Mary Ann Davidson Blog

No ka moana ku'u mele, no nā nalu au e hula ai.

(From the ocean comes my song, of the waves I dance my dance.)



I am still glowing from what, for me, constitutes the perfect vacation: a week surfing in Hawai'i. I spent each day surfing about four or five hours a day, and the night listening to Hawaiian music and drinking Mai Tais. (I skipped the part about popping Advil non-stop and slathering on Mineral Ice for sore muscles from all that surfing.) As I always do after a good surf fest, I have had time to reflect on what surfing has done for me as a person -- how it changed my life, maybe even saved my life.



Sometimes, when I meet people at security conferences -- particularly women -- they comment on how much self-confidence I seem to have. Friends who have known me a long time know very well that that is not true. First of all, I still have my share of insecurities like any other person. Second, I guess it is a good time to 'fess up that I never had any confidence in myself until I learned to surf. I am really grateful for the friend who taught me to surf (Mahalo nui loa, e ku'u koaloha Keli!) and for the "bros" I have found out in the lineup: the people who hooted me into waves, told me to go for it, gave up a wave so I could catch it, and encouraged me even after particularly nasty wipeouts. Surfing gave me confidence that I could take risks; surfing taught me to face my fears in lots of aspects of life.



In particular, a surf buddette of mine gave me advice a long time ago that turned out to be good life advice: "You know, you can take off on a bigger wave than you think you can." Surfing is all about conquering fear; in fact, it is about embracing your fear, because even though there is always another wave you could catch if you back out of one, you are absolutely, positively guaranteed to miss 100% of the waves you do not go for. And you will never get a second chance to catch the exact wave you wussed on. My biggest regrets out in the lineup are not after a wipeout, but over the waves I chickened out of, that I could have "made" if I had just paddled for it and had confidence that I could make the wave. While you need the judgment to know which waves are "makeable" -- can be surfed -- and which not, you also need to embrace the concept of Going For It. (There are surf shirts that are proudly emblazoned 'Eddie Would Go,' in homage to Eddie Aikau, a big wave surfer who died swimming for shore after a boat he was on capsized. Eddie would and did indeed Go For It and inspires surfers to this day.)



After I started surfing, I found that I had courage in other areas of my life that I never had before. I realized that you build confidence by taking risks, not by letting waves pass you by. I was willing to Go For It a lot more often than not: everything from trying new sports (and I am not naturally an athlete; really, I am a natural klutz) I decided I was going to be killer at, like cross-country skiing to taking more risks at work. Surfing gave me the courage to take on the role of Chief Security Officer and to repeat that little mantra in my head: "You can take off on a bigger wave than you think you can." I have mostly ceased looking at life as a series of potential wipeouts, and started looking at life as a series of potential great waves. All because I learned to surf.



On this trip, I faced up to a particular fear, which is taking off at the peak. You can catch waves at a lot of stages. You can catch a wave after it has broken and has started to "re-form" after breaking the first time. Typically, beginners learn to surf by hopping up on waves that are already broken and will push them right along. You can surf by catching a shoulder of a wave (i.e., not where the wave is starting to fall over and is most steep, but farther over where the wave is less likely to pitch you down the face if you don't catch it just right). But if you want the biggest drop down the face of the wave, the biggest adrenaline rush, and more importantly, if you want the maximum power from the wave, and the most choices as to whether to go right or left on the wave, you need to catch it at the peak.



Catching it at the peak requires better judgment, requires you to look behind at how the wave is forming, and to be flexible physically and mentally. Take another stroke, or not? Slow down a split second to wait for the wave, or not? And you need to be fast to your feet: when you feel the wave catch the board, you have to pop up and lean into the wave -- commit to it heart and soul -- quickly. When you catch the wave just right, the freefall down the face is effortless. You are riding pure energy, because as everyone who has studied physics knows, it isn't the water that really moves, it is the energy of the wave that does. Raw power. Once you experience that feeling of weightlessness as you drop down the face of a wave, you know you would do anything to experience it again. It requires taking the maximum risk for the maximum joy. Nui ka maka'u; nui ka hau'oli (Big-the-fear;big-the-happiness.)



I caught some truly excellent waves last week, at the peak, and floated down the face in moments of perfect joy that will live with me forever. Nui ka hau'oli.



There's another thing about surfing that is unlike every other sport I have tried and unlike most things in life: you remember every great wave, every beautiful sunset, every honu (sea turtle) that came up to you, every nai'a (dolphin) that ever surfed the same wave with you. These are sacred moments and you treasure them in your heart. For the times I am travelling too much, or are too sleep deprived, or frustrated in traffic or at work, I relive those moments in the ocean. And when I get out of the water after a really good surf session, all my problems just seem to melt away. I can face them with equanimity.



For the Hawaiians, surfing was part of their culture and of their religion. For example, once you selected a tree for your surfboard (papa he'e nalu), a board builder would dig a hole near the roots and put a fish in the hole as a prayer/offering to the gods for the tree he was about to take to shape the board. Hawaiians also prayed for surf (an experience that, believe me, is as old as the sport). When the sea was flat, they would pick a pohuehue vine (beach morning glory), beat the water into ripples and chant:



Ku mai! Ku mai! Ka nalu nui mai Kahiki mai!
(Arise, arise you great surfs from Kahiki [Tahiti!])

Alo po i pu! Ku mai ka pohuehue,
(The powerful curling waves. Arise with the pohuehue)

Hu! Kai ko'o Loa.
(Well up, long raging surf!)



(I confess, on one trip to Hawai'i when the surf was flat, I did indeed rip a section of pohuehue off a plant, beat the water, and say the above chant. I am sure it was purely coincidence, but a new swell arrived the very next day!)



Surfing also is a subject of many traditional Hawaiian songs. "He'eia," for example, is about surfing the waves at He'eia. (I might add, like many Hawaiian songs, what you think the song is about is only one layer of meaning; what the song is really about is something else. "He'eia" is actually sort of kolohe (naughty).) Surfing is a lot like that song: it's not really about the waves; it is about something else: the entire experience of wind, sun and water. Feeling the swells, like the heartbeat of the ocean, seeing the beauty around you, and the aloha of sharing waves with others.



Despite my love of all things Hawaiian, I do not worship the Hawaiian gods. I do, however, believe on very solid authority that God went surfing before Creation:



In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)



"The spirit of God moving over the waters" is as perfect a description of surfing as there ever was. E ke Akua, mahalo nui loa nō nā nalu!



For more information:

• The lyrics of He'eia. Many Hawaiian artists have recorded it, including the legendary Gabby Pahinui and Hapa.


• Information on the history of surfing


• And I am pleased to say that my favorite Hawaiian music group, Hapa, won several Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards (Hawaiian music awards) last week.

One of my friends is visiting Israel this week. We have a kind of strange rule to our friendship: I am teaching him Hawaiian and he is teaching me Modern Hebrew, typically a phrase or greeting at a time. I am now pretty good at translating Hebrew into Hawaiian, should there ever be a market niche opening up for that skill. Elad, however, is way behind on Sheuré Ivrit (Hebrew lessons). I've been trading Hebrew lessons for Hawaiian lessons; although once in a while, he throws in a Yiddish expression. Yiddish is a language that was created from a mix of other European languages and spoken by predominantly Eastern European Jews. I've found both Hebrew and Yiddish to be wonderfully descriptive and colorful languages.


As some of you may have guessed, I really like languages, and apparently that seems to go hand in glove with being a security weenie. Lots of people who were linguists ended up being recruited for cryptography work in the Second World War (e.g., at Bletchley Park), and not merely for their translating skills, but for their ability to detect patterns of usage and their ability to do frequency analysis (how often certain letters are used, which helps immensely in code breaking). Some of you probably know also of the Navaho Code Talkers who played such a key role in US victories in the Western Pacific. The code was never broken, in part because there really weren't many native speakers of Navaho.



In a previous life, I studied Biblical Hebrew and classical Greek, motivated in no small part by the desire to read various Great Works (e.g., the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey) in the original languages. (I can add to my personal list of what constitutes Great Works Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which has been translated into both Latin and classical Greek. Call me a Philistine, but having read both, I can say honestly that reading about Quidditch is a lot more fun than reading Herodotus.)



One of the things you realize after reading works in the original language - though in my case, "picking at the text painfully and slowly, with lots of dictionary lookups" is a more accurate description than "reading" - is how careful translators have to be - and how hard that is sometimes - in their word choice. People reading works in translation don't necessarily have access to or understanding the original text, and the nuance is lost sometimes. Translators do the best they can, but in some cases there may not be an exact equivalent for a word, or they may have to choose one word among many possibilities.



Even if you aren't a linguist, all of us have had that experience of using a word (for example, in an email) we thought was perfectly clear and meant "X," only to have someone on the receiving end hear (or read) "Y." I get regular reminders of this when I give public presentations or interviews on security, read the press coverage, and get emails from people asking, "Did you really say that all British are criminals?" (No, I didn't say that.) It's easy to complain that you are misquoted but some honest introspection leads to the conclusion that, perhaps, if you made a different word choice, the likelihood of being misquoted or misunderstood goes way down. The quest for the right word is something we all struggle with. Please do not misinterpret this point as a concession to political correctness. No one has ever accused me of being too PC! I really mean picking the right words is essential so that the meaning you intend is the one the audience receives.



In some cases, it's literally impossible to know what a word in an ancient text actually meant because it does not exist anywhere else in the text, to provide context or reinforcement for the meaning. There is actually a linguistic term for this phenomenon: hapax legomenon or ‘απαξ λεγóμευου, from the Greek participial form of λεγω, to speak. (I am indebted to my Biblical Hebrew teacher, Jack Love, for this arcane bit of knowledge, and in the "small world" department, I ran into Jack at an Oracle OpenWorld conference several years ago. He'd become an Oracle DBA and was no longer teaching Biblical Hebrew.) For example, there is a word in the book of Ruth (3:7) that is an hapax legomenon, wherein Ruth uncovers Boaz's margolot (מךגלות), translated "feet." Not to be prurient, but nobody really knows what Ruth uncovered because the word doesn't exist anywhere else.



I used to say in my early days working in security that security was an hapax legomonon in many organizations: the word usage only occurred in one place, and nobody really knew what it meant. A lot has changed since then. There are lots of books about, emphasis upon and awareness of what security is and what it means. Many if not most organizations now have written security policies, train people on them, and measure compliance against policies. Oracle has many such policies and they cover everything from responsible use (of corporate assets), to who can access our corporate networks and how we handle security vulnerabilities in our software.



When I think about how security has changed over the last 10 or 12 years, it's as if some dusty old word that nobody used - an hapax legomenon - started cropping up in what we read and digest every day. (Maybe margolot will make a linguistic comeback? And high time, too!) The next step now that security is no longer an hapax legomenon is to get the deeds to match the words.



Using the wrong word, or an imprecise word, can leave people walking off with entirely the wrong idea and sometimes the wrong idea takes on a life of its own. People argue all the time over what words mean in linguistic contexts, and reading literature in translation is always risky to the extent that someone can - maliciously or unintentionally - slip one by you. For example, I have often heard people quoting a Biblical passage to support the view that women are not supposed to be pastors, or otherwise preach or speak in church: "As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says." (1 Corinthians 14:33). I confess that I have a particularly strong reaction to this passage since I come from a long line of outspoken women. Which is why I wanted to know what it really says in koine Greek (Biblical Greek), and not what the translation says.



Greek, as it happens, has many, many words for speaking, only five of which pertain to preaching or proclamation. None of the five were used here. What was used is the word laleo - meaning "to chat, talk or converse."



(Hawaiian has at least three words for talking I know of: kama'ilio, to converse, ‘ōlelo - to speak, and namu - to mutter. Obviously, telling someone not to talk (Mai ‘ōlelo ‘oe!) is a lot different from telling someone not to converse (Mai kama'ilio ‘oe!) To cut to the linguistic chase: what St. Paul was really saying was that women shouldn't be chatting in church, which makes even more sense when you realize so many women were not educated and didn't get out in public much in Hellenistic times. This was, in fact, an admonition to the ladies to be on good behavior in church, not a dictum to women to refrain from speaking at all.



There are religious arguments over what is really meant by this passage, in part because the people arguing are reading a translation, and translators often have to translate words for which there is no exact equivalent. My mother insisted I not chatter during church as a child, but my mother and grandmother are both outspoken women and would be the last people to tell anyone not to "speak up and out," even in church.



(Attribution: I am indebted to a former Oracle SVP, George Koch, now pastor of a church in Wheaton, Illinois, for his analysis of this passage in 1 Corinthians from a sermon entitled "Shall a Woman Keep Silent?" Only George would link Joan Rivers' exhortation "Can we talk?" to the meaning of laleo. Thanks, George!)



In a day of instant gratification, instant messaging, instant everything, learning a hard language - and Greek and Hebrew are ferociously hard (although Elad would disagree about Hebrew) - seems to have little relevance. I probably switched to Hawaiian because it was a lot easier, frankly (no verbs for "to have" or "to be," hallelujah!). The value of learning a difficult language and struggling with it comes from understanding - truly understanding - what something says and not what a translator chose to convey. You also learn to be very mindful of your word choices in everyday life, because you realize entire orthodoxies can rest on what a word really means. "Laleo." "Margolot." "Security." "Full disclosure," the visceral reaction to which makes religious arguments seem tame by comparison. For me, the "translation takeaway" is that when I disagree with something I read - I try, before hitting Reply All in a huff - to go back to the person and tell them what I understood them to say, and ask whether that was, indeed, what they meant? A little patience, or he ho'omanawanui li'ili'i, as the Hawaiians would say.



And as far as whether women can speak, for myself, I think being outspoken is a gift, because there are a lot of people who talk an awful lot without saying much of anything. (There's probably a Greek word for that.) Life is short; get to the point. On the other hand, you want your bluntness to reflect what you really meant to say, and not something else, so that people agree or disagree with what you really said, and not something they perceived "through a glass, darkly."



One Biblical passage that says this succinctly, whether you take it religiously or just as it is: "Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No.'" (Matthew 5:37) That's good advice for all of us.



For more reading:

• The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten. Yiddish is just so descriptive that everybody ought to have a few words in their linguistic repertoire. Momzer is a particularly useful word for the evening commute on Highway 101.


• For a really delightful "translation experience," listen to the Brothers Cazimero singing the theme song from 1979's the Muppet Movie (The Rainbow Connection) in Hawaiian. (Who knew Kermit was a Hawaiian frog?) You can find it on their Greatest Hits Album.


• The Wikipedia definition of hapax legomenon


• An interlineal (you can read in Hebrew and/or Greek and English side by side) Bible; third chapter of Ruth


• More on the Navaho code talkers


• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Greek (ΑΡΕΙΟΣ ΠΟΤΗΡ ΚΑΙ Η ΤΟΥ ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΥ ΛΙΘΟΣ)