Category: Language Matters

‘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.

 

Mark Steyn on Code Language

Thank God for Mark Steyn, a man of intelligence and courage and a resolute foe of liberal-left idiocies. He cites one Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of African-American studies at Princeton, who proffered the contemptible inanity that  “language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.”  Steyn comments:

“Personal responsibility” is racial code language? Phew, thank goodness America is belatedly joining Canada and Europe in all but abolishing the concept.

“Code language” is code language for “total bollocks.” “Code word” is a code word for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me.” “Small government”? Racist code words! “Non-confiscatory taxes”? Likewise. “Individual liberty”? Don’t even go there! To an incisive NPR racism analyst, the elderly gentleman telling his congressman “I’m very concerned by what I’ve heard about wait times for MRIs in Canada” is really saying “I’m unable to overcome my deep-seated racial anxieties about the sexual prowess of black males, especially now they’re giving prime-time press conferences every night.” With interpreters like professor Harris-Lacewell on the prowl, I’m confident 95 per cent of Webster’s will eventually be ruled “code language.”

Enjoy Steyn's brilliance in its entirety. 

 

On Writing Well: The Example of William James

From the mail bag:

I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

Continue reading “On Writing Well: The Example of William James”

An Inappropriate Use of ‘Inappropriate’

Too many people nowadays are afraid to use no-nonsense words like ‘wrong,’ ‘immoral,’ and the like. So they employ ‘inappropriate’: ‘Clinton’s behavior in the Oval Office with Monica Lewinsky was inappropriate.’

Sorry, but that is an inappropriate use of ‘inappropriate.’ Mr. Clinton’s behavior with his subordinate was morally wrong. The following sentence illustrates an appropriate use: ‘It would have been inappropriate of Mr. Clinton had he attended the black tie affair dressed in a swimsuit.’