Language Matters – Page 30 – Maverick Philosopher

On the Label ‘Obamacare’

Some object to the popular 'Obamacare' label given that the official title of the law is 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act' or, as commonly truncated, 'Affordable Care Act.' But there is a good reason to favor the popular moniker: it is descriptive where the other two labels are evaluative, expressing as they do a pro attitude toward the bill.

Will the law really protect patients? That is an evaluative judgment based on projections many regard as flimsy. Will the law really make health care affordable? And for whom? Will care mandated for all be readily available and of high quality?

Everybody wants affordable and readily available health care of high quality for the greatest number possible. The question is how best to attain this end. The 'Affordable Care Act' label begs the question as to whether or not Obama's bill will achieve the desired end. 'Obamacare' does not. It is, if not all that descriptive, at least evaluatively neutral.

If Obama's proposal were referred to as "Socialized Medicine Health Care Act' or 'Another Step Toward the Nanny State Act,' people would protest the negative evaluations embedded in the titles. Titles of bills ought to be neutral.

Proponents of a consumption tax sometimes refer to it as a fair tax. Same problem. 'Fair' is an evaluative term while 'consumption' is not. 'Consumption tax' conveys the idea that taxes should be collected at the consuming end rather than at the income-producing end. 'Fair tax' fails to convey that idea, but what is worse, it begs the question as to what a fair tax would look like. It is a label that invites the conflation of distinct questions: What is a consumption tax? Is it good? Answer the first and it remains an open question what the answer to the second is.

What is fairness? What is justice? Is justice fairness? These are questions that need to be addressed, not questions answers to which ought to be presupposed.

There is no good reason to object to 'Obamacare' — the word, not the thing.

Orwellian Bullshit

The POMO prez, Barack Obama, said last night (emphasis added):

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't.

Obama is not just a bullshitter, but an Orwellian bullshitter.

See articles below.

Contemporary Liberal Doublethink: Welfare = Self-Reliance

First of all, what is doublethink? We turn to George Orwell's 1984 and the following quotation therefrom reproduced in Wikipedia:

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

— Part II, Chapter IX — The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

This official website is an excellent contemporary example of doublethink, from the State of Idaho, of all places. (One expects PeeCee doublethink and newspeak in the People's Republic of Taxachusetts and in the once Golden State of Californication, but in Idaho, with all its Mormons and gun-totin' conservatives? Holy moly, things are worse than I thought.) At the State of Idaho website we read:

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare's Self Reliance Office 6/2010

What is the Self Reliance office?

The Self Reliance office is the portion of Idaho Health and Welfare where people can apply for state funded public assistance.

This is what we call an 'Orwellian' use of language. It is language perverted and destroyed so as to serve leftist ideology and make clear thinking impossible. Accordingly, one who accepts welfare via the State from productive citizens is 'self-reliant,' when in truth he is the exact opposite.

Black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reliance on others is self-reliance.

Limited government is anarchism.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness = ObamaCare. (Idiot Pelosi accurately paraphrased.)

Fiscal responsibility = fiscal irresponsibility.

Semi-automatic rifle = fully- automatic rifle.

Semi-automatic rifle used purely defensively = assault weapon.

Constitutionally-mandated border control = xenophobia.

ID requirement at polling place = disenfranchisement.

Critic of a black person's ideas = racist.

And so on. Continue the list and resolve to do your bit to resist and oppose the liberal-left scumbaggers. It is your life, liberty and happiness that are at stake.

Misused Expressions

You've heard of the Soup Nazi. I'm the Language Nazi.

1. Toe the line, not: tow the line.

2. Tough row to hoe, not: tough road to hoe.

3. Rack one's brains, not: wrack one's brains.

4. Wrack and ruin, not: rack and ruin.

5. Flout the law, not: flaunt the law.

6. Give advice, not: give advise. "He advised her to take his advice cum grano salis."

7. Cum grano salis, not: cum grano Sallust. (This one's a joke; I just made it up.)

8. One and the same; not: one in the same.

9. Same thing, not: same difference. One of those moronic expressions that is so bad it's good. Tom: "That's a firefly!" Dick: "Its a glowbug!" Jethro: "Same difference!" This is not to suggest that there aren't correct uses of 'same difference.'

10. Regardless, not: irregardless. Say 'irregardless' and you probably chew tobacco.

11. I couldn't care less, not: I could care less. Almost as moronic as (9).

Yahoos seem naturally to gravitate toward double negative constructions which they use as intensifiers. For example, 'I can't get no satisfaction' to mean can't get any. 'No' is an intensifier not a negator. "Nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free." (Kris Kristofferson) This is probably what is going on in (9) and (10).

In each case, though, the speaker conveys his meaning. So does it matter whether one speaks and writes correctly? Does it matter whether one walks down the street with one's pants half-way down one's butt?

Addenda

12. Tenter hooks, not: tender hooks. (Via Monterey Tom)

13. Old fashioned, not: old fashion.

Sweat, Perspire, Glow

It was a hot and humid September day, twenty years ago. I was sitting in a restaurant in Wuhan, China. There had been a power outage, so the air conditioning was off. The lady next to me was perspiring profusely. I somewhat crudely drew attention to the fact probably using some such expression as 'sweating bullets.'

The lady gave me an arch look and said, "Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow."

The good lady was glowing something fierce.

Arguments Don’t Have Testicles!

Prepared lines come in handy in many of life's situations. They are useful for getting points across in a memorable way and they make for effective on-the-spot rebuttals.

A mind well-stocked with prepared lines is a mind less likely to suffer l'esprit d'escalier.

Suppose a feminist argues that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion. Without a moment's hesitation, retort: Arguments don't have testicles!

Other applications are easily imagined.

We ought to be able to extend the idea to race. Suppose a left-wing black takes umbrage at a Bill O'Reilly-type pointing out of the causes of the problems in the black 'community.' Say: In my neck of the 'hood, arguments they ain't got no skin color. Hell, they ain't got no skin!

Dueling Injunctions

"Dont' hide your light under a bushel." "Don't cast your pearls before swine."

"Haste makes waste." "He who hesitates is lost."

Others escape me at the moment.

UPDATE (7 September). Jeff Hodges and Kid Nemesis come to my aid. Jeff contributes:

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder."
"Out of sight, out of mind."

Jeff adds, "According to some, the latter was translated into German to mean "blind and crazy"! That might be a joke, but I did hear a professional translator render "white male gaze" into German as "white male homosexuals."

Well, "Out of sight, out of mind" is rendered exactly by the German proverb Aus den Augen, aus den Sinn. Someone who didn't know German well could easily translated the latter as "blind and crazy" thinking that the German sentence means "out of eyes and out of mind."

Kid Nemesis writes, "Not really injunctions, but. . .

'Distance makes the heart grow fonder' vs 'Out of sight, out of mind.'"

'Absence,' not 'distance.' But KN makes a good point: my second example and Jeff's are not injunctions. My post should have been titled, 'Dueling Maxims.' An injunction is an act of ordering or commanding or enjoining or admonishing or else the content of an act of ordering or commanding or enjoining or admonishing. Injunctions are broadly imperative as opposed to declarative. A maxim may or may not be imperative.

Pronouns and Their Antecedents

Here is an interesting tidbit:

$100M Calif. mansion has unusual sale requirement.

HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. (AP) — As if the $100 million asking price wasn't deterrent enough, the owner of a mansion for sale in a ritzy San Francisco suburb says the buyer can move in only after his death.

That is indeed a highly unusual requirement. Why would anyone buy a house that he could inhabit only after he was dead? And why would he need a mansion for such necrotic tenancy?

‘Redskin’ Offensive? What About ‘Guinea Pig’?

Apparently, the online magazine Slate will no longer be referring to the Washington Redskins under that name lest some Indians take offense. By the way, I take offense at 'native American.' I am a native Californian, which fact makes me a native American, and I'm not now and never have been an Indian.

But what about 'guinea pig'? Surely this phrase too is a racial/ethnic slur inasmuch as it suggests that all people of Italian extraction are pigs, either literally or in their eating habits. Bill Loney takes this (meat) ball and runs with it.

And then there is 'coonskin cap.' 'Coon' is in the semantic vicinity of such words as: spade, blood, spearchucker, spook, and nigger. These are derogatory words used to refer to Eric Holder's people. In the '60s, southern racists expressed their contempt for Martin Luther King, Jr. by referring to him as Martin Luther Coon. Since a coonskin cap is a cap made of the skin of a coon, 'coonskin cap' is a code phrase used by creepy-assed crackers to signal that black folk ought to be, all of them, on the wrong end of a coon hunt.

'Coonskin cap' must therefore be struck from our vocabulary lest some black person take offense.

But then consistency demands that we get rid of 'southern racist.' The phrase suggests that all southerners are racists. And we must not cause offense to the half-dozen southerners who are not racists.

But why stop here? 'Doo wop' is so-called because many of its major exponents were wops such as Dion Dimucci who was apparently quite proud to be a wop inasmuch as he uses the term five times in succession starting at :58 of this version of 'I Wonder Why' (1958). The old greaseball still looks very good in this 2004 performance. Must be all that pasta he consumes.

I could go on — this is fun — but you get the drift, unless you are a stupid liberal.

The Role of Ridicule in Politics

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Conservatives have a tendency to try to win every debate with logic and recitations of facts which, all too often, fail to get the job done because emotions and mockery are often just as effective as reason. The good news is that liberals almost never have logic on their side; so they're incapable of rationally making the case for their policies while conservatives can become considerably more effective debaters by simply adding some emotion-based arguments and sheer scorn to their discourse. This has certainly worked on Twitter, where conservatives keep making the Obama campaign look like buffoons by taking over its hashtags.

The bolded sentence above is #5 of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The rest of the text is from John Hawthorne's 12 Ways to Use Saul Alinky's Rules for Radicals Against Liberals. I agree entirely with Hawthorne's advice. I have come to see that calm and careful argumentation, the marshalling of facts, and all the rest of what constitutes rational persuasion are simply not enough. While necessary, they are not sufficient. Not sufficient, because most people are emotion-driven, not reason-driven. This is especially true of the young. It is the cool, not the cogent, that persuades them.

The Left knows how to fight and the Right had better learn. If you doubt that politics is war conducted by other means, then consider the following from a recent Dennis Prager column:

The head of the Louisiana Democratic Party, State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, stood before her colleagues in the state Senate and announced the reason people oppose Obamacare.

"You ready?" she asked three times.

It is President Obama's color.

"It isn't about the administration, and it should not be about the administration of the state nor federal level when it comes to Obamacare," she said. "But in fact it is. And why is that? I have talked to so many members in the House and Senate and you know what it comes down to? Are you ready for this? It is not about how many federal dollars we can receive. You ready? You want to know what it's about? It's about race. Now nobody wants to talk about that. It's about the race of this African-American president. … It comes down to the race of the president of the U.S. which causes people to disconnect and step away from the substance of the bill."

What the senator said is of course egregiously false, and she must know it. But then why does she and so many other liberals say things like this? Because it is a useful lie. It is useful to the forwarding of the leftist agenda. Liberals lie and distort and smear because it works. The end justifies the means.

There are examples aplenty of this. For the Left, politics is a form of warfare. The above example, which is entirely characteristic, proves it.

Only Asian Homunculi Would Fit

If 'chink in the armor' is about Asians, then the Asians in question would have to be rather tiny to hang out interstitially in, say, a coat of mail.

Now blacks have shown themselves to be absurdly sensitive to the imagined slights embedded in such words and phrases as 'niggardly,' 'black hole,' and 'watermelon.' But Asians too?

Why not take offense at 'chunk'? Someone might get it into his PeeCee head that a chunk is a fat chink.

There is no end to this madness once it gets going, which is why we sane and decent people need to mock and deride liberals every chance we get. Mockery and derision can achieve what calm reasoning cannot.

One cannot reason with those who are permanently in a state of self-colonoscopy.

Story here.

And don't miss: Of Black Holes and Political Correctness

Of Black Holes and Black Hos

On the Misuse of Superlatives (the Brokaw Fallacy) and Two Other Fallacies

Adjectives admit of three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. The first refers to the zero case of comparison: Tom is tall. The second refers to a situation in which two things are compared: Tom is taller than Tim. The third refers to a situation in which a thing is compared to all the other members of its reference class: Tom is the tallest man in Fargo. It is easy to see that if Tom is the tallest man in Fargo, then (a) there cannot be a man taller than him in that reference class, and (b) he is unique in respect of tallness in that reference class. (I.e., there cannot be two tallest men in the same reference class.)

Therefore, if the WWII generation is the greatest generation (relative to some agreed-upon criteria of generational greatness), then (i) there is no greater generation, and (ii) the WWII generation is unique in respect of greatness. Now does Tom Brokaw really want to affirm both (i) and (ii)? Is the WWII generation the greatest generation of any country in the whole of recorded time? Or is it merely the greatest generation in American history? The latter is clearly dubious if not outright false: the generation of the founders is arguably the greatest generation of Americans. A fortiori, for the former.

What Brokaw is doing when he speaks of the WWII generation as the greatest is misusing the superlative ‘greatest’ to mean the positive ‘great,’ or perhaps the comparative ‘greater.’ Perhaps what he really wants to say is that the WWII generation is greater than the Baby Boomers. But instead of saying what he means, he says something literally false or else meaningless. One might think that a news anchor would have higher standards.

Perhaps the underlying problem is that people love to exaggerate for effect, and see nothing wrong with it. Not content to say that Bush was wrong about WMDs, his opponents say he lied – which is a misuse of ‘lie.’ Not content to say that she is hungry, my wife says she is starving. Not content to say that Christianity is more than a doctrine, Kierkegaard and fellow fideists say that Christianity is not a doctrine. Not content to use particular quantifiers ‘Some’, ‘Most’),people reach for universal quantifiers such as ‘Every,’ ‘All,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Never.’ Thus instead of saying that one must be careful when one generalizes, one says, ‘Never generalize,’ which refutes itself.

I have exposed three mistakes that the truth-oriented will want to avoid. We have the misuse of superlatives, the misuse of universal quantifiers, and the mistaken notion that if X is not identical to Y, then X and Y have nothing to do with each other.

Let me expatiate a bit further on the last mentioned mistake. If X is not identical to Y, it does not follow that X and Y are wholly diverse from each other. A book is not identical to its cover, but the two are not wholly diverse in that the cover is proper part of the book. Regretting is not identical to remembering, but the two are not wholly diverse: Every regretting is a remembering, but not conversely. A melody is not identical to the individual notes of which it is composed, but it is obviously not wholly diverse from them.

Safe Speech

"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in – she construed it as sexual harrassment. You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble. In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion. To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be. Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?

Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed. Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals. Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior. The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'

You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them. My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs. But I will. Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.

Companion post: Idle Talk

Copy Editors and Political Correctness

Tribal America

Empty Chair, Empty Suit, Empty Speech

Speech and Guns

UW should resist feds' speech code

Black ‘Bash Mobs’ on the Rampage in Southern California

Here is the story from The Los Angeles Times.

Nowhere in the article or in the video is it mentioned that the rioters are black. You can see that they are from the video.

The liberal media falsely portrayed the Hispanic, George Zimmerman, as white in order to fit him into their 'America is racist' script; but they refuse to report the truth when blacks rampage.

No surprise: the truth would not fit the liberal-left 'narrative.'

'Narrative' is one of theose POMO words that a conservative should be careful about using. As I have said more than once, only the foolish conservative talks like a liberal.

Language matters!

An Addendum on So-Called ‘Racial’ Profiling

One of my persistent themes is that conservatives must not talk like liberals, thereby acquiescing in the linguistic hijacking that liberals routinely practice, and putting themselves at a disadvantage in the process. Conservatives must insist on standard English and refuse to validate the Left's question-begging epithets. Only the foolish conservative repeats such words and phrases as 'homophobe,' 'Islamophobe,' and 'social justice.'

For example, if you employ 'homophobe' and cognates, then you are acquiescing in the false notion that opposition to homosexual practices (which is consistent with respecting homosexual people) is grounded in an irrational fear, when the opposition is not based in fear, let alone in an irrational fear.

So I was slightly annoyed to see that Peter Wehner in a recent otherwise excellent Commentary piece used 'racial profiling.' I've heard other conservatives use it as well.

As I argued yesterday, there is no such thing as racial profiling. Now I add the following.

Why say that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled by Zimmerman when you could just as well say that he was gender profiled or age profiled or behavior profiled? Old black females walking down the street are not a problem. But young black males cutting across yards peering into windows can be a big problem.

Zimmerman profiled Martin for sure, and he was justified in doing so. We all profile all the time. But he didn't racially profile him any more than he age or gender or behaviorally or sartorially profiled him. (Martin wore a 'hoodie' and he had the hood pulled up thereby hiding part of his face.)

As I said yesterday,

Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

[. . .]

There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.