The taint

I’ve been watching this phenomenon for some time now, and finally reached a point where I can isolate it and, perhaps, understand it. Correct me if I’m wrong.

In the olden days, when dragons roamed the land and portable music players had cassettes in them instead of mp3s, LD cases began with a construct of value and criterion, plus whatever definitions were necessary for meaningful discussion of the topic. This would be followed by what were called contentions or lines of analysis, which were the arguments the debater was offering to support a side of the resolution. The lion’s share of time and energy was spent on these arguments. An argument could be one long, complicated presentation, broken down into easily understood chunks of point and subpoint, or a debater could offer a couple of complementary or even independent arguments to support a position. If I remember correctly, at the time Taft was in the White House, and they had just installed his special supersized bathtub.

Then things changed. Because there was almost from the very beginning a reliance on the V/C construct to help judges evaluate the arguments, and because suddenly there seemed to be debate camps in every Middlesex village and town, not to mention on the moon, under the Atlantic, and presumably in Hobbiton as well, there came through the various lands new emphases on these V/C constructs, made again and again by those to whom these constructs were very important, i.e., the judges who used them to evaluate rounds, and the camp instructors (often the same people) who used them as something to talk about at their institutes when they ran out of ribald stories about the coaches of yore and their heirs and assignees. The shapes of cases began to shift, and instead of a balance of roughly 1/3 setup of construct and 2/3 argumentation, it began to be about half and half construct and argument. In other words, debaters began to devote half their debating time to analysis of how to analyze their debating, and half their debating time to, well, debating. Creative minds could and did wreak havoc with this new allotment of time, and introduced all sorts of off-case, independent, sub-dependent, non-dependent, theory-based, topic-critical, acritical, you-name-it constructs that obviated the need for argumentation, and occasionally even vilified it. Less creative minds simply proffered increasingly muddled V/C constructs at great length, often listing multiple criteria with various rules and regulations for adjudicating a round depending on which criteria/criterion was used for the adjudication, much like an old make-your-own-adventure-game approach, where if you go down this path, this happens, and if you go down that path, that happens. Turn to page 33 to continue, if you know what I mean.

Now, in the present day, there’s a new wrinkle. I’ve been seeing this off and on in the last year or two in Sailor cases, and in the odd round I’d judge, and I saw it again up at Lexington. There is a new tendency to break cases up into three parts. The first part is all that V/C construct stuff, and that’s 1/3 of one’s time allotment. The third and final part is the literal argumentation, i.e., the presentation of a position of some sort on the resolution. This, too, is 1/3 of one’s time allotment. In the middle, and taking up the other third of one’s time allotment, is something else. It’s not really V/C, and it’s certainly not argumentation. I’m not quite sure what it is, but mostly it seems to be some hifalutin explanation of the proceedings separate both from V/C and from argumentation. It is, in a word, the taint, as the old boys hangin’ around the pool hall would have it. I mean, ‘t ain’t one, and ‘t ain’t t’other. It contains no voting issues to speak of. I guess it’s something of a spin-off of all that off-case, independent, sub-dependent, non-dependent, theory-based, topic-critical, acritical, you-name-it stuff, finally given its own home in a case. So now the so-called sophisticated case one wants to emulate (assuming that one is a blithering follower of fashion) has three parts: V/C construct, arguments and taint.

Which makes me happy. As a word person, I find it useful to pin things down. You may find this antediluvian and reductive in the pejorative sense, but I find that, at least in this instance, knowing what something is helps me understand it better. I can imagine some future world in which taints—which contain no measurable, vote-inducing content—make sense to me, and I am encouraging the mighty Sailors to include them in their cases. But then again, I can also imagine some future world where we all travel to work with jetpacks on our back like escapees from some Depression-era world’s fair. In any case, I have now made two additions to the glossary on the right. One of them is the taint. The other one isn’t.