Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Up & Us

Up

Up — Skyward. Or moving away from the sky, perhaps, if you’re above it. Unless up means going northward, which might drive cartographers to drink but the dictionary says it’s cool. Or hitting a certain level, as in “When I did the physical challenge in Double Dare, I was up to my armpits in chocolate pudding.” Up is also how I take my whiskey, but that’s because I’m too lazy to get ice.

Going up also means elevating. So let’s talk elevators. Who invented the first elevator? This is a bad question to ask at trivia night, since the answer depends on what an elevator even is. Does an elevator need a pulley system? Does it need a cage or a platform? If all an elevator is just an object that lifts something, then aren’t we all elevators?

Let’s step away from the question “who invented the elevator?” and ask the more precise “which individuals had the most noticeable impact on elevator design?” Archimedes is first on that list. According to Vitruvius’ writings in 236 B.C., Archimedes wrapped ropes around a drum and used manpower to wind that rope around a capstan. That invention is centuries before ‘the first elevator’ a lot of others writers insist on crediting to engineers in the Versailles Palace in 1743. At the behest of Louis XV, a ‘flying chair’ was added to the king’s bedroom so he could be lifted to his mistresses’ chambers. The palace also included a ‘flying table’ which allowed servants to plate meals while out of sight, then lower the table through the ceiling of the dining room. When the meal was complete, the table would be lifted once more and the dishes cleared without the pesky need for royals to acknowledge the existence of their servants.

But when someone asks “Who invented the modern elevator?” the trivia game answer is usually Elisha Graves Otis. His legacy still lives. The next time you step into an elevator, look for the name brand ‘Otis’. There’s a 22% chance you’ll spot it.

Otis was a toymaker, craftsman, and inventor of a robot turner that made bedsteads, safety brakes for trains, and automatic bread bakers, among many other things. But when the city of Albany diverted a stream to increase its fresh water drinking supply, Otis’ fortune floundered. He relied on a water wheel to power his workshop. Overnight, a great number of projects ground to a halt.

Since he couldn’t work on the projects he wanted, Otis decided to clear floorspace. He wanted to build a hoisting platform to move machines to the upper levels of his workshop, but he didn’t want to risk destroying his hard work if the platform ropes unmoored themselves. So he invented a safety brake that could kick in if the rope slipped, locking the platform in place. He moved a bunch of machinery this way, then moved on. He didn’t patent or attempt to sell his hoisted platform safety brake. It was only intended to perform a single job in his workshop, and Otis moved on.

The bedstead factory he worked for declined, and Otis eventually returned to this invention. He took a risk and flipped his little invention factory into an elevator company. No orders came in for several months. In the minds of the consumer, hoisted platforms were risky and the brake was a gimmick. Otis could say his platforms were safe, but that’s what every manufacturer sells you.

So Otis made the logical next choice. He put his life on the line inside The Crystal Palace at the New York World’s Fair of 1853. While fairgoers looked on, Otis hoisted himself high in the air, then demanded the hoisting rope be cut. Spectators gasped as the platform fell. But Otis only fell a few inches before the safety locks kicked in with a slight jolt. The trick worked, and sales of Otis Safety Elevators skyrocketed, allowing passengers to ride up multiple floors that would otherwise be nightmare stair climbs. Soon, the first skyscrapers in New York City were using Otis’ elevators, and the race to the clouds was on.

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Us

Us — The group that includes myself. There’s an odd problem with ‘Us’ and ‘We’ in that the two pronouns don’t specify whether or not the person being spoken to is part of the group. Telling me that “We’re all getting ice cream” could be a great time or a tragedy depending on whether or not I’m part of the ‘we’. “We all have appointments with the gynecologist” could be too much information, or a shocking development for me. This is why it’s important to ask.

Not every language features this glitch. In fact, the distinction of who is included in ‘us’/’we’ is a common enough feature among world languages. But not any European languages. Clusivity is peppered across the rest of the globe. Sometimes it’s the predominant way to use us/we, like in the language groups of Australia and South East Asia, and sometimes it appears randomly with no apparent pattern, such as how it’s sprinkled among the Indigenous American languages.

On occasion, the desire for clusivity is built off of the first person singular pronoun. There’s something appealing about using ‘we’ as a sort of ‘me plus’. In Vietnamese, for example, the familiar word for I is ‘ta’, and the more formal word for I is ‘tôi’. To make the inclusive and exclusive plural, we add the prefix chúng, so it becomes chúng ta for inclusive we, and chúng tôi for exclusive we. It’s not perfectly aligned, but you can get a feel for the distinctions that original Vietnamese speakers were playing with.

The lack of clusivity in English can cause confusion, but we can make ourselves clear through context. When Louis Jordan sings “There Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” it’s obvious he’s not including the farmer who’s yelling about all the noise in his barn. Or when John Denver sings “It’s in everyone of us, to be wise.” he’s talking about everyone that exists. At least I hope that’s the case, and he’s not talking about everyone but you because that would be awkward for you, my dude.

But whenever we use ‘us’ or ‘we’, there will always be ambiguity. And where there’s ambiguity, there’s the potential for making an equivocation fallacy, or a fallacy that hinges upon the double meaning of a word. It’s a trick that some sly debaters take advantage of to muddy the gray area between us an organization, and us which includes you. ‘Our party believes that party members should pay dues to keep the party running. That’s what we all believe in. So since that’s what you believe, it’s time to pay your dues right now. Get out your wallet.”

Madsen Pirie uses this variation on a classic example of the equivocation fallacy in How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic:

Half a loaf is better than nothing.
Nothing is better than good health.
Therefore, half a loaf is better than good health.

On the surface, this proof tracks. But it relies on ‘nothing’ meaning the same thing in sentence one and two, which it doesn’t. In the first sentence, nothing means the absence of anything. In the second sentence, nothing means the highest extreme which can not be exceeded. By sentence three, the two definitions turn half a loaf of bread into an alchemist’s panacea.

The next time you want to be sneaky about winning a debate, feel free to muddle the word ‘us’. Sucker the opposition early into agreeing that your organization believes in something (how could they argue against you when you say ‘we believe that people are fundamentally good’ in a tone that infers you’re talking about your own organization?) then follow with a line of arguments that they must refute. Later in your debate, point out your opponent’s hypocritical stance (“But you already agreed with me that ‘people are fundamentally good’! You just said that five minutes ago!”) and when they try to double back, hit them with distracting emotional baggage (“Not only only are you flip flopping, but you don’t even think people are good!”) Recycle and repeat.

Or I suppose you can be the boring kind of person that points out equivocation fallacies when you see them. What a shame. Some people just want to watch the world learn…