Notation: More Thoughts On Grappling

One problem to which I've yet to find a satisfactory solution is the need to distinguish between the actions of the performer and those of the performer's opponents. Consider the following line from Short Form 18 which has been gnawing at my brain for awhile:

BB-(LOW)

That reads "bird break to the opponent's left, outer wrist" which, by itself, is clear enough. In the greater context of the form, however, the move only makes sense if you understand that the opponent has grabbed the performer's right wrist immediately prior. Ideally what I would like is to have some convenient way of indicating this action on the part of the opponent.

At this point we're essentially dealing with the problem of representing multidimensional data on paper. The solutions which most quickly spring to mind involve doing something to the notation text itself such as changing it's color or font to indicate who's doing what. That might work for publishing in HTML, but recall that we also want to be able to use this notation in the field with nothing more than pen and paper, which basically rules out any sort of fancy manipulation of the text.

One thing we could try is to changing its size since that's something which is easy enough to do in the field. For example, if I wanted to indicate that the bird break was immediately preceded by a grab on the opponent's part I might write

BB-(LOW)
Grab-(ROW)

Which reads as "opponent executes a left grab to the performer's right, outer wrist". I think there's merit in this idea; the change in size de-emphasizes the importance of the text, making it more of an annotation to the main action. However, I'm not convinced that this is a general solution to the problem of identifying performer and opponent, so let's see what else we can come up with.

Part of the motivation for telling one from the other is the desire to have notation which works for describing chi na (techniques involving holds/grappling) as well as strikes. We're partway there, but the notation we've been using for grappling so far lacks precision. When I write

Grab-(ROW)

what kind of grab am I trying to convey? There's only one that makes any sense in this context, but we can't always rely on that being the case. What I'd really like to be able to do is describe chi na in terms of the surfaces/targets which are brought together. Something like

(IH)-(ROW)

where "IH" is "inner hand" (or "palm", if you prefer). You see, however, that there's a bit of ambiguity here; which surface belongs to which person?

One solution which has occurred to me is somewhat baroque and may not work in the long run, but I want to get it down for posterity anyway. Suppose that we envision the performer as being in the center of a grid, surrounded by opponents, like this:

If we want to describe a particular configuration we can then write it in this grid like so:

Literally this reads "the performer's right, outer wrist is in contact with the left, inner hand of the opponent standing in front of em" from which we can infer that the opponent has grabbed the performer by the wrist. Now, things that I like about this format:

• Ownership of limbs is fully established.
• It's easy to convey the relative position of the performer and opponent. This is especially important for chi na since the opponent may attack from behind or the side.
• We can do away with specifying "left" and "right" for limbs/surfaces by positioning them in the appropriate portion of the box. This has the added benefit of disambiguating "performer's left" from "opponent's left".
• It's visually very appealing; I can tell at a glance that there's some sort of grapple involving the performer's right side and the opponent's left side.

Now, the cons:

• It's not compact or efficient; there's a lot of empty boxes lying around.
• It's difficult (if not impossible) to typeset in HTML.

Let's work on the compactness issue first. Suppose we eliminate all of the boxes that have nothing going on:

Better... we've increased the data ink ratio. But in removing the unused boxes we've lost our grid and, with it, the implicit identification of the performer as the person in the center. Can we de-emphasize the opponent's actions/position in some fashion like we did above by shrinking the font size? I think so:

It seems self-evident to me that the performer is the one in the solid box and the opponent is the one in the dotted box. Now, how about typesetting? Most of the elements can easily be done with HTML tables; the only thing that's at all complicated is the "grapple" line since it crosses two cells. We can work around that by creating DIVs containing the Unicode box-drawing character "│" (│):

		(IH) │
		│ (OW)

That takes care of the two big objections I lodged earlier, but it still remains to be seen whether this innovation can be coherently integrated into a complete form. Here's what Short Form 18 looks like when the note about the grab is added:

SK			Right
CFS
←DPB		RSH
BB-(LOW)
		(IH) │
		│ (OW)
IB		BS HP
	↑
	NS

My immediate objection is how prominent the grab is; it draws the eye and takes up the equivalent of four rows. It becomes the focus when it's really supposed to be more of an annotation to help the student understand the following action. More radical action is required:

		(IH)│
		(OW)

That screaming you hear is me abusing CSS relative-positioning to position the grappling line, but the result looks a lot better. Short Form 18, with the revised typesetting:

SK			Right
CFS
←DPB		RSH
BB-(LOW)
		(IH)│
		(OW)
IB		BS HP
	↑
	NS

Better, but still not quite what I'm looking for. I think this box-style notation will be good for chi na since grappling is the main focus of those techniques. But, even with reduced space consumption, the boxes are still too obtrusive to be used for the type of annotation which Short Form 18 seems to require. So let's return to the idea which we set aside earlier, using a smaller font under the main entry to denote what the opponent is doing.

Recall that the main problem is that, with the existing grappling notation, there's no way to tell which surfaces belong to which person. We could just adopt a convention based on position and say that the left side of the "(<target>)-(<target>)" formulation always belongs to the performer while the right side belongs to the attacker. But that's a sub-optimal solution since left and right are used to denote sides of the body everywhere else. Another thought which occurs to me is that we can use one type of bracket for the performer and another type of bracket for the opponent. We could, for example, use "< >-( )" where "< >" is the performer's action and "( )" is the opponent's. This would almost be workable except for the fact that "<" and ">" are already reserved for attention changes. Square brackets are reserved for preparation and delivery, which leaves use with curly brackets ("{ }") as the only common set of bracketing symbols which are still available. "{ROW}-(LIH)" is OK, but not great, since curly braces aren't particularly evocative of anything.

Maybe we need to go back and revisit the notion for grappling/targeting entirely? I like the notation we've developed for targeting; "<symbol>→(<target>)" just makes sense. Here's a thought... can we change the symbol we use to indicate "grapple" so that it's not symmetric? I was looking through the list of Unicode arrows and noticed that it contains some double arrow glyphs:

⇇ ⇈ ⇉ ⇊

If a single arrow means "strike" can we then take a double arrow to mean "grapple"? I like this solution a lot; it seems like a natural extension of the existing (and perfectly satisfactory) targeting notation. We can then also adopt the following conventions across the board:

• "( )" means "target/surface".
• "→" means "strike". The head of the arrow points to the person being struck (usually the opponent).
• "⇉" means "grapple". The head of the arrow points to the person being grappled.

Let's return once more time to Short Form 18. Rewriting using the above conventions it becomes:

SK			Right
CFS
←DPB		RSH
(LOW) ⇈ BB
IB		BS HP
	↑
	NS

Note also that I rewrote the bird breaks to use the proper arrows/orientation; the way I'd written it before technically mean to do the break to the side.

That, I think, looks pretty good, but we still haven't solved the original problem of how to indicate what the opponent is doing. How about if I just put the opponent's action in a smaller font alongside?

SK			Right
CFS
←DPB		RSH
(LOW) ⇈ BB  (LIH) ⇊ (ROW)
IB		BS HP
	↑
	NS

So now, next to the performer's action, there's a smaller block of text which reads "left inner hand grapples right outer wrist". This should be interpreted as the action to which the performer is responding/reacting. I went back and forth on the direction of the grappling arrows and finally decided that it was easier to understand if we just maintain the convention the performer's front is always the top of the page.

Comments on all of the above?