The title “who’s your audience” reminded me to blog this:

I use Jott.com to send myself memos from my cellphone when I know I’m going to otherwise forget to write something down later. The reason I prefer this to using the voice memo feature of my phone (or to simply leaving myself voicemail) is that Jott.com has the voice memo transcribed and sends it to the email address of my choice. I think it’s a really great service, and for now, it’s gratis.

Recently, my “jotts” to myself have been things to add to a shopping list. The other day, I speed-dialed Jott.com (press ‘J’ and hold) and left myself the following memo:

Kosher salt and Kleenex

Here’s the email I received:

This says quite a lot, I think, about whom Jott employs for transcriptions. I’m willing to believe that someone working in a cubicle farm in America’s heartland doesn’t know what kosher salt is, even that they might not know the word ‘kosher’. I’m also willing to believe that my accent makes ‘kosher’ the way I say it sound like ‘culture’ they way they say it. But “clean X” — that’s a dead giveaway that the transcriptionists aren’t American. “Clean X” is a perfect phonetic representation of Kleenex® so it’s not a pronunciation issue.

Paul Cantor closes his defense of The Simpsons with the following metaintellectual metajoke:

Few people have found the Critique of Pure Reason funny, but in The Gay Science, Nietzsche felt that he had put his finger on Kant’s joke:

“Kant wanted to prove in a way that would puzzle all the world that all the world was right — that was the private joke.… He wrote against the learned on behalf of the prejudice of the common people, but for the learned and not for the common people.”

In Nietzsche’s terms, The Simpsons goes one better than the Critique of Pure Reason: it defends the common man against the intellectual, but in a way that both the common man and the intellectual can understand and enjoy.

Having listened to 80% of David Gordon’s recent seminar on the history of political philosophy, I have Plato and Aristotle on the brain, so I immediately notice a similarly ironic contrast between the two:

• Plato wrote in a popular form — dramatic dialog — saying that only intellectuals should have political power and that common perceptions were false;
• Aristotle said that common understanding was, at base, correct, but he said it in such a way that only the most devoted intellectuals can manage to follow.