Category: Language Matters

Alienans Adjectives

A reader inquires:

I find your blog interesting and educational.  A while ago you mentioned that there is a term for an adjective which is used not to specify a particular sort of the noun which it modifies, but rather a thing which does not meet the definition of that noun.  (I've likely somewhat mangled the description of this term in trying to recall it.)  For example 'polished leather' and 'red leather' are kinds of leather, but 'artificial leather' refers to things which aren't leather at all.  I have tried to find the post that talked about this but I forgot what the topic was when you mentioned it.  Can you please tell me the name for this?

'Artificial' in 'artificial leather' functions as an alienans adjective.  It 'alienates' the sense of the noun it modifies.  In the case of specifying adjectives,  an FG is a G, where F is an adjective and G a noun. Thus a nagging wife is a wife, a female duck is a duck, cow's leather  is leather, and a contingent truth is a truth. But if 'F' is alienans,   then either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an  FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, a   decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, and a   relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart   attack? It may or may not be. One cannot validly move  from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in  'apparent heart attack' is alienans.

Note that I was careful to say 'artificial' in 'artificial leather' is an alienans adjective.  For it does not function as such in every context.  'Artificial' in 'artificial insemination' is not alienans: you are just as inseminated if it has come about artificially or naturally.

Two more examples of alienans adjectives that I borrow from Peter Geach: 'forged' in 'forged banknote' and 'putative in 'putative father.'  If x is a forged banknote it does not follow that x is a banknote.  And if x is the putative father of y, it does not follow that x is the father of y. Here is an example I got from the late Australian philosopher Barry Miller:  'negative' in 'negative growth.'  If my stock portfolio is experiencing negative growth,  then it is precisely not experiencing growth.

Of course, I am not suggesting that every adjective (as employed in some definite context) can be classified as either specifying or alienans.  Consider the way 'mean-spirited' functions in 'mean-spirited Republican.'  In most contexts, the implication is not that some Republicans are mean-spirited and some are not; the implication is that all are.  To be a Republican is just to be mean-spirited.  Is there a name for that sort of adjective?  I don't know.  But there ought to be, and if I ever work out a general theory of adjectives, I'll give it one.

Now consider 'Muslim terrorist.'  A politically correct idiot might take offense at this phrase  as implying that all Muslims are terrorists or even that all and only Muslims are terrorists.  But no intelligent person would take it this way.  If I say that Hasan is a Muslim terrorist , then the plain meaning to anyone with his head screwed on properly is that Hasan is a Muslim and a terrorist, which obviously does not imply that all Muslims are terrorists. 

When Is a Tautology Not a Tautology?

My Aunt T. was married to a gruff and taciturn Irishman who rejoiced under the name of 'Morris.' Thinking to engage Uncle Mo in conversation during one of my infrequent visits to the Big Apple, and knowing that Morris drove a beer truck, I once made some comment about the superiority of German over American beer. Uncle Mo, not to be seduced  into the bracing waters of dialectic, replied, "Beer is beer." End of conversation.

But the beginning of an interesting line of thought. A tautology is a logical truth. To be precise, a tautology is a logical truth within the propositional calculus. (Every tautology is a logical truth, but not every logical truth is a tautology.  The logical truths of the predicate calculus are not tautologies, strictly speaking.)

Continue reading “When Is a Tautology Not a Tautology?”

It Is What It Is

Maybe not. It all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Seriously, though, this saying is seeing quite a lot of use lately.  It is a sort of present-tensed Que sera, sera.  Things are the way they are.  Don't kick against the pricks.  Acceptance and resignation are the appropriate attitudes.

From a philosophy-of-language point of view, what is interesting is the use of a tautological form of words to express a non-tautological proposition.  What the words mean is not what the speaker means in uttering the words.  Sentence meaning and speaker's meaning come apart.  The speaker does not literally mean that things are what they are — for what the hell else could they be?  Not what they are?  What the speaker means is that (certain) things can't be changed and so must be accepted with resignation.  Your dead-end job for example.  'It is what it is.'

There are many examples of the use of tautological sentences to express non-tautological propositions.  'What will be, will be' is an example, as is 'Beer is beer.'  When Ayn Rand proclaimed that Existence exists! she did not mean to assert the tautological proposition that each existing thing exists; she was ineptly employing a tautological sentence to express a non-tautological and not uncontroversial thesis of metaphysical realism according to which what exists exists independently of any mind, finite or infinite.

'What will be will be' is tautologically true and thus necessarily true.  What the sentence is typically used to express, however, is the non-tautological, and arguably false, proposition that what will be, will necessarily be, that it cannot be otherwise.  So not only do sentence meaning and speaker's meaning come apart in this case; a modal fallacy is lurking in the background as well, the ancient fallacy of confusing the necessitas consequentiae with the necessitas consequentiis.

Now you know what I think about on those long training runs (3 hours, 18 minutes last Sunday).  Running is marvelous for 'jogging' one's thoughts.

‘Merry Xmas’

When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten. See here.

It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading.  Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.

A Language Rant: ‘Perks’

A C-Span segment one morning bore the title, 'Congressional Perks.' It was a good program, as almost all C-Span offerings are, but would it have killed them to use the right word, 'perquisites'? 

If this were an isolated example, then you could accuse me, with justification, of being a pedantic ass. Some of you will do so in any case. But I could give a hundred similar examples, and you hope I won't.

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

Loosely translated: No pain, no gain. Der Fleiß (Fleiss) is German for diligence. Thus 'Heidi Fleiss' is a near aptronym, diligent as she was in converting concupiscence into currency.

Another interesting German word is Sitzfleisch. It too is close in meaning to diligence, staying power. Fleisch is meat and Sitz, seat, is from the verb sitzen, to sit. One who has Sitzfleisch, then, has sitting meat. Think of a scholarly grind who sits for long hours poring over tome after tome of arcana.

And that reminds me of a story. Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann were German philosophers of high repute, though Scheler was more the genius and Hartmann more the grind. As the story goes, Scheler once disparaged Hartmann thusly, "My genius and your Sitzfleisch would make a great philosopher!"

On Exaggeration

Why do people exaggerate in serious contexts? The logically prior question is: What is exaggeration, and how does it differ from lying, bullshitting, and metaphorical uses of language? A physician in a radio broadcast the other morning said, "You can't be too thin, too rich, or have too low a cholesterol level."

Note first that the medico was not joking but making a serious point. But he couched this serious point in a sentence which is plainly false. Since he had no intention of deceiving his audience, and since the point he was making (not merely trying to make) about cholesterol 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.

Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language

I am writing a review of J. P. Moreland's The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009).  It is a very good book, and J. P. Moreland is one of my favorite philosophers.  I don't know the man personally, but I rather doubt that he is politically liberal.  And yet throughout his book one find sentences like the following: "If a naturalist is going to admit into his/her ontology an entity whose existence cannot be explained naturalistically, then he or she must adopt a dismissive strategy that in some way or other shows why it is no big deal that we do not have such an explanation." (p. 169)

Why the political correctness as indicated by "his/her" and "he or she"?  The PC jargon might have been foisted upon him by an editor, but if so, Moreland could have removed it.  For Ed Feser's adventures with a PC copy editor, see here.

Continue reading “Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language”

Fun With English: Is ‘None’ Singular or Plural?

To my ear, the following sounds grammatical:

1. None of the members were present at the meeting

whereas the following sounds ungrammatical:

2. None of the members was present at the meeting.

But isn't 'none' just a contraction of 'no one'? If it is, then (2) is grammatical and (1) is not. Now compare

3. All of the members were present at the meeting

4. All of the members was present at the meeting.

(3) sounds grammatical to me, while (4) sounds decidedly ungrammatical.

But surely (3) is logically equivalent to the ungrammatical

3*. Each of the members were present at the meeting

and (4) is logically equivalent to the grammatical

4*. Each of the members was present at the meeting.

Let this serve as a warning to school marms and copy editors  and those who would imitate them: be careful when you criticize another's English. He may have thought a lot harder and deeper than you. Your petty rules may collapse under logical scrutiny.

The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor

The copy editor, like a testosterone-crazed male cat, likes to mark his territory. His territory is your manuscript. But like a cat, he is lazy and easily bored, which leads to inconsistency. He starts out changing every occurrence of ‘identical with’ to ‘identical to,’ but then tires of this game so that the end result is a mishmash. He would have spared himself the bother had he appreciated the simple fact that in the English language ‘identical with’ and ‘identical to’ are stylistic variants of each other.

My advice to editors: stick to questions of formatting, and to the correction of obvious spelling and grammatical errors. Keep your political correctness to yourself.  Don't replace the gender neutral 'his' with the abomination 'his/her.'  Keep your stinking leftist politics out of my manuscript.  And don’t try to be what the Germans call a Besserwisser: don’t presume to know better what I want to say and how I want to say it. My writing is an exacting labor of love; your editing is a lousy chore you can’t wait to be done with.

Condign Punishment

There are qualifiers that occur only with the word they happen to qualify but  not with any other word.   A punishment and a remark can both be fitting or appropriate, but only a punishment is condign. One does not hear or read 'condign remark.' Is 'condign' ever used apart from 'punishment'? That is one question. A second: What is the technical term for this linguistic phenomenon? There is one, but I can't remember what it is.

A reader supplied this bit of linguistic evidence that answers my first question:  "Scotus's proposed replacement way of drawing the distinction between condign merit and congruous merit is quite complicated. Underlying it is the claim that the reward for condign merit is everlasting life, and that the reward for congruous merit is the gift of sanctifying grace (i.e., justification)."  (Richard Cross,  Duns Scotus, p. 105)

As for  the second question, I thought the answer might be hapax legomenon.  But that term refers to a word or phrase that occurs but once in a corpus, a phenomenon which is similar to but distinct from the phenomenon I am referring to.

A Charming Malapropism

I heard a pretty lady the other day refer to a barista as a barrister. Barista is Italian for bartender. Bartenders here and abroad mix and serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages hot and cold. Entering English the word has suffered semantic shrinkage: a barista typically mixes coffee drinks only.

Baristas and barristers ply their trade in the vicinity of bars: standing behind them or before them, respectively. So the malapropism has a certain 'logic.'

A Checkered Past

Having recently compared two lunch companions to each other in point of having checkered pasts, but aware of recent shifts in the meaning of the phrase, and not wishing to give offense, I quizzed one of them on the meaning of 'has a checkered past' as applied to a woman and to a man. He replied that it suggests that the woman was a prostitute and the man a crook. That answer is not wrong and accords with current usage. But the phrase origninally had no such pejorative connotation as far as I can tell. My old Webster's defines checker, vt, as to vary with contrasting elements or situations and gives the example of a checkered career as a racer. Nothing pejorative about that: the racer's career had its ups and downs. Or one might describe a man whose 20s were spent in the Jesuits, his 30s teaching philosophy, his 40s as a soldier of fortune, and his 50's as an exterminator of insects as having had a checkered past. Nothing pejorative about that either.

Only an idiot thinks that change qua change is good.  And so I hold to the old way of using 'checkered past.'

‘The Wrong Side of History’

I once heard  a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.'  But surely this is a phrase that no self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use.  The phrase suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified by the actual tendency of events. But how can the mere fact of a certain drift justify that drift?  For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty.  This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power.  Would a conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it?  Obviously not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.'  It doesn't follow  that such-and-such is true.  'Everyone now does such-and-such.'  It doesn't follow that such-and-such ought to be done.  'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.'  It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome.  In each of these cases there is a logical mistake.  One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, or values from facts. 

One who opposes the drift toward socialism, a drift that is accelerating under President Obama, is on the wrong side of history. But that is no objection unless one assumes that history's direction is the right direction.  Now an Hegelian might believe that, one for whom all the real is rational and all the rational real.  Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it.  But no conservative who understands conservatism can believe it.

As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative don't talk like a liberal.  Don't validate, by adopting, their question-begging phrases.