Harvard Talk

Vaccines usually take 10 years to develop. The impetus of global lockdowns has given us one inside of a year. Once again, in a time of crisis, humanity has demonstrated its incredible reserve capacity.

It’s not as simple as an unusually focused commitment of resources, although that has certainly helped. The removal of bureaucratic barriers was also very helpful. But I’d guess an important factor, though unquantifiable and so overlooked, was the sense of purpose and duty that scientists and technicians and everyone else felt as they worked on one of the hundred-plus vaccine efforts of the past year.

Per usual, it was an imminent sense of crisis that spurred America to focus its resources and Americans to act with purpose. It was the threat of Germany and Japan in World War II that boosted America’s annual aircraft production from less than a thousand in 1939 to nearly 100,000 in 1944. Over the course of the war, that threat of annihilation allowed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Class of 1904, to move more than half a million people into the middle of the New Mexican desert and propelled them to split the atom.

Tom Lehrer is no longer a household name, but he was one of the most important political satirists of the 20th century. A musical comedian, his lyrics are edgy, irreverent and heroically creative. Working from the 1950s through the 1960s, he mocked the Church, the Army, the space program — no cow remained sacred. His crudity kept him off the radio and away from full mainstream success, but he still sold millions of records and, maybe more importantly, influenced the comedians of today. Weird Al Yankovich, Randy Newman, and Lizz Winstead, the creator of The Daily Show, all cite him directly. Bo Burnham is a clear spiritual descendant. As political satire has blitzkrieged mainstream American culture, it’s worth looking at its greatest practitioner in the 20th century and seeing what we can learn.

The most obvious element of Lehrer’s biography is his titanic intellect. In 1946, at the age of 18, he started his Ph.D. in math at Harvard (a place he memorably termed a “hotbed of celibacy”). In a group of friends that included a future Nobel laureate, he was considered “the intellectual leader.” Equally impressive as a musician, he once entertained friends at a Harvard party by playing Rachmaninoff in two keys at once, one for each hand.

In college, he wrote musical comedy simply to entertain at parties. But especially as Lehrer’s career took off, much of his work turned more political. On the nuclear arms race: “‘The Lord’s our shepherd’ / says the psalm / but just in case / we better get a bomb.” On nominal liberals: “It’s fun to eulogize the/ people you despise as / long as you don’t let them in your schools.”

What’s so important about rhyme? Why does it have a stranglehold on so much of humanity’s collective creative output? It has aesthetic power: “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky.” It flaunts wit: Lin-Manuel Miranda rhyming “jettison” with “debt is in.” And some artists show how much they value these qualities when they reach a little too far for a rhyme: “Don’t ever fix your lips like collagen / And say something when you gon’ end up apologin.” Well done, Kanye.

But rhyming is not just aesthetic. It establishes a constraint that can jumpstart the creative process. More than that, it prompts us to connect words that we otherwise wouldn’t, simply because they rhyme. Words have semantic properties — their definitions and connotations — and syntactic ones, which we’ll broaden a bit to just mean not semantic.

When we force ourselves to rhyme, words are brought together because of purely syntactic similarities, which allows us to discover semantic similarities — similarities in meaning — that we might have missed. The power of syntactic reasoning might be obvious in rhyme, but it’s incredible in its far-reaching utility.

Every once in a while, as I pass the enormous columns of Widener Library, I’m struck by the historical permanence of Harvard. Widener grants imposing physicality to the abstract idea that Harvard has been around for a long, long time.

And yet, it’s not terribly unusual for buildings to last a long time. Although the pandemic has kept most of us far from campus, we are still surrounded online by an even more impressive reminder of Harvard’s antiquity. Every day, as we Zoom with our proctors and work on our comps and text about punches, we participate in the great, multi-centennial linguistic tradition of Harvard slang.

“Comp” has been around so long (predating even the Crimson’s first issue) that no one knows whether it stands for competition or competency or something else entirely. The origin of “punching” is similarly shrouded.

Almost every Harvard student of the past decade has contributed to the collaborative literary masterpiece that is the Q-Guide comment section. At the end of the semester, some students use their new-found freetime to craft poetic odes to a great course or professor, while others assemble cutting polemics no less artful — all in wonderful anonymity. A few highlights:

"Don’t be daunted by Ed Glaeser — he’s a cutie in disguise."

"If you have to take this class, it is because you are a sinner, for if you had not sinned, God would not have sent this course as a punishment."

"Lol" is a funny word — not laugh out loud funny, but ironic in how far it has come from its initial and semi-literal usage. It started out as a sincere reaction, transitioned to a sign of mild amusement, and now often has almost nothing to do with laughter. This is the “lol” we put at the end of a message that sounds too aggressive, too serious, too emo, too … anything. “Lol” as a de-intensifying particle.

English has many de-intensifiers — “a little,” “kind of,” “slightly” — but “lol” stands apart. Think about the difference between texting "I'm a little excited" vs "I'm excited lol." Standard qualifying words serve to specify. When we use “lol” or “lmao,” though, we're instead taking a step back and laughing at whatever we just expressed. “Lol” lets us maintain some ironic distance from our emotions.

“Lol” is also remarkable in its versatility. A Boomer might text "I'm a little upset" or "I'm pretty upset" or "I'm very upset": in all three cases, a Zoomer could use the flexible "I'm upset lol.” It’s very ambiguous, but then again, that’s the point. If I leave it to my friend to decipher the intensity of my feelings through context, he will conclude that I'm exactly as upset as he thinks the situation warrants. I'm protected from judgement.