wh5 = who, what, where, when and why. The five basic questions that are the structure of any story. Explored in "Who says what, where, when and and Why: Context in Conversation." An introduction to Sociolinguistics through Conversation Analysis. wh5 is the blogsite of the book published 2008 by Nanundo-Phoenix, Tokyo.
Satoshi tells Masato he doesn’t need his old Windows computer.
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Satoshi: Unplugged it this morning. Come and pick it up anytime.
No, no, it runs fine.
Why’d I switch? Just got sick of all the wiring.
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Voice-over
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) liked Macs but didn’t like cables. Apple must have listened, the latest ones, most things being built-in, are relatively cable-free. Unlike PCs.
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Svetlana’s sending on a chain mail has consequences.
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Eva: You included my name in that chain letter, and the amount of spam in my mailbox jumped.
Svetlana: Coincidence, surely?
Eva: Explain this. I haven’t had anything but spam in Spanish for months, and not 24 hours after you put my email on your chain letter, I start getting spam from Nigeria and Belgium and, get this, from Germany.
Svetlana: You are German, no?
Eva: I get this email from a woman called Anina Buss. She claims to know me. She offers to go into business with me.
Svetlana: Lucky?
Eva: Where does she find out my email? Why does she know things about me?
Svetlana: What business does she suggest?
Eva: Vitamin pills.
Svetlana: Vitamin pills are good.
Eva: Vitamins to enhance language learning? Con.
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Voice-over
It could be a con. But it could also be Svetlana playing a joke on Eva.
Eva received a chain email from Svetlana.
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Eva: That email, about adding your name and passing it on, was from you, right?
Svetlana: Well, it was for a children’s science fair.
Eva: You know, don’t you, what those chain emails are for, don’t you?
Svetlana: Well, for spreading the word about a cause, umm, helping people social network?
Eva: I can’t believe it. You know, they’re to collect email addresses for spammers. You just don’t pass them on. Not if you want to leak your friends’ email addresses to spammers.
Svetlana: It was from a friend, I just thought…
Eva: Of course it was from a friend. Where have you been all these years?
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Voice-over
Chain letters, passed by hand in the playground, were innocuous enough. Some of the goblins lurking in potholes on the digital road, are just waiting for you miss your step. Steer clear.
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Hank gives some advice on jogging to young Fred.
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Hank: Takes ten minutes for the pain to go, then you start to feel good.
Fred: Is it worth all the pain and sweat and exhaustion?
Hank: Adds years to your life.
Fred: Took years off that fellow wrote a book on running, what was his name, Jim Fixx?
Hank: Died at 52, sure, but his father died at 42.
Fred: Anyway, how do you take your mind off all the pain?
Hank: I hum Zippedydoodah. Sun comes out and the birds start singing.
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Voice-over
Instead of Zippedydoodah, maybe an iPod is the modern exercise pain-reliever.
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Voice-over
Let’s have a go at adapting a work of literature into a film scenario. It’s not of the quality of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but we all have to start somewhere.
“It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”
E.M. Forster. Howards End.
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Aunt Juley: I do like the way it opens.
Margaret: Really, Aunt Juley. Heroes and shipwrecks? The third movement…
Helen: Yes, yes, the goblins… and then the elephants dancing…
Tibby: (score open upon his knees) But listen out for the transitional passage, the drum coming in.
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Joseph, veteran political speech analyst, is asked by an interviewer whether Barack Obama will be different from George Bush.
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Joseph: If you look at the speeches they make, you see differences. George Bush uses a lot of the first person: “ I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security.”
Interviewer: Whereas Barack Obama…?
Joseph: Barack Obama uses “We” a lot. “We face a lot of problems.”
Interviewer: So this shows a difference in style? George Bush tends to be unilateral, Barack Obama, multilateral?
Joseph: Definitely. And there’s another defining characteristic between them. George Bush, talking about terrorism, used the expression, “You’re either with us or against us.” It’s a polarizing expression. Black vs. white. No room in the middle for maneouvering.
Interviewer: Or dialogue presumably.
Joseph: Right. A zero tolerancy approach. Hard power. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a proponent of soft power. It’s a multinational world. “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”
Interviewer: The speechmaker molds the leader we see?
Joseph: Partly. But an authoritarian, polarizing approach can also be a reflection of an insecure leader. They put up false dilemmas. Either… or… The secure leader listens and synthesizes.
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Elana tells Maria that her mother doesn’t have a cell phone.
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Elana: I bought her one and she just put it in a drawer and won’t use it.
Maria: Why bother?
Elana: It’s her heart. It sometimes stops and I worry she might have an attack when I’m not there.
Maria: There’s a telephone in the house isn’t there?
Elana: An old one, I mean it’s not even a push-button type. It’s got a round thing on the front… with holes, you know?
Maria: A telephone you actually have to DIAL?
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Voice-over
The digital divide becomes the social divide. You can certainly live without computers and cell phones, it is possible, yes. But negotiating with people who don’t use them can be difficult like sending an email or arranging a meeting point. It’s like encountering inhabitants from a parallel universe. Thinking of what to say to Robinson Crusoe. Or is this an overreaction?
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Shooting stops on the set while the scene is being rewritten by the author/scriptwriter.
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Sven: Dunno why you employed him to adapt his own book into a screenplay. Haven’t you always said, “Writers write books. Screenplay writers pick it up from there and prune the foliage?”
Ingmar: I know, but he’s a friend. And he asked.
Sven: Lots of fine descriptive sentences but too long. Plenty of clever dialogue, but again too long.
Ingmar: He knows the grammar of writing. But he doesn’t know the grammar of film. His sentences don’t translate into scenes and his paragraphs don’t translate into sequences. That’s why I’ve called in a rewriter.
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Voice-over
A metaphorical way to approach the differences of the grammar of writing and the grammar of film is to deconstruct as follows:
One letter is a metaphor for a frame.
One word is a metaphor for a shot.
One sentence is a metaphor for a scene.
A paragraph consisting of sentences is a metaphor for a sequence of scenes.
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Polly has told Basil his brochure cover needs some spicing up.
Basil: There. I added a Mickey Mouse.
Polly: You can’t do that.
Basil: Who says?
Polly: Copyright law says you can’t. You can’t copy their mouse. Disney still owns it. You can’t copy the form and manner. They can’t stop you using an original picture of a mouse.
Basil: All right. How about if I put in a picture of some other mouse?
Later:
Basil: There. It’s not Disney, it’s a photo I took myself.
Polly: A real rat? It gets attention, and copyright law won’t get you but do you think any guests will come?
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Voice-over
Polly is quite right about Mickey, but Disney doesn’t own the idea of mice, anthropomorphic or real. Basil, as usual however, goes to an extreme.
But then, there is the issue of copyright in parody photographs... For some, parody is how they survive and make sense of life.
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Joe the Plumber meets up with John McCain after the election.
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John McCain: Thanks for the help, Joe. Appreciated it.
Joe the Plumber: Obama won by a big majority. You said the polls were wrong. That people would tell pollsters they were going to vote black but on the day they’d vote white.
John McCain: The Bradley effect. Tom Bradley was a black candidate in the 1982 California governor’s elections, he was ahead in the poll predictions, but on the day, he lost. George Deukmejian, white candidate, just pipped Bradley. Some people worry about being politically correct and say one thing publicly, but think the opposite.
Joe the Plumber: So what happened to this Bradley effect?
John McCain: It didn’t happen. Happened to Tom Bradley in 1982. Colin Powell was still worried about the effect so he didn’t run in 1996. Maybe it has diminished.
Joe the Plumber: Maybe it never existed. Maybe it was just an excuse put up by the pollsters because they got their figures wrong.
Dr Yeoh is just finishing his presentation on item response theory. The audience is quiet, so the moderator asks a question.
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Moderator: Does the computer know if the student is guessing?
Dr Yeoh: That can be screened for by analyzing previous student responses. After that, this stochastic approach comes in. We can use a Bayesian Estimation if we know something about the background or history of the test-takers. Or we can use a Maximum Likelihood Estimation if we don’t know anything about the test-taking population.
Moderator: Can you give us an example?
Dr Yeoh: OK, like this. If the sky is already cloudy it will help make a prediction on whether it will rain or not. That’s Bayesian. But if we are remote, we don’t know whether the sky is cloudy or not, and we make a prediction based on previous cases, the history of the area, assuming a normal distribution, that’s Maximum Likelihood Estimation.
Moderator: That’s all we have time for. Please remember there are two discussion rooms. There is this fantastic room, E1, with hi-tech presentations, but the other one is, the other room, E2, is ah, wonderful too.
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Voice-over
One of the moderator’s tasks is to make a presentation conclude smoothly. Clarifying questions such as “Can you give us an example?” are a reliable standby.
Note the moderator’s dropped guard, flagged by the contrastive conjunction “but”, in expressing unconscious preference for Room E1 over E2.
Authorial interjection
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There are events in history we recall by what we were doing at the time they occurred in our lives.
I just watched (twice) Barack Obama’s victory speech. I can’t recall being so moved by U.S. politics since a day in 1963 when, on returning from tennis,my mother said, “John Kennedy died.”
Obama stood between flags flying behind him and thousands of cheering people in front of him.
And at the end of his speech, a gracious and pretty gripping speech, he tells a story. Not his own story.
One of a 106-year-old woman in Georgia, Ann Nixon Cooper, who voted.
“Born just a generation past slavery but for many years couldn’t vote for two reasons, because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.”
Symbols which punctuated her life: “She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We shall overcome.’ Yes we can.”
Then he diverted attention from the race issue.
“A man touched down on the Moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination,'' And then: “And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.”
The president-elect will face problems with the earth, energy, the economy, but at least he knows how to inspire people with stories.
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Voice-over
Telling a story can move crowds but repeating keywords can also pull them along with you. Did Barack Obama’s speechwriter increase the keyword count using a cloud tagger? America, campaign, change, hope, nation, people.
And Obama seemed to have learned this victory speech well. No TELETEXT in sight. When did he find time to memorize it? Or was he rehearsing already some months back?
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Terence disputes Dale’s insistence that speaking different languages leads to wars.
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Dale: I mean, if everyone spoke the same the language, we’d all understand each other, and we could resolve all disagreements by negotiation, and wars would die out.
Terence: When did you stop beating your wife?
Dale: What?
Terence: You speak the same language but you still argue.
Dale: I don’t beat her and I never did. What’s your point?
Terence: The point is, dear antipodean, that what have all these countries got in common? In alphabetical order:
Dale: Rice?
Terence: In those places, the people all spoke the same langu8age, understood each other but they had murderous wars. Words are not the be-all and end-all, they d0n’t solve everything. When did you stop beating your wife?
Dale: I don’t beat her and I never did. You going to take my photo saying this?
Terence: Later. I gotta go to the airport, see off K.
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