by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I am an English major.

Note that I did not say, “I was an English major.” English majors often use that construction to disguise the fact. Putting it in the past tense suggests it was a youthful indiscretion from which they have since recovered.

But being an English major is not a historical fact. It’s a psychological condition. It’s not an event that happened in the past; it’s an ongoing state of affairs that crops up shortly after puberty and complicates your life even more than that did.

Being an English major is like being left-handed . . . or very tall . . . or asthmatic. Once it sets in, you’re stuck with it. You have to deal with it all your life.

The symptomology is insidious. Onset is marked by a lot of reading, pleasant vocabulary, and a propensity to be “clever.” Since most of the K-16 educators are themselves liberal arts majors, the English major generally enjoys early success in academia.

But adulthood is not always kind to us. Turns out the rest of the world doesn’t much care about past participles. The rest of the world wouldn’t know a gerund from a groundhog . . . and they’re not in the least impressed that you do.¹ Nor do they appreciate having their memo’s punctuation corrected.

The problem permeates every aspect of your life. English major interpersonal relationships are complicated by the fact the rest of the world has a hard time fully appreciating knowledge which does not make the car start or breakfast taste better.

First dates are not liable to be advanced by an erudite discourse on James Joyce. Or, for that matter, Louise Penny or Ann Patchett. ²

And the job market is more like a job bodega. Or a street vendor. An employment kiosk.

There are lots of jobs for people who’ve studied other languages. If you learned Javascript or Python³ or SQL⁴ you will be able to afford food. If you studied English, you’re on a diet the day they hand you the diploma.

“What can you do with an English major?”
“You can teach English.”
“What else?”
“You can teach English as a Second Language.”
“What else?”
“You can go back to school and learn more stuff so you can be a lawyer or a museum curator or . . . teach English.”

For me, it was law school. And so, for the last fifty-two years, I’ve been making a very nice living out of my English degree. My congenital weakness for words, the defective gene that forces me to get this stuff out of my system⁵ has worked out pretty well for me. ⁶

But the times, they are a-changin’. A lot of words are sneaking into the language that I recognize as English but still have a hard time processing.⁷ Words like “nanoprocessor”⁸ and “blockchain” and “nonce.”

So help me, cryptocurrency is completely indecipherable to me. I watched the PBS documentary explaining it because it seemed like something I should know about. The documentary is fifty minutes long. I watched it for an hour and a quarter because I kept having to rewind it and listen to passages over again.

Nothing. I got nothing. It was about as helpful as a mime in a dark room.

In fact, my English major was counterproductive. Take the word “nonce,” which I mentioned two paragraphs ago. Anyone who’s read Shakespeare understands that word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, for at least 850 years, it’s meant “an occasion, an event, a particular purpose.” Shakespeare’s use of it in Hamlet—“or chalice for the nonce”—refers to the possibility of doing away with his uncle by putting poison in his cup.

Here's what the word means in Cryptocurrency World: “A nonce is a random whole number that miners in proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin iterate over to solve the cryptographic puzzle that allows them to add a new block and earn the block reward. A miner’s goal is to find a nonce where the SHA-256 hashed output begins with a certain number of zeroes. This allows PoW⁹ networks to adjust the mining difficulty, requiring more zeroes if blocks are being mined too fast.”

Ri-i-i-ight.
Uh . . . lemme get back to you on that.

My staff has become inured to my talk of retirement. They no longer pay any attention to it, and there’s probably no reason you should. But so help me, the first time a cryptocurrency case lands on my desk, I’m gone. Montgomery Gentry gone.¹⁰

Come to think of it, we may not have to wait that long. Here’s what my newspaper said to me today about fusion: “The National Ignition Facility consists of 192 gigantic lasers, which fire simultaneously at a metal cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser. The cylinder, heated to some 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit, vaporizes, generating an implosion of x-rays, which in turn heats and compresses a BB-size pellet of frozen deuterium and tritium, two heavier forms of hydrogen. The implosion fuses the hydrogen into helium, creating fusion.”

If there are members of my species advanced enough to be doing stuff like that, a language gap is not my biggest problem. I’ve somehow blundered into the wrong century. I’m still not certain I have a firm grasp on how a carburetor works, and these people are firing laser arrays at frozen deuterium.

They did this in Berkeley. I went to school in Berkeley when there was more tear gas in the air than nitrogen. I can vouch for the fact this barely makes the Top-10 list of strange goings-on in Berkeley.

But it still worries me. It reiterates for me that there are humans out there orders of magnitude smarter than I am. And more and more of them are going to law school. I can tell by the briefing. The issues get more complex every year. I may not last until cryptocurrency reaches my desk.

I wonder if there are any openings nearby for an English as a Second Language teacher.

BEDS NOTES

1. What’s the opposite of “impressed?” Not “unimpressed,” that’s not strong enough. More like “antagonized.”
2. English majors who find their way into film have a better chance here. Clever dialogue from Ryan Reynolds easily outpaces clever dialogue from Oscar Wilde.
3. Which is not how snakes talk, apparently.
4. Pronounced “sequel” by those who learned it and therefore own Teslas and vacation homes.
5. This is my defense for subjecting you to this column every month. It’s pretty much a “not guilty by reason of insanity” plea. What do you think? Are you ready to find me NGBRI yet, or do you need to keep reading?
6. It may not be the best thing that’s ever happened to you, but it’s worked out pretty well for me.
7. My difficulty is probably well illustrated by the fact the sentence you just read does not describe what most people now understand as “word processing.”
8. “A small control-oriented processor microcontroller without an ALU nor the ability to add or subtract.” Well, of course. I knew that.
9. Not a typo.
10. “Gone like a freight train; gone like yesterday; gone like a soldier in the Civil War: Bang, bang. Gone like a ’59 Cadillac . . .
    like all the good things, that ain’t never coming back.” It’s better when it’s put to music.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.