If On A Winter's Night An Economist

I too am intrigued by this question from Diskusi Ekonomi: Is there any case in which standard economic cost-benefit/incentive framework can not be applied into?

For a non economics student, this query might sound annoyingly stupid. But after you read economics,--Freakonomics, for instance--, it may not be that foolish anyway.

Today I think I find a case in which such framework might not work, that is, the problem of writing/reading/interpreting a literary work.

From Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, an excellent novel I fetched from the library to balance my other winter-break reading of, well, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, I read this passage:

"...She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record list all of the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. "That way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, "with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistence of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don't pay them any attention. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book"..." --page 182.

For me, that is a futile attempt to decipher a literary work or text. I know next to nothing of linguistic or literary criticism, but it seems to me that Calvino mocked the use of content analysis.

OK, I digress. My point is that in interpreting a novel, economics does not help, too. And that's perfectly fine.

My own stupid analysis: when ease sounds yucky

Good God I’m not a police officer (in Indonesia). ‘Cause if I were one, at some point in my career I would have been called a “kompol”. That is an abbrev for Komisaris Polisi or police commissioner (it was “mayor”, Indonesian for “major”, back in the era before the police wanted to be different from its army and navy competitors). It sounds like “ngompol”, an Indonesian slang for an act of “unintentional pee”. You know, as in “Honey, wake up, he ngompol again” – said a woman to her husband as their baby wets the bed in the middle of the night (conversation back in the days when diapers were not as good).

No, it’s not just the police, of course. I’m sure you have heard tastipikor, setwapres, jampidsus, musrembang, or back then, sesdalopbang (google-up yourself, I've made my point). I don’t know if it’s just me, but dikdasmen (pendidikan dasar dan menengah – basic and mid-level education) reminds me of basement and budpar (budaya dan pariwisata – culture and tourism) really sounds like a thunder.

Bank Indonesia is the winner. They have this campaign against counterfeit money with a rupiah identification method called “3D”: dilihat, diraba, diterawang (looked, touched, held-up-to-the-light). It is really funny, because they used the prefixes as the basis for the abbrev – not the words themselves! (lihat, raba, terawang – to look, to touch, to hold up to the light). Maybe it is because LRT doesn’t sound catchy enough. Or maybe they got it from marketing class somewhere. Well, in either case, I guess they could have come up easily with 10D, then – should they want.

Them in Hollywood are equally ridiculous: Brangelina.

Wonder now. Why is it SBY rather than Susbamyo? JK rather than Juskal?

Is this yet another market-gone-wild thing? Because I thought you can’t even force something that sounds too funny. So, I guess it’s a matter of time, kompol will die out. Wanna bet?

Shoot, I still prefer the SMS way.