Category: Language Matters

Of Apples and Sparkplugs

All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, and so on.

Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference. Or, 'You are comparing prime numbers and prime ministers.' Or, 'You are comparing anorexic girls and over-inflated basketballs.'

This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper. A man once ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites. He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed through the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently chopped up or watered down.

So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my fourth grade teacher Sr Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

A good piece of folk wisdom that has served me well.

Meaning and Word Order

Here is a linguistic bagatelle for your delectation. The striking difference in meaning between 'to see through something' and 'to see something through' is entirely due to word order. Thus the semantic and syntactic are linked. But they couldn't be linked if they weren't distinct.

On ‘Illegal Alien’ and ‘Illegal Immigrant’

Liberals, whose love of political correctness gets the better of their intellects, typically object to the phrase 'illegal alien.' But why? Are these people not in our country illegally, as the result of breaking laws?  And are they not aliens, people from another country? 

"But you are labeling them!"  Yes, of course.  Label we must if we are not to lose our minds entirely. 'Feral cat' is a label.  Do you propose that we not distinguish between feral and non-feral cats?  Do you distinguish between the positive and the negative terminals on your car battery?  You'd better!  But 'positive terminal' and 'negative terminal' are labels. 

Label we must.  There is no getting around it if we are to think at all.  There is a political outfit that calls itself "No Labels."  But that too is a label.  Those who eschew all labels label themselves 'idiots.'

Related to this is the injunction, 'Never generalize!' which is itself a generalization. Label we must and generalize we must.  Making distinctions and labeling them, and constructing sound generalizations on their basis are activities essential to, thought not exhaustive of, the life of the intellect.

Liberals also object to 'illegal immigrant.'  In fact, the AP has banned the phrase.  But given that there are both legal and illegal immigrants, 'illegal immigrant' is a useful label.  There is nothing derogatory about it.  It is a descriptive term like 'hypertensive' or 'diabetic.' 

One consideration adduced at the AP site is that actions are illegal, not persons. But suppose your doctor tells you that you are diabetic, and you protest, "Doc, not only are you labelling me, you are forgetting that diabetes is a medical condition and that no person is a medical condition." The good doctor would then have to explain that a diabetic is a person who has diabetes.  Similarly, an illegal immigrant is one who is in the country illegally.  There is the act of illegally crossing the border, but there is also the state of being here illegally.

Plain talk is an excellent antidote to liberal nonsense. When a liberal or a leftist misuses a word in an intellectually dishonest attempt at forwarding his agenda, a right-thinking person ought to protest.  Whether you protest or not, you must not acquiesce  in their pernicious misuse of language.  Or, as I have said more than once in these pages,

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!

Bear in mind that many of the battles of the culture war are fought, won, and lost on linguistic ground. If we let  our opponents destroy the common language in which alone reasonable  debate can be conducted, then much more is lost than these particular  debates.  The liberal-left misuse of language is fueled by their determination to win politically at all costs and by any means, including linguistic hijacking.

Language matters!

On Sentence Fragments

I was taught to avoid them. The teaching was sound. But rules of style admit of exceptions. That too is a rule of sorts. My rule anent sentence fragments hitherto has been that they are to be deployed, if deployed at all, sparingly. That's what I taught my students.

Does my rule admit of exceptions?  Is it in need of revision? Take a gander at the opening three paragraphs of Charles Dickens' Bleak House:

Chapter 1 — In Chancery

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

Not one complete sentence in these three paragraphs. And yet this is great writing. The fourth paragraph shows that the man can write complete sentences.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Dickens Charles

 

To Write Well, Read Well

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

Language Rant: Verbal Inflation and Deflation

The visage of Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' signals the onset of a language rant should you loathe this sort of thing.

WalterWhy use ‘reference’ as a verb when ‘refer’ is available? Why not save bytes? Why say that Poindexter referenced Wittgenstein when you can say that he referred to the philosopher? After all, we do not say that X citationed Y, but that X cited Y. (And please don’t confuse ‘site,’ ‘sight,’ and ‘cite.’)

You will not appear learned to the truly learned if you use ‘reference’ as a verb; you will appear pseudo-learned or pretentious. Of course, if enough people do it, it will become accepted. But what is accepted ought not be confused with the acceptable in the normative sense of the latter term. Admittedly, using ‘reference’ as a verb is no big deal. But it is uneconomical, and linguistic bloat, like other forms, is best avoided. This rule, like all my rules and recommendations, is to be understood ceteris paribus. Thus there may be an occasion on which a bit of bloat is what is needed for some rhetorical purpose. Good writing cannot be reduced to the mechanical application of a set of rules. You won’t find an algorithm for it. Language Nazis like me need to remind ourselves not to become too pedantic and persnickety.

Curiously enough, the same people who are likely to engage in verbal inflation will also fall for the opposite mistake. They will speak of Nietzsche quotes when they mean Nietzsche quotations. ‘Quote’ is a verb; ‘quotation’ a noun. ‘Nietzsche quotes’ is a sentence; ‘Nietzsche quotations’ is not. Perhaps I should be grateful that no one, so far, has used ‘quotation’ as a verb: Poindexter referenced Nietszche in his footnotes, and quotationed him in his text.

Now consider ‘criticize,’ ‘criticism,’ and ‘critique.’ One verb and two nouns. Don’t say: She critiqued my paper; say she criticized it. And don’t confuse a criticism with a critique. A correspondent once made a pusillanimous criticism of an article of mine, but referred to it as a critique. That’s a case of objectionable verbal inflation.

On a more substantive note, realize that to criticize is not to oppose or contradict, but to sift, to assay, to separate the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false, the demonstrated from the undemonstrated and the indemonstrable.

Note also that the Left does not own critique. There is critique from the Right, from the Left, and from the Middle. Resist the hijacking of semantic vehicles. We need them to get to the truth, which is not owned by anyone.

Proof that I am a Native American

A while back a front page story in the  local rag of record, The Arizona Republic, implied  that one is either a native American, a black, or an Anglo. Now with my kind of surname, I am certainly no Anglo. And even though I am a 'person of color,' my color inclining toward a sort of tanned ruddiness, I am undoubtedly not black either.

It follows that I am a native American. This conclusion is independently supported by the following argument:

1. I am a native Californian.
2. California is in America.
3. If x is native to locality L, and L is within the boundaries of M, then x is a native M-er.
Therefore
4. I am a native American.

This argument is impeccable in point of logical form, and sports manifestly true premises. What more do you want?

Note that (2) is true whether 'America' is taken to refer to the USA or to the continent of North America.

Let us also observe that since I am a native American, it cannot be the case that "we are all immigrants" as far too many 'liberal' knuckleheads like to claim.

We need more mockery of 'liberals.' There is little point in attempts to engage them on the plane of reason, for that is not the plane they inhabit.

Slavoj Zizek remarks (jokingly I think) that  ‘native Americans’ hate this term, mentioning one who preferred to be call an ‘Indian’ on the ground that ‘native’ American is racist. For it means that someone so denominated  is part of nature, and is therefore beneath the cultural American. The Indian in question prefers to be called an ‘Indian’ for this moniker implies the white man's stupidity.

‘Peninsulate’

If 'insulate' is a word, from the Latin insula, insulae, island, then why not 'peninsulate,' v. i. meaning to insulate partially?  Example featuring an adjectival cognate:

His is a peninsular life, a balanced life, neither continental not insular. While connected to the mainland of the traditional, the quotidian, and the commonsensical, a part of him stretches out into the oceanic Apeiron.

Does your mother look askance at your new boyfriend? Perhaps the above sentence will take the edge off her disapprobation.

About Whataboutism

What's with all the contemporary noise about 'whataboutism'?

Example 1. A lefty complains, "Trump is a liar!"  A conservative responds, "What about Hillary and Bill and Obama? They are not liars?"

Example 2. A pro-lifer argues that killing the prenatal is immoral and meets with the response, "What about all of the  'pro-lifers' who bomb abortion clinics, terrorize clinic staff, and block women’s legal access into such clinics?”

On one way of looking at it, 'whataboutism' is just the ad hominem tu quoque fallacy.  It's old wine in a new, but very ugly, bottle.  If the question is whether Trump is a liar, then it is irrelevant to bring in Hillary and Bill and Obama, despite their being egregious and proven liars.  Similarly in the abortion case. The violence of a few pro-lifers is simply irrelevant to the question of the moral permissibility of abortion. Or suppose my doctor, who has cancer, diagnoses  cancer in me. It would be absurd for me to protest the diagnosis on the ground that the sawbones has it too. What about you, doc? 

So can anything good be said about 'whataboutism'?

Let's think a bit deeper about example 1. If a lefty points out Trump's undeniable flaws in an effort to show that he is unfit for office, then it is relevant to bring up Hillary's also undeniable flaws.  For if her considerable  flaws do not count against her fitness for high office, why should Trump's?

Understood in this way, 'whataboutism' is not the fallacy of tu quoque, but a legitimate charge of double standard.  Trump is being held to a higher standard than Hillary.  

If the question is simply about Trump's character, then Hillary's is irrelevant. But if the two are competing for the same office, and Trump's defects are cited as disqualifying, then it is relevant to bring up Hillary's. Not to do so would be to employ a double standard.

One conclusion, I think, is that 'whataboutism' is a waste basket term that ought to be dumped. We  already have 'tu quoque fallacy' and 'double standard.'

Besides, it is a barbarism. 

Of ‘Shit’ and ‘S**t,’ Type and Token

How many words immediately below, two or one?

cat

cat.

Both answers are plausible, and indeed equally plausible; but they can't both be right. There can't be both two words and one word. The obvious way to solve the problem is by distinguishing between token and type. We say: there are two tokens of the same type. One type, two tokens. That's a good proximate solution but not, if I am right, a good ultimate one. But that's a long story for another time.

Some write 's**t' to avoid writing 'shit.' Aren't they two tokens of the same word type? How then can one token be offensive and the other not? Or one more offensive than the other?

Here is a dilemma for your delectation:

Either we have two tokens of the same type or we don't. If the former, then both are offensive, and nothing is gained in point of politeness by writing 's**t' instead of 'shit.'

If, on the other hand, the inscriptions are not two tokens of the same type, then 's**t' cannot substitute for 'shit' in a manner that conveys the same meaning that 'shit' conveys to the English speaker.

We seem to have sunk into some really deep shit/s**t!

(Crossposted at my FB page where I expect some discussion to erupt.)