Category: Language Matters

Latin and Greek for Philosophers

Here, by James Lesher. Sample:

Ex vi terminorum: preposition + the ablative feminine singular of vis/vis(‘force’) + the masculine genitive plural of terminus/termini (‘end’, ‘limit’, ‘term’, ‘expression’): ‘out of the force or sense of the words’ or more loosely: ‘in virtue of the meaning of the words’. ‘We can be certain ex vi terminorum that any bachelors we encounter on our trip will be unmarried.’

Uncle Bill advises,

When it comes to Latin, and not just Latin, don't throw it if you don't know it.

‘Unthinkable’ Used Thoughtlessly

WalterPeople say that such-and-such is 'unthinkable.' An electromagnetic pulse, for example, one that destroys the power distribution grid, would be a calamity in comparison to which the current pandemic would pale into insignificance.  This is said to be 'unthinkable.' And yet we are now thinking about it. What one thinks about can be thought about, and is therefore thinkable.  So the calamity in question is precisely not 'unthinkable.' Nor is it 'unimaginable.' I can imagine it and so can you.

People use these expressions because they thoughtlessly repeat what they hear other people say.  That's my explanation. Do you have a better one?

Not every test is a litmus test. So why do people refer to any old test as a litmus test? Same explanation.

I could continue with the examples. And you hope I won't. Don't be a linguistic lemming. Think. The mind you save may be your own.

Language matters.  Walter approves of this message.

‘Clearly’

It is better to be clear than to write 'Clearly, ____________.'

Similarly with 'surely,' 'plainly,' 'obviously,' 'undoubtedly,' and others.

What should we call such words?  Asseveratives?  Assuratives? 

I know a guy who, if you preface a remark with 'surely,' you receive in response, "Don't call me 'Shirley.'"

Word of the Day: Recusant

Merriam-Webster:

1: an English Roman Catholic of the time from about 1570 to 1791 who refused to attend services of the Church of England and thereby committed a statutory offense.
2: one who refuses to accept or obey established authority.
Example:
So, like atheists in a theocracy, or recusants in Elizabethan England, we go underground. We are a secret society — brave rebels against the epidemiocracy.

Why Typos Don’t Matter Much and the Musical Watershed that was the ‘Fifties

This is a re-post from 21 September 2011. I dust it off in dedication to my friend Dr. Vito Caiati, historian and old-school scholar who is excessively worried about typographical errors in his missives to me.

Don't get me wrong: love and respect for our alma mater, the English language, our dear mother, mistress and muse, demands that we try to avoid errors typographical and otherwise. But let's not obsess over them.

Transmission of sense is the name of the game, and if that has occurred, then communication has taken place.

…………………………..

An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:

I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together

Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical or spelling hang-ups here.  My friend is an old Kerouac aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives.   Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen?  My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.

A curious watershed era it was in which  the sweet and tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse.  Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music.  "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call."  That was actually played on the radio in the '50s.  To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing.  And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."

I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic.  The prime example?  Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.  One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!'  Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.

Aptronym of the Day: ‘Jason Rantz’

RantzI've seen the bearer of the name several times on Tucker Carlson's show, and I am impressed. He talks sense and his head is screwed on Right.  His appearance is odd with his pompadour and his thick and possibly cosmetically enhanced eyebrows. But we conservatives 'celebrate diversity' too.  And not just the politically correct variety.

Could 'Rantz' be his real name?  Is this a case of nomen est omen?

Nominative determinism anyone? 

Is ‘Wuhan Virus’ Racist?

I'll grant you that it is if you grant me that leftism is a deadly virus and that leftists, 'liberals,' 'progressives,' and members of the Democrat Party in the USA knowingly and willingly carry and transmit it.

Do we have a deal?  But if 'Wuhan Virus' is racist, then then so are the following:

  • West Nile
  • Lyme (named after a town in Connecticut)
  • Spanish flu
  • German measles
  • Norovirus (named after Norwalk, Ohio)
  • Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
  • St. Louis encephalitis
  • Lassa fever (named after a town in Nigeria)
  • Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
  • Ebola (named after a river in Africa)
  • Legionnaires' disease (named after the American Legion)

If the bulleted entries are not racist expressions, then neither is 'Wuhan Virus.'

Class dismissed. Above list found here.

Howler of the Day and a Warren Post-Mortem

"Warren gets particularly exorcised in the more recent book when talking about President Donald Trump." 

One could only hope for the exorcism of the hysterical intersectional demons in the fake Indian.

It is a good post-mortem, though, of a very capable woman whose lust for power drove her to suicide by political correctness. 

One gets the sense that Bernie Sanders doesn’t know any better. He’s not thoughtful enough to understand how much he overstates government’s ability, disciplined enough to lay out the costs of his grand proposals, or self-reflective enough to catch the irony of his own capitalistic practices. But based on her first book, it is patently clear that ElizabethWarren does understand. And that’s probably more troubling. Ignorance with self-righteousness is one thing. Knowing better and then arguing otherwise is a different sort of evil.

So what happened to Warren? My best guess—and, I think, the most gracious interpretation of her hypocritical flips—is that “the fight” became everything. And so principles, wisdom, and insight became the casualties. The ends slowly began to justify the means. Maybe losing the “bankruptcy war” to Hillary and the lobbyists embittered her. Or maybe “subsidizing the wrong people”—through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and banks that were “too big to fail”—sent her over the edge. In any case, the cause made it acceptable to strive for power.

Four Senses of ‘Absurd’

Clarity will be served if we distinguish at least the following senses of 'absurd.'  The word is from the Latin surdus, meaning deaf, silent, or stupid.  But etymology can take one only so far and is no substitute for close analysis. And beware the Dictionary Fallacy.

1) Logico-mathematical. The absurd is the logically contradictory or self-contradictory or that which entails a logical contradiction.  Absurdity in this sense attaches to propositions or sets of propositions.  A reductio ad absurdum proof, for example, is a reduction to a contradiction. It is a way of indirectly proving a proposition. One assumes its negation and then derives a logical contradiction thereby proving the proposition.

2) Semantic. The absurd as the linguistically meaningless. Meaningful words can be strung together in meaningless ways, or meaningless words can be strung together. Example of the first: "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination." (Russell)  Example of the second: "The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." (Lewis Carroll). There is nothing syntactically or logically wrong with these sentences.

3) Existential.  The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible.  The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Sartre's and Roquentin's  nausea.  The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.

4) Ordinary. The absurd as the manifestly false. To be precise, 'absurd' as it is mostly used in standard English by non-philosophers refers to that which is both factually false and manifestly false. "Pelosi's assertion that there is no border crisis is absurd!" In other words, Pelosi's assertion is factually false, and plainly so.  What is manifestly false as a matter of fact needn't be logically or semantically objectionable.

Item for further rumination: In Christianity construed along Kierkegardian lines, the apparent absurdity of human existence is redeemed by the Higher Absurdity of the God-Man on the cross. 

Cultural note: the hipster depicted below is a parody of the beatniks of the late 'fifties and early 'sixties. It is what Joe Average imagined an 'existentialist' must look like: a goateed cat with a beret, dressed in black, smoking a cigarette, preferably a Gitane or an unfiltered Gaulois.

Autobiographical addendum: Things didn't work out with an early girlfriend. She complained that I was an 'existentialist' who was "down all the time." I did read a lot of Camus and Sartre in those days, but my favorite existentialists were the Dane, Kierkegaard, and the Russian, Nicholas Berdyaev. Lev Shestov came later. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger are only loosely classifiable as existentialists.

Existentialist Threat

‘A Fetus That Was Born’

More linguistic chicanery from the Left. Obviously, a fetus that was born is no longer a fetus.  To refer to a fetus that was born as a fetus aids and abets the next murderous move: the sanctioning of infanticide as just another form of abortion, post-natal abortion. The 'reasoning' might go like this: The killing of human fetuses is morally acceptable;  a human neonate is a human fetus; ergo, the killing of human neonates is morally acceptable.

But I must also lodge a protest against certain conservative extremists who think 'fetus' a dirty word. They think that the use of this perfectly good word somehow denigrates pre-natal humans or strips them of their right to life.  It does no such thing.

Language matters!  It is the foolish conservative who allows the leftist to hijack the terms of the debate.