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What matters in life

Here are the last three sentences of an opinion piece that appeared in Time magazine some time ago:

It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

To what does that “it” refer? By themselves, these sentences leave open several possibilities. They sound very much like the more strident remarks that aggressive atheists make about religion. For their part, believers have been known to reply to these remarks in kind. People on each side of that dispute tend to build their favorite presuppositions into the way they use words like “reality” and “life,” so that each could accuse the other of offering “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.” At the same time, leftists have been known to write this way about right-wingers, especially when the right-wingers in question belong to groups that the leftists see as victims of unjust policies that the right supports. The phrase “false consciousness” may not be much in favor any longer, but there are other ways of accusing people of being deluded about what political movements are in their own best interests. The line about “fake status as minority martyrdom” sounds just like the sort of thing left-of-center Americans are often provoked to say when their least favorite political figures claim to have suffered unfair treatment at the hands of a “liberal elite.” Again, it is not uncommon for right-wingers respond in kind, presenting leftism as a mental illness and a sign of self-loathing.

Indeed, just about any activity or belief of which a speaker disapproves could be attacked in the words that Time magazine used above. If the speaker is absorbed in a rival activity or committed to an opposing system of belief, it may seem obvious that Time‘s description is perfectly accurate. For example, when I was in graduate school, I was entirely immersed in the study of ancient Greece and Rome. For years, I and my fellow students averaged something between 80-100 hours a week studying the languages, literatures, histories, and material remains of classical antiquity. We socialized primarily with each other, and modeled ourselves on our professors. So by the middle of our grad school years, we came to take it for granted that every walk of life that did not advance classical learning was a waste of time, a poor consolation for people who couldn’t make it in classics. We had entered graduate school with a more balanced view, and by the time we entered the job market most of us were on our way back to that balance, but for most of us there was a period starting sometime around the end of the first year and ending sometime before the fourth year when it was hard to take anything outside of classics at all seriously. I suspect we would all have nodded in agreement if someone had described, say, a career in the insurance industry as “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality,” etc.

Of course, classical scholarship is not one of the most powerful or celebrated professions in the twenty-first century. So once a person emerges from the odd little world of a graduate program in classics, that person is unlikely to continue taking it for granted that classicists are the only successful professionals. Other fields enjoy far more prestige; their practitioners are in much greater danger of becoming unalterably attached to the idea that they and their colleagues have a monopoly on wisdom. Businesspeople, scientists, and medical doctors seem to number among their ranks many people whose intellectual development is permanently stunted in the condition of the second-year grad student. For these individuals, the boundaries of “reality” and “life” are the boundaries of their disciplines, and anything outside those boundaries is a “substitute for reality” and a “flight from life,” and people who dwell out there are sad cases to be taken gently, but firmly, in hand.

Political and religious beliefs are even more likely to swallow up a person’s conception of success in life than is a sense of the importance of one’s profession, and certainly less likely to spit that conception back out into the open air. So it is small wonder that left and right, atheist and believer might see each other in the light that Time magazine describes. For each ideological group, it seems obvious which things truly matter in life, and people who are uninterested in those things and devoted to others must therefore be fools who are suffering from some peculiar sort of disorientation. Any influence such fools have on those around them is, of course, dangerous and requires action to reassert the more wholesome values.

So, these sentences represent, on the one hand a content-free insult, but on the other hand the writer’s confession of faith. What he was attacking as unreal, unliving, and pernicious was the direct negation of what he thought of as most plainly real, lively, and wholesome. To find out who Time magazine was insulting, turn to the original article (which I found here.)

by acilius on October 5, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language, Periodical Notes

Tagged insults, rhetoric, Time Magazine

Posted by acilius on October 5, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/10/05/what-matters-in-life/

Charitable speech

Today’s xkcd:

The late philosopher H. Paul Grice tried to make some of these rules explicit; his most famous attempt to do this can be found in his essay “Logic and Conversation,” published in his book Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard U.P., 1989 and 1991, pages 22-40.) Grice there lays down a set of rules in the form of a series of maxims. Grice begins with an overarching maxim that he calls the “cooperative principle”: “Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” He breaks the requirements of the cooperative principle down into several maxims. So, one ought to be truthful, one ought to provide the listener with enough information to make it easy for the listener gather one’s meaning, one ought not to provide the listener with so much information that it is difficult to gather one’s meaning, one ought to provide information that is relevant to the conversation, one ought to express oneself clearly.

As Carole J Lee points out in her article “Gricean Charity: The Gricean Turn in Psychology” (Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2006; 36(2), 193-218,) what Grice has given us in these maxims are not “universal norms of conversation” (203.) Still less, despite their phrasing, are Grice’s maxims commands that he would have insisted we follow. Rather, they are a sketch of the expectations that listeners tend to bring to a conversation. One tends to expect that a speaker will behave according to the maxims. When a listener finds that a speaker is systematically violating one or more of the maxims, that listener might react with laughter. That laughter shows that the listener, relying on the maxims, had constructed a different meaning than the one the speaker intended. Or, the listener might react with distrust or frustration, if reliance on the maxims has led him or her to a dead end. A charitable listener will bring these expectations to a conversation, assuming that each speaker is displaying the competence the maxims outline. To refuse to give a speaker credit for following Grice’s maxims is to fail to show that speaker the charity that makes cooperative communication possible.

In the strip, the hairless stick figure is frustrated by the hairy figure’s decision to “interpret an obviously sympathetic ‘I’m sorry’ as an apology.” Hairless seems to be frustrated that Hairy is not giving him* credit for following Grice’s maxims. The maxim of quantity requires that each speaker provide just that information the listener needs; the “Why?” in “Why? It’s not your fault” suggests that he is leaving out something essential, something which his sarcastic reply might supply. The maxim of relevance requires that each contribution to the conversation bear on the topic at hand; that Hairy would react to a conventional expression of sympathy as she does would suggest that she does not regard Hairless’ sympathies as relevant to a the topic of her mother’s misfortune. This rejection of Hairless’ expression of sympathy might well strike anyone as rather harsh.

Grice acknowledges that all of the properties that his maxims enjoin are complex. For example, he says of the maxim of relevance: “Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversations are legitimately changed, and so on.” Of course, different cultures conceive of relevance in vastly different ways, a fact that serves as the starting point for many studies which question the usefulness of Grice’s maxims as a guide to the analysis of conversational behavior around the world.**

To the extent that Grice’s maxims are an attempt to outline the expectations listeners have of speakers, it is unsurprising that they do not lay injunctions upon listeners. If we were to complement them with a set of maxims that outline what speakers might reasonably expect from listeners, perhaps the first maxim would call for charity. That charity would be as multidimensional, and no doubt as culturally specific, as the properties Grice’s listeners expect from speakers. We might break our maxim of charity into several sub-maxims to give an idea of what the dimensions of this charity might be. First, assume that the speaker is performing his or her communicative project competently unless s/he provides evidence to the contrary. One might refer to Grice’s maxims in defining competent communicative performance. Second, assume that if the speaker has failed to perform his or her communicative project competently, any failures are as small as possible. So, if a speaker provides a logically invalid argument, a charitable listener might look for the simplest available premise that can be added to make the argument valid. Third, assume that the speaker is a person of goodwill. Under this assumption, one should try to find the least obnoxious possible interpretation for any unclear passages.

In the strip, Hairy has been uncharitable to Hairless, albeit in a rather subtle way. Hairless’ sarcastic response is of course a grossly uncharitable one. Grice was interested in sarcasm, which he saw as something that happens when when “the maxims are flouted.” What Hairy flouts in a subtle way is what Hairless responds by flouting in a massive way, the requirements of charity as I have tried to formulate them in the paragraph above. When speakers think that their listeners are refusing to follow these requirements, they often do respond with anger.

Two examples come to mind. Recently, I took part in a discussion thread on one of my favorite websites, the mighty Language Log. One of the mighty Log’s most distinguished authors, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, posted a little piece about a newspaper columnby a writer named Kathleen Parker. Parker opens with a story about a brief encounter among a group of about ten strangers sharing an elevator at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Parker was among this group; apparently she had not seen any of the other riders before. Two riders did know each other, a woman and a man. The woman spent the moments of the elevator ride shouting at the man. In the course of her diatribe, the woman called the man a “motherfucker” several times. By the time this pair left the elevator, the woman had made it clear that the man was her son. Parker describes the discomfort that she and the other riders displayed while in the sharing the elevator with the shouting woman. She goes on to allow that coarse words are not in themselves particularly dangerous to the moral health of society, giving as an example of her willingness to tolerate them her relaxed response to a fellow guest at a very proper tea party who called sometime golf champion Tiger Woods an “asshole” in an incongruously “refined accent.” Still, Parker claims, “Lack of civility in words bleeds into a lack of decency in behavior… An “MF” here or an “FU” there might not constitute the unraveling of society, but each one uttered in another’s involuntary presence is a tiny act of violence against kindness, of which we surely could use more.”

There are any number of things one might say about this column. It’s interesting that the word “motherfucker” has come to be so frequently used as a symbol of obscenity without any evocation of the meaning of its root words that a mother could unselfconsciously apply it to her son. It’s puzzling what Parker means by a “refined accent”; she does say that the tea party guest was British, and evidently she was using what we used to called Received Pronunciation. But obscenity is now so common a feature of the speech of Britons of all classes that I cannot imagine any vulgar word being incongruous when spoken in any British accent.

What Professor Nunberg in fact chooses to do with the column is to accuse Parker of veiled bigotry. Noting that Parker’s response to the woman at the tea party had been to say that it would be all right for the woman to curse so long as she used her plummy accent while doing it, Nunberg says: “Now I can come up with at least five contexutal parameters that explain why the public harangues of the elevator expletiviste were obnoxious and offensive in a way that the English (one assumes) woman’s wasn’t. But the posteriority of the initial vowel of the epithet isn’t one of them.” This is a failure of charity on Professor Nunberg’s part; Parker’s use of the story to show her own relaxed attitude towards a non-threatening use of taboo words makes it clear that she was joking with the woman at the tea party. Lest we think that Professor Nunberg is himself joking, and merely pretending that he doesn’t see Parker’s joke, he goes on:

Why should it be? Would the incivility of the first woman’s rants have been tempered if she had called her son an asshole in an accent like Emma Thompson’s? Would the tea party lady’s reference to Tiger Woods be more offensive if the woman had sounded like Wanda Sykes? While we’re on the subject of vulgarity — and insolence — can we linger for a moment on the smug suburban gentility of that word refined? You’re left with the unsettling implication that the acceptability of allowing a naughty word to cross one’s lips depends, in part, on how thick they are.

Where does Professor Nunberg find this remarkably ugly implication? He seems to find it in Parker’s telling of the story of the elevator ride. Quoting key bits of the story, he comments:

The race and class of the woman and her companion weren’t specified, but readers might have been able to divine those attributes from the particular word Parker chose to report (or was that the only vulgarity the woman used?), helped along by the setting at Broadway and 168th Street and the mentions of the separated father and in particular of the young man’s “baggy drawers,” which presumably were intended to convey some relevant information. (If it had been an upper-middle-class white woman screaming “motherfucker” at a phat-pantsed white preppie, communicative cooperativeness would have obliged Parker to mention that fact lest the reader draw the wrong conclusions.)

None of the markers Professor Nunberg mentions in this paragraph is at all strongly correlated with race and class in New York City in 2011, as commenters on the post pointed out. Your humble correspondent mentioned a couple of items showing that, while “Motherfucker” may have originated among African Americans in the early twentieth century, it has been in general use among whites and others for decades. Professor Nunberg himself added to this list, strengthening my point (perhaps inadvertently.) Another commenter pointed out that Broadway and 168th is in the middle of Spanish Harlem, so that if that location tells us anything about the woman’s ethnicity it would suggest either Puerto Rican or Dominican heritage. Still others have pointed out that New York Presbyterian has more than one Manhattan location. One might also mention that Manhattan is rather a compact place, so a wide variety of ethnicities may be found in any of its hospitals. In the column, it is quite clear that “the “[mention] of the separated father” was “intended convey some relevant information,” and it is also clear what that information is. It is when the woman in the elevator mentions the man’s father that it becomes clear that she is his mother, and so it is when Parker quotes that line that she provides the punchline about the woman’s use of “motherfucker.” “Baggy drawers” or “phat pants,” like the use of “motherfucker” as an all-purpose obscenity, likely originated among African Americans and doubtless once was seen almost exclusively in African American communities, but one needn’t spend much time among young American whites to see that those days are long gone.

I appended many comments to this thread. Here are links to all of them, in the admittedly unlikely case that you are interested: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I’ll copy the last one, because in it I finally got around to saying what I’d been trying to say all along:

@Daniel: 1. “This post doesn’t really need any more comments, but”- Yes, I sympathize. It’s as hard to stop as it is to stop eating a salty snack. An angry, angry salty snack.

2. “”drawers,” which I definitely associate with AAVE.” The structure of this debate seems to be, S1: Parker reports (item.) I associate (item) with African Americans. Therefore, Parker wants her readers to associate the people she is denouncing with African Americans.” In reply, S2: “I don’t associate (item) with African Americans.”

The least involved premises we can add to S1’s assertions to make them into a logically valid argument would surely be “I am the sort of reader Parker had in mind when she wrote her column, and she should have known that I would associate (item) with African Americans.” In the absence of any data about what Parker’s readers think of when they think of these various items or about what she has reason to expect from her readers, we have no reason to suppose that these premises are true.

3. “Rhetorically, that is clearly implying that the British lady did not have context or delivery issues.” Let’s remember the context and delivery Parker describes in her opening vignette. She was on an elevator, which is to say, in a confined space. A person entirely unknown to her joined her and several others in that confined space. For a few moments, this unknown person shouted obscenities. Anyone might feel uncomfortable in that situation.

By contrast, Parker met the British lady (if British and lady she in fact was***) in a situation where she was free to move about. Parker and this second person were introduced and participated in a conversation. In the course of that conversation, the second person used a word that often classified as objectionable. Parker did not object to it. In fact, she made a little joke to forestall objections.

What, then, is the simplest explanation of the difference between Parker’s response to the two situations? Is it that person 1 was of a different ethnicity than person 2, and that Parker is hostile to the ethnic group person 1 represents and friendly towards the ethnic group person 2 represents? Or is it that she would rather engage in a conversation at a social event with someone who clearly poses no threat to her than be trapped in an elevator with an angry stranger?

Granted, Professor Nunberg does make a nod in the original post to “at least five contexutal parameters that explain why the public harangues of the elevator expletiviste were obnoxious and offensive in a way that the English (one assumes) woman’s wasn’t.” His remarks before and after that, accusing Parker of “nudge-nudge allusions to race and ethnicity… the way people intimate someone’s Jewishness by saying they’re ‘very New York'” and of implying “that the acceptability of allowing a naughty word to cross one’s lips depends, in part, on how thick they are” does not leave much opportunity to put serious weight on these contextual parameters.

I’ll quote a bit from my second-to-last comment as well, since in it I brought up the points I’m making here about charity. In particular, I mention that a listener who is charitable to a speaker in one way may have to think ill of that speaker in another way:

@Peggy: “Keith M Ellis: “The whole point of dog-whistle racism is its deniability.” The whole point of accusations of dog-whistle racism is their unfalsifiability.” That’s going a bit far, surely. One ought to be charitable to people with whom one disagrees; one form of charity is to assume that when a logically defective argument can be made valid by the addition of an unspoken premise, the speaker has omitted the simplest possible premise that can achieve that result. So, suppose I ask you “Are the sidewalks wet?” and you reply, “They must be- it’s raining.” You’ve then made an argument that could be presented thus: (Premise) It’s raining. (Conclusion) The sidewalks are wet. By itself, this argument is invalid. The simplest way to make it valid is to add, as a second premise, “If it’s raining, the sidewalks are wet.” It would be an uncharitable listener who refused to make so small a cognitive leap in the course of a conversation.

Likewise, if one were to encounter an invalid argument that could most readily be made logically valid by the addition of a racist idea as an additional premise, it would be charitable to consider the possibility that the person making the argument has simply omitted that premise. I could mention some newspaper columnists who in fact do precisely that on a regular basis.

I’d extend that maxim of charity beyond the logical structure of arguments to the emotional response people exhibit to various stimuli. If, for example, Parker were usually happy when she was required to share a confined space with white people repeatedly shouting obscenities, but unhappy when an African American did the same thing, and she spoke as if no explanation was necessary for this difference in reaction, then charity to Parker would warrant the assumption that she was right, that the reason for the difference was in fact so simple that anyone could find it without an explanation. Charity to such a speaker might lead us to suspect the speaker of race prejudice.

Again, the column under consideration obviously does not meet this description. However, it is far from rare for people to exhibit emotional reactions to stories about misbehavior among African Americans that are not only grossly disproportional to the reactions the same people exhibit when they have heard similar stories about people of other ethnic backgrounds, but which also kick in long before any evidence is presented showing that the stories are even true. When that happens, it is neither irresponsible nor unfalsifiable to claim that racism is at work.

The more I thought about this exchange, the stranger it seemed to me that someone as learned as Professor Nunberg could take Parker to task for seeing a threat in a situation where she was confined in an elevator with a stranger. Granted, the idea that this represented a threat to civility in general is a bit underargued, but once one describes the situation it is hard to see what need there is to attribute Parker’s anger to racial prejudice. Yet shortly after, I noticed a news item describing an equally distinguished academic replicating Professor Nunberg’s behavior with some precision.

Evidently there is a woman named Rebeca Watson who writes a blog that is popular among atheists and other irreligious folk. In June, Watson attended a conference at which her fans were well represented. Very late on one of the nights of this conference, Watson found herself alone in an elevator with one of these fans, a man who made an awkward pass at her. Watson declined the man’s offer, and said on her blog that it made her uncomfortable. She gave it as an example of the wrong way for a man to approach a woman.

That, one would think, would be that. Were one to think so, one would be reckoning without Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins took it upon himself to post the following, as comment #75 in a thread on P. Z. Myers’ blog:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

First, I would point out that Professor Dawkins has far more demands on his time than I do, so the fact that he would enter such a discussion shows that he uses his time even more foolishly than I do. In fact, even before the rise of the internet, Dawkins used to send unsolicited mail to people containing precisely these sorts of gratuitous insults. Some years ago, I read a magazine profile of a Harvard graduate who became a spokesman for Creationism. One day he opened his mail to find a letter from Richard Dawkins, whom he had never met, telling him that he was either an idiot or a villain, more likely a villain. I can’t recall the man’s name, since I’d never heard of him before or since. But for some reason Richard Dawkins wanted to send him hate mail.

Second, if Dawkins were as obscure a figure as am I, his remark would have been forgotten the moment comment #83 appeared in the same thread, from “Forbidden Snowflake”:

Dear Richard,

What right have you to bemoan the teaching of creationism in your country while people are dying of malaria in West Africa?
Seriously, this “you have no right to complain about your problems as long as there are bigger problems somewhere in the Universe” is nothing but a silencing tactic.

But of course Professor Dawkins is world-famous. And he tried to defend his remark, making it much worse, and again, making it still worse. So, there’s been a great deal of controversy.

Professor Dawkins’ invocation of Muslim women who live in countries where genital mutilation is practiced and severe form of Islamic law obtain might be expected to trigger anger from readers who identify with Rebecca Watson and assume that the professor is sharing information which he assumes to be relevant. If one were charitable to him, assuming that he was so competent a communicator that the relevance of the information to Watson’s post is likely easy to find, the premise one might supply would be that Watson is self-centered and unconcerned with the sufferings of such women.

Unsurprisingly, Watson’s defenders have responded in kind. Gawker quotes blogger Jen McCreight:

[It] makes me want to cry a little when you live up to the stereotype of a well-off, 70 year old, white, British, ivory tower academic. But let me spell it out for you instead of just getting mad (though I’ll do that too):

Words matter. You don’t get that because you’ve never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don’t have people constantly explaining that you’re subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal. You don’t have people saying you shouldn’t have rights. You don’t have people constantly sexually harassing you. You don’t live in fear of rape, knowing that one wrong misinterpretation of a couple words could lead down that road.

Gawker quotes Watson’s expansion on McCreight’s remarks, then asking: “Can it really be that Dawkins has never been exposed to insults as odious as the ones mentioned by Ms. McCreight? As a jump-starter of the modern atheist revival, doesn’t Dawkins probably get a lot more threatening hate mail than all of his critics combined?” Considering that he’s a man who lives in the UK, I’d be willing to stake any amount of money on the proposition that Professor Dawkins has been called a “cunt” quite a few times in his life, and considering the amount of hate mail he gets I suspect that he’s been on the receiving end of the other words and claims frequently as well. Of course, words that have an association with a specific group wouldn’t have the same force when applied to someone outside that group, so Professor Dawkins is no contender for the title of Most Aggrieved. McCreight’s choice of words is still unfortunate, however.

At any rate, surely this whole matter calls for charitable reading. Only by dint of a most uncharitable reading of Watson’s original remarks could Professor Dawkins have thought it was appropriate to come at her in the way he did. A charitable reading of Dawkins’ words would not leave him looking at all good, but might have kept his critics from responding in anger when pity would have been not only more suited to the quality of his thought in this matter, but also more likely to inspire in him some feeling of embarrassment.

*Hairless stick figures in xkcd often turn out to be male, hairless ones female. Also, author Randall Munroe uses the first person singular to refer to Hairless in this strip, so I’m assuming it represents him.

**Some early examples of these studies are mentioned in Mary Louise Pratt, “Ideology and Speech Act Theory,” Poetics Today, vol. 7 no 1 (1986,) pages 64-65.

***She in fact was. I’d forgotten the relevant bit of Parker’s original column and was distracted by a side discussion in the thread about other properties of the tea party guest.

by acilius on August 31, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language

Tagged carole j lee, conversational maxims, geoffrey nunberg, kathleen parker, Language Log, paul grice, rebecca watson, richard dawkins, xkcd

Posted by acilius on August 31, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/08/31/charitable-speech/

Before Babel?

The Tower of Babel, by M. C. Esher

Fotb Maggie Jochild has reminded us of a study that was published in Science in April and publicized in The New York Times. Biologist Quentin D. Atkinson applied mass comparison methods familiar in genetic research to the analysis of phonemes, the sounds that languages use to distinguish one word from another. If a geneticist found the same pattens in a set of single-nucleotide polymorphisms that Atkinson found in the phonemes of the world’s languages, that geneticist would likely conclude that the set represented descent from a single common ancestor. So, Atkinson suggests that all languages known to us, both those currently spoken as mother tongues and ancient languages known to us only through writings, descend from a language spoken in Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

When Atkinson’s paper appeared, it attracted strong criticism from some of our favorite writers. To mention only the two posts about it that appeared on the incomparable Language Log, Mark Liberman analyzed Atkinson’s methodology, and Sarah Thomason reproduced a letter that anthropologists Ives Goddard and Bruno Frohlich sent to Science, but which that journal refused to publish. Professor Liberman is lightly skeptical of Atkinson’s methods, but optimistic that his conclusions might prove true, while Professors Goddard, Frohlich, and Thomason express more severe reservations.

For my part, I’ve often wondered how many languages were spoken when language was first spoken. For various reasons, it would be interesting if the idea of “a language” were familiar to the first generations of language speakers. The New York Times article says that Atkinson’s work “implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.”

I don’t think it does imply that, actually. Even if it were proven that all languages available to us for study shared a common ancestor, it would not thereby be proven that “language originated only once.” That language may well have been one of many languages spoken at the time, and may well have been descended from other languages spoken many millennia earlier. Consider the languages of ancient Italy. Latin is the ancestor of many languages spoken around the world today; the dozens of other languages that flourished on the peninsula before the rise of Rome have left no descendants. If it weren’t for the written evidence that has come down to us from antiquity, we might be tempted to conclude that language originated in Italy only once, and in Latium. Extending the processes that singled Latin out as the only Italian language of the mid-first millennium BC to leave descendants back another 50,000 years to a time when all of our ancestors may still have lived in Africa, we can see that they may well have left only one language spoken at that period with descendants, even if at the time it had thousands of contemporaries.

Indeed, that might have happened even if that hypothetical mother tongue had not stood out among its contemporaries. To resume for a moment the parallel with Latin, before the late fifth century BC it would have been a rare observer who would have guessed that varieties of that language would grow into languages that would continue to be spoken for thousands of years after the language of the far wealthier and more powerful Etruscans had died without issue. Going back further, the people who spoke the language that was the common ancestor of the Anatolian and Indo-European language families probably lived sometime around the year 4000 BC. They were likely a rather scruffy group of nomads who lived in some of the less desirable corners of the Black Sea coast, what Moe the Bartender would no doubt call “one of them loser countries.” * Even the early Romans would have seemed impressive set against them. Yet something like half the people in the world now speak one or another of the hundreds of languages that descend from theirs. If such an undistinguished group can launch a language that crowds out so many of its contemporaries over a period of 6,000 years, surely there is little we can say about the career in the world of a language that is likely 1o times that old.

(more…)

by acilius on August 15, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language

Tagged Language Log, Maggie Jochild, Quentin Atkinson

Posted by acilius on August 15, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/08/15/before-babel/

We’re still here

Hmm, been a bit of a hiatus since the last post. But we’re still here. Here are a couple of links to interesting things:

Andrew Gelman has redesigned his blog; same material, but a fresher look and you no longer have to go through the back door to link to individual posts. A couple of days ago he put up a terrific post called “One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society.” He wonders why it is that so many economists can simultaneously believe these two things:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

Anatoly Liberman, the Oxford Etymologist, put up a nice little piece in May about the odd career of the letter “H.” I must register one small demurrer concerning this piece. Liberman writes:

Everything would have been fine if th were not also used in Greek words for rendering the letter theta. We have it in such monstrosities as phthisis and chthonic. Very few people are so pedantic as to pronounce the initial consonants in them, but th is part of both words.

Surely the charge of pedantry holds no terrors for anyone who speaks the words phthisis and chthonic aloud, and gives them no motive to suppress the initial consonant of either word. Come to think of it, I’ve had occasion to pronounce the word chthonic a few times while teaching classes in which it came up, and I did say it very much as I would have if it were spelled χθωνικ-.*

A post on “Understanding Uncertainty” appears to be about mobile phones and brain cancer, but comes to this twist ending:

The moral of this story has nothing at all to do with mobile phones or cancer. It is that you can’t get a full story of what’s going on on a health issue by simply following what’s in the mainstream media. What you’ll find there is not necessarily what you want to read, but what other people want you to read.

Be careful out there!

*I know there’s supposed to be an acute over the omega, but WordPress doesn’t do diacriticals well enough to make it worthwhile.

by acilius on July 21, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language, Quick Links

Tagged economics, Gelman, oxford etymologist, science reporting, understanding uncertainty

Posted by acilius on July 21, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/07/21/were-still-here/

Nearly rhymes, or, up your assonance

Some time ago, fotb “Mister Slither” launched a site called “Nearly Rhymes.” He heads it “Some phrases that just about rhyme” and gives it the cautionary tagline “May include phrases that do rhyme.” I’ll quote a few of his word pairs:

From the inaugural post, “Some phrases that include the names of nationalities and just about rhyme“:

Spanish spinach
Tanzanian human bein’
Who’d expect an Uzbek?
Phoenician phonetician
Wax-can the Oaxacan

From the second post, “Some hostile rhymes“:

He’s cruisin’ for a bruisin’
He’s on his way to the fist cafe
He’s nattering for a battering

From the third post, “Words that more or less rhyme with some animal names“:

Ghostly goat
Ostrich outrage
Purple gerbil
Compliant lion
Flippant hippo
Livelier tiger

Mister Slither hasn’t posted there since November 2010; today he added me to the site as an administrator. To show my gratitude, I’ve put up a post called “Up your assonance!” in which I quote the dictionary and list 10 word pairs that more or less rhyme.

by acilius on February 25, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language, Thunderlads at Large

Tagged Nearly rhymes

Posted by acilius on February 25, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/02/25/nearly-rhymes-or-up-your-assonance/

Some links

A few interesting things from the old year:

A look back at the “Sokal hoax,” an event of the mid-90s that made it possible for me to stop studying Deconstructionism. (Michael Bérubé)*

“Etymology is perhaps the most intellectually frustrating field of study because, as a general rule, all clever theories about the origin of any word are wrong. The real explanation is always something boring and senseless, like “from a West Frisian word for turnip greens.”” (Sailer)**

In an interview about herself, Alison Bechdel says that when she was a child, pop culture images of women always emphasized their femininity, so that they were “not generic, they were always female people.” (Alison Bechdel)***

(more…)

by acilius on January 3, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language, Quick Links

Tagged Alison Bechdel, etymology, the sokal hoax

Posted by acilius on January 3, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/01/03/some-links/

Acyrologia in the news

Yesterday, Language Log posted this cartoon. Click on the image to see it in full size on the cartoonist’s site:

The poster, Professor Arnold Zwicky, at first remarked that he hadn’t seen the word “acyrologiaphobia” before; he then updated the post with the cartoonist’s explanation that “Acyrologia… seems be more or less synonymous with malapropism.” So I googled “acyrologia,” and found this nifty little page explaining the word and its uses. The page is part of Silvae Rhetoricae, an online reference for students of rhetoric maintained by Professor Gideon Burton of the Brigham Young University.

by acilius on November 19, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Comics, Language

Tagged coarse ground by micah gordon, gideon burton, Language Log

Posted by acilius on November 19, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/11/19/acyrologia-in-the-news/

“I’m not a/an X, but…”

For a while, I’ve been thinking about sentences of the form “I’m not a [label,] but [statement.]” After some quick searches on LexisNexis and Google, I think I can assign these sentences to two major categories: those which are a way of saying “Please don’t dismiss me after you hear this statement,” and those which are a way of saying “Please don’t dismiss me before you hear this statement.”

1. “Please don’t dismiss me after you hear this statement” sentences seem to break into two major sub-categories. First, those where the form is “I’m not a [person who is hostile to group X,] but [idea that might be unhelpful to members of group X.]” Second, those where the form is “I’m not a [person who stands to benefit from policy Y,] but [endorses policy Y.]”

Examples of the form “I’m not a [person who is hostile to group X,] but [idea that might be unhelpful to members of group X]” are not abundant in the results of the simple searches I have done, perhaps because the form has become such a cliché. So, a Google search for “I’m not a racist, but” draws up many more examples of people denouncing sentences of the form “I’m not a racist, but [associates self with racist idea]” than actual examples of that form. Among these results are a number of sites devoted to an award-winning book called I’m Not a Racist, But… Perhaps the form is more common in spoken language than online. It’s easy to come up with jokes about sentences of this form, jokes making it obvious that the person disclaiming the label is precisely the person for whom the label was invented. So, this was the top result in my latest Google search for “I’m not an anti-semite, but.” These jokes in turn have become so familiar that they can themselves be joked about, sometimes in jokes like this where the label does not suggest hostility at all.

The fact that a label shows up between “I’m not a” and “but” can suggest that the speaker believes that s/he would be dismissed if s/he accepted it. By association with sentences like those above, this might in turn suggest that the label names some form of hostility. So, “I’m not a feminist, but [endorses basic principle of feminism]” is a form of sentence that annoys people who regard “feminist” as a label to be worn with pride, not least because it may suggest that feminism represents a form of group hostility.

Examples of the form “I’m not a [person who stands to benefit from policy Y,] but [endorses policy Y]” are a bit trickier to find, but do not seem uncommon. So, the top result for “I’m not rich, but” is this statement opposing taxes on the rich.

2. “Please don’t dismiss me before you hear this statement” seems to be, if anything, the more common meaning for this locution in online text. Here the meaning seems to be “I’m not a [person qualified to give an expert opinion about this topic,] but [statement which calls for the support of an expert’s opinion.] The top result for an overall Google search in the form “i’m not a *, but” is at the moment “I’m not a Buddhist, but…,” a list of books about Buddhism on Amazon.com. Not being a Buddhist, the person is not someone we would typically regard as a guide to Buddhism. S/He acknowledges this, and asks to be heard in spite of it. And I suppose we’ve all heard sentences that begin with “I’m not a scientist, but…”

Most Americans have heard the line “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” This was the opening of a widely-ridiculed advertisement that ran on US television in 1986. As I recall, it was on quite frequently for a good many weeks. I never found out what they were trying to sell, as the rest of the commercial was always drowned out by the sound of my laughter. Perhaps what makes that line so very preposterous is that it calls attention to the speech act. The actor seemed to be saying “I’m not a [person qualified to give an expert opinion about this topic,] but [you obviously don’t care about that, since you’re watching this ad.]”

by acilius on October 29, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Language

Posted by acilius on October 29, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/10/29/im-not-aan-x-but/

The Interpreter

I teach at a university deep in the interior of the USA. Most of the residents in the apartment complex where I live are students at that same university. Several of these neighbors are Iraqis who have come here as part of an exchange program between our university and one in Baghdad.

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I left my apartment and walked to the bus stop. Two of my Iraqi neighbors were sitting on the bench, a man named Abdullah and a woman whose name I did not know. Abdullah greeted me; his friend turned her face shyly and tugged on her headscarf. Abdullah offered me his hand. I declined to shake it, explaining that I had a cold and did not want him to catch it. Abdullah turned to his friend and said a few words in Arabic. She nodded at him and gave a grateful smile, saying nothing. As we waited for the bus, Abdullah and I talked about colds and remedies for them. After each exchange, Abdullah turned to his friend and spoke for moment in Arabic. Each time he did, she nodded at him and gave the same smile, never saying a word. It was clear to me that he was interpreting for her.

I wondered how well Abdullah was doing as an interpreter. I was talking slowly and making an effort to keep my vocabulary simple, but still I came up against the limits of his English a number of times. That didn’t stop Abdullah. Even when he wrinkled his brow and paused for a few seconds, he still turned to his friend and talked, I suppose offering an Arabic version of whatever he had gathered from my words. His friend seemed quite pleased with Abdullah, impressed with his gallant efforts.

The bus came into sight. Distracted to see it, I forgot to keep my English simple. Thoughtlessly, I gave poor Abdullah a challenge that even professional interpreters can rarely meet successfully: I made a joke. “Well, there’s a saying,” I told him. “A cold usually lasts about seven days, unless the patient is under a doctor’s care. Then it lasts about a week.” When I said this, Abdullah’s friend immediately burst out laughing. Abdullah gave a blank stare for a moment. He wrinkled his brow and leaned forward. Then he turned to his friend and interpreted. She nodded at him, smiled gratefully, and said nothing.

by acilius on July 9, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Language, Narratives

Posted by acilius on July 9, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/07/09/the-interpreter/

Pictograms taking care of business

The other day, Ingrid Piller’s “Language on the Move” blog showed a number of signs that are posted in restrooms in Australia. The purpose of these signs is to explain, without text, how to use a Western toilet. This is a harder task than those of us who are accustomed to such devices might assume. The international symbols for “Men,” “Women,” and “Wheelchair Accessible” that often mark public restrooms appear on these signs in a variety of non-self-explanatory positions.

I’ve always been intrigued by these international symbols, or pictograms. I’m not the only one. Here‘s a “Flickr Hive Mind” thing of images of the “Wheelchair Accessible” pictogram. For example, here‘s the wheelchair pictogram carrying a flower; here is the same pictogram some distance from a family group; here are two of them, apparently in an embrace; here are two about to go their separate ways, though still facing the same direction. Also on Flickr, we can see a sign that appears to invite women accompanied by tiny people using wheelchairs, and one that appears to invite men accompanied by tiny people using wheelchairs.

I’ve found the same pictogram having still other adventures. For example, here‘s the accessibility symbol shouting through a megaphone:

Here‘s the international symbol for falling out of your wheelchair:

If it bothers you that the accessibility pictogram is unisex, you might like to see this on the Paris Metro:

The other pictograms are livelier than you might think, as well.

Here‘s an argument against unisex restrooms:

Here, Mr & Mrs Pictogram put on some clothes. If this is a fair representation of their fashion sense, I can see why we are usually shown only their silhouettes:

This picture has a similar esthetic to the one above, but makes its statement more bluntly:

Perhaps these “branded” women could benefit from the sort of sisterhood illustrated in this image.

Here‘s a crowd of men’s symbols:

I wonder which direction they’re facing.

This fellow seems to be in trouble:

Perhaps he’d envy this kinsman of his:

This one seems to be having a better time:

Here, a mosaic of international symbols makes up a giant face:

This is the international symbol for Muslim prayer room. I think it needs work. The woman’s headscarf looks like a device that’s keeping her head taped to her shoulders: