...
The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: language (page 1 of 1)

May 2, 2025

sentences

Arjun Panickserry:

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

J. K. Rowling is the wrong comparison here, since the Harry Potter books were written first for children and then (in later volumes) for young adults. For recent writers, the proper comparisons to Austen, Dickens, and Emerson would be Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion.

The bigger problem is the failure to recognize the developments in the punctuation of English prose over the centuries. Chaucer and Spenser wrote before the current roster of punctuation marks — in addition to periods and commas, we now have colons, semicolons, parentheses, and dashes, which add often subtle variety of meaning, variety of clausal relations, without necessarily affecting comprehensibility — became clearly established. Ancient texts were typically written in scripta continua: not only did they lack punctuation, there were not even any breaks between words. In such a regime of writing, there’s nothing even to correspond to the word “sentence.” 

(Indeed, an important subset of the history of written language is the history of punctuation: see e.g. Malcom Parkes’s wonderful, and wonderfully titled, Pause and Effect. Also brilliantly titled, and a fine read: John Lennard’s history of parenthesis in English verse, But I Digress.) 

Also, consider this famous passage from Hemingway:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

One could re-punctuate it thus:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early; then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows: there was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails, the deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers — it was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

That would make the sentences longer, but it wouldn’t make them more sophisticated or challenging. It would just make them a bit worse.

November 1, 2024

what’s up

The Finnish comedian Ismo has a nice routine in which he describes how hard it is to learn the nuances of spoken English. The best-known part of the routine (justifiably!) is when he explains why he thinks the most complicated word in English is “ass.” But I also like his comment that it took him a long time to learn that the proper response to the phrase “What’s up?” … is the phrase “What’s up”?

I thought about that when I took a look at an essay many people have recently recommended: this one by Nathan Pinkoski. The first sentence of the essay is: “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed.” And my first thought at reading that first sentence was: Has it? Has it really? Because, you know, a whole lot of what I see around me looks a great deal like what I saw around me in the twentieth century. I mean, many things have definitely changed — there’s a lot more internet, for instance. But we have the same banking system, the same car manufacturers, the same hostilities in the Middle East, the same attempts to “dismantle the canon” in university English departments, the same tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the same dumb artistic provocateurs making the same dumb provocations. We’re voting the same way we voted in the twentieth century, except that more of us get to vote early. We’re less religious then we were fifty years ago, but more religious than at other times in our history, and in any case there doesn’t yet seem to be a obvious correlation between irreligion and civilizational collapse. 

But that’s just in America. What about elsewhere? Well, immigration has altered European civilization, but “collapse” seems even there to be a strong word. China and India are richer and more powerful than they were in the twentieth century; China in particular may be headed for trouble, but “collapse”? 

I could go on, but you get the point. 

Who didn’t get the point was me, who for a moment took Pinkoski’s statement as a declaration of fact. My bad! It was actually a liturgical greeting, as when we Anglicans exchange the Peace in the middle of the Eucharistic rite. Technically we should (I think) be saying (1) “The peace of the Lord be always with you” followed by (2) “And also with you.” But usually we say (1) “The peace of the Lord” and (2) “The peace of the Lord.”

Similarly, people who (like me) grew up as University of Alabama football fans know how to greet each other: Salutation: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.” Response: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.”

Initially, I took Pinkoski’s first sentence as a statement of fact when in fact it was a tribal salutation, the proper response to which is the same phrase: (1) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?” (2) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?”

But I’m not a member of that tribe, so I didn’t say the phrase. Nor did I read any further. The essay clearly wasn’t meant for me, and it was kind of Pinkoski to begin with the tribal salutation that informed me of that. 

October 28, 2024

articulation

To call a person “articulate” is to say something rather complex. One element of articulateness is the quick and easy summoning of words — but if the words summoned are not appropriate, we don’t call the person articulate but rather a chatterer, a windbag, a babbler. We call what comes out of their mouth “word salad.” Appropriate words are precise and also information-rich. The articulate person is able to speak fluently but also to the point. 

I say all this by way of noting something curious: The current Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are surely the least articulate Presidential candidates in American history — the least able to speak in reliably coherent complete sentences, the least likely to summon relevant information in discussing a topic, and most prone to extended and expansive servings of word salad. 

During the 2020 Presidential campaign a meme arose comparing Biden and Trump to Kennedy and Nixon debating in 1960, and sure enough, if you listen to the 1960 debates it’s astonishing how … well, articulate both men are. They navigate their way smoothly from subject to verb to object in every sentence; they have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. The only Presidential candidate of this century who wouldn’t sound foolish in their company is Barack Obama. 

Sixty years ago, and throughout previous American history before that, a certain level or articulateness was thought essential to Presidential leadership. Not everyone had it in the same degree, or was articulate in the same way — Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, for instance, both used biblical cadences, but Lincoln was straightforward and measured (in his high-pitched voice) while Bryan was an orotund thunderer. Calvin Coolidge was notoriously laconic, but terseness can be a form of articulateness also; his style of speech was essential to his self-presentation. Only someone like Eisenhower, whose appeal to the American people was grounded in something wholly other than his command of language, could get away with being a poor speaker. 

The one great exception to this rule, at least if H. L. Mencken is to be trusted, was Warren G. Harding. The “G.” stands, remarkably enough, for Gamaliel, and Mencken insisted that Harding spoke in an idiolect best called Gamalielese. 

I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. 

Such linguistic incompetence was noteworthy at the time; now it’s the norm. We may only choose between pish and posh, between flap and doodle, between balder and weave. 

The question is: How did we get here? How did we get to the point at which our Presidential candidates are actually less articulate than the average person? How did we manage to create a Presidential campaign season which resembles nothing so much as a pack of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights? 

I dunno. But I have one theory: To speak articulately, in an age in which one’s every utterance is recorded and analyzed, is to court refutation and correction. Perhaps this is evolutionarily adaptive behavior for politicians: nobody can call you out if you just hang the tattered washing on the line. 

Or maybe we’ve just ceased to care about anything being done well. So let’s enjoy the word salad while we can. Because we’re about three elections away from Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Though, come of think of it, President of America Camacho is pretty articulate, in his own distinctive way. 

October 10, 2024

Rorty’s bastard children

Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” 

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it. 

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter the frame of reference — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them. 

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want. 

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to refines that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” 

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what the-country-they-call-theirs should be and employ language to affirm and strengthen that vision. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing. 

UPDATE: This essay by Joshua Rothman — with the telling title “Do They Really Believe That Stuff?” — is a useful addendum to this post. 

September 10, 2024

Can We Talk! | Ian Frazier:

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. 

Ian Frazier is great, and this is a fun essay-review, but it’s pretty strange to have Tagalog, a language spoken by a couple of million Americans, lumped in with two “small” — presumably this means “little-spoken” — languages. Tagalog shouldn’t be “unexpected” in any large American city. Heck, I’ve heard it spoken in Waco. 

December 15, 2023

words, words, words

Many of our arguments are fruitless because we don’t know the meaning of the words we use. And we don’t know the meaning of the words we use because meaning is not a property of language that our culture thinks important. In common usage, especially on social media, words are passwords, shibboleths — they are not employed to convey any substantive meaning but to mark identity. You use the words that people you want to associate yourself with use; it doesn’t go any further than that. If they call Israel an example of “colonialism,” then you will too, regardless of the appropriateness of the word. 

For this reason, my frequent inquiries into the words and phrases people rely on as identity markers are probably the most useless things I write. But I keep writing them in the hope that at least a few readers will realize that they don’t have to accept the language that is most widely used, that they are free to use other words, or to ask other people what, specifically, they mean by the words they rely on. 

In How to Think I conducted such an inquiry into the phrase “think for yourself.” 

A while back on this blog, I tried to understand what people mean when they denounce “critical theory” — and “critical race theory” as well. 

In a recent essay in Comment I ask whether people know what they mean when they use the word “gender.” 

And today I’ve posted a short essay at the Hog Blog in which I suggest that the term “self-censorship” is incoherent and inappropriate. 

Those are just a few examples; I could cite a hundred. I keep doing this kind of thing, fruitless as it sometimes feels, because if even a few people disrupt the thoughtless recycling of automatic phrases, some of our shouting contests could become actual arguments. And that would be a win. 

October 26, 2023

Smeagol, philologist

I’m sure others have said this before — I doubt I have many thoughts about Tolkien that others have not had before me — but I am reflecting on this passage from Gandalf’s account of Gollum in the chapter of The Lord of the Rings called “The Shadow of the Past”: 

The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Sméagol. He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward. 

Is this not a Portrait of the Philologist as a Young Man? (Or as a young proto-hobbit.) Isn’t Tolkien here describing the déformation professionnelle of the historian of language, the characteristic danger faced by the scholar who always burrows deeper and deeper into the history of words, thinking — Gabriel Josipovici in his wonderful The Book of God says this is the characteristic illusion of 19th-century scholarship — that truth is always archaeological, always to be found at the Source or Origin. Gollum would eventually learn that “All the ‘great secrets’ under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.” 

Perhaps, then, writing a book like The Lord of the Rings is, for the philologist, a spiritual discipline, a healthy re-ordering of priorities; and a reminder that genealogy — the long living history of a language, with unexpected detours and adventures and late flowerings — is more important, more alive, than archaeology? 

March 27, 2023

Zena Hitz:

The traditional monastic rule against particular friendship is the great bogeyman of the cinematic representation of religious life. Who can forget, once seen, the dreadful episode in The Nun’s Story (1959), where the nun befriended by the protagonist confesses their attachment in the chapter of faults, and both are asked to scrub the floor in atonement?  

[Dumb comment deleted. I misread this! I am so accustomed now to seeing singular “they” and “their” that I read it here when it didn’t exist. It’s not “the nun’s attachment” but “the attachment of the two women.” Duh. I do think, though, that while this certainly bears witness to my dim-wittedness it also bears witness to the ways that the overuse of singular “they” and “their” — overuse, I say, because it’s perfectly appropriate in many circumstances and always has been — sows confusion among readers.] 

January 14, 2023

peeved

This should not annoy me as much as it does, but … here’s a sentence that I see sometimes in books or articles: “I tried unsuccessfully to reach him by email.” I always think, What, you couldn’t find the send button? Or you didn’t know how to get an email account? Of course, that’s never what they mean. But what do they mean? It seems to me that there are two possibilities: either they couldn’t find an email address for the person, or they emailed the person and didn’t get a reply. So why not just say which of those it was?

December 15, 2022

Elizabeth D. Samet, in an interview:

World War II gave us a way to look at the world as an unambiguous contest between good and evil. We have used a vocabulary that was inherited from it: Fascism became Islamofascism, the Axis Powers became the Axis of Evil, the second President Bush’s term to describe a constellation of unrelated adversaries. It also left us with the belief that the exercise of U.S. force would always magically bring about victory and would serve the cause of liberating the oppressed. As a result of that, we find ourselves, after decades of war and loss, having to reckon with the fact that our way of thinking and talking about war and about the world is hopelessly out of date. 

A very interesting point! Because World War II was “the Good War,” American politicians regularly attempt to create a linguistic association between their own endeavors and that one. I wonder how long that will last, especially since the last WWII veterans are rapidly disappearing from the scene. 

December 5, 2022

This post by Victor Mair on the staggering variation in translations of the Daodejing points to something that has been worrying me. I want to go father with my investigations into Daoism — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but I keep running into differences in the various translations that are this extreme or even more so. I’m starting to think that I’m either going to have to abandon my Daoist inquiries … or learn Chinese. The latter being a very daunting thought, especially at my age. (If I’m going to pursue any language with an alphabet other than my own, it probably should be Greek — which I know a bit of — or Hebrew — which I don’t really know at all.) 

November 17, 2022

a right bollocking

Well, this is surely Adam’s best post title ever, but the post is really fascinating also. A key passage: 

But let’s go back to this magic clod. What’s going on here? Pindar’s word is βῶλαξ (bōlax), a poetic form of the word βῶλος (bōlos) — a term still in use in English today, of course (though a bolus is more likely nowadays to refer to a lump of chewed food, than a lump of soil). In Homer the word ἐριβῶλαξ [Odyssey 13.235 and often in the Iliad] means ‘bountiful land’, literally ‘large-clod-place’, and in Theocritus [17:80] βῶλαξ is used to describe the abundant soils of the Nile. The connection, clearly, is with fertility. Pindar describes the magic clod as ἄφθιτον Λιβύας σπέρμα (afthiton Libyas sperma), ‘the indestructible sperm of Libya’, and the word βῶλος is etymologically linked to βολβός, ‘bulb’, which is to say: seed. This makes sense, I suppose. Egypt is dry and barren except where the Nile brings its fertile mud. Cyrene, Herodotus [4:158] tells us, has rain where the rest of Libya has none. Thira’s soil is enriched by its volcanic ash. Good for growing. 

Reflecting on the myth that underlies Pindar’s poem, Adam notes that in that tale “the βῶλαξ comes from a divine source — the clod of God — and that’s what makes it so powerful, so consequential.” When I read that I was immediately certain that βῶλαξ or βῶλος had to be the word used in the Septuagint for the earth from which Adam — Adam our common progenitor, not Adam the novelist — was formed (Genesis 2:7). I fairly ran to my reference books, and … nope. My certainty was misplaced. The only place in the whole Bible where βῶλαξ is used is Job 7:5: “My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; My skin is broken, and become loathsome.” The Septuagint renders the Genesis passage as χοῦν (dust) from γῆς (earth). 

Oh well. I record this because one should acknowledge one’s strikeouts as well as one’s home runs. 

November 12, 2022

John Banville:

The English language is beautiful. It’s immensely rich and untidy with so many influences from other cultures, and I glory in it. People say to me that they have to go to the dictionary. Is that a great trouble? The dictionary is one of the most precious things you have in your house. You should be thanking me for the excuse to go to it. I say to them: “I bet when you went to look up whatever word, you came across four or five new ones. So you gained! I did you a favour!” 

Alas, most of Banville’s readers would’ve looked up the words on Google. It’s only the dictionary in codex form that works the way Banville wants it to work — the way it should work. Trust me on that — and also trust my buddy Austin Kleon. If you don’t have any other books in codex form, have a dictionary and a Bible. They’ll surprise you and teach you every time you pick them up. 

P.S. Unrelated, but here’a another great passage from that interview:

You know, someone said to me recently: “John, I suppose you’ll be writing your Covid novel?” I said: “I certainly will not, and I hope nobody else does either.” The art of fiction isn’t for commenting on events of the time. It may do that, but that’s not its object, which is to imagine the world. 

August 9, 2022

exousia

The Greek word exousia (ἐξουσία) is one that develops in curious ways.

  • In Plato its connotations are often (though not invariably) pejorative: for instance, in the famous story of the Ring of Gyges (Republic, Book II), the trait that Gyges exhibits in using the power of his ring so lavishly is exousia. It is a kind of license, a recklessness in exercising one’s own will without restraint.
  • The Stoics, though, gave the word a positive spin. The great goal of the Stoic sage was freedom (eleutheria), and they actually defined freedom as a kind of exousia: “the authority of self-action” (exousia autopragias).
  • In the New Testament the word has overwhelmingly positive connotations, and I am especially interested in its use to describe Jesus: “He spoke as one with authority” (ēn gar didaskōn autous hōs exousian echōn) — unlike the scribes and Pharisees. They have the institutional power, but he, this peripatetic sage and prophet, has the real authority. Also, the word often suggests speaking or acting in a way properly “authorized”: See Matthew 8:9 and especially Matthew 28:18: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Edothē moi pasa exousia en ouranō kai epi tēs gēs).

The more I think about this the more I see consistency rather than change in this history. Always, what exousia is depends on the character of the person exercising it. (A distinction we capture in English when we say authoritative or authoritarian.) Exousia in a selfish man, like Gyges, will produce vice; in a sage will produce freedom; in the Son of God will produce compelling teaching, a call to righteousness and intimacy with God. Exousia for Gyges yields self-gratification, while for the Stoic sage it yields self-fulfillment; but in Jesus it manifests itself in words of life for others.

June 28, 2022

Brain Sciences | Is Reduced Visual Processing the Price of Language?:

Abstract

We suggest a later timeline for full language capabilities in Homo sapiens, placing the emergence of language over 200,000 years after the emergence of our species. The late Paleolithic period saw several significant changes. Homo sapiens became more gracile and gradually lost significant brain volumes. Detailed realistic cave paintings disappeared completely, and iconic/symbolic ones appeared at other sites. This may indicate a shift in perceptual abilities, away from an accurate perception of the present…. Studies show that artistic abilities may improve when language-related brain areas are damaged or temporarily knocked out. Language relies on many pre-existing non-linguistic functions. We suggest that an overwhelming flow of perceptual information, vision, in particular, was an obstacle to language, as is sometimes implied in autism with relative language impairment. We systematically review the recent research literature investigating the relationship between language and perception. We see homologues of language-relevant brain functions predating language. Recent findings show brain lateralization for communicative gestures in other primates without language, supporting the idea that a language-ready brain may be overwhelmed by raw perception, thus blocking overt language from evolving. We find support in converging evidence for a change in neural organization away from raw perception, thus pushing the emergence of language closer in time. A recent origin of language makes it possible to investigate the genetic origins of language.

June 12, 2022

Sam Adler-Bell:

Of course, many good ideas, theories of change, and histories of oppression and struggle have been generated on campuses. The wider dissemination of such stories has been a salutary hallmark of our era. I, myself, am a beneficiary of a radical education. But I have had to unlearn many of the ways of speaking I cultivated as a student radical in order to be more convincing and compelling off campus. The obligation to speak to non-radicals, the unconverted, is the obligation of all radicals, and it’s a skill that is not only undervalued but perhaps hindered by a left-wing university education. Learning through participation in collective struggle how the language of socialism, feminism, and racial justice sound, how to speak them legibly to unlike audiences, and how others express their experiences of exploitation, oppression, and exclusion — that is our task. It is quite different from learning to talk about socialism in a community of graduate students and professors.

June 10, 2022

In Times of Tribulation, Prophecy Books Multiply:

“We are looking for books that not only try to decipher what the Bible is describing, but also how we live now,” says Kim Bangs, editorial director at Chosen Books, an imprint of Baker Publishing. Bangs attributes a greater interest in the End Times to social media, where crises happening around the world are shared. “When you see in real time what the Bible says will happen in the End Times, you start to pay attention and ask questions,” she says. “We seem to be closer to the end than ever before.” 

I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say we are unquestionably closer to the end than ever before. 

April 23, 2022

a tiny rant

Recently I listened to a highly-regarded political podcast in which some of the participants referred to Senator Fine-Stine while others spoke of Senator Fine-Steen. I have several thoughts: 

  1. Any journalists who plan to talk about a person for half an hour in public have a positive moral obligation to decide in advance how that person’s name is to be pronounced. 
  2. It is not difficult to discover how Senator Feinstein pronounces her name, so what does it say about journalists’ commitment to their job when they can’t be bothered to find out? 
  3. The mispronunciation some of them chose is not just wrong but indefensible, because the syllable -ein cannot legitimately pronounced one way in the first half of a name and a different way in the second half of the name. 
  4. I blame Leonard Bernstein for this confusion. As far as I know, he is the first famous American with a name ending in -stein who chose to pronounce it -steen. Now it’s a question for everybody in the same nominative condition.
  5. Note, though, that there’s never a debate when someone’s name begins with Stein or simply is Stein. 
  6. I think we should all pronounce names that end with -stein the correct way (the Einstein Way, let’s call it) (the Ein Steinway?) and if anyone with such a name wants to pronounce it -steen we should tell them that they’re wrong and refuse to comply. 

UPDATE: Matt Stover has written to inform me that — as Tom Wolfe has informed others — Leonard Bernstein pronounced his name Bern-Stine and corrected those who called him Bern-steen. I had always heard his name pronounced in the latter way and thought him responsible. Turns out I was, unforgivably, blaming the victim. On the other side of the ledger, my friend Joe Mangina — who shall be cited in a forthcoming post — reminds me of this. 

February 19, 2022

William Davies: 

Before March 2020, I was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of ‘guided reading’. My daughter (aged eight during the school closures that year) was sometimes required to read the same short passage five days in a row and to perform different tasks in relation to it. Presumably the idea was for her to learn how specific sentence constructions work, in the hope that she would be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere – but the invitation to write autonomously, beyond a sentence or two, never arrived. It wasn’t merely the emphasis on obscure grammatical concepts that worried me, but the treatment of language in wholly syntactical terms, with the aim of distinguishing correct from incorrect usage. This is the way a computer treats language, as a set of symbols that generates commands to be executed, and which either succeeds or fails in that task.

This vision of language as code may already have been a significant feature of the curriculum, but it appears to have been exacerbated by the switch to online teaching. In a journal article from August 2020, ‘Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’, John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. 

Almist every structural element of Western education, on all levels, militates against humane learning. 

February 18, 2022

cunning

“Cunning” is a very interesting word. What follows comes largely from rummaging around in the OED.

Long ago it could mean little more than “quite knowledgable” — as when Richard Rolle, in the fourteenth century, refers to “Clerkes of grete cunnyng” — though it more typically acknowledged some kind of physical skill or dexterity, as when the Psalmist says, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” See also this description of the boy David: “I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person, and the Lord is with him” (1 Samuel 16:18, KJV).

But gradually, over the centuries, it began to take on a certain coloration, that of rare and hidden knowledge or skill — thus the “cunning men” or women, the healers that I write about in this essay. Cunning folk may not be formally educated, but they possess much lore or local knowledge, and are capable of exercising wise discernment and tact in their healing art. What they do is not easy to learn or easy to teach; it’s not readily formulable in any commonly-shared language.

Which surely is what leads to the pejoration of the term: the use of “cunning” to mean something like manipulative or deceitfully malicious. Thus Francis Bacon: “We take Cunning for a sinister or crooked Wisdome.” And Tolkien says that Saruman means “man of cunning” — originally in the neutral sense, but as he becomes corrupted by Sauron, in the Baconian sense.

And yet cunning can also be a necessary tool for the marginalized, the oppressed, the threatened — the weak. Emerson says, “Nature has endowed some animals with cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld.” When Stephen Dedalus, at the end of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pledges to practice “silence, exile, and cunning,” he must do so because his powers are slight in comparison with the great forces (religion, nation, family) with which he must contend if he wants to fulfill his calling as an artist.

The kind of cultural repair I am inviting my readers to participate in requires the cultivation of cunning men and women — but woe be unto us if our cunning becomes corrupted. The path from a necessary guile to “a sinister or crooked Wisdome” is not a long one. It is interesting in this context to note that William Tyndale’s translation of 1 Corinthians 2:13 directly juxtaposes the positive and negative connotations of the word: “which thinges also we speake not in the conynge wordes of manes wysdome but with the conynge wordes of the holy goost.”

November 30, 2021

language, language

Ian Leslie:

Capitalism, fascism, neo-liberalism, structural racism, transphobia, wokeness: these giant, airborne nouns, which float around the discourse like zeppelins, are unavoidable in some ways. We probably have to use them. But we should be aware that there is a price to be paid, in clarity and intelligence, for doing so. I sometimes read passages of writing that consist of almost nothing else. I try and use them as sparingly and as precisely as possible, wincing a little inside as I do so. And sometimes when I search for a way to say what I’m saying without using the obvious word, I find a more powerful way of saying it.

On the other hand, keeping your language vague and abstract can be a smart rhetorical tactic. It minimises your exposure to counter-evidence and argument. It means you can send luridly coloured smoke signals about where you stand without having explain or defend your position in any depth (cough, Judith Butler). It allows you to pump out feelings of animosity and outrage without defining the offence, which is why culture wars thrive in this environment.

I used to complain that people just recite the currently approved phrases (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) and therefore should look for less predictable and more vivid ways to say what they mean. Then I realized that reciting the approved phrases is the whole point. I might as well have been asking people to vary the language in the Pledge of Allegiance.

In closely related news, I have a post up at the Hog Blog on why people say that stanning for an Anglo-Saxon king is “woke tosh.” 

November 18, 2021

symbolic manipulation

Matt Yglesias:

A lot of today’s politics is taken up with issues that are not just cultural, but symbolic — what do we teach in middle school U.S. history classes, which meaning of the word “racism” do we use, is it okay to watch Dave Chappelle, which statues do we pull down, etc.

People care about symbols for a reason, and I’m not going to try to talk anyone out of it. I, personally, enjoy the symbolism of living in a neighborhood named after Robert Gould Shaw near a traffic circle named after John Logan and sending my kid to a school named for William Lloyd Garrison, and I would be upset if it was all named after old racists instead. That being said, with my rational brain turned on, it is obvious that this symbolism is less important than whether zoning rules in the neighborhood promote displacement of working-class Black people, and the answer is that they do. And given those bad zoning rules, everything else you might try to do in the neighborhood (better schools and parks, better transportation, safer streets) has weirdly perverse impacts via rent increases.

I think everyone agrees on some level that these material impacts matter more than the symbolism, but we seem to really struggle as a society to focus on concrete things. And that’s a shame. Concrete things are not only more important, but precisely because they are concrete, they are more amenable to compromises and win-win solutions than zero-sum symbolic battles over symbolism and social status. 

This is an old theme for me also. As I wrote seven years ago — almost to the day! — “people who habitually traffic in symbolic manipulation — which includes pretty much everyone who spends a great deal of time, vocationally or avocationally, on the internet — tend to overestimate quite dramatically the power of symbolic manipulation. These people are so scrupulously attentive to how symbols (images and words, above all) are being handled in their corner of the online world that they can scarcely be brought to think about the quite concrete suffering and injustice that happen away from their (and everyone else’s) screens.” 

October 13, 2021

a brief note on narrative

Recently I’ve come across a number of pieces dismissing or critiquing the idea of “narrative” – the idea being that when you call something a narrative you’re turning it into a subjective account that isn’t subject to empirical verification, or external assessment of any kind. I suppose this critique arises from the increasingly common use over the past decade of phrases like “my truth” and “my story.” 

But maybe it’s worth noting that for a long time the primary meaning of the word “narrative” was “faithful account” – that is, to call something a narrative is to proclaim that it tells the truth about something that happened. In the early modern period the word was primarily used in legal contexts; it meant what we might now call “the facts of the case.” 

That’s why Frederick Douglas’s autobiography is not called an autobiography but rather a narrative: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Douglass’s point in so titling his autobiography wasn’t “This is my truth” but rather “This is what actually happened, so help me God.” Fiction writers who wanted to add an aura of verisimilitude to their stories would sometimes appropriate this usage, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. But this only worked because people generally understood the word “narrative” to mean “true account.” 

CleanShot 2021 10 13 at 09 58 57 2x

October 9, 2021

Justin E. H. Smith:

To say that On the Situations and Names of Winds is a “pseudo-Aristotelian” text is to say among other things that it is the sort of text Aristotle could have written. He did in fact write of the names of the winds in his own Meteorology, and in the History of Animals he also, like Pliny, attributes to the wind the power to impregnate horses. To recognize that a philosopher, indeed “the Philosopher” as he was long known, could have been expected to write about the winds, and to do so in his capacity as a philosopher, is an occasion to think about the shifting priorities of a discipline that is unusually difficult to define. These days you can go to college and take a class called “Philosophy of Sport,” but on no list of course offerings will you find, say, “Philosophy of the Sun”. You can take a class called, “Philosophy of Journalism”, but you cannot take one called “Philosophy of Wind”. We take it for granted that this is how things should be, but a moment’s reflection will force you to admit that, if philosophy is reflection on the most important things in life, then the Sun surely deserves its own class well before “sport” does. There is no “sport” without the Sun, whereas the reverse is obviously not the case. Wind might be less important than the Sun, but I would place it well before “sport” or journalism on the list of things that fundamentally shape our lives. Similarly “Philosophy of Climate Science” is hot stuff these days; “Philosophy of Weather” is non-existent. If I were ever permitted to teach a course on the philosophy of wind, I would begin with the questions: How did the winds lose their names? And what does it mean for us to live in a world of nameless winds? I step outside and I feel a gust. “That’s wind,” I think to myself, and I have nothing more to add beyond that. I don’t know the winds. […] 

It seems to me the last philosopher to write about nature in a way continuous with the classical tradition of natural philosophy was Gaston Bachelard, and this has something to do with the fact that for much of his career Bachelard was a rural schoolmaster rather than an urban, status-anxious university professor. He did not write a philosophy of wind, though he did write a psychoanalysis of fire. Here “psychoanalysis” is not understood in the Freudian sense, and has nothing to do with the subconscious symbolism of fire in our dreams or erotic fantasies. Bachelard, rather, is analyzing the soul of fire itself, trying to figure out what fire essentially is, through the combination of his cultural erudition, his scientific literacy, and his poetic imagination. More recently one might be tempted to cite the name of Peter Sloterdijk, who writes entire tomes on things like bubbles. But as far as I can tell it never takes very long for Sloterdijk to move on from the bubbles themselves to other things that the idea of the bubble might help us to understand, things that are held to be more important than real bubbles (just as “sport” is more important than the Sun), like the metaphorical bubbles of financial markets and so on. Now more than ever, I think, we need to revive the tradition of Bachelard, which as I’ve said is continuous with the way philosophy was understood for most of its history, and to pursue the philosophy not just of wind but of bubbles too, and of fire and of the Sun: in themselves and for their own sake. I’m serious about this.

July 12, 2021

two quotations: great words and grand themes

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. ‘Home!’…it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

Nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years, but at the same time nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them.

— Kinsgley Amis, introduction to Poets of the 1950s

July 10, 2021

orbital obliquity

SciTech Daily:

Planets which are tilted on their axis, like Earth, are more capable of evolving complex life. This finding will help scientists refine the search for more advanced life on exoplanets. […]  

“The most interesting result came when we modeled ‘orbital obliquity’ — in other words how the planet tilts as it circles around its star,” explained Megan Barnett, a University of Chicago graduate student involved with the study. She continued, “Greater tilting increased photosynthetic oxygen production in the ocean in our model, in part by increasing the efficiency with which biological ingredients are recycled. The effect was similar to doubling the amount of nutrients that sustain life.” 

“Orbital obliquity” is one of those scientific terms — like “persistence of vision” and “angle of repose” — that just cries out for metaphorical application.

All of the writers and thinkers I trust most are characterized by orbital obliquity. They are never quite perpendicular; they approach the world at a slight angle. As a result their minds evolve complex life. 

P.S. Another of those metaphor-generating terms: “impact gardening.” 

May 28, 2021

partners

Whenever I hear someone refer to their husband, wife, spouse — even their Significant Other, a phrase from a now-distant past — as their “partner,” I think of something Wendell Berry wrote decades ago: 

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. 

“Partner” is, in the context of marriage or even long-term cohabitation, an ugly word, connoting as it does a business relationship for mutual profit, ready to be dissolved when the profits aren’t high enough. It should never be used in the context of mutual love.  

UPDATE: My friend Andy Crouch has written to me in defense of the word “partner,” suggesting that it “has a wider frame of reference” than I allow, and pointing out that it’s the nearly-universal translation of koinonos in Philemon 17. This is a very good point! I’ll take this under further consideration, but for now, several thoughts:  

  1. The word certainly had a wider referential scope in the past. If you look at the OED you discover that Milton’s Adam says “I stand / Before my Judge, either to undergoe / My self the total Crime, or to accuse / My other self, the partner of my life.” And Robert Southey 150 years later: “So forth I set … And took the partner of my life with me.” 
  2. However, this kind of usage almost completely disappears for nearly two centuries, until it is revived largely by people looking for a word to describe committed gay and lesbian relationships, at a time when such people could not marry. But up until that time, again if the OED is any guide, the business-based meaning had for many decades almost completely displaced all others. 
  3. Thus one could reasonably conclude that the business-based uses of the word have become so dominant that they cast a strong dark shadow over any current use of the word — which is my view. Or recent uses of the term certainly could reasonably be heard as a renewal of older, more richly human meanings — which is Andy’s view.
  4. So the connotative situation is definitely more complex than I acknowledge above. 
  5. The economic overtones of the word would certainly be displaced if one were to follow Milton and Southey in making it a phrase, “the partner of my life,” or, more shortly, “life partner” — but that, I suspect, is a phrasing most people who employ the term wouldn’t want to commit to. 
  6. Finally: I wonder if, given the connotations the word has acquired, “partner” is a good translation of koinonos, or whether an alternative needs to be considered. I notice that the 14th-century Wycliffite version of Philemon 17 has “Therefore if thou has me as a fellow, receive him as me,” which captures the idea of koinonia as a fellowship — but we don’t use “fellow” that way any more. Maybe contemporary English has no real equivalent to koinonos. That would be a situation worthy of our reflection. 
September 22, 2020

Gaslighting

One of the more pernicious quirks of English usage to arise in the past few years is the employment — by a remarkably large number of people, it seems to me — of the term “gaslighting” as the default explanation for disagreement. Nobody just disagrees with me anymore, they’re trying to gaslight me.

Let’s remember where the phrase comes from: a 1944 film in which a husband attempts to make his wife think that she’s crazy. To say that someone is gaslighting you is to say that they know you’re right but are pretending not to. They’re maliciously trying to get you to doubt yourself. They are dishonest, deceitful, manipulative. The charge of gaslighting is an extreme form of Bulverism: Instead of claiming You say that because you’re a man or You say that because you’re an American it’s You say that because you’re a moral monster. 

It’s a useful tactic to deploy if you’d prefer never to think about whether any of your assumptions are correct. Your opponents are not only wrong, they are wicked, and why should you engage with arguments that are obviously made in bad faith and for evil purposes? These convictions keep your echo chamber hermetically sealed.

What I find especially interesting about this usage is that it seems to have been adopted with equal eagerness by extremists on the left and the right. (Unlike the structurally very similar red pill/blue pill meme, which has been totally co-opted by the right.) It’s one of the many ways in which the far left and the far right are continually borrowing language, rhetorical strategy, and in some cases even direct political strategy from one another. It would be nice if we could ship them all off to their own island where they could fight it out, or, perhaps, discover that they can’t tell one another apart.

August 7, 2020

hoisting the flag

I mentioned on my micro.blog that I’ve been reading Stephen Harrigan’s magnificent Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. (The title comes from the painter Georgia O’Keefe, a native of Wisconsin who remembered her first coming to west Texas: “I couldn’t believe Texas was real. When I arrived out there, there wasn’t a blade of green grass or a leaf to be seen, but I was absolutely crazy about it…. For me Texas is the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”) As I said over there, the book is full of passages like this one:

The Edwards brothers, and Martin Parmer, another outraged colonist who called himself the Ringtailed Panther, launched a rebellion, wrote yet another declaration of independence, designed yet another flag, and established yet another evanescent republic. This one was called the Republic of Fredonia, a brand-new country that in the Edwardses’ mind included not just the territory of his former colony but the greater part of Texas itself. Though it was at heart an Anglo rebellion, Haden Edwards managed to enlist a smattering of Cherokee allies, under the leadership of Richard Fields, who was a tireless advocate of the tribe despite his run-of-the-mill Anglo American name and his one-eighth measure of Cherokee blood. “The flag of liberty,” Edwards exulted, “now waves in majestic triumph on the heights of Nacogdoches and despotism stands appalled at the sight.”

The rhetorical flamboyance of Edwards’s description of what he had achieved — alas, Fredonia lasted just a few months — makes me smile. Maybe you had to have a lot of energy, in those days, to try to make a go of it in Texas, and that energy manifested itself not least in your language.

Such vibrancy could be terse — as in Davy Crockett’s famous farewell to Tennessee politics: “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas” — or elegant — as when the magnificently named second President of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, offered his hopes for the country: “Our young Republic has been formed by a Spartan spirit — let it progress and ripen into Roman firmness, and Athenian gracefulness and wisdom.” But more often it was, like Haden Edwards’s encomium to Fredonia, unashamedly flashy. Presumably such flash was regularly inspired by the aforementioned “flag of liberty.” One hopeful colonist headed for what was then the northernmost province of New Spain was encouraged by a newspaper of the time with these stirring words: “God speed ye, [and] may no difficulties or obstacles oppose you — until the flag of liberty waves triumphant over the prostituted insignia of time-serving priests and the broken truncheons of substitute kings.”

I am sad that my culture has lost this facility and lost it altogether. Look at some of the statements of the Black Lives Matter organization, for instance:

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

Or:

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Doesn’t exactly stir one’s loins with revolutionary fervor, does it?

I started to write that this language sounds like it comes from a draft manifesto of the Theory Collective at a midwestern university — but then I reflected that it sounds more like an except from the Policies and Procedures manual that your Human Resources department posted on your institutional intranet. And then I realized that Black revolutionaries, literary theorists, and HR departments all write exactly the same way. What a nightmare. What a desiccated, lifeless, mechanical, exhausted and exhausting nightmare.

Friends, let us recover some of the linguistic flamboyance of our ancestors. Only then may the flag of liberty flutter and snap with proud delight as it is tickled by the powerful winds of Progress!

Also, please call me the Ringtailed Panther.

July 14, 2020

Mindslaughter and the united front

Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (delivered as a lecture in 1958) begins with a meditation on political ends and means. “Where ends are agreed,” he writes, “the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones.” It is simply a matter of political engineering. This is of course what Oakeshott calls “rationalism in politics.”

Berlin then comments that if a stranger visited a British or American university, he would surely think that all the questions of ends has been settled, “for all the serious attention that is paid to fundamental problems of politics by professional philosophers.” That is, our professoriat act as though they believe that all the old debates about the social and political order, debates that go back in the West at least to Socrates and in the East at least to Confucius, have been decided. In Berlin’s view, this habit of mind “is both surprising and dangerous.”

Surprising because there has, perhaps, been no time in modern history when so large a number of human beings, in both the East and the West, have had their notions, and indeed their lives, so deeply altered, and in some cases violently upset, by fanatically held social and political doctrines. Dangerous, because when ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them – that is to say, those who have been trained to think critically about ideas – they sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism.

I think it was an awareness of just this danger that made the great historian Robert Conquest write, in one of his last books, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), that in an age dominated by what he calls “mindslaughter” — the destruction of intellect by ideas that have “grown too violent to be affected by rational criticism” — Yeats’s description of the state of affairs just before the Second Coming might not be right. When Yeats wrote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” he implied that the best needed to acquire a “passionate intensity” of their own — but Conquest isn’t so sure. Maybe what the world needs is more people who are skeptical by temperament, inclined to suspect certainty, wary of passions and their resulting intensities.

Conquest says, citing Orwell, that he wants to resist “the lure of the profound.” I have not been able to find that Orwell ever wrote that, though perhaps he said it to Conquest — I believe they knew each other, and Conquest wrote an incisive poem about Orwell. Why resist profundity, or at least the quest for it? There’s a hint at the beginning of Christopher Hitchens’s book Why Orwell Matters, which is dedicated to Conquest with these words: “premature anti-fascist, premature anti-Stalinist, poet and mentor, and founder of ‘the united front against bullshit.’” What the desire for profundity lures us into is bullshit.

Maybe we don’t need any more passionate intensity for a while. Maybe we need to revivify the United Front Against Bullshit.

May 28, 2020

my expert opinion

Americans have never more desperately needed reliable knowledge than we do now; also, Americans have never been less inclined to trust experts, who are by definition the people supposed to possess the reliable knowledge. There are many reasons why we have landed ourselves in this frustratingly paradoxical situation, and there’s no obvious way out of it. But I want to suggest that there’s one small thing that journalists can do to help: Stop using the word “experts.”

Of course, expertise is a real thing! — though perhaps not quite as commonplace a thing as is widely believed. In most of life’s situations we understand the value of expertise: few of us try to repair our own computers, and none of us decides to remove his own spleen. But occasionally we draw a line.

Some are inclined to draw that line in strange places — say, believing that the moon landing was faked, or that the world is ruled by lizard people. But the really common dissents seem to come in matters of health: you might not know any moon-landing skeptics or lizard-people True Believers, but you surely have an anti-vaxxer cousin, or an aunt whose belief in the healing power of essential oils persists in defiance of her doctor’s counsel. And if you’re going to try to persuade those dissenters from standard opinion to change their minds, almost the worst thing you can do it appeal to “experts.”

There are three reasons for this. The first is that many people with genuine expertise in a given field have a difficult time staying in their lane. I have long thought that the perfect example of this is the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The question of whether we are close to nuclear war is a political question, not a scientific one; an “atomic scientist” has no reasonable claim to knowing any more about it than you do, at least, not by virtue of being an atomic scientist. (Factoring climate change into the Doomsday scenario doesn’t help matters much, because atomic scientists aren’t climate scientists any more than they are psychiatrists or nutritionists.)

A second reason that invocations of expertise often fail is simply that people with equivalent expertise in the same field often disagree. This leads to the phenomenon, familiar to anyone who has ever flipped from one cable news station to another, of Dueling Experts.

The third, and most important, reason why appeals to expertise are futile is that the term “expert” functions as a kind of class marker. An expert is One Who Knows, a member of the noocracy or epistocracy — and you are not. “Experts say” is a phrase that often carries a strong implication: “So shut up and heed your betters.” This is not the sort of message that Americans like, even when maybe they ought to.

My suggestion to journalists, then, is simple: Never use the word “expert.” If you are tempted to say “We talked to an expert,” say instead that you talked to an immunologist, or an epidemiologist — and then take a moment to explain what an immunologist or epidemiologist actually is. Tell us that you talked to someone who has spent twenty years studying the ways that diseases are transmitted, especially from one person to another. Yes, that takes longer than saying “expert,” but it’s worth it. To describe the person you’re interviewing or quoting in that more detailed way tells a little story, a story not about someone standing on a pedestal labeled “EXPERT,” but rather a person who is continually working to learn more. A person who has thought hard, and tested her ideas, and worked with colleagues who care about the same things. A person whom we should listen to not because she belongs to a certain class that’s higher than ours, but rather because she‘s dedicated to gaining knowledge — and knowledge directly relevant to the questions we’re all asking right now.

It should be obvious that this discipline will also ensure that journalists rely on people with the appropriate knowledge. When you’re scrambling to find someone to interview or cite and can only find someone whose field is but tangentially related to the question at hand, he word “expert” can neatly obscure your problem.

All this takes more time and effort. But the word “expert” has been poisoned now for millions of people, and not always for bad reasons. I know that in journalism time is often short and word-count limited, but journalists have a responsibility to educate as well as inform their public, and this is a way to do that better. After all, you want to be an expert communicator, don’t you?

December 3, 2019

My preferred pronouns? None. You should use nouns only when referring to or addressing me.

November 7, 2019

the call

“I call bullshit.” I used to see that a lot on social media, back when I was on social media. But what does it mean? It means, “I disagree.” That’s all. The statement has no further content. But “I disagree” sounds bland and flat while “I call bullshit” — well, that sounds badass. You must have some powerful Refutation Mojo if you can call bullshit, just like that, right there on the internet in front of everybody. 

When we were kids, on some excursion in a parental automobile, and were leaving the mall or the grocery store or the McDonald’s, someone would shout “Shotgun!” And then one of the bigger kids who hadn’t said anything would calmly climb into the shotgun seat, after which a little voice from the middle of the back seat would whine, “But I called it!” — and would simply be ignored. Calling bullshit is like that. 

September 5, 2019

monosyllabic

At the excellent Futility Closet I learn of a nineteenth-century fellow who wrote a sermon entirely in words of one syllable:

He who wrote the Psalm in which our text is found, had great cause to both bless and praise God; for he had been brought from a low state to be a great king in a great land; had been made wise to rule the land in the fear and truth of God; and all his foes were, at the time he wrote, at peace with him. Though he had been poor, he was now rich in this world’s goods; though his youth had been spent in the care of sheep, he now wore a crown; and though it had been his lot for a long time to hear the din of war and strife, peace now dwelt round the throne, and the land had rest.

That’s quite good, is it not? See also William Barnes’s book of speech-craft.

And: this stanza from one of the greatest of Auden’s poems, “The Shield of Achilles”:

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

Sixty-three words: one of three syllables, four of two syllables, all the others of one syllable each (including thirty-seven of them in a row). The words trudge at the pace of a terrible dirge.

December 17, 2018

Speech-craft

In 1878 a man named William Barnes published a book called An Outline of English Speech-Craft. “Speech-craft” is a word Barnes prefers to “grammar” because “grammar” is not an English word but a Greek one. Barnes’ self-chosen quixotic task — as outlined in his Preface Fore-Say — is to describe English speech-craft using only English words. The task is quixotic because linguists and lexicographers and grammarians typically use words borrowed from Latin and (less often) Greek. They speak of prepositions and participles, of the nominative and the subjunctive, of transitive and intransitive. Here are some of Barnes’s alternative terms — I’ll leave it to you to guess what Latinate terms they are meant to replace:

  • speech-breathing
  • breath-penning
  • pitches of suchness
  • outreaching
  • unoutreaching
  • time-taking
  • thought-wording
  • sundriness

Notice how many of these are kennings. Notice also that he can’t escape the influence of Latin altogether.

Screen Shot 2018 12 17 at 9 32 24 AM

September 26, 2018

“a large superfluous establishment of words”

We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.

— Dickens, David Copperfield 

N.B.  Quote posted by a man who has published more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles, so grains of salt may be required. 

September 25, 2018

Christian language policing

Mary Eberstadt:

The word gay and related terms like LGBTQ should be avoided for a deeper reason. They are insufficiently respectful of the human beings who are described in this way. Such identifiers sell humanity short by suggesting that sexual desire amounts to the most important fact about an individual. However well-intentioned (or not), these terms advance a reductionist view of men and women incommensurate with the reality that we are infinitely rich and complicated beings, created in the image of God.

It is bad enough when the wider culture, interested in exploiting carnal desires for commercial or prurient reasons, objectifies human beings in this way. When religious authorities do the same, the damage is worse. I’m reminded of Fr. Arne Panula, a prominent Washington, D.C., priest of manifest goodness and wisdom who died last year. In one of our last conversations, he mentioned meeting a friend-of-a-friend in Italy. This friend felt compelled to tell him, “Fr. Arne, I’m gay.” To which the priest replied, “No, you’re not. You’re a child of God.” Fr. Arne was making the point that the most important fact about this man was not his erotic leanings.

I have heard some version of this argument many times and I have never understood it. Are there any other adjectives or descriptors that Eberstadt sees as having the same character?

For instance, imagine that I had just met Fr. Arne, and as we chatted he started telling me, with the evident sense that this would mean something to me, that he loved the city of Montreal and thought that the RCMP is an especially admirable institution that other countries should imitate. Imagine further that, in order to head off any misunderstanding, I said, “Fr. Arne, I’m American.” Would he reply, “No, you’re not. You’re a child of God”? And if not, why not? (We can easily imagine other situations in which I might say “I’m white” or “I’m Southern.”)

Adjectives and similar descriptors tend to be circumstantial in this way. Were I to say, in the imagined context, “I’m American,” I would not therefore be affirming that being American is intrinsic to my identity or the most important thing about me. I would, rather, be affirming that my status as an American was contextually relevant. And aren’t there other contexts in which “I’m gay” or “I’m straight” would be similarly relevant?

At this point in writing this post I realized that what I’m saying sounded familiar to me, and I thought a while, and remembered that Ron Belgau has already made my point: “English speakers say, ‘I am X’ all the time without meaning that ‘X’ is either a defining or constitutive element in their identity….” Belgau concludes, definitively: “I do not think that ‘gay’ describes any deep fact about who I am in Christ.” And yet no matter how many times he and his colleagues make these denials, someone always turns up to say Yes you do, you totally think that.

The insistence I see in so many quarters on policing this very particular bit of English usage is very strange to me, and I am losing the ability to see it as anything but a power play, a way of saying to gay and lesbian Christians You’ll use the language we decide you should use, or else. It’s become a non-fatal shibboleth, this demand that a certain word or set of words be used or not be used as a precondition of full fellowship. Isn’t it past time just to let this go?

August 11, 2018

excerpt from my Sent folder: on exhausted languages

What I really am, by vocation and avocation, is a historian of ideas, and when you’ve been a historian of ideas for several decades you’re bound to notice how a certain vocabulary can take over an era — and not always in a good way. Consider for instance the period of over half the 20th century in which Freudian language completely dominated humanistic discourse, despite the fact that it had no empirical support whatever and was about as wrong-headed as it is possible for a body of ideas to be. Some tiny number of people flatly rejected it, a rather larger group enthused over it, and the great majority accepted it as part of their mandatory mental furniture, like having a coffee table or refrigerator in your house. (“It’s what people do, dear.”) Eventually it passed not because it had been discredited — it had never been “credited” in the first place — but because people got tired of it.

This exhaustion of a vocabulary happens more and more quickly now thanks to the takeover of intellectual life by a university committed to novelty in scholarship. But that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, when you do this kind of work you develop — or you damn well ought to develop — an awareness that many of our vocabularies are evanescent  because of their highly limited explanatory power. You see, in a given discipline or topic area, one vocabulary coming on as another fades away, and you don’t expect the new one to last any longer than the previous one did. I think this makes it easier for you to consider the possibility that a whole explanatory language is basically useless. But while those languages last people get profoundly attached to them and are simply unwilling to question them — they become axioms for their users — which means that conversations cease to be conversations but rather turn into endlessly iterated restatements of quasi-religious conviction. “Intersecting monologues,” as Rebecca West said.

Often when I’m grading essays, or talking to my students about their essays, I notice that a certain set of terms are functioning axiomatically for them in ways that impede actual thought. When that happens I will sometimes ask, “How would you describe your position if you couldn’t use that word?” And I try to force the same discipline on myself on those occasions (too rare of course) when I realize that I am allowing a certain set of terms to become an intellectual crutch.

Moreover, I have come to believe that when a conversation gets to the “intersecting monologue” stage, when people are just trotting out the same limited set of terms in every context, that says something about the inadequacy of the vocabulary itself. Not just its users but the vocabulary itself is proving resistant to an encounter with difference and otherness. And that’s a sign that it has lost whatever explanatory power it ever had.

I think that’s where we are in our discourse of gender. And that’s why I am strongly inclined to think that there’s nothing substantial behind that discourse, it’s just a bundle of words with no actual explanatory power. And even if that’s not the case, the only way we can free ourselves from bondage to our terministic axioms is to set them aside and try to describe the phenomena we’re interested in in wholly other terms.

This, by the way, is the origin of all great metaphors, the “metaphors we live by”: the ones that make a permanent mark on culture are the ones that arise from an awareness of how our conventional terms fail us. Those coinages are (often desperate) attempts to throw off the constricting power of those terms. It was when Darwin realized that the explanatory language of natural history had reached a dead end that he coined “natural selection,” a term whose power is so great that it is hard for most people to realize that it is after all a metaphor. Our whole discourse of gender needs Darwins who can’t bear those constrictions any more and decide to live without them. And the first term that should go, as I suggested to you earlier, is “gender” itself.

June 27, 2017

definition as poetry

ABER, adj., sharp, acute, as an edge-tool; clear, well-defined, as a cloudless sky; eager, as a hungry fish at a bait; secure, as a knot on a line; ardent, severe; v., to sharpen, as a knife; to stir up and make bright, as a fire.

— A piece of Shetland dialect, reported poetically in James Stout Angus’s A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect – as we learn from Robert Macfarlane

August 27, 2016

“Picturization”

December 15, 2015

“the power of a discourse that is never open to reply”

Uttering the unacceptable in prose and exploring the elusive, not-yet-captured depth of things in poetry have in common the crucial recognition that we shan’t learn about ourselves or our world – including our political world – if we are prevented from hearing things to argue with and things that leave us frustrated and (in every sense) wondering. Our current panics about ‘offence’ are at their best and most generous an acknowledgement of how language can encode and enact power relations (my freedom of ‘offending’ speech may be your humiliation, a confirmation of your exclusion from ordinary public discourse). But at its worst it is a patronising and infantilising worry about protecting individuals from challenge; the inevitable end of that road is a far worse entrenching of unquestionable power, the power of a discourse that is never open to reply. Debates about international issues like Israel and Palestine, or issues of social and personal morals – abortion, gender and sexuality, end of life questions – are regularly shadowed by anxiety, even panic, about what must not be said in public, and also by the sometimes startlingly coercive insistence on the ‘rational’ and canonical status of one perspective only. On both sides of all such debates, there can be a deep unwillingness to have things said or shown that might profoundly challenge someone’s starting assumptions. If there is an answer to this curious contemporary neurosis, it is surely not in the silencing of disagreement but in the education of speech: how is unwelcome truth to be told in ways that do not humiliate or disable? And the answer to that question is inseparable from learning to argue – from the actual practice of open exchange, in the most literal sense ‘civil’ disagreement, the debate appropriate to citizens who have dignity and liberty to discuss their shared world and its organisation and who are able to learn what their words sound like in the difficult business of staying with such a debate as it unfolds.

— Rowan Williams

March 1, 2015

About “It”

Consider these sentences:

Wilson nailed it.

Jones just doesn’t get it.

It’s about ethics in games journalism.

It’s not about politics.

It. And: about. This kind of language is useless — worse than useless, in fact. Substantively, such phrases say nothing more than “I agree” or “I disagree,” but they add a layer of blurry obfuscation. Whole vast complexes of ideas and experiences disappear in the dense fog generated by a two-lettered pronoun. Wilson nailed what? Jones doesn’t get what? Put your brain in gear and figure out what you mean by “it.” Then write or say what you’ve decided you mean. Maybe then you can contribute something more than the mere announcement of what team you’re on.

About just thickens the fog further. What is this “it” that can only be “about” one thing? What does it even mean for an it to be about? All you’re really saying when you employ this locution is, “I would prefer us to debate certain topics that are different than the topics other people want to debate.” Again: vacuous.

So don’t use these locutions, ever. Just remember: It’s about clarity of thought and precision of expression.

February 1, 2015

Stefan Fatsis is Wrong

This post by Stefan Fatsis is remarkably dumb. Let me explain why.

When people disagree with dictionary-makers’ decisions about which words belong in a given dictionary, here’s what Fatsis says they do: they “panic.” They “grouse.” They “bemoan.” They “howl.” They “tsk-tsk.” He imagines them saying “Think of the children!” — presumably in a squeaky voice. Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we, Stefan?

So for Fatsis any criticism of such choices is simply absurd, period. Why? Because “evolution of culture”! Because “language changes with time”! Disagreement with the dictionary makers is “manufactured” — by whom he doesn’t say — and “trumped up” — he doesn’t assign a perpetrator there either. Shadowy forces, setting themselves against “evolution of culture”! Who do they think they are?

Basically, Fatsis is making a “wrong side of history” argument: The evolution of culture rolls inexorably on — oppose it not, lest ye be crushed beneath its mighty wheels! But that’s just silly. These lexicographers are not, like Napoleon marching through Jena, embodiments of the Weltgeist. They are people making a product for sale. Those who might buy and use that product have every right to form opinions about its contents, and to argue for those opinions. Isn’t there more than enough passive consumerism in the world already?

Fatsis thinks it’s self-evidently ridiculous for people to want the word “acorn” in a children’s dictionary in preference to the word “broadband,” largely because he thinks such people have no status to question their lexicographical overlords, who embody “evolution of culture,” but also because he says we live in a world where kids simply use computers more than they play outside, “like it or not.” Here he’s just failing to understand that children’s dictionaries are tools that parents and teachers employ in child-rearing: debates over what forms those tools should take cannot be resolved by appealing to the current status of lexicographers’ self-description. Lexicography can be descriptivist; child-rearing cannot. It’s perfectly reasonable to want children to learn more nature-words and not to worry so much about how many internet-words they pick up.

This is reasonable in part because the relation between world and word is not unidirectional. People don’t use dictionaries only to discover the meanings of words they have encountered elsewhere; sometimes by browsing through dictionaries we discover that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in our philosophies. Even acorns.

So, Stefan Fatsis, enough of your panicking, howling, grousing, bemoaning, and tsk-tsking. Think of the children!

August 16, 2013

My great-grandmother was born in Mississippi, in 1890, and lived in Mississippi for the whole of her long life. But her own grandparents, who died long before I was born, were Scottish, and vestiges of this Scottishness still survived in her nursery talk. In the same way her husband, my great-grandfather — generations removed from his French ancestors — instinctively corrected naughty dogs and children as his old French aunties had done, with a sharp and very Gallic non!

A particular lilt crept into my great-grandmother’s voice when she sang and when she read to me aloud. It was dreamy and gorgeous to my ear, this special voice of hers, the very stuff of warmth and love; it was, I believed, peculiar to her alone of all the world, a voice which, like a cat’s purr, was specific to hearth and home, reserved for her dearest ones. Not until I was older — and, rather to my shock, heard the private lullaby voice being spoken in public by a perfect stranger on a television program — did I realize that the beloved musicality which for many years I’d confidently believed was mine alone was in fact a Scots accent.

— Donna Tartt
July 23, 2013

And so, among Jews, Braun now becomes a familiar figure: a shanda fur die Goyim. The Yiddish phrase translates, roughly, to “a shame before the non-Jews.” The idea is sort of two-fold: That more is expected of Jews, specifically by Jews; and that when a famous Jew fails to live up to those high standards, it makes us all look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world. Madoff is a shanda. Maybe Weiner and Spitzer. You get the idea. And Braun, now, will surely join their ranks.

This is something relatively assimilated Jewish people still say, and still mean sincerely; it’s not just, like, a Twitter thing. But it is interesting that the phrase persists in the original Yiddish. That language, essentially a German dialect written in Hebrew script which is now spoken only by a handful of native speakers from Eastern Europe as well as by members of several Hasidic sects, is explicitly ethnic (yid is Yiddish for “Jew”) and as such unavoidably paints the world in expressly ethnic, tribal terms. To call someone a shanda, in other words, is to think in ethnic terms doubly.

— Marc Tracy
July 15, 2013

There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern Australia.

Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan, has been studying the young people’s speech for more than a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.

The language, called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, is spoken only by people under 35 in Lajamanu, an isolated village of about 700 people in Australia’s Northern Territory. In all, about 350 people speak the language as their native tongue. Dr. O’Shannessy has published several studies of Light Warlpiri, the most recent in the June issue of Language.

“Many of the first speakers of this language are still alive,” said Mary Laughren, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved in the studies. One reason Dr. O’Shannessy’s research is so significant, she said, “is that she has been able to record and document a ‘new’ language in the very early period of its existence.”

— Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy – NYTimes.com
css.php