1,000 Greatest Drivers: David Coulthard
Also, my thoughts on Stefan Fatsis's Unabridged.
I should have listened to my models more. When I was going through all the F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR race winners and scoring all their seasons last year, I was way off on Coulthard. In my head, I regarded him very similarly to most of the other prolific #2 winners like Rubens Barrichello, Valtteri Bottas, and Mark Webber. Maybe I wasn’t wrong on Bottas, and Coulthard was probably better than Eddie Irvine even though almost everybody’s models including mine put Irvine higher, but he clearly wasn’t in the same league with Barrichello and Webber, and I’m not sure that him having a below-average rating in my open wheel model is necessarily spurious. I was rating his Williams and McLaren seasons too highly given how frequently he underachieved the dominance of his cars, while I was rating his late-period Red Bull seasons too low. I have corrected for this, and now I think I have fairer grades for him. He’s still a lock, but I awarded him a few too many cumulative points. Here are my revisions: 1995: E- to C+, 1998: C to C+, 1999: C+ to C-, 2000: E- to C+, 2001: E to E-, 2003: off to C-, 2005: C- to C, 2006: off to C, 2007: off to C-.
About a month ago, I started reading Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged. Coincidentally, he just launched his own Substack while I was in the middle of it. As a former tournament Scrabble player, his 2001 classic Word Freak was very important to me, and I reminisced about that a little on the Red Byron entry. I started reading his new book a month ago after listening to him being interviewed on a bunch of podcasts for it (which is one of my worst vices these days). All his books are in the George Plimpton tradition of “participatory journalism” where he embeds himself in a scene to get the real scoop, just as he did in Word Freak for Scrabble tournaments or his other book when he convinced an NFL team to take him on as a fourth-string placekicker (I haven’t read that one). In Unabridged, he convinced Merriam-Webster to take him on as an employee, where he actually got words and definitions into the dictionary, including some highly timely ones. His dream was to actually contribute to a paper dictionary, but at the time he arrived at Merriam, nobody was making new editions of paper dictionaries anymore because the profit motive was gone and almost all the paid lexicographers everywhere were laid off, never to return. It was really just another long, sad story of the collapse of a solid brick-and-mortar industry, successfully disrupted by ultimately-inferior-but-more-profitable-in-the-short-term Internet platforms that will no doubt be increasingly enshittified over time.
Speaking of enshittification, that won Word of the Year at the American Dialect Society, whose meeting Fatsis attended in 2024. That’s a good choice and from what I’ve read from Cory Doctorow, he generally seems right about most things. (I think I’ve had various apps tell me that he’s the famous writer who I write most like, but I don’t know about that.) Enshittification beat words like “fuck around and find out” and “cunty” and thank goodness for that. I don’t really like the business of reclaiming slurs (of course people would tell me I have no right to say that because of my privilege and I don’t really have a response to that, but it’s real rich since most of those people usually have had steady professional-managerial class jobs and a lot more money than I ever had) and it seems like the only freedom most people across the entire political spectrum want (at least the extremely online ones) is the right to be offensive, whether it’s online liberals who want the right to dehumanize anyone in demographics who are likely to skew conservative or conservatives who want the reverse. Obviously, the conservatives are worse because it is less bad to bully the members of privileged groups than the members of underprivileged groups, not to mention that breed of “own the libs” conservative has taken over the Republican establishment while the Bluesky liberals are mostly ignored by the Democratic establishment (which is about the only good thing I have to say about the Democratic establishment these days). Shouldn’t it be not okay to bully anyone? I know that was the mainstream opinion when I was a kid, and I guess I never outgrew those values. Nowadays the one thing liberals and conservatives seem to agree on is that civility is for suckers. Now, it’s completely acceptable to bully anyone you think might possibly be a Trump supporter or even adjacent to one, and I’m just exhausted, man.
The problem with slurs is the dehumanization and I agree they aren’t okay, but there are plenty of dehumanizing phrases the Internet has mainstreamed that are just as dehumanizing yet are considered perfectly acceptable when I think they should be completely unacceptable. I rant about this stuff all the time. “Fuck around and find out” is one. “Raped my childhood”, “die in a fire”, “rest in piss”, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”, “leopards ate my face”. The Darwin Awards. The Herman Cain Awards. There is so much of this shit and I’m so tired of it, man. Whenever there’s a natural disaster, social media hiveminds want to celebrate on either side if it happened in a place where a plurality of people happened to vote for the party you consider evil, as if 1) it’s ever acceptable to celebrate or laugh at people’s deaths (maybe, MAYBE for a war criminal politician, but definitely not for some random working class schlub who voted differently from you, and you see this all the time), 2) all people in any geographical area voted the same way when there will always be a minority who voted for your preferred party who were also hurt by the tragedy, 3) plenty of people don’t even vote or aren’t even eligible to vote at all, 4) either the Democrats or Republicans will do anything to repair our crumbling infrastructure and prepare for natural disasters or anything beyond the next quarterly report until they renounce neoliberalism. It’s like people took red states and blue states so seriously as a winner-take-all concept that every locality is now stereotyped based on how the plurality of people voted when all areas are far more purple than anyone is willing to acknowledge and also the parties didn’t even have freaking colors consistent across all media platforms until 1996. Nobody spoke about red states and blue states until the 2000 presidential election recount, and now everybody acts like this is something that always existed. I was alive for this! So thank goodness “Fuck around and find out” lost. Enshittification - much better choice.
Yeah, I waxed political here I guess and I’m trying to stop ‘cause my vaguely anti-libertarian/communitarian politics where I’m an economic leftist and a right-leaning social centrist aren’t very popular at all (except maybe with any Gen Z males whose dendrites have not been warped by Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson or whatever). But I suppose it was unavoidable because the book was political because that’s where all the action is in today’s language. Fatsis reports about how his definitions for alt-right and microaggression were accepted into the dictionary with alterations. There are chapters on slurs, pronouns, social media, modern politics, and AI. Very timely. I liked most of it even if Fatsis’s politics aren’t really mine, but Word Freak was still better. The most endearing chapter was probably when he went to visit hoarder Madeline Kripke’s legendary dictionary collection in New York before she died. I think that was probably the best-written chapter, and it was definitely that chapter that reminded me most of what I liked about Word Freak, especially all the stuff he wrote about Washington Square Park and The Flea House. All these sorts of places are the kind of communities I have been desperately longing to find before private equity squeezed them out.
My mom’s still doing fine and I’m waiting for a contractor to successfully bid on the roof repair and ramp installation, but when she does die, I’m resigned to losing the house to Medicaid for the nursing home stay, and honestly, I’m okay with that as long as I can get my credit up to rent an apartment. I want more people in my life and fewer possessions to maintain and I’ll do anything to find that. (Undercutting my argument, I did just buy a book recapping the 2000-2009 24 Hours of Le Mans, and I’m gonna start collecting the other ones, but that’s admittedly probably necessary for my book research so I can identify how much each sports car driver was contributing on the top multi-driver sports car teams.) I’m so damn lonely, man. I don’t quite know where I want to live after I lose the house, but I know for sure that it probably isn’t Syracuse.
