Category: Language Matters
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Hate Thought
My man Hanson once again. Excerpt: Apparently, racist, sexist or homophobic words themselves do not necessarily earn any rebuke. Nor is the race or gender of the speaker always a clue to the degree of outrage that follows. Instead, the perceived ideology of the perpetrator is what matters most. Maher and Letterman, being good liberals,…
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Retronyms
Keith Burgess-Jackson writes, "First there was a copy; then there was an electronic copy; then there was a physical copy." To which I add: First I had a plain old address; then I acquired an e-mail address, so that now my plain old address is a physical address. Should we speak of retronymic families? 'Physical…
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Truth and Accuracy
I heard Paula Deen's son say that some statements made about his mother were not accurate. But I think what he should have said, and perhaps wanted to say, is that they were not true. What is the difference between truth and accuracy as properties of statements and such cognate items as declarative sentences, propositions,…
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Use and Mention
I am listening to Dennis Prager. According to Prager, Harry Truman once wrote on a postcard "I am now in kike town." And then Prager went on to make the correct observation that quoting a person's use of a word is not to use that word oneself. Philosophers distinguish between use and mention. It is one…
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‘Not Sure’ and ‘Don’t Know’
They are not semantically equivalent. Suppose you have no idea who Hitler's Minister of Propaganda was. If asked, you should say, 'I don't know,' not 'I'm not sure.' If, on the other hand, you think it was Joseph Goebbels on the basis of a history course taken long ago, then 'I'm not sure' is appropriate.…
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Copy Editors and Political Correctness
The Recent Referrers list pointed me to this old Feser post that links to a similar protest of mine. Excerpt: At least the PC “non-sexist” stuff is not entirely the fault of copy editors, however. Many publishers of academic books and journals insist on this “inclusive language” nonsense, and it is an outrage. It is bad…
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Is ‘IRS’ Code for ‘Nigger’?
Here. Makes sense, right? Certain conservative individuals and groups have been harassed by the Internal Revenue Service for their political views. The IRS is a a branch of the U. S. government whose president is Barack Obama, a man who is half-black and half-white, and therefore black. Those who criticize the targeting of conservatives by the…
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A Good Translator
A good translator must not only know the language from which he is translating, but also the subject matter. Indeed, expertise in the latter is the more important of the two. I have been re-reading Jean Piaget's Psychology and Epistemology: Toward a Theory of Knowledge (Viking, 1971, tr. Arnold Rosin). As a marginalium of mine…
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Oxymoron of the Day: ‘President Obama’
A president presides over something. To preside over it, however, he must know something about it. But 'President' Obama seems to know little or nothing about what is going on in his government. He puts me in mind of Sgt. Schulz of Hogan's Heroes: "I know nothing!" Check out this clip. This cute comparison occurred…
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Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle
In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin. Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of…
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On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’
If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a…
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The Unlawful Are not Silicon Carbide
I hope that is something we can all agree on. My title is the literal translation of the fake-Latin Illegitimi non carborundum, often passed off jokingly or by the pseudo-erudite to mean "Don't let the bastards grind you down." A good maxim when it comes to Latin is: If you don't know it, don't throw…
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Talk is Cheap
Talk is cheap, except when it isn't. There are vows, oaths, and solemn promises the breaking of which can be costly. There are Nixonian and Clintonian lies and cover-ups that exact a high price in the end. There are verbal assaults that bring reprisals that don't always remain verbal. And there are other sorts of 'fighting…
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The Government Is Us?
Liberals like to say that the government is us. President Obama recently trotted out the line to quell the fears of gun owners: You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’…
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Diana West on ‘Islamist’
Her article begins: The AP [Associated Press] Stylebook has opened a new chapter on the non-"offensive" Engllsh-language lexicon to parse the war on the world waged by Islam. The wire service bible (can I say that?) has decreed that "Islamist" is out as a "a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals." …