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 IRS are criticizing the president. But to criticize a black president for anything is racist. It is the equivalent of applying 'nigger' to him. Therefore 'IRS' is a conservative 'dog whistle' for 'nigger.'
Thus 'reasons' the liberal.
Am I using 'nigger' or mentioning it? The latter. It is an important distinction. Philosophers are careful to observe it. It is one thing to use a word to refer to someone or something, and quite another to talk about, or mention, the word. Boston is a city; 'Boston' is not: no word is a city. 'Boston' is disyllabic; Boston is not: no city is composed of two syllables. Same with 'nigger.' It's a disyllabic word, an offensive word, a word that a decent person does not use. I am not using it; I am mentioning it, talking about it to make a serious point.
Those who refuse to write out 'nigger' but have no qualms about other such offensive epithets as 'kike' employ a double standard. It is also ironic that one should be squeamish about writing out 'nigger' when one has no qualms about slandering conservatives in the most malevolent and scurrilous ways.
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 from the autumn of 1972 indicates, the following sentence involves a mis-translation: "In the case of a priori forms, the analysis of facts is more delicate, for it is not enought to analyze the subjects' consciences but also their previous conditions." (p. 5, emphasis added)
In some languages, French being one of them, the word for conscience and the word for consciousness is the same: conscience (in French) Someone versed in philosophy or psychology would know from the context that Piaget is talking about consciousness, not conscience. A competent translator translates the sense, not the word. The sense, however, depends on the context: first the sentence, then the wider contexts (paragraph, etc.)
Translation requires understanding. The notion that translating machines understand anything is preposterous.
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.
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 a willful fabrication of a 'quotation' in pseudo-Latin:
An anecdote on pseudo-Latin + French bullshit rolled into one.
A rather infamous but self-satisfied French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli (yes, some of our sociologists are as bad as some of our philosophers), recently gave an interview in one of the major weeklies, L'Express, in which he said "Everybody knows the Cartesian sentence Cogito ergo sum, but we tend to forget the rest: Cogito ergo sum in arcem meum."
[I think therefore I am in my castle.]
I ferociously answered that in an article of his, available on line, he had already committed the same sin, unforgettable for a university professor, of forging a quotation ("the Latin formula in its entirety is more interesting" he had stated). And this was in a development supposed to prove that the concept of the individual is ascribable to "the beginning of modernity", since, only "collective thought" was known to the benighted thinkers of the Dark Ages.
I then told him
(1) that the Discours de la méthode was written in French, and was translated into Latin seven years later by Etienne de Courcelles, so there was no real need for showing off Latin (Je pense donc je suis being the original Cartesian French);
(2) that the invention in arcem meum is, alas!, doubly mistaken since it piles a syntactic error ("in" with a local meaning must be followed by an ablative) onto a morphological error (the name "arx" is feminine), so the real Latin should read in arce mea; no scholar would have been guilty of these atrocious mistakes in Descartes' day;
(3) that the metaphor of the "citadel of the soul" was known to such people as John of Salisbury (who duly wrote in arce animae) in the 12th century, and long before him to the Stoics, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius;
(4) that for anybody desirous to meditate on "modernity", Saul Steinberg's jocular Cogito ergo Cartesius sum was perhaps of more interest than a forged quotation.
All this is easily accessible on the Internet.
Disgusting! Another example of the destruction of the universities and the decline of the humanities 'thanks' to leftism, post-modernism, and scientism.
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 notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex. Hence, ex Deus. But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case. Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo. Ex Deo would have been correct. Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.
It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader. It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers. I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally. One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart. There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals. Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance. They think they know what they don't know. They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts. And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate. Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.
Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course. Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics. When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead. It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum. It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980. An appalling development. It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.
The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers. For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad. For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation. For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism. Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit. Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name. Some substantiation here. It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.
You can see that I am warming to my theme. I am also brushing in very broad strokes. But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site. In short, a pox on both houses. Be a maverick.
What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent. He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin. Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem. And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus. 'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get: Carpe mundum. If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.
And another thing. I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology. Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare. Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.
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 it.
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 words' and incendiary speech.
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,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.
Liberals might want to think about the following.
If the government is us, and the government lies to us about Benghazi or anything else, then we must be lying to ourselves. Right?
If the government is us, and the government uses the IRS to harass certain groups of citizens whose political views the administration opposes, then we must be harassing ourselves.
I could continue in this vein, but you get the drift. "The government is us" is blather. It is on a par with Paul Krugman's silly notion that we owe the national debt to ourselves. (See Left, Right, and Debt.)
It is true that some, but not all, of those who have power over us are elected. But that truth cannot be expressed by the literally false, if not meaningless, 'The government is us.' Anyone who uses this sentence is mendacious or foolish.
The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many of us, run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.
If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Certain scumbags of the Left love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.
There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have." Or something like that.
From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).
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."
Well, if you are 'Islamophobic,' then, given that a phobia is an irrational fear, you have an irrational fear of Islam or of certain Muslims. Is that really what you want to say? Do you really want to announce to the world that you are proud to have a phobia? I should think that fear of radical Islam and of those who promote radical Islam, whether Muslims or non-Muslim leftists, is entirely rational.
But I know what you mean. My suggestion is that you say what you mean.
'Islamophobic,' like 'homophobic,' is a coinage of liberals/leftists. It is their word. It is foolish for a conservative to use it. If you are a conservative, why are you talking like a liberal? Why are you allowing them to frame the debate in terms they have invented for their own advantage? Is that not foolish? You should insist on standard, ideologically-neutral language.
Compare 'social justice.' That is leftist code. Why then does Bill O'Reilly use it? Because, like too many conservatives, he is not good at properly articulating and properly defending conservative positions.
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 labelling 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 labelling 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.
When I encountered 'transpicuous' for the first time today, I thought the writer was either neologizing by combining 'transparent' and 'conspicuous,' or else just confused. But the word, though rare, has been in the English language since the 17th century.
Will liberals call for oven control? Or perhaps demand that ovens come with warning labels: Do not store ammunition in ovens! Or perhaps: Remove all ammo, fuels, cats and babies before preheating!
Is there anything so stupid that some liberal won't jump to embrace it?
That last sentence is an example of a rhetorical question, which I define as follows. A rhetorical question is an interrogative form of words utterance of which is used to make a statement or issue a command. For example, suppose you are the father of a teenage daughter. It gets back to you that she was texting while driving. You utter this grammatically interrogative sentence: 'Do you have to text while you drive?' You are not, logically, asking a question or making a statement. You are, logically, issuing a command: Do not text while driving! Depending on the proclivities of the lass you might add: And do not 'sext' while driving!
'Is there anything so stupid that some liberal won't jump to embrace it?' is grammatically interrogative but logically declarative.
'He doesn't know shit, so he doesn't know shit from shinola.' In its first occurrence, 'shit' functions as a logical quantifier; in its second, as a non-logical word, a mass term.
Addendum (26 February): Steven comments, "I have my doubts about "crap" meaning "anything." I think it means "nothing", but appears in acceptable double-negative propositions which, because of widespread colloquial usage. The evidence I bring forth is the following. "You've done shit to help us" means "You've done nothing to help us," not "You've done anything to help us."
BV: I see the point and it is plausible. But this is also heard: 'You haven't done shit to help us.' I take that as evidence that 'shit' can be used to mean 'anything.' Steven would read the example as a double-negative construction in which 'shit' means 'nothing.' I see no way to decide between my reading and his.
Either way, it is curious that there are quantificational uses of 'shit,' 'crap,' etc!
A Fox News anchor's reportage from earlier today betrays presumably inadvertent bias. The anchor said that Pope Benedict XVI is "a conservative not in favor of many reforms." A reform is not merely a change, but an improvement. The Wikipedia article gets it right: "Reform means the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc."
"A conservative not in favor of reforms" therefore implies that conservatives are not in favor of the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc. And to describe the current pontiff using the phrase in question is to imply that he is not in favor of improvement or amendment of what needs improving or amending.
The Fox News anchor could have avoided the biased formulation by reporting what is true in neutral language, e.g., "The Pope, being a conservative, is skeptical of changes." Or something like that.
Conservatives tend to resist change. That is not to say that conservatives are opposed to what they take to be ameliorative changes. For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs and practices. Note the adjective 'defeasible.' Liberals, being more open to change, lack this presumption in favor of the traditional.
The paragraph I just wrote is an example of neutral writing. It does not take sides; it merely reports a salient difference between conservatives and liberals.
As I have said many times, language matters. It is particularly important that conservatives not adopt the slovenly speech habits of liberals. Much of liberal-left phraseology is rigged to beg questions and shut down debate. That is exactly the purpose of such coinages as 'homophobe' and 'Islamophobe.' To call a person who argues that radical Islam is a serious threat to the West and its values an 'Islamaphobe,' for example, is to deflect attention from the objective content of his utterances so as to focus it on his mental state. Since a phobia is an irrational fear by definition, calling someone an Islamophobe is a way of refusing to engage the content of his utterances. It is a form of the genetic fallacy.
If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!
For example, why do conservatives like O'Reilly and Hannity and Giuliani and a score more play the liberal game and speak of 'assault weapons'? Can't they see that it is an emotive phrase used by the Left — the positions of which are mainly emotion-driven — to appeal to fear and make calm discussion impossible?
Note the difference between 'semi-automatic long gun' and 'assault weapon.' Suppose you did a poll and asked whether ordinary citizen should be permitted to own assault weapons. I am quite sure that you would find that the number answering in the negative would be greater than if you framed the question correctly and non-emotively as "Do you think ordinary citizens should be permitted to own semi-automatic long guns?"
And why does Bill O'Reilly say things like,"Obama is for social justice? 'Social justice' is lefty-talk. it sounds good, but if the folks knew what it meant they would oppose it. See What is Social Justice?
It is the foolish conservative who acquiesces in the slovenly and question-begging speech patterns of liberals.
