Category: Language Matters

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, therefore, is to imply that it is a disease, which is precisely what it is not. Drunk driving is a freely chosen  act. Use of 'epidemic' in connection with drunk driving aids and abets the cockeyed liberal view of the world according to which well-nigh every type of negative behavior is a disease.

Words mean things. Language matters. Don't talk like a liberal unless you are one.

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 amateurs, as distinct from those who get paid and those who don't. I suspect that by your definition I aspire to be a professional philosopher who doesn't get paid; but I'm not sure, because I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Would you care to spell this distinction out further?
 
Here is what I wrote:
 
While I'm on this topic, I may as well mention two other distinctions that are often confused. One is the distinction between professionals and amateurs, the other between people who make money from an activity and those who do not. These distinctions 'cut perpendicular' to one another, hence do not coincide. Spinoza was a professional philosopher even though he made no money from it. One can be a professional philosopher without being a paid professor of it, just as one can be an incompetent amateur and still be paid to teach by a college.
 
A better way to put it would be as follows.  'Professional' and 'amateur' each have two senses.  In one sense, a professional X-er is a person who makes a living from X-ing.  This sense of 'professional' contrasts with the sense of 'amateur' according to which an amateur is is an X-er who does not make a living from X-ing.  As the etymology of the word suggests, an amateur in this first sense is one who does what he does for love and not for money.  In a second sense, a professional X-er is a person whose X-ing meets a high standard of performance, while an amateur in the corresponding sense is one whose X-ing fails to meet a high standard of performance. Examples:
A. Tiger Woods is a professional in both senses and an amateur in neither. Kant is an example among the philosophers.
B. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professionals in the second sense and amateurs in the first sense.
C. Ayn Rand was a professional in the first sense, but a rank amateur in the second.
D. The vast majority of chess players are amateurs in both senses: they neither make a living from chess, nor do they play at a high level.

 


‘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.

A gentleman came to our chess club but once. And this despite our showing him every hospitality. For he lost every game. He had played seriously as a youth but hadn't recently. I explained to him that we are a bunch of patzers and that soon enough he would be winning games. He replied, "I don't mind losing." But he never came back despite a follow-up call or two.

In the mouths of most if not all 'I don't mind losing' means: I mind losing and I mind admitting that I mind losing, which is why I pretend not to mind losing.

ADDENDUM: If you read the above carefully, you will have noticed that I enclosed the sentence under comment with single quotation marks on two occasions but double quotation marks in the middle paragraph. Why? In the middle paragraph I was quoting an actual person, whereas on the two other occasions I was not quoting, strictly speaking, but mentioning a sentence. You may want to take a gander at my post  Use and Mention. It's fun for the whole family. And from there you can get to my post On Hairsplitting.

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 of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed., p. 96. According to Hendrickson, "The novelist James Morier introduced the word in a book about Turkish life published in 1834."

'Coffee,' 'kiosk,' and 'divan' are also on loan from Turkish corresponding as they do to kahve, köşk, and divan.

As interesting as facts like these are to me, it is more interesting that there are people who have no interest in them.

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 me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.

'Whither' means to where just as 'whence' mean from where. (Please avoid the pleonasm of 'from whence.') The distinction is obliterated by the promiscuous use of 'where' for both. That cannot be good from a logical point of view. It is therefore right and fitting and conducive unto clarity that my favorite antediluvian curmudgeon, the Laudator Temporis Acti, should complain:

The use of whither is withering away in English, alas, just like whence, although both words usefully distinguish notions that we now force where alone to bear, e.g. in the New International Version of John 13.36:

Simon Peter asked him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus replied, "Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later."

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 not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'chauvinist.'"

I did a quick check at Merriam-Webster Online. It seems to me that when someone is called a male chauvinist, the second of the three senses of 'chauvinism' given by Webster's is meant, viz. 'undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged.' But if so, it seems that a male chauvinist is a chauvinist. Male chauvinism is one type of chauvinism. It is that type of 'undue partiality' shown to members of one's own sex.

Continue reading “On ‘Male Chauvinist’ and ‘Relative Truth’”

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 be extirpated, not moderated.

Continue reading “Concision at War with Redundancy”

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 religion is superstition, while 'the folly of idealist metaphysics' insinuates the proposition that idealist metaphysics is foolish. Both propositions are false; but even if you disagree with me on that, you must agree that they cannot be assumed to be true.

A critical reader doesn't let himself be bullied by verbiage of the above sort. He unpacks the loaded phrases and tests their explosive power, if any.

Apples and Sparkplugs

All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, etc.

Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference.

This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper, the Post Advocate. (We paper boys called it the Pest Aggravate.) A man  ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites.  He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed throught the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently watered down. So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my 4th grade teacher Sr. Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

Questions: Their Raising and Their Begging

To raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.

 Suppose A poses the question, Does Allah exist? B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists.

The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.

Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto.  The battle has already been lost.  So why do I write things like the above?  Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises.

Call it What it Is!

In the swimming pool the other morning, conversation drifted onto the topic of recipes.  One lady who hails from Texas proceeded to give me her recipe for what she referred to as cornbread 'dressing.'  In my preferred patois, 'stuffing' is the word, not 'dressing.'  And so in our little conversation I kept using the 's' word.  In mock irritation she finally replied, "It's dressing; call it what it is."  She was not really irritated, but she was serious that things should be called what they are.

Thereon hinges a philosophical point, one which of course I did not pursue with the matron.  The point is that people often succumb to what Rudolf Carnap at the beginning of Chapter 12 of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science calls "a magical view of language":

Many people hold a magical view of language, the view that there is a mysterious natural connection of some sort between certain words (only, of course, the words with which they are familiar!) and their meanings.  The truth is that it is only by historical accident, in the evolution of our culture, that the word 'blue' has come to mean a certain color. (116)

As between 'stuffing' and 'dressing' there is nothing to choose; neither captures the nature of their common referent.  The incantation of neither has the power to conjure up the edible reality.  Both words stand in a merely conventional relation to their common referent.

The confusion of words and things is a mistake to avoid.  A cognate mistake is the notion that there are such things as true definitions.  Definitions merely register our free decisions as to how words will be used.  Questions of true and false arise only after we have fixed our terms.

So is religious language based on elementary confusion? "Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name." "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Or is the Carnap point superficial like so much in Carnap?

 

 

If You are a Conservative, Don’t Talk Like a Liberal!

I saw Michael Smerconish on C-Span one morning. His conservative credentials are impressive, but he used the word 'homophobe.'

I've made this point before but it bears repeating. We conservatives should never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. Battles in the culture war are often lost and won on linguistic ground. So we ought to resolutely oppose the Left's attempts at linguistic corruption.

Continue reading “If You are a Conservative, Don’t Talk Like a Liberal!”