obviously. ‘Feeds’ – isn’t that what I’m already on, Facebook? If I click on ‘See More’, the list becomes even more bewildering. ‘Climate Science Centre’ – why the fuck does Facebook have a ‘Climate Science Centre’? What even is that? ‘Meta Quest 3S’ – I don’t know what that is, Facebook – why is it there? ‘Ray-Ban Meta’. What?! I just – I don’t even know what I’m looking at, and why is any of this stuff here? Why is any of this stuff considered to be important enough to have on the main page?

Below all of that is a list of ‘shortcuts’ – possibly the only useful thing on the page. On the opposite side is a list of ‘contacts’ – don’t you mean my actual friends, Facebook? Or have we given up on that word? It would be nice if the list were ordered in a way that wasn’t entirely random. There’s also a message button in the top right – with a lightning bolt through it. It’s not entirely clear how this is different from the list of contacts – they seem to do the same things.

That’s just the main page. The experience of it is like pouring battery acid in my eyes and then going on a guided tour of the Museum of Fresh Turds – with a tactile exhibit. What is any of this for, Facebook? Why would I want any of this? WHO is it for?! Is anyone actually using this?

You might be wondering, at this point, why I still have a Facebook account if I hate the site so much. I suppose it’s just out of the belief that, if I delete my account, it would be easier for a scammer to impersonate me on the site. I mean, that’s it – that’s why. How low Facebook has fallen for that to be the only reason left to keep an account on there open.

Sometimes I think that another reason to keep it open is so that I can contact old friends on there should I need to. But actually I think most of my friends on there have long since stopped using Facebook altogether.

(I also keep my Facebook account so that I can promote various things I do – books and videos and the like – on there. But I’ve never been very good at this – in large part because the site is so ungainly to use.)

I won’t go through every page of the website and examine all the ways in which it is shit – suffice to say that every other page of the site is filled with problems too. Over the years, I’ve tried using Facebook ads for various things. I have never persisted with them for very long – in large part because the ads manager system was just completely broken – I honestly don’t know how anyone used it. Pages would fail to load; links would lead in loops; nothing was where you’d expect it to be. This was a few years ago, but I honestly don’t know how Facebook has ever managed to make any money with such a broken ads platform.

I think that Facebook has suffered from a problem that many technology companies suffer from after a time. You see, everyone who works at a technology company wants to put their mark on the technology they create. They want to have their feature – the thing that they added – it was their idea or they implemented it. It’s a status thing – they can forever boast about how they were the person who added that thing to the technology. The result is, over time, such pieces of technology inflate with features that are not useful or necessary. Facebook reeks of this. Elon Musk takes plenty of flak for wanting to make Twitter some kind of ‘everything app’, but Facebook has already been trying to do this for years, it seems.

Oh you know what, to finish, I’ll roast another part of the site. Managing a Facebook page is an absolute fucking nightmare. Every time I try to do anything for my ‘Benjamin T. Milnes’ page on Facebook, I just give up. I am just presented with a bewildering selection of crap that I don’t want.

When I go to my page, I’m asked a question: ‘How healthy is your Page?’. I don’t care Facebook. Not least because one of the options in this box is to ‘Link your WhatsApp account’. Are you insane, Facebook? Why would I want to do that?!

There’s a link that will take me to my ‘Professional dashboard’, whatever that is. Let’s see. Ah, here’s a new page – never seen this one before (clearly the masterpiece of another demented ‘product manager’ at Facebook). The first box has the heading ‘Weekly challenges’. No other information is presented with it – just a progress bar saying ‘0%’. Fucking marvellous, Facebook.

On the left there are some options. Apparently there’s an ‘Inspiration hub’ – whatever the fuck that is. I can ‘Earn achievements for creating reels’. Oh really, Facebook? What are these ‘achievements’ you speak of? Unless it’s money, I don’t really give a shit. Under ‘Tools to try’, I can click ‘Stars’. Oh wow, Facebook, ‘Stars’?! How magical! How special!

I haven’t the faintest idea what this shit is, and I don’t care, but let’s click on it anyway. Clicking on it takes me to a page titled ‘Monetisation’ – right, Facebook, because it was obvious that that’s where the link would lead. I’m presented with a ‘Status’, where I’m told that I have ‘No monetisation breaches’. Well fan-bloody-tastic, Facebook.

Under that is, again, ‘Tools to try’, where it says ‘Stars’ again. This was the wrong page to take me to, Facebook – make your links work properly, you absolute morons. Here, at least, there is a brief description of what ‘Stars’ are. They are a kind of pretend currency that Facebook has made up. In a million years, Facebook, I would never have guessed that that’s what they were.

And by this point, I’m completely lost. I could not tell you what part of the Facebook website I have found myself on.

Meanwhile, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a post from an actual friend on this site.

Symbolomania – The obsession with symbolism over reality

By all means, accuse me of inventing too many words with the suffix ‘-mania’, but I do find it to be infinitely useful.

The year is 2019. The month is May. Fans of fantasy all around the world gather to watch the final episode of Game of Thrones.

Daenerys Targaryen has, inexplicably, gone mad. Jon Snow decides to kill her. Drogon, her dragon, after seeing this, decides to attack … the Iron Throne.

It makes no sense. Dragons in this world, while unable to speak or communicate telepathically as they can in some other fantasy worlds, are supposedly ferociously intelligent. There is no way that Drogon doesn’t know that it was Jon Snow who killed Daenerys. Dragons are also vicious, and rather indifferent to humans other than the ones they are bound to in some way. Drogon would kill Jon Snow. That would make sense.

But instead the dragon attacks … the chair. Why? It’s a chair. What does it mean to a dragon? Unless of course, Drogon somehow knows what the chair symbolises – the desire for power, and all the infighting it causes. Drogon, in this moment, gains a meta-level understanding of the world he’s in. He momentarily becomes the audience, and that’s why he attacks the symbol and impetus of the show.

For a show that is supposed to be realist, this is ridiculous. It only happens because the writers think it’s profound, and that profundity takes precedence over physical and logical realism. It is one of the many reasons why the show is considered a car crash, and why people hardly ever talk about it now, despite it being one of the most popular shows in the world for about a decade.

In the subsequent years, I have seen this obsession with symbols many other times. I have seen people be obsessed with the symbolism of something – what they think it means – regardless of the actual logical, physical, or logistical consequences of something, regardless of reality.

I won’t enumerate all of the examples, as that would make this post unbearably long, but I will focus on one: royalty.

I am a royalist. It’s actually one of the few ‘-ist’ words I will actually apply to myself. I’ll save a full explanation of why I’m a royalist for another post, but it’s worth saying that being a royalist does not mean that you support or are in favour of every single thing every single member of the royal family does all the time. It means you are in favour of the concept of royalty.

In any discussion on royalty, one of the arguments against it you’ll hear quite often and quite early on is ‘I don’t think anyone should be considered “better” than anyone else.’ – in other words, they see the meaning of ‘royalty’ as being that some people in society should be higher up, higher in status, more important, intrinsically more moral people – better.

It’s a weird argument, because I don’t think anyone who is a royalist today actually believes that members of the royal family are better, more worthy, than the rest of us. I think royalists just see the royal family as inheritors of an ancient tradition who have a life-long duty to preserve a substantial proportion of our cultural heritage. That does not make them better, or more worthy. They are not necessarily more moral people, nor should they escape justice when justice is needed. Now sure, we should expect higher standards of them than we do of most people, since they are the inheritors of this legacy, and the performers of its rituals, but this does not mean they are necessarily better.

I think the people who see royalty as some kind of status of intrinsic superiority are obsessed with what they believe the symbolism of royalty is rather than the practical, real effects that we see in society as a result of them (or even, indeed, a truer, actual symbolism, rather than a false interpretation). In that sense they are the same as the writers of Game of Thrones (and the very small number of people who actually liked that final episode).

So I find I need a word to describe this phenomenon. I choose symbolomania – the obsession with symbols or symbolism – usually a perceived symbolism – over reality or over a more logical understanding of something.

Words of Killing – Words that end with the Latin suffix ‘-cide’

Continuing my series of posts about different etymological families of words, let’s look at the words that end with ‘-cide’.

Once again, these words may be of particular use to fantasy and science fiction authors, like me, as rather a lot of murder happens in these genres. Words like ‘regicide’ – the killing of a king – ‘deicide’ – the killing of a god – or ‘tyrannicide’ – the killing of a tyrant – are obviously useful.

The full list of words that end with ‘-cide’ is quite long, and many of them are technical or scientific, so I won’t cover all of them here – I’ll just look at the ones that might be called poetically interesting.

Word	Origin	Meaning
suicide	from Latin sui, ‘of oneself’, and cidium, ‘a killing’, ultimately from caedere, ‘to slay’	the killing of oneself
homicide	from Latin homo, ‘man’, ‘person’	the killing of another person
feminicide	from Latin femina, ‘woman’	the killing of a woman; ‘femicide’ is also used, but this seems to be a needless contraction
uxoricide	from Latin uxor, ‘wife’	the killing of one’s wife
patricide	from Latin pater, ‘father’	the killing of one’s father
matricide	from Latin mater, ‘mother’	the killing of one’s mother
fratricide	from Latin frater, ‘brother’	the killing of one’s brother
sororicide	from Latin soror, ‘sister’	the killing of one’s sister
senicide	from Latin senex, ‘old man’	the killing of an old man
regicide	from Latin rex, ‘king’	the killing of a king
tyrannicide	from Greek tyrannos, ‘lord’, ‘master’	the killing of a tyrant
vaticide	from Latin vates, ‘prophet’, ‘seer’, ‘diviner’	the killing of a prophet or seer – potentially a very useful word for fiction
deicide	from Latin deus, ‘god’	the killing of a god
genocide	from Greek genos, ‘race’, ‘kind’	a fairly modern word, less than 100 years old, meaning ‘the killing of an ethnic group’; this word is used incorrectly more than it is used correctly
feticide	from Latin fetus, ‘fetus’	the killing of an unborn child
filicide	from Latin filius, ‘son’, filia, ‘daughter’	the killing of one’s son or daughter
prolicide	from Latin proles, ‘offspring’	the killing of one’s children
floricide	from Latin flos, ‘flower’	the killing of flowers
felicide	from Latin feles, ‘cat’	the killing of a cat – a grave crime
vulpicide	from Latin vulpes, ‘fox’	the killing of a fox
ceticide	from Latin cetus, ‘whale’, ‘sea monster’	the killing of a whale, the killing of a sea monster – possibly a very useful word
avicide	from Latin avis, ‘bird’	the killing of a bird
libricide	from Latin liber, ‘book’	the killing of books
verbicide	from Latin verbum, ‘word’	the killing of a word, usually by perversion of its original or proper meaning
linguicide	from Latin lingua, ‘language’	the killing of a language
temporicide	from Latin tempus, ‘time’	the killing of time – potentially a very fun word to use
liberticide	from Latin libertas, ‘freedom’	the killing of freedom, liberty
legicide	from Latin lex, ‘law’	the killing of laws

Aischomania – The obsession with making oneself ugly

You’ve either noticed it or you haven’t. If you haven’t noticed it, then there’s probably nothing I can do to point it out to you. If you have noticed it, then you probably already know what I’m talking about before I explain it.

Over the last few years, there have been a number of people – a very small number as a proportion of the total population, but very noticeable online – who seemed have developed an obsession with making themselves ugly.

Again, you either know who I mean or you don’t.

This is not something I saw coming. I think it is an internet phenomenon – it’s a phenomenon, for the most part, created by the internet – social media in particular. But ten years ago I would never have seen this coming.

Why do these people do it? I think it’s driven largely by a desire to be different – to be unique. Our society values individuality, which means that anything that shows you as not being like other people is desirable. It’s a fashion to show how you aren’t following the trend – how you’re doing something different – how you’re setting a new trend.

Of course, all of these people end up looking the same. Every generation has had this: a group of people who think that they are all different and special and unique, but who ultimately all end up looking the same. In the 90s and early 2000s it was the Goths. In the mid and late 2000s it was the Emos.

But unlike the Goths, who were (as far as I can tell) just obsessed with black dyed hair, eyeliner, black nail polish, and black clothes, and unlike the Emos, who were just obsessed with eyeliner and a brightly-coloured streak of hair sweeping across their face, covering their eyes, this latest cohort seems to be just obsessed with making themselves ugly. They favour mullets (a hairstyle that I’m sure a few years ago we all agreed should never make a return) – or more often a mullet with the front half of their head shaved. They favour nose piercings – like the ones that cows sometimes have. They reject the idea that people who are slender and muscular are generally better-looking. Like their predecessors, they are obsessed with coloured hair, but it is often a garish mixture of colours that do not go together.

I think this is driven by the desire to look different, but also with the presupposition that there is no such thing as objective beauty – that beauty is wholly subjective. This is a curse that has afflicted the Anglosphere for some time. The reality is that beauty is not wholly subjective. It’s not wholly objective either – it’s partly objective and partly subjective. That explains why humans have such a terrible time understanding it – we like absolutes – absolutes are easy to remember. It’s the same with fine art – paintings and the like – the beauty of a painting is not wholly subjective. The beauty of a building is not wholly subjective. The quality of a book or a movie is not wholly subjective. All of these things are partly objective.

If you are not yet disavowed of the idea that beauty is subjective, consider this: ask a thousand people who is better looking: Chris Hemsworth or Boris Johnson. You already know, roughly, what the results of such a survey would be before you see them. You could try the same survey with many such pairs of well-known people. You would, very often, be able to roughly predict the results. How are you able to do this unless there is a pattern to them? That pattern is simply an objective fact about human beings – what human beings consider beauty to be. That pattern might vary slightly from one society to another, but it cannot be wholly gainsaid. You also may not be able to predict equally as reliably how an individual person might respond to the survey, but that does not negate the pattern for a large population. Beauty is partly objective.

And I think all of these people who are obsessed with making themselves ugly, on some level, know this. What they do is about rebellion. It is using rebellion, as fashion, as a signifier of how virtuous they perceive themselves to be (where, in a society that values individuality and self-expression, non-conformity is considered a virtue). In a society that has mastered beauty (through cosmetic products, digital photo editing, the millions-strong filter for beauty that is Instagram, and even plastic surgery and weight loss injections), ugliness is the only form of aesthetic rebellion that remains.

I have seen this phenomenon enough times now that I find I need a word for it. As always, the best English words are constructed from Latin or Greek elements. There is an Ancient Greek word, αἶσχος, aiskhos, meaning ‘ugliness’, but also ‘disgrace’ or ‘disgraceful deeds’. This would seem to be the perfect word, so I name this phenomenon aischomania – ‘the obsession with making oneself ugly, usually as an act of social or cultural rebellion’. (I have tried to mimic the usual pattern of consonant changes when words travel from Ancient Greek to English, but I might have gotten it wrong.)

This word could also be applied metaphorically to the obsession with ugliness seen in other areas of modern life. Brutalist architecture – and a lot of later styles – is an example of aischomania. Modern art is, often, an example of aischomania. Even some contemporary styles of music are.

Aischomania – the obsession with and desire for ugliness, often with the belief that there is a kind of moral purity that can be found only through disgrace and self-degradation.

Words of Creation – Words that end with the Greek suffix ‘-poeia’

A few weeks ago, I came across the word ‘mythopoeic’. What a nice-looking word! Dictionaries give its meaning as ‘pertaining to the creation of myths’, but I sense it has a true meaning that is a bit subtler than that.

It comes from Greek mythos – obviously – meaning ‘myth’, ‘story’, ‘thought’, ‘discourse’, and Greek poiein, meaning ‘to create’ – from which we also get the word ‘poet’. Who’d’ve thought – the word ‘poet’ literally just means ‘one who creates’. (I guess that means we’re all poets now. Oh dear.)

From ‘mythopoeic’ we can get to ‘mythopoeia’, which is ‘the creation of myths’. It didn’t occur to me, at first, that there were other words ending with ‘-poeia’, but there are, and these form an etymological family of words all pertaining to creation.

As always with this series of posts, first I will list words ending with this suffix that I’ve found in dictionaries. (It may not be an exhaustive list.)

Word	Meaning
pharmacopoeia	‘the making of medicine’
logopoeia	The creation of words – not in the sense of coining new words, but in the sense that a word is formed over time by its usage in different contexts, and the associations it gains through its usages. (This word may be worth a blog post of its own.)
phanopoeia	The creation of images – particularly within the mind, the visual imagination.
melopoeia	The creation of sounds – again particularly in the sense of writing that builds the idea of a sound in the mind.
prosopopoeia	The putting of words into the mouths of others – what a great word. (A complex etymology.)
onomatopoeia	The famous one – ‘the formation of words or names by imitation of natural sounds’.

Most of these ‘-poeia’ words are quite grand, so perhaps any new words made with the ending should be similarly grand. Below I’ve thrown together some new words that could be made with this ending, but they’re a bit literal.

Word	Meaning	Adjectival Form
geopoeia	‘the creation of the Earth’	geopoeic
rhabdopoeia	‘the creation of wands / staffs’ – a great one for fantasy – a person who creates wands or staffs (like Ollivander) could be a ‘rhabdopoet’ – particularly in reference to the magical, rather than mechanical, aspects of creating a wand	rhabdopoeic
astropoeia	‘the creation of stars’ – for extra grandeur of concept, this could be used for metaphorical stars – i.e., celebrities – ‘the process by which a person becomes a celebrity and the crafting of their public image’ (although perhaps this rather removes grandeur than adds it)	astropoeic
oneiropoeia	‘the creation of dreams’ – again, could be used for literal dreams, or this word could be used to refer to how aspirations are instilled in the people of a given society – i.e., the process by which the American Dream is instilled	oneiropoeic
arithmopoeia	‘the creation of numbers’ – could be used to refer to the process by which mathematicians deduce that a different class of number (such as imaginary and complex numbers) is needed	arithmopoeic
chronopoeia	‘the creation of time’ – could be used to refer to how different events and activities create the perception of time in the mind – i.e., a very boring activity that makes time go slow is chronopoeic	chronopoeic
sophopoeia	‘the creation of wisdom’ – could be used to refer to the methods and environments that create wisdom within those going through education	sophopoeic
alethopoeia	‘the creation of truth’ – could be used to refer to how governmental and media institutions try to ‘create’ a ‘truth’ that may well be different from actual, objective truth (although perhaps this is a rather grim usage of such a grand word)	alethopoeic

No, the comma does not always go before the closing quote mark – Logical Punctuation

‘The comma always goes before the closing quote mark.’

I’ve heard this a number of times over the last 7 years or so – mostly, but certainly not exclusively, from Americans.

And I had heard it in life before that too. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard it – I think it was possibly in secondary school, from one of my secondary school English teachers. But I do remember that when I first heard it, I immediately thought ‘That’s silly.’.

Consider the following sentence.

‘I think I like pears more than I like apples.’

Now let’s imagine that this is a line said by someone – a character in a novel, perhaps. Now, the ‘he said’ / ‘she said’ could be put at the end.

‘”I think I like pears more than I like apples.”, she said.’

Or we could split the sentence and put the ‘he said’ / ‘she said’ in the middle.

‘”I think”, she said, “I like pears more than I like apples.”‘

This illustrates the problem. That first comma in the line above – those who say ‘The comma always goes before the closing quote mark.’ would have it go before the first closing double quote mark – immediately after the word ‘think’.

But I think this is ridiculous. That comma is not part of the original sentence – what this person is actually saying. It is not part of the ‘inner sentence’ – it is part of the ‘outer sentence’. For clarity, I’ve written the same text again below, but coloured the ‘inner sentence’ green and the ‘outer sentence’ blue.

‘”I think“, she said, “I like pears more than I like apples.“‘

The double quote marks are the demarcations between the inner and outer sentences. You can join together all of the separately-quoted parts of the inner sentence to get back the original thing being quoted.

If we were to follow the ‘The comma always goes before the closing quote mark.’ rule, however, we would have:

‘”I think,“ she said, “I like pears more than I like apples.“‘

This is clearly less elegant. The inner and outer sentence are now mixed together across the quote marks.

So I would say that the correct rule is: only that which is part of the quote goes within the quote marks.

Now sure, commas are for adding structure to written language – we do not speak them. (Well, they sort-of represent pauses in spoken language, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and they’re better understood as making clauses easier to recognise in written text.) But that structure is still either of the inner sentence or the outer sentence, and putting a comma in the inner sentence when it’s actually part of the outer sentence can change the meaning.

I learned a while ago that my preferred style of using punctuation is called logical punctuation. And apparently the other style – the comma-before-the-quote-mark style – is known as typographer’s punctuation, or something like that. I’m not too sure about these names. ‘Logical punctuation’ is a bit grandiose, even if it is more logical, and I don’t know why typographers would be expected to be so slapdash in their approach to punctuation. But apparently these are terms that are used.

I’ve also seen it said that logical punctuation is the British style, and the other way is the American style. I’ve certainly heard Americans advocate for the comma-before-the-quote-marks style more often. I’ve heard Britons insist upon it too, though whether this is just because of the cultural backwash we get from America, I can’t say.

But regardless of what the best names for these styles are, and regardless of whether the Britons or the Americans use one style more, it is better to use logical punctuation.

The main argument I hear in favour of the American style is ‘It looks better.’. There’s just something about the lower punctuation mark followed by the higher one that looks better than the inverse. While aesthetics are very important in language, to some extent (only some) what you like is just what you get used to over time, and aesthetics should generally not be at the expense of function and semantics. (There are exceptions, of course, but generally.)

Some would say that my approach is perhaps the product of a mathematical mind. (I am a physicist by training.) You can certainly see the appeal of logical punctuation to a mathematical mind – logical punctuation perfectly mimics the way brackets work in mathematics. However, this is somewhere where the penetrating orderliness of mathematics should influence human language. Using logical punctuation allows you to avoid a great many problems that arise if you try to use the American style. The American style generally applies not just to commas, but to all punctuation. Consider the following sentence.

‘What did he say after “You’re not supposed to do that?”‘

The typographer’s style advocates for putting that question mark before the closing double quote mark, as I’ve written it above. But is the question mark part of the inner sentence or the outer sentence? Or both? You can’t tell – but it changes the meaning. If the question mark is part of the inner sentence, the person being quoted is asking a question. If it’s not part of the inner sentence, the person being quoted is making a statement.

This is clearly a problem, and if you try to follow the American style for an entire book, you will run into variations of this problem over and over again – with no way to be both consistent and always unambiguous. (You might think the problem won’t come up very often, but it does – it comes up A LOT.)

Logical punctuation solves this easily. If the inner sentence is a statement, you write:

‘What did he say after “You’re not supposed to do that.”?’

and if it’s a question, you write:

‘What did he say after “You’re not supposed to do that?”?’

Some people might find it visually clumsy to have all those punctuation marks bundled together like that. But again, the aesthetics you can adjust to if you just get used to it – but the semantic issues of the typographer’s style cannot be cleanly resolved.

I hope that logical punctuation becomes more popular. Britons seem to be split on it. But I think it’s an easy rule to remember: only that which is part of the quote goes in the quote marks.