Thought That Came Unbidden

Is it possible to humiliate yourself?

Webster’s defines humiliate as “to reduce to a lower position in one’s own eyes or others’ eyes.”

If you’re engaged in a behavior or activity that makes you feel bad about yourself then yes, it probably is. But what if what you’re doing makes you feel stronger, more alive, more in control but someone else’s opinion is one of ridicule? Are you humiliated? Are you humiliated if you never know that other person’s opinion?

The MapMyWord Dictionary, which is a nifty little Google widget, lists the following for humiliation:

• state of disgrace or loss of self-respect
• strong feelings of embarrassment
• an instance in which you are caused to lose your prestige or self-respect
• depriving one of self-esteem

Seems to me like the only person who can humiliate you is yourself. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt was right.

In The Divine Comedy Dante declared that the 9th circle of hell was reserved for the treacherous. Treachery, he reasoned, lacked love therefore those who engaged in it should be as far from God’s love as possible. They should be denied any and all warmth and should, indeed, spend eternity in a sheet of ice.

Dante was full of shit.

The 9th circle of hell is having to deal with insurance company customer service representatives over the phone.

Take a virtual tour of the Inferno (requires Flash).

In my day job I’m a front end web geek. Roughly that means that I concentrate on things like communications strategy (Yes, really, we should communicate with our donors on a more regular basis than ‘whenever we remember to do so’), web standards, and accessibility. Yesterday I rolled out a new look and feel and a new information architecture for a site that, well, looks like it was built by a bored 15 year-old…in 1997. Oh the unclosed tags! Oh the nested tables! Oh the images displayed at incorrect sizes!

The best thing about this, though, is I got to play with the .htaccess file and let me just say that it redirect 301 is the coolest thing since sliced bread.

No more “empty” html files with meta redirect tags that trap the user in a 0 second loop trying to use the browser back to see what was on that page that just flashed in front of her face. No more “if this page doesn’t automatically reload please go here” messages. Just an elegant simple command that makes the server invisibly do the work.

Made me dance in my chair, it really did.

It’s been snowing here for about two hours. A light dusting that is barely covering the sidewalks. Yet, it seems so peaceful, so calm. It’s making me smile.

One of many in an occasional series examining words, usage, grammar, punctuation, slang, and other aspects of this living thing we call English.

I don’t read the book reviews in The Washington Post often. That is, mostly, because they review the sorts of books that while they may be great literature one day strike me as middle-brow pretention, particularly when more than a handful of people are reading the same book on the same subway car. Are they reading it because it’s good or because of some social pressure to keep up and be hip?

I view reading in much the same way I imagine a true gourmand views eating a meal: it is too big a pleasure to waste on that which will not bring pleasure or in some way nourish. In other words, don’t read it because you’re afraid you won’t be up-to-date on the latest cocktail party chatter; read it because the story intrigues you, or the author’s use of language makes your soul sing with joy. Read it because it might challenge your worldview and expand your horizons or give you insight into someone else’s perspective on or experience in the world. Read it because it makes you laugh.

I was intrigued enough today, though, to at least skim Carolyn See’s review of Alice Hoffman’s new book Skylight Confessions and I am so very glad I did for See uses possibly the most apt portmanteau I have run across in a very long time.

She writes of Hoffman’s book:

Because of the arduous demands of our so-called real lives, every society needs fairy tales, and Alice Hoffman, over the years, has excelled at producing them for us. This novel, for instance, features a glass house fancifully called the Glass Slipper, a ghost who can be seen by more than one person, flocks of birds that gather at the time and place of human death, magic stones with the power to save the shipwrecked and pearls that change color. There’s also “a tribe who lived on the other side of the water, in far-off Connecticut, who could sprout wings in the face of disaster. They looked like normal people until the ship went down, or the fire raged, and then they suddenly revealed themselves. Only then did they manage their escape.”

But the real magical thinking in “Skylight Confessions” comes from two dearly held and not-often-spoken-of female fantasies: the first, that men who spend their lives being mean and emotionally withholding to their wives and children will sooner or later see the error of their ways, go through a karmuppance of some kind and experience an overwhelming feeling of contrition. (This could happen. Actually, I’ve seen it occur twice in my own life.)

Buried there in the midst of a middling review of this book is the perfect word for that feeling we get when we want someting bad, maybe not too bad or possibly truly awful, to happen to someone who you believe deserves to have something uncomfortable happen to her as a result of her actions: karmuppance.

It is the perfect conflation of karma – which in the Western mind translates roughly to “you reap what you sow” – and comeuppance – defined by M-W.com as “a deserved rebuke or penalty.”

It is true that the concept of karma carries with it that good things can come to you as a result of your actions but that is not its only meaning. While both terms connote, and comeuppance denotes, retribution the combining of the two with the larger, more mystical aspects of karma makes the combination that much more powerful than either word by itself. Comeuppance’s implied immediacy with karma’s long-term, long range impact make up for the weaknesses in both: karma seems so much more serious yet we hardly ever get to see the bastard get what he deserves whereas comeuppance seems so light weight and transitory despite the immediate satisfaction of watching it work.

And there you have it. Karmuppance: a new word for a feeling that I am sure we have all had at one time or another.