Caught the snippet of some show through the toes darkly (that’s not the name of the show, just the position I caught it in) there’s this math professor Pointing to a board with all these fancy math problems with lines, parenthesis, letters and numbers and he’s all …” I love numbers, and there’s only ten, like counting on your fingers …” and he goes into some personal revelation and lets the class go.
I rolled over.
First off most of what was on the board weren’t numbers at all, second ten is wrong, and I don’t mean in the smart-ass two of them are thumbs way, I mean in the very important way that zero is a number, if you ain’t got nothing it’s the only significant number. Thirdly, his lecture was one of those bad telling not showing rhetorical devices; the character tells you all you need to know about him couched as something inherent to his gig.
I suck at math, but I’m really good at pattern recognition. The highest level of math I ever learned was all rules, which is sort of the language equivalent of the alphabet, there’s no wiggle room, you don’t go anywhere without jumping that hurdle. I was shocked later in life to meet so many people who felt about language arts the way I did about math. To me language is intuitive and math counter intuitive.
I think the scriptwriter felt the same. I don’t think he could have faked sixty seconds of a real math lecture. A well-used rhetorical device is like a well-made cocktail, you can hardly tell there’s alcohol in it. In this case the formula of the show depended on the rhetorical device, but it also covered for not knowing the subject. Like a sport scene that takes place in a locker room.
The cool thing about doing fiction in the first person is that you don’t have to know anything more than what the character knows. The downside is you have to remember that, he can’t, for instance, not know how a gun works then go all macGuyver and make a bomb out of stuff in the 99 cent store.
Ok, rolling back over.
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