Language Matters – Page 18 – Maverick Philosopher

Tavis Smiley Too? ‘Inappropriate’ Sexual Conduct?

The witch hunt is on and the Left eats its own. PBS has suspended distribution of Smiley's late-night talk show. I don't think much of Smiley's opinions, you understand, but I fear that we may end up like the Soviet Union or China under the Cultural Revolution. Don't tell me it can't happen here; just look at the outrages that have already happened here. From the L. A. Times:

“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” Smiley said. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering six networks over 30 years.” [emphasis added]

If Smiley had exposed himself appropriately, then no problem?

By the way, what is it about liberals that makes them use 'inappropriately' inappropriately?

Whipping out your schlong in front of a female colleague is not inappropriate behavior but morally wrong behavior. Why can't you liberal boneheads say that? Too 'judgmental'? But that's what you are doing: you are making moral judgments. Did Bubba behave 'inappropriately' with Juanita Broderick? But if Clinton had shown up at a black-tie event in a swimsuit, then you could say, appropriately, that his behavior was inappropriate.

'Inappropriate' is far too weak a word for rape and sexual intimidation. On the other hand, 'reach out' is too strong a phrase for the uses to which it is put by contemporary language morons. If I hear that your wife has suddenly died, I may 'reach out' to you in sympathy and with an offer of assistance. But if I phone you to inform you that one of your tail lights is out, I haven't 'reached out' to you.

Finally, Smiley's 'tell their truth' is quite the howler. For his accusers are (at least) telling their truth. Truth is truth. There is no such thing as his or hers or their truth.

Of Coulter and Kant, Screwed Pooches, and Milked He Goats

Ann Coulter:

Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration. It's all that matters to the country, and it's all that matters for winning elections.

She's right: read what she has to say.

What caught my eye, however, was the expression 'screw the pooch.' I now send you to Slate for an explanation of its meaning, thereby proving that that site is good for something.

The irrepressible Coulter also avails herself of the expression, 'milk a he-goat':

We'll have to watch helplessly as "establishment Republicans" fight "anti-establishment Republicans" over the right to milk a he-goat. Both sides will lose, and Democrats will sweep Congress and destroy our country.

Now that's a very old expression; I first encountered it in Kant in a particularly delightful form at A 58 = B 83 of his Critique of Pure Reason:

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if the question is absurd in itself and demands unnecessary answers, then, besides the embarrassment of the one who proposes it, it also has the disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener into absurd answers, and presenting the ridiculous sight (as the ancients said) of one man milking a he-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath.

The true Kant aficionado will of course know that Kant invoked this simile already in his pre-Critical period in his 1770 Latin Inaugural Dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis. See, for the Latin, Daniel S. Robinson, "Kant and Demonax–A Footnote to the History of Philosophy," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1950), pp. 374-379.

Below, Professor Robinson misspells Norman Kemp Smith's name. In an age of literary irresponsibility we need more pedants like me. Or maybe not.

Irony Deficiency

Some suffer from an iron deficiency; the cure is straightforward. Others from an irony deficiency; I know of no cure. I wrote the other day:

Long-time reader E. C. sends us to rapper Joyner Lucas, I'm Not Racist. It warms my heart this holiday season to see how wonderfully race relations have improved since the '60s in this country.

The second sentence displays irony. The meaning I intend, and succeed in conveying to those not suffering from irony deficiency, is the opposite of what the sentence itself expresses when considered in itself, apart from context, simply as a sentence of English.

Irony thus exploits the fact that speaker's meaning and sentence meaning can come apart. What a speaker or writer of a sentence means by the utterance or inscription of a sentence sometimes differs from what the sentence itself means considered apart from a context of use.

Schopenhauer in Italian on Schadenfreude, La Gioia per il Danno Altrui

If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another injuries (Schaden). The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical.

Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.

My translation of the Italian:

To feel envy is human, but to taste joy at the injury of others is diabolical.

Language Rant: Taking Responsibility and Taking Credit

Another note for benighted journalists who have, but too often do not honor, their duty to preserve and protect the English language in all her expressive and thought-guiding glory.

What one takes responsibility for may be either good or bad. What one takes credit for, however, is good. Terrorist acts are not good.

Therefore, do not report that ISIS 'took credit' for an atrocity but that they 'took responsibility' for it.

Walter (HT: Jeff Dunham) is the MavPhil 'icon' of the language rant. 'Icon,' however, needs it own rant. Later.

A Simple Point of Logic Journalists Ought to be Aware Of

One often encounters sentences like this one:

There are many arenas in which all ideas are not considered equal.

This example is from a recent piece in Vox. I could give further recent examples, but one is enough. To simplify, consider just the core thought:

All ideas are not considered equal.

Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what the core thought is. For the sentence is ambiguous as between

1) No ideas are considered equal

and

2) Some ideas are not considered equal.

The thoughts (propositions) expressed are distinct since the first can be false while the second is true. Although it is fairly clear that the author intended (2), a good writer avoids ambiguous constructions unless for some reason he intends them. So don't write sentences of the form

3) All Fs are not Gs

if you intend say something of the form

4) Some Fs are not Gs.

Write instead sentences of the form

5) Not all Fs are Gs

which, by simple quantifier negation, is equivalent to (4).

Class dismissed.

‘Never-Trumper’

You are misusing 'never-trumper' if your usage does not comport with this conditional:

If you are a never-trumper, then you are a conservative, real or at least self-proclaimed.

Bill Kristol is a never-trumper; Hillary is not.

Underlying principle: do not engage in verbal inflation without a damned good reason. If a word or phrase has a specific meaning use it in that meaning.

A Note on Vox Clamantis in Deserto

This just over the transom from London Ed:

Pedantic, but I think you will secretly enjoy it.

Matt. 3:3 quoting Isaiah 40:3. The Vulgate has Vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam Domini. [Right, I checked both quotations in my Biblia Vulgata.] There has always been a question about the parsing of this. Is it

A voice of one calling in the wilderness, “prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”,

as your quotation implies. Or is it

A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”.

Different translations differ. Of course the ancient Hebrew/Greek may be ambiguous, as they were not cursed with the quotation mark. I shall investigate further.

[Time passes]

OK I looked further. I always wondered if Matthew knew his scripture, but checking the Isa 40:3 in the Septuagint (the Jewish Alexandrian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), it is identical, i.e. Matthew’s Greek accurately reflects the Greek translation of Isaiah.

However, at least according to Pentiuc, the Septuagint Greek is a mis-translation of the Hebrew.

According to the reading proposed by the Masoretes, this voice "cries" to the one called "to clear" the way in the wilderness (cf. Mal 3:1). Babylonian texts speak in similar terms of processional ways prepared for a god or a victorious king; this is the road by which Yahweh will lead his people through the desert in a new exodus. Quite contrary to this reading is the Septuagint's rendering, where the "voice is crying in the wilderness." This version indicates that the wilderness is the location of the mysterious voice, rather than the meeting place for God and his people returned from exile.

My emphasis. The Masoretes were the Jewish scribe-scholars who worked on the interpretation of the ancient texts.

BV: I am not competent to comment on the scholarly punctilios, , but I prefer the Septuagint reading for the (non)reason that I live in a desert. And I know Ed Abbey, the author of Vox Clamantis in Deserto, would agree for he too lived in the desert, in fact, in Oracle, Arizona, not far from here.

By the way, the preceding sentence is not good English by the lofty standards of MavPhil. Can you see why? Combox open.

On ‘Devout’

One reads that so-and-so is a 'devout Catholic' or a 'devout Muslim.'

How would the writer know? Devotion is an interior state inaccessible to observation from without. The practicing Catholic or observant Muslim, by contrast, can be seen to be such by others. So if what you mean to convey is that so-and-so is a practicing or observant Christian, Muslim, or Jew, then you should write that. It is obvious that the practitioner of a religion need not be particularly devout or devout at all. And that includes priests, rabbis, and imams.

I grant that external practices are evidence of inner attitude. So, by the dictionary definition, you would not be wrong to call a regular practitioner of a religion 'devout.' But here at Maverick Philosopher our standards are a cut above those of a mere dictionary. We aim at precision in thought and speech. And sometimes we miss the mark.

So rather than bandy about, lemming-like, an oft-heard phrase, journalists should ask themselves whether the alternatives suggested above are more appropriate.

Language matters.

Speaking of dictionaries, The Dictionary Fallacy is a very good article in my biased opinion. It will cost you some effort, but a little hard work never hurt anybody.

Unbegriff

This passage from Schopenhauer illustrates one of my favorite German words, Unbegriff, for which we have no simple equivalent in standard English.

"An impersonal God is no God at all, but only a word misused, an unconcept, a contradictio in adjecto, a philosophy professor's shibboleth, a word with which he tries to weasel his way after having had to give up the thing." (my trans.)

I read Schopenhauer as attacking those who want to have it both ways at once: they want to continue talking about God after having abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So they speak of an impersonal God, a construction in which the adjective 'contradicts' the noun. (The Ostrich of London may perhaps fruitfully reflect on the deliberate use-mention fudge in my last sentence.)

Language Rant: When to Capitalize the Initial Letter in ‘Earth’

I found the following sentence in David Benatar's The Human Predicament, p. 36:

Nothing we do on earth has any effect beyond it. (36)

This sentence slipped past the Oxford editors. The initial letter of 'earth' ought to be capitalized since the word is being used as the proper name of a planet. A while back, Cher threatened to leave for Jupiter, not jupiter, should Trump win the election. Men are from Mars, not mars, and women from Venus, not venus.

Mons veneris, however, is from the proper name of the goddess of love, not the planet. You know what it means and you know that it does not refer to an extraterrestrial geological formation.

But if you are talking about dirt or soil or the mythical Aristotelian element, then write 'earth.' The lower case is also employed in such expressions as 'What on earth are you saying.'

The same goes for such expressions as 'She's not long for this earth.' When a person on Earth dies, his body does not leave Earth. But he leaves the world in one sense of 'world.' Sic transit gloria mundi.

Watch it, ragazzi, else I'll sic my cat Heinrich on you.

Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?

'White supremacist' is becoming the Left's smear word of choice eclipsing even 'racist.' This leads to an interesting question: Is every racist a white supremacist? That depends on what you think a racist is.

On one definition, a member of a race is a racist if he harbors an irrational hatred of the members of some other race just in virtue of their membership in that other race. It follows that blacks who harbor an irrational hatred of whites just in virtue of their being white are racists. But presumably few if any of them would count as white supremacists, on any reasonable definition of the latter.

To answer the title question: it is not the case that every racist is a white supremacist; with few exceptions black racists are not white supremacists.

Now what I have just written has a tongue-in-cheek flavor. I am not seriously trying to straighten out any 'progressive' loon. For surely it would be absurd to invoke reason in the Left's lunatic asylum. It would be absurd to point out to a race-obsessed 'progressive' that 'racist' and 'white supremacist' have different meanings.

Race obsession is a cognitive aberration of leftist group-thinkers. These sick people need therapy, not refutation or calm analysis.

Be Careful with ‘Over-represent’ and ‘Under-represent’

If you fancy yourself clear-thinking, then you ought to be very careful with the word 'over-represent' and its opposite. These words are ambiguous as between normative and non-normative readings. It is just a fact that there are proportionately more Asians than blacks in the elite high schools of New York City. But it doesn't follow that this state of affairs is one that ought not be, or that it would be better if there were proportional representation. So don't say that the Asians are 'over-represented.' For then you are trading in confusion. You are blurring the distinction between the statement of a fact and the expression of a value judgment.

Consider the sports analogy. Asians are 'under-represented' on basketball teams. That is a fact. But it doesn't follow that this state of affairs is one that ought not be, or that it would be better if there were proportional representation. Enforced proportional representation would adversely affect the quality of basketball games.

Women are 'over-represented' among massage therapists and realtors in that there are more of them than men in those professions. Is that bad? Of course not. It is just a fact. And one easily explained. Women are better than men at the sorts of negotiations that real estate transactions involve. For an excellent discussion of such generic statements see my cleverly named Generic Statements. It has been my experience that liberals have a heard time wrapping their heads around generic statements. They also have a hard time grasping the logic of stereotypes.

As for the massage therapists, it is easy to understand why most of them are women. Men love to have their naked bodies rubbed in dark rooms by women. Women do not love to have their naked bodies rubbed in dark rooms by men. Capisce? By the way, both of the preceding statements are themselves generic.

If you say that women are 'under-represented' in philosophy, are you reporting a fact or reporting a fact plus bemoaning said fact? It is true that there are fewer women than men in philosophy. But it doesn't follow that this is a state of affairs that needs correction. There are perfectly non-nefarious explanations of the fact.

'Over-represent' and 'under-represent' are words best avoided because they paper over illicit inferential slides from the factual to the normative/evaluative. Is that why liberals like them?

Don’t Surrender to the Left on Language

The Left's destructiveness extends even unto language. Shoot back against the linguistic hijackers. Here's some ammo from Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic, 3rd ed., p. 36, n. 1:

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun "he" is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect "they." But when we say "one baby was healthier than the others because they didn't drink that milk," we do not know whether the antecedent of "they" is "one" or "others," so we don't know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby's health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive "in-your-face" generic "she," which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing "he" to "he or she" refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying "she or he." (5) Or we could use the neuter "it," which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use "she or he or it," which, abbreviated, would sound like "sh . . . it." I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of "political correctness," linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.

What a sexist Neanderthal this Kreeft fellow is! Send him to a re-education camp!

Find the Linguistic Howler

For all his insights about the pathologies of the modern left, Mark Lilla has not divested himself of the most ubiquitous intellectual quirk of today’s establishment liberal: He equivocates the common good with the electoral success of the Democratic Party. Lilla is not trying to convince leftists that they stand to learn anything from voters in Appalachian West Virginia or rural Missouri. He’s just trying to convince them to be able to stand their presence long enough to win their votes.

Source

"But it's a good article, Bill, and the author is obviously a youngster; why seize on a linguistic peccadillo while ignoring the content of his piece?"

Because I'm the nastiest, surliest, prickliest, language Nazi north of the Rio Grande and west of the Pecos. I love language even more than I hate libruls.

UPDATE:

Dave Bagwill comments:

J'accuse you of being a glossophile!

Guilty as charged! But I plead innocent of graphomania:

"Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;

The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1978