Language Matters – Page 8 – Maverick Philosopher

‘Infra Dig’

Can you dig it? Substack latest.

‘Unthinkable’ Used Thoughtlessly

People say that such-and-such is 'unthinkable.' An electromagnetic pulse, for example, one that destroys the power distribution grid, would be a calamity in comparison to which the COVID-19 pandemic would pale into insignificance. An EMP event is said to be 'unthinkable.' And yet we are now thinking about it. What one thinks about can be thought about, and is therefore thinkable. So the calamity in question is precisely not 'unthinkable.' Nor is it 'unimaginable.' I can imagine it and so can you. People use these expressions because they thoughtlessly repeat what they hear other people say. That's my explanation. Do you have a better one?

Not every test is a litmus test. So why do people refer to any old test as a litmus test? Same explanation. Not every record is a track record. Not every list is a laundry list. I could continue with the examples. And you hope I won't. Don't be a linguistic lemming. The mind you save may be your own.

Language matters. The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

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Word of the Day: Assuasive

Merriam-Webster: soothing, calming. Example: "Like all good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment." (David Foster Wallace)

I am a good listener, but far more intense than assuasive.

You have the verb 'assuage' in your vocabulary; now add the adjective 'assuasive.'

Don’t Talk Like a ‘Liberal’

When you do, you validate their obfuscatory and question-begging jargon.

For example, leftists believe in something they call 'hate speech.' As they use the phrase, it covers legitimate dissent.

It is foolish for a conservative to say that he is for 'hate speech,' or that 'hate speech' is protected speech. Dennis Prager has been known to make this mistake. We conservatives are for open inquiry and the right to dissent. Put it that way, in positive terms.

If leftists take our dissent as 'hateful,' that is their presumably willful misapprehension. We shouldn't validate it.

Don't let leftists frame the debate. He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

Word of the Day: Prodromal

From 'prodrome,' a premonitory symptom of disease.

Etymology: French, literally, precursor, from Greek prodromos, from pro- before + dromos act of running, racecourse — more at PRO-, DROMEDARY

Example of use found at Diogenes' Middle Finger:

Now we are engaged in a prodromal civil war, and American constitutional democracy is the contest’s prize. The universities and the media, always diseased, have progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to mandate that their schools teach critical race theory — that is racism — and elected leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin. – David Mamet – Playwright and Screenwriter

'Constitutional democracy' is right, not 'democracy'! Tucker Carlson take note.

Never use 'democracy' sans phrase!

A Pronoun Puzzle: “He who hesitates is lost”

Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one.

A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over an abysmal chasm. I say, "He who hesitates is lost!" My hiking partner, a smartass, replies, "You mean Biden?"

My witticism is modelled on a genuine Yogi Berra joke. You are asked what time it is and you reply, "You mean now?"

'He' in the folk saying is grammatically a pronoun, but it does not function logically as one. How then does it function?

I say it functions as a universal quantifier. Not like a universal quantifier, but as one. Thus:

For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

This strikes me as clear as day. Rather less clear is the role of the first-person singular pronoun in 'I think, therefore I am.' Does 'I' in this context have an antecedent, and if it does, what or who is the antecedent? Anythng you say will land you in the aporetic frying pan. Or so I could argue.

Later.

‘Handsome Devil’

I visited a couple of aunts some years back. As I entered her house, Aunt Ada exclaimed, "My, you are a handsome devil!" Aunt Margaret said to Ada, "Don't call him a devil!" But of course Ada did no such thing; Margaret failed to appreciate that 'handsome' in 'handsome devil' in this context and almost all others functions as an alienans adjective.

For more examples and a definition see my adjectives category.

The Left’s Verbal Theft

A lot of conservatives are making the mistake of surrendering perfectly good words to the Left. This is another indication that conservatives in the end conserve little or nothing. The fact that leftists use and misuse 'narrative' or 'problematic' or 'toleration' or 'diversity' or 'equity' does not make these words radioactive. Or take 'spiritual' and 'spirituality.' The fact that some airhead says that she is not religious but spiritual is no reason for a conservative to avoid 'spiritual.' Nor does the Left own such phrases as 'toxic masculinity' and 'existential threat.' Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. They of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details. But the upshot was brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off, dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.

Of course, normal masculine behavior is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself. Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them.

Filed under Language Matters which, after I hit 'post,' will contain 554 entries. There is plenty of ammo here for those of you with the cojones to take up the fight.

‘The Wrong Side of History’

This is a re-thought and much improved version of a post that first appeared on this weblog on 15 May 2012.

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I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' This question I want to raise is whether this is a phrase that a self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. For if there is a 'wrong side,' then there must be a 'right side.' 'Right side of history,' however, suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified or rendered good by the actual tendency of events. But how could the mere fact of a certain drift justify or render good or attach any positive normative predicate to that drift and its likely outcomes? 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 self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it or renders it good? Presumably 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 is morally permissible. 'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. (If a mountaineer is sliding into the abyss and fails to self-arrest, would you say that he is headed in a salutary direction?) In each of these cases there is arguably if not obviously a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, values from facts, desirability* from the fact of being desired, or progress from change. Progress is change for the better. But that a change is for the better is not validly inferable from the change qua change.

One who opposes the drift toward a socialist surveillance state, one in which 'equity' (equality of outcome) is enforced by state power, a drift that is accelerating, and indeed jerking under President Biden, could be said to be on the wrong side of history only on the assumption that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that. Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. Alexandre Kojève reads Hegel as claiming that the master-slave dialectic in the Swabian's Phenomenology of Spirit (ch. 4, sec. A) is the motor of history, which, I note, clearly anticipates the opening paragraph of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Logically prior to the question of what the motor of history is, is the question of whether it has one. If history has a motor, it lies deeper than the succession of events and any empirical regularities the events display; it lies deeper as the driver of these events and the ground of their patterns and regularities. The Hegelians and the Marxists, despite their important differences, have their answer: there is a motor but the motor is immanent, not transcendent, and the end state will be attained in the here and now, in this material world by human collective effort, and not hereafter by transcendent divine agency. Crudely put, the 'pie' is not in 'the sky' but in the future. This is what is meant by the immanentization of the eschaton.

For Kojève and his fellow travellers, 'right side of history' has a legitimate use: you are on the right side if you are hip to, and in line with, history's internal 'logic,' dialectical to be sure, a logic driven by a spiritual Logos in Hegel, which is a secularization and immanentization of the triune God of Christianity, but in Marx arguably the same except stood on its head and materialized. You are on the 'right side' which is also the left side if you march in step with the beat of the internal 'drummer' toward the immanent eschaton whereat all alienation and class distinctions will be at an end, a state in which the State will have withered away (V. I. Lenin), all coercion will cease, a state in which all will be free and equal, mutual recognition and respect will be universal and humanity will realize itself fully als Gattungswesen, as species-being, and embrace this life, this world, and its finitude, making it so beautiful and so satisfying that there will be no hankering for the nonexistent hinter worlds of the metaphysicians and the religionists. The friends of finitude will achieve such a rich state of self-realization that their finite lives, albeit extended somewhat by technological means, will suffice and there will be no longer any craving for nirvanic narcotics or religious opiates.

So while the mere fact of a certain empirically discernible drift of events does not justify or render good the drift and its probable outcomes, a drift driven by a hidden motor might. This brings us to the theocon, the theistic conservative.

Many if not most conservatives are theists and theists typically believe in divine providence. God provides and he fore-sees (pro-videre). God created the world and he created it with a plan in mind. The teleology is built in and not up for decision by such frail reeds as ourselves. He created it for a purpose and in particular he created us for a purpose. For theists God is the hidden motor, the Prime Mover, and First Cause, both efficiently and finally. God is Alpha, Omega, and everything in between. He caused the world to exist ex nihilo and he gave it its purpose which in our case is to share in his life and to achieve our ultimate felicity and highest good thereby. A theistic conservative, then, has a legitimate use for 'right side of history.' You are the right side when you submit to the divine plan and live you life in accordance with it. You are on the wrong side when you don't, in rebellion and glorifying your own miserable ego.

To conclude, I see two ways of attaching a legitimate sense to the expressions 'right side of history' and 'wrong side of history.' One is theistic, the other atheistic, as above.

I now refer you to Malcolm Pollack's effort in a similar direction. We pretty much agree, except that he doesn't credit the atheist option which is a secularization and immanentization of the theistic. I am a theist myself, for the record.

Is the secularization a betrayal, a fulfillment, or a disaster which is the inevitable consequence of the false Judeo-Christian starting point?

Before logging off, I would like to recommend to Malcolm and the rest of you Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, which includes the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence and a very clear and informative introduction.

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*Note the ambiguity of 'desirable' as between 'worthy of being desired' and 'able to be desired.' I intend the former.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940’s Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights. Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s. I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

“Trust, but Verify!”

I said:

Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"

The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know what 'trust' means.

Dmitri replies:

This expression "Trust, but verify" is, among other things, a literal translation of a very popular saying in Russian. I am sure this is part of the reason Reagan used it.

And you can trust and still verify, because the person or institution you trust could be worth your overall trust, but err on occasion. In short, you can understand the meaning of trust and, at times, verify a trusted party at the same time.

I counter-respond:

I didn't know that the expression translates a popular Russian saying. Thank you for informing me of that.

On the point of disagreement, I persist in my contention. Set aside institutions and other objects of potential trust/distrust. Consider an interpersonal situation with exactly two persons. Suppose that person A says to person B: "I trust you with respect to your assertion that p, but I must verify that p." This was the situation between Reagan and Gorbachev. Gorbachev had made a specific assertion and Reagan said in effect that he trusted Gorbachev's veracity but but still had to make sure that what Gorbachev had asserted was true.

That is what I am claiming makes no semantic or conceptual sense. If I trust that what you are saying is true, then I cannot consistent with that trust verify what you are saying. I am making a simple point about the concept trust. If you were to deny that there is a unitary concept trust expressible in different languages, then I would say that I am making a simple point about the meaning of the word 'trust' in English.

But if I deem a person overall trustworthy with respect to what he asserts, I may, consistent with that overall trust, tell the person that I need to verify a specific assertion that the person makes. So in the end I don't think Dmitri and I are in disagreement.

Various philosophical questions wait in the wings. What is the difference between the meaning or sense of a word and the concept the word expresses, assuming the word, on an occasion of use, expresses a concept? What is a concept? Are concepts mind-dependent? Are they all general, or are some irreducibly singular? Should we distinguish between the concept trust and the essence of trust where essences are mind-independent ideal or abstract objects that exist or subsist in splendid independence of minds and language? Is a linguistic prescriptivist committed to the existence of essences?

The Erasure of History at the University of Leicester

Another incident in the suicide of the West. And in England of all places. The battle appears to be lost in the mother country and in the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States of America. Here is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide.

Is the meaning of 'last stand' such that the defenders, fighting against overwhelming odds, always lose? That is what 'last' implies. Custer's last stand was the end of Custer. He stood no more. Or does the meaning of the phrase allow for the defenders to sometimes prevail? Onkel Ludwig taught us that meaning is use. I take it to be an empirically verifiable lexical point that the phrase is used in both ways. Sometimes linguistic prescriptivists such as your humble correspondent have to acquiesce in the ways of a wayward world. Kicking against the pricks is somethimges pointless. I am tempted to dilate upon 'kicking against the pricks,' but I will resist temptation.

Jillian Becker: A Terrorism Archive Lost:

If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity,”

Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching? Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?

The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.

Jillian Becker self portrait (early 1970s)

Other photographs of Jillian Becker

Diversity Worth Having

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal, if not greater, claim on our respect.

Example. ONE language only in the public sphere makes possible MANY voices to be heard and understood by all. To communicate our differences we need a common language.

Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other. Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.

I predict more shooting and less talking as the nation declines 'thanks' to the destructive leftists who have infiltrated the once-respectable Democrat Party.

Gun and ammo are flying off the shelves, even in the toniest enclaves of the bien-pensant:

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear, which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

You know things are getting bad when the super-rich who can easily afford the best in private security are buying firearms.

Honor thy Mother

Our biological mothers bore us into the world of matter; the mother tongue into the realm of objective spirit. Both deserve respect and honor, the latter more so than the former inasmuch as the spirit is higher than the flesh. What the mother tongue receives from the matricidal Left is neglect and abuse and Orwellian subversion and distortion. Ingratitude and retromingency are marks of the leftist. To the Left's retromingency in point of pissing on the past I now add the retromingency of the Left's pollution of the headwaters of its expressivity.