"Disambiguate, disambiguate!" Monday morning in Dalek mode

For a creative person, errands can feel bone-crushing. Here's my latest workaround.

Yarn-bombed Dalek in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Inveresk, Launceston, Tasmania. Photo: Gary Houston, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last year I learned a new word from my friend the historian, author, and non-profit founder Tamara J. Walker. The word is “disambiguate,” and it’s starting to change my life.

To disambiguate is to remove ambiguity from the meaning of something. If a word can mean many things, looking at how it’s used in a sentence can make clear, or disambiguate, which sense the author intended in this instance.

My brain has created a pro version of “disambiguate.” This leans into the “ambi” part of the word, which means “both” or “around” in Latin. For example, someone might pile a bunch of disparate thoughts into the same paragraph - things that would work better parsed out - disambiguated - and dealt with in separate paragraphs.

I like “disambiguate” for the process of forking apart ideas that are competing for attention, for teasing apart word salads that bristle with acrobatic moves but that don’t stick the landing. And - best of all - “disambiguate” works for distilling amorphous feelings of fear and loathing into distinct annoyances that are contained enough to fix.

This brings me to this morning’s Dalek breakthrough.

Getting copy edits and pages proofs of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY done this summer meant procrastinating on a bunch of errands that ranged from slightly meh to utterly terrifying . You know the type: log into an unpleasant portal, fill in a form with too-small boxes, or - worst of all - Make A Phone Call. I label these errands YTML - You’ll Thank Me Later. This magnificent phrase comes from an episode of Frasier, a 1990s/2000s comedy series that’s as smart as its situations are hilarious.

As I geared up to start my YTML errands, I found myself muttering “disambiguate, disambiguate!” in an effort to get the fear and loathing under control. It was as if I had absorbed the power of the Daleks in Dr Who, alien robots like upside-down cones with blender arms sticking out of their stomachs, machines that whoosh around chanting ominously, “exterminate, exterminate!”

And why not? For the tasks weren’t actually scary or difficult. (Not today, anyway). They were just… boring.

I had to interrupt the chain of thought that went from “This errand doesn’t ‘spark joy’” (to use organizing consultant Marie Kondo’s great phrase) to “The world is ending.” I had to separate two propositions that had gotten tangled up in my lizard-brain reaction to the growing mound of short tasks, each requiring totally different forms / portals / documents / content. I had to … DISAMBIGUATE these thoughts!

The new internal monologue:

“This errand doesn’t spark joy / is boring” leads to: “This errand comes with music / ends in a treat.” I listened to a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album. I streamed The Jazz Show with Jamie Cullum on BBC Radio 2 (I didn’t know there was anything good on Radio 2 either, but I’ve been listening to this show for over a year and it is fab). No worlds are ending.

It worked!

Four YTML errands got done in three tomatoes (three 25-minute timed pomodoro sessions). Three tomatoes is a daily max for YTMLs - otherwise my subconscious brain will never let me start them.

Here’s hoping for Dalek focus and energy for all my readers this week!

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Takes and recs

I just finished R. F. Kuang’s Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It’s a gorgeously written adventure, a work of speculative fiction set in nineteenth-century Oxford, seeded with a story about the British empire powered - in this case - by silver given special powers through acts of literary translation.

I wonder whether disambiguate is a power word? I won’t say more because SPOILERS, but capacious, even provocative definitions of words help us to think outside the boxes of convention. And that’s something I do with monster in my forthcoming book.

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Preorder Humans: A Monstrous History

There are links here, or you can order it via preferred bookstore anywhere in the world. It may already be in their online catalogue! From October 4, anyone in the US or Canada will be able to order it at a 30% discount from the University of California Press website.

For the extraordinary power of preorders for authors, see my previous newsletter here.

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Upcoming talks

Weds October 2nd at 12 noon-1pm EDT (virtual): Renaissance Society of America, with Leah Redmond Chang, “Creative and Narrative Nonfiction: What, How, and Why.” Open to members of the society. Anyone can join the society here. You can register here for the webinar.

Weds October 30 at 5pm EDT (virtual): Harvard University Renaissance Studies Seminar, “A Monstrous Renaissance History for Our Times”. Register here.