Language Matters – Page 21 – Maverick Philosopher

BRIXISH

Malcolm Pollack goes Dennis Prager one better. BRIXISH is indeed superior to SIXHIRB for Malcolm's reasons below, but also because it is in the vicinity of BREXIT. After all, the BRIXISH would tend to support BREXIT. Here's Malcolm:

Saw an unfamiliar acronym over at Maverick Philosopher the the other day: “SIXHIRB”. I had to look it up. It’s a coinage of Dennis Prager’s, and it stands for Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted: the “basket” of cudgels routinely applied to anyone to the right of the Vox editorial staff.

I’d have preferred “BRIXISH”: it sounds more like an adjective, and carries a faint echo of America’s founding people and culture (i.e., the usual target). But it’s still handy to have a linguistic shortcut for these reflexive and ubiquitous slurs, so here’s a nod to Mr. Prager.

I am slightly surprised that Malcolm did not instantly recognize the Pragerian provenience of SIXHIRB inasmuch as every other time I have used it I have credited Prager. I didn't this time to save keystrokes, figuring that everyone knew by now that it is Prager's coinage.

Now for a pedantic punctilio. SIXHIRB and BRIXISH are clearly acronyms by any reasonable definition, including the one I offer in Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations: Another Look:

An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from either the initial letters of two or more words, or from contiguous letters of two or more words. For example, 'laser' is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of the following words: light, amplification, stimulated, emission, radiation. And Gestapo is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of the following words: geheime, Staats, Polizei.

But what about BREXIT? It is not an initialism or a truncation as I define these terms:

An initialism is a string of contiguous letters, unpronounceable as a word or else not in use as a word, but pronounceable as a list of letters, formed from the initial letters of two or more words. For example, 'PBS' is an initialism that abbreviates 'Public Broadcasting System.' 'PBS' cannot be pronounced as a word, but it can be pronounced as a series of letters: Pee, Bee, Ess. 'IT' is an initialism that abbreviates "information technology.' In this case 'IT' is pronounceable as a word, but is not in use as a word. You can say, 'Mary works in Eye-Tee,' but not, 'Mary works in IT.' The same goes for 'ASU' which abbreviates 'Arizona State University.'

A truncation is a term formed from a single word by shortening it. 'App,' for example is a truncation of 'application,' and 'ho' is presumably a truncation of 'whore' (in black idiom). 'Auto' is a truncation of 'automobile,' and 'blog' (noun) of 'weblog.'

So I book BREXIT under acronym despite its difference from the other two. BREXIT fits my definition of 'acronym' inasmuch as it is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of two or more words, in this case, 'Britain' and 'exit.' The fact that all of the letters of 'exit' are packed into BREXIT does not stop the latter from being an acronym.

Of ‘Broach’ and ‘Brook’

I just found this sentence at Puffington Host: "He is so insecure, he will broach no criticism." You may easily guess whom the author is huffing and puffing over.

But one does not broach no criticism; one brooks no criticism.

I brook no contradiction on this point.

Language matters.

‘Post-Truth’

'Post-truth' is a silly buzz word, and therefore beloved by journalists who typically talk and write uncritically in trendy ways. There is no way to get beyond truth or to live after truth. All of our intellectual operations are conducted under the aegis of truth.

Here is one example of how we presuppose truth. People routinely accuse each other of lying, and often the accusations are just. But to lie is to make a false statement with the intention of deceiving one's audience. A false statement is one that is not true. It follows that if there is no truth, then there are no lies. If we are beyond truth, then we are beyond lies as well. But of course lies are told, so truth exists.

I could squeeze a lot of philosophical juice out of this topic, and you hope I won't. I will content myself with some mundane observations.

'Post-truth' is used mainly to describe contemporary politics. The idea is that it does not much matter in the political sphere whether what is said is true so long as it is effective in swaying people this way or that. What is persuasive need not be true, and what is true need not be persuasive. But this has has always been the case, so why the need for 'post-truth'? Is it really so much worse these days?

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-of-lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus! There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them. Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice. Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion. Still, it could be true. Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence. He pretended to know something he could not know. Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.

So he didn't lie. What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting. He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true. But why pick on Trump?

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.

Obama bullshits with the best of them. A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.) Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement. Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth. (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them: he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure. The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true. He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam. The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.

So once again we have a double standard. Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?

Politics as War

A reader sends this:

A correspondent has just emailed me, completely out of the blue, to tell me that you're a “racist, islamophobe, bigot”. Thought you would like that. 😀

I like it very much except that he leaves out the remaining SIXHIRB epithets: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, and homophobic. But three out of seven ain't bad.

To understand the Left, you must understand that they see politics as war. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means. I wish it weren't so, and for a long time I couldn't bring myself to believe it is so; but now I know it is so.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.

Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

As the old saying has it, "All's fair in love and war." And so it is no surprise that leftists routinely proceed by the hurling of the SIXHIRB epithets.

One soon learns that it does no good patiently to explain that a phobia is by definition an irrational fear, that fear of radical Islam is entirely rational, and that therefore it is a misuse of 'phobia' to call one who sounds the alarm an Islamophobe. Nor does it do any good to point out to those who use these '-phobe' coinages that they are thereby refusing to show their interlocutors respect as persons, as rational beings, but are instead ascribing mental dysfunction to them. Our enemies will just ignore our explanations and go right back to labeling us sexists, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic . . . deplorable, etc.

Again, it is because they see politics as a war to the death.

Leftists that they are, they believe that the end justifies the means. They see themselves as good people, as their 'virtue-signaling' indicates, and their opponents as evil people. So why to their minds should they show us any respect?

To ask Lenin's question, What is to be done? One has to punch right back at them and turn their Alinskyite tactics against them.

"But aren't we then no better than them? We are hen doing the same things they do!"

Suppose A threatens to kill B, shoots at him but misses. B shoots back and kills A. Suppose the weapons are of the same type. Both A and B instantiate the same act-type: shooting at a man with the intention of hitting him using a 1911 model .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol.

While A and B 'do the same thing,' B is morally and legally justified in doing it while A is not. So there's the difference.

We are defending ourselves against leftist assault, and this fact justifies our using the same tactics that our enemies use.

This helps explain the appeal of Donald Trump. He knows how to punch back, unlike Mitt Romney, Jeb! Bush, and so many other clueless gentlemen who "seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union . . . ."

‘Discernable’ or ‘Discernible’?

The latter. My man Hanson this morning:

Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors.

I should think a conservative would want to resist all pointless innovations. The correct spelling points back to the Latin. Leibniz spoke of the identitas indiscernibilium not the identitas indiscernabilium.

I want the link to the Latin maintained out of a sort of salutary piety for our tradition.

This is why I write 'tranquillity' rather than 'tranquility.'

Pedantic punctilios? No doubt, which is why I will not draw my weapon if you disagree.

Now go read Hanson's excellent column which is more important than my picayune points supra.

Ontological Crisis?

You will have noticed by now that leftists are in permanent 'crisis mode.' But now comes something new, ontological crisis:

In the wake of their devastating loss, Democrats find themselves in the midst of ontological crisis . . . .

Holy Heidegger! It serves them right.

Long Lines as ‘Voter Suppression’

On C-SPAN this morning I watched part of a re-run of a program from last Wednesday. A bunch of leftists were bemoaning Hillary's defeat. One Steve Cobble uncorked a real doozy to the effect that long lines at polling places are a form of 'voter suppression.'

This is too stupid to waste time refuting, but it's good for a laugh.

Turns out this Cobble character writes for the The Nation. Surprise!

For articles of mine on 'voter suppression,' see here.

English is Strange: ‘Quite a Few’

If I ask how many people showed up at a party, an answer might be 'a few.' Another answer could be, 'quite a few.' The first phrase means a small number, while the latter means a comparatively large number.

It follows that the meaning of 'quite a few' is not built up from the meanings of 'quite' and 'a few.' This is so whether 'quite' is taken to mean entirely or very.

Equivalently, the meanings of 'a few' and 'quite a few' have no common meaning element. 'Quite a few' functions as a semantic unit. Its meaning cannot be arrived at by piecing together the meanings of 'quite' and 'a few.' It must be learned as the unit it is: 'quite-a-few.'

I rejoice in being a native speaker of this irregular and illogical language. Irregular and illogical as she is, she is my thought's alma mater, and I love her dearly.

But my love is not jealous. I do not begrudge the foreigner who attempts to learn my language and share in her charms and foibles.

‘Incentivize,’ ‘Incent,’ or Neither?

Some discussion here. My sense of style suggests the avoidance of both.

Example: "When was the last time Democrat, or Republican, tax hikes balanced the budget instead of merely incenting even more government spending?"

Language is fun even in cases in which it doesn't much matter, as here. In politics, however, it matters greatly: he who controls the language controls the debate.

Meaning is Tied to Use; Syntax Too?

It would seem so. Consider the way Peggy Noonan, no slouch of a political commentator, uses the adjective 'crazy' in this passage about Donald Trump:

He had to be a flame-haired rebuke to the establishment. He in fact had to be a living insult—no political experience, rude, crude ways—to those who’ve failed us. He had to leave you nervous, on the edge of your seat. Only that man could have broken through. Crazy was a feature, not a bug. (The assumption seemed to be he could turn crazy on and off. I believe he has demonstrated he can’t.)

That is perfectly intelligible of course, even though Noonan uses 'crazy' twice as a noun.

The syntactical difference between noun and adjective no doubt remains in place; it is just that a word that traditionally was always used as an adjective is here used as a noun, as a stand-in for the abstract substantive, 'craziness.' A bit earlier in her piece, Noonan uses 'crazy' as an adjective.

(Can you adduce a counterexample to my 'always' above?)

No word has a true or real or intrinsic meaning that somehow attaches to the word essentially regardless of contextual factors. Is the same true of syntactical category? Can every word 'jump categories'? Or only some?

For a long time now, verbs have been used as nouns. 'Jake sent me an invite to his Halloween party.' 'How much does the install cost?' 'An engine overhaul will cost you more the vehicle is worth.' How far can it go? Will tire rotations ever be advertised as 'tire rotates'? 'I thought the rotate was part of the deal!'

Some words have always (?) had a dual use as verbs and nouns. 'Torch,' might be an example.

'I' is an interesting case. (I mean the word, not the English majuscule letter or the Roman numeral.) 'I' is the first-person singular pronoun. But it can also be used as a noun.

Suppose a Buddhist says, 'There is no I.' Is his utterance gibberish? Could I reasonably reply to the Buddhist: What you've said, Bud, is nonsense on purely syntactical grounds. So it is neither true not false.

More later.

On Mocking Religious Figures

My view in a few words.

Other things being equal, one should not mock, deride, or engage in any sort of unprovoked verbal or pictorial assault on people or the beliefs they cherish. So if Muslims were as benign as Christians or Buddhists, I would object on moral grounds to the depiction and mockery of the man Muslims call the Prophet despite the legality of so doing. But things are not equal. Radical Islam is the main threat to civilized values in the world today. Deny that, and you are delusional as Sam Harris says. The radicals are testing us and provoking us. We must respond with mockery and derision at a bare minimum. The 'Use it or lose it' principle applies not only to one's body, but to one's rights as well. For the defense of liberty, the enemies of our rights must be in our sights, figuratively at least, and this includes radical Islam's leftist enablers.

Hillary, for example, who won't even call it what it is.

Word of the Day: Fainéant

n. irresponsible idler.

adj. idle and ineffective: indolent.

Exaggeration and the Erosion of Credibility

Why do people exaggerate in serious contexts? The logically prior question is: What is exaggeration, and how does it differ from joking, lying, bullshitting, and metaphorical uses of language?

Donald Trump in the first of his presidential debates with Hillary Clinton made the astonishing claim that she has been fighting ISIS all her adult life.

Note first that Trump was not joking but making a serious point. But he couched the serious point in a sentence which is plainly false and known by all to be false. So he cannot be taxed with an intention to deceive. Since he had no intention of deceiving his audience, and since the point he was making (not merely trying to make) about Clinton's fecklessness is true, he was not lying. He was not bullshitting either since he was not trying to misrepresent himself as knowing something he does not know or more than he knows.

Our man was exaggerating. That is different from joking, lying, and bullshitting.

‘Homegrown Terrorist’

Consider three types of case. (a) A Muslim terrorist who was born in the USA and whose terrorism derives from his Islamic faith. (b) A Muslim terrorist who was not born in the USA but is a citizen of the USA or legally resides in the USA and whose terrorism derives from his Islamic faith. (c) A terrorist such as Timothy McVeigh who was born in the USA but whose terrorism does not derive from Islamic doctrine.

As a foe of obfuscatory terminology, I object to booking the (a) and (b) cases under the 'homegrown terrorist' rubric. In the (a)-case, the terrorist doctrine, which inspires the terrorist deeds, is of foreign origin. There is nothing 'homegrown' about it. Compare the foreign terrorist doctrine to a terrorist doctrine that takes its inspiration, rightly or wrongly, from American sources such as certain quotations from Thomas Jefferson or from the life and views of the abolitionist John Brown.

The same holds a fortiori for the (b)-cases. Here neither the doctrine nor the perpetrator are 'homegrown.'

There is no justification for referring to an act of Islamic terrorism that occurs in the homeland as an act of 'homegrown' terrorism.

The (c)-type cases are the only ones that legitimately fall under the 'homegrown terrorist' rubric.

So please don't refer to Ahmad Khan Rahami as a 'homegrown terrorist.' He is a (b)-type terrorist. There is nothing 'homegrown' about the Islamic doctrine that drove his evil deeds, nor is there anything 'homegrown' about the 'gentleman' himself. Call him what he is: a Muslim terrorist whose terrorism is fueled by Islamic doctrine.

The obfuscatory appellation is in use, of course, because it is politically correct.

Language matters. And political correctness be damned.

Does Trump Incite Violence?

Yes, but only in the febrile 'mind' of an Hillarious liberal.

You have to realize that when Trump is 'off script,' he talks like a rude New York working man in a bar. He does this in part because it is his nature to be rude and vulgar, but also because he realizes that this helps him gin up his base.

Let me try to put his point in a more 'measured' way. His point was not that Hillary's bodyguards ought to be disarmed so that she could more easily be 'taken out.' His point is that if guns cause crime and have no legitimate uses, then why are her bodyguards armed to the teeth with the sorts of weapons that she would like to make it illegal for law-abiding citizens to possess and carry?

If guns are never the answer, why are they 'the answer' for government agents? If law-abiding citizens cannot be trusted with semi-automatic pistols and long guns, how is it that government agents can be trusted with them?

The graphic makes the point very well. Trump was not inciting violence. But if you say he was then you are slandering him and his supporters. Be careful, the Second Amendment types may 'come after you.' Politically.

UPDATE (9:25 AM). Here is what Trump said:

She [Hillary] goes around with armed bodyguards like you have never seen before. I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm. Right? Right? I think they should disarm immediately. What do you think? Yes? Yes. Yeah. Take their guns away. She doesn’t want guns. … Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, okay? It would be very dangerous.