Category: Language Matters
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Crude Conservatives and Harsh Language
It is no surprise to find crude liberals. After all, liberals are big on toleration, including toleration of every manner of bad behavior. Indeed, some of them are so tolerant that they tolerate those with no respect for the principle of toleration. This is part of the explanation of why they tend to be soft…
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Baby Talk and First Grade English
It is annoying when a senator says that such-and-such is a 'no-no.' Closely related is the phenomenon of what might be called 'first grade English.' George Bush and others have spoken of 'growing the economy.' One grows tomatoes, not economies. But perhaps I am being peevish and pedantic. What about the current overuse of 'broken'? One…
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Of Black Holes and Political Correctness: If You Take Offense, Is That My Fault?
Suppose a white person uses the phrase 'black hole' in the presence of a black person either in its literal cosmological meaning or in some objectively inoffensive metaphorical sense, and the black person takes offense and complains that the phrase is 'racially insensitive.' Actual case here. Compare that with a case in which a white…
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‘Islamophobia’
This is another one of those silly PeeCee expressions liberals love to use to obfuscate issues and slander their opponents. A phobia is an irrational fear. There is nothing phobic about opposition to radical or militant Islam. To fear it is entirely rational. Militant Islam and Islam are presumably distinct. I could be wrong, but I…
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An ‘Epidemic’ of Drunk Driving?
If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal. A while back I heard an otherwise intelligent C-Span presenter speak more than once of "an epidemic of drunk driving." But an epidemic, by definition, is an outbreak of a contagious disease in excess of what might normally be expected. To describe drunk driving as an epidemic,…
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Amateur and Professional
Amod Lele e-mails: I've been enjoying your blog for some time now, and particularly appreciated your post Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation. I recently mused on this topic at my own philosophy blog - http://loveofallwisdom.com/2009/06/neither-career-nor-hobby/ – and you might find my remarks there of some interest. I'm intrigued, though, by your distinction between professionals and…
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‘I Don’t Mind Losing’
'I don't mind losing' illustrates the non-identity of sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. Anyone who understands English knows what the sentence in question means. Its meaning is fixed by the rules of the language system, English. But what the sentence means is what very few people mean when they produce a token of the sentence.…
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Whence ‘Bosh’?
'Bosh,' meaning nonsense, derives from the Turkish 'boş,' which counts among its meanings: empty, hollow, vacant, futile, unfounded, ignorant and several others. I have known this Turkish word for over ten years, but didn't note the connection between 'boş' and 'bosh' until I happened across the entry for the latter in Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia…
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Whither and Whence
I had a teacher in the fifth grade who, when one of us inappropriately wandered off, would query, "Whither goest thou?" alluding, as I did not realize at the time, to the Gospel of John (13:36): Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow…
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Overheard at the 20 Mile Mark
"Why couldn't Pheidippides have died now?" (An interesting non-temporal use of 'now': tokening it, the speaker is obviously not referring to the time of utterance, but to a distance.)
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On ‘Male Chauvinist’ and ‘Relative Truth’
A reader comments: I'm confused about a claim you make. You say: "Take 'male chauvinist.' As standardly used nowadays, this refers to a male who places an excessively high valuation on his sex vis-a-vis the opposite sex. So a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist, and 'male' functions as as an alienans adjective: it does…
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Concision at War with Redundancy
One of my faults as a writer is that I am prolix. I almost wrote ‘excessively prolix,’ which would have illustrated the fault in question. Piling ‘excessively’ onto ‘prolix’ would not only have been unnecessary, but would also have suggested that one can be prolix in moderation. But wordiness is a vice, and vices should…
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Linguistic Smuggling
Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchy, p. 72: Only religious superstition or the folly of idealist metaphysics could encourage us to assume that nature will prove ultimately rational . . . . Linguistic smuggling has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. The mere phrase 'religious superstition' smuggles in the proposition that all…
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My Preferred Modes of Locomotion
Ambulatory and cursory, primarily, and then in distant second and third places respectively, natatory and saltatory.