Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Lexicographer supreme Erin McKean, whose wonderful work has been discussed on LP previously, argues in the Boston Globe that, in the words of Boing Boing, English is a user-modifiable technology. We should forget “I’m not sure if this is a real word”, she urges:
In short, if it seems wordish, use it. No apologies necessary.
“Wordish”, by the way, is a real word. You can read the rest of McKean’s fabulous column here.
It’s well known that grammar stoushes can get a tad heated.
A very curious article in the Boston Globe reflecting on punctuation wars surrounding the semicolon, with the tag line “the punctuation mark that makes men tremble”, shows something rather interesting about language in use aside from its ostensible casus belli: how quickly heated arguments lead to the invocation of gendered abuse.
Consider this:
Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.
And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”
Nevertheless, the semicolon has been suffering. Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing “a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.”
You’d think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. If semicolons are masculine enough for Melville and Irving, why should they unsettle Barthelme and Vonnegut? Are today’s male writers just more insecure than yesterday’s about the manliness of their vocation?
Story: British MPs raise torture concerns
So some politicians have finally noticed that when one group of people define torture so that it includes waterboarding and another group defines torture so that it excludes waterboarding, then the word torture itself becomes stripped of substance in terms of the debate over the ethical and humane treatment of prisoners (let alone which techniques are actually effective at intelligence-gathering).
Took them long enough.
Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded by the US Military to see whether it felt like torture to him. It did.
via Pharyngula, who has links to video.
As the uncle travelling Matt of LP, I bring you strange news from the Outer Space that is the USA.
For those who hadn’t heard, the US Supreme Court has issued its first opinion since the 1930s which directly addresses the Second Amendment and outlines the Court’s approach to the right to bear arms.
In a 5-4 decision, they have come down on the “individual rights” view of the Second Amendment, asserting that this construction…
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
…refers to an individual right to bear arms that existed prior to the framing of the Amendment, and which pre-existing right the framers intended to codify and co-opt into the service of a well-regulated militia for the defence of the State against attempted tyranny, foreign or domestic.
At Ambit Gambit, Graham Young comments on the grammar controversy over a resource guide prepared for the English Teachers’ Association of Queensland - which was criticised by Emeritus Professor Rodney Huddleston from UQ and damned by Kevin Donnelly as “a progressive, cultural-left approach to English as a subject”. Among Donnelly’s objections:
[Parents] and their children will not be surprised at the erudition of some of the learning activities proposed in the articles. These suggest that students identify nouns and verbs by analysing newspaper previews for Home and Away and Neighbours. Pathetic.
Perhaps Milton should be set? Oops, they wrote before traditional grammar was entrenched… Or one William Shakespeare who used the double superlative “most unkindest” before… As Young writes:
The Romans, driven I suspect by their infatuation with standardisation (which palls in comparison to ours, but they caught the disease first), invented grammar. It didn’t exist before them, people just spoke languages. English grammar was invented because without a grammar it was an “inferior” language. And as Latin was by this time seen as some sort of Platonic form amongst languages, English grammar was made to conform to Latin in areas where it didn’t. So was born the ban on split infinitives and the insistance that two negatives made a positive, even in circumstances where two negatives used to mean something like “double plus bad”. If that’s the way that Latin did it, then that’s the way a language with pretensions must.
When you think about it, there are probably more languages in the world without formally taught grammars than there are ones with, but how many speakers of these languages complain, or have trouble learning their languages without it?
As Andrew Leigh remarks, if you want to get a sense of how powerful an orator Barack Obama is, you need to watch the video of his victory speech, rather than just read the transcript. For purposes of comparison, I’ve included Hillary’s concession speech. It was belated, and that’s done her some damage (and I suspect it was more of a matter of a personal concession than the power plays we’ve heard discussed that led to its delay), but it’s significant that she included reference to the issues her campaign has been pushing as well as a rather dignified endorsement of her erstwhile rival. There’s another interesting comparison which I’ll discuss over the fold.
Continue reading ‘A tale of two campaigns in words and pictures’
Exhibit #1: ABC TV news, Sunday night, item about the Waratahs coach Ewen McKenzie, whose contract hasn’t been renewed. There’s a quick grab from McKenzie saying he’s proud to leave the Waratahs in better shape than he found them, they are a great “brand”.
Funny, I thought they were a football team. Continue reading ‘The commodification of just about everything (especially language)’
When traipsing round the blogosphere, I encounter a common patois of hatred dispensed with indiscriminate fury, and in the same patterns of speech, against all-comers in the political arena.
I am reminded of the perennial hate-figure from 1984.
To demonstrate, can you discern which politician is being hated in each of the quotes below - Kevin Rudd, John Howard, George Bush, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Each of them are the target of at least one of these quotes…
I’d like to propose a corollary to Godwin’s law: As an internet thread gets longer, the probability of someone invoking free speech to prop up an otherwise unsustainable argument approaches 1.
Free speech is a tricky beast: it’s one of the most precious aspects of our civilisation, and yet, in many practical day-to-day situations it can turn out to be worthless, contributing nothing but misinformation, spreading rumour and insinuation, and damaging ourselves and others.
In discussion, the “free speech” card is sometimes played in earnest by sensitive souls who misinterpret honest rebuttal or refutation as an attempt to silence them. It is at other times used dishonestly to distract from paucity of evidence or logical flaws in the accuser’s position - attack being considered the best form of defence.
If we look at speech in the blogosphere, newsprint and on TV, we see that it is all free. But how much of it is ethical?
Continue reading ‘An ethics of free speech, from the Bible to Spider-Man’
Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.
I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.
Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:
Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.
There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.
Continue reading ‘A national/natural history of memory and forgetting’
Except of course, they aren’t. Our world is chemicals, our life is chemistry.
This rant is brought to you by yet another TV talking head rabbiting on about
“natural remedies, not those chemical ones”
Sorry Kochie, all those natural remedies are full of chemicals too. Chemicals don’t only come from factories, where they are not created but refined from naturally occurring raw materials and recombined to form new compounds.
Chemicals are also combined, recombined, recycled and recombined again every time you, me and every other animal breathes and eats, just for starters. Chemicals also gad about when every plant respires and photosynthesises - every plant and every animal is made of chemical elements and every natural remedy consists of active ingredients that have consistent conventional chemical names e.g. vitamins.
This idea that chemicals are nasty and unnatural and dangerous is rampant. Why? Continue reading ‘Terrible, horrible, scary UNNATURAL chemicals’
Y’know, I don’t find this offensive. It’s clever, not least in its rather pointed metacommentary on the way that advertisements for menstrual products have relied on euphemisms since forever. This ad very pointedly avoids any salacious lingering on female anatomy as well, which is more than can be said for some other ads for menstrual products. The men gazing at the woman and her companion aren’t represented as stupid either, just bemused by the unusual sight of a beaver at the beach, which is another nice change from some other ads for menstrual products.
So, what it is about this ad which has caused so many complaints to flow into the Advertising Standards Bureau? There’s been sufficient controversy for the ad to be blogged widely overseas, for instance. Is it just that “beaver” is a direct reference to the vulva/vagina? Not euphemistic enough? Would there have been the same complaints if she’d gone through her daily routines with a team of painters in tow?
This piece struck a chord with me regarding some of the frequent epithets hurled at “lefties” on this very blog:
why have conservatives frequently insulted the type of food (sushi-eating), type of coffee (latte-drinking), or type of alcoholic beverages (wine and / or microbrews) that many progressives consume? It seems to me that they consider an individual’s divergence from their habits to somehow be an insult to them, rather than the outlandish possibility that different people just prefer different kinds of food and drinks. Does their intolerance know no bounds? And if they really like the food, coffee and alcoholic beverages they consume, why does it bother them so much that other people have different preferences? That strikes me as a shockingly high level of personal insecurity concerning one’s cultural preferences.
This literal distaste for pluralism, coupled with whining over something as petty as personal eating habits, is demonstrative of what has always struck me as the extreme insecurity among conservatives in the cultural realm. That someone even cares what someone else eats is absolutely pathetic. The inability to just live and let live reveals how the conservative cultural supremacist message is based in the highest levels of personal insecurity that one can think of. The fear of gays, of Mexicans, of Muslims, and even of food is infantile in the extreme. Does Boehner need to someone to scare away the unpronouncable words and diverse menu options under his bed at night, too? What else can conservatives fear and hate? Are they going to start holding news conferences about progressives hanging toilet paper the wrong way, too?
Continue reading ‘Lefties probably tie their shoelaces wrong, too’
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