English as she is Wrote

by Kieran Healy on November 26, 2007

Via Matt Yglesias, a headline and subhead from a Newsweek profile of Giuliani:

bq. Growing Up Giuliani: Rudy Giuliani was raised to understand that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner. The making of his moral code.

It seems to me that a line can be fine, or it can be blurry. I’m having a hard time visualizing a fine, blurry line.

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Kieran Healy has some problems « Entertaining Research
11.26.07 at 9:14 pm

{ 39 comments }

1

Emma 11.26.07 at 4:56 pm

Come on, Kieran. It’s fine enough to be blurred when viewed through the lens of self-interest… :-)

2

Michael Bérubé 11.26.07 at 4:58 pm

Just think of the fine, blurry line between clever and stupid. It’s like that line.

3

JP Stormcrow 11.26.07 at 5:08 pm

“It’s like, ‘how much more black and white could this be?’ and the answer is none. None more black and white.”

4

engels 11.26.07 at 5:09 pm

It doesn’t seem hard to me. A line can be fine or broad. Independently it can be sharp or blurry.

5

P.D. 11.26.07 at 5:20 pm

Some blurry lines are shabby and need work. Others are just fine.

6

Melinda 11.26.07 at 5:22 pm

Actually, a line can’t be broad or fine – a line is infinitely thin. One point wide. A “line” on a piece of paper is probably best described as a rectangle.

7

Jason 11.26.07 at 5:29 pm

Wait, maybe this an actual line drawn somewhere then. With a paintbrush or a Sharpie. Like he’s spending physical energy contemplating the line so he can understand it. Check the covers of his high school notebooks.

I guess my question is how fine and/or blurry a line between saints and sinners is going to be (“Mother Theresa: My Cocaine Hell”). I think what they’re actually thinking of is the line between “9” and “11.”

8

ogged 11.26.07 at 5:34 pm

I’m having a hard time visualizing a fine, blurry line.

And that’s Newsweek’s point: it doesn’t exist. “Saint” and “sinner” are just words, man, so don’t get all worked up and vote for the guy who will do “whatever it takes.”

9

Sk 11.26.07 at 5:36 pm

Thank god we’ve got academics to help us get past the horserace aspect of campaign news coverage, and focus on the issues that really matter!

Sk

10

engels 11.26.07 at 6:01 pm

#6 Er, no, the English word “line” does not mean that, any more than the English word “group” means a set with a binary operation satisfying certain axioms.

11

David in NY 11.26.07 at 6:06 pm

This is just another example showing that, as a writer, Yglesias doesn’t give a shit for his readers. He ought to be ashamed of himself for his sloppiness. Moreover, since he comes from a family of writers, he ought to know better. He is certainly not a credit to the rest of the Yglesiases.

12

David in NY 11.26.07 at 6:07 pm

Oh sorry, it’s not the blurry line that are Matt’s fault — it’s the typos in the rest of his post. My fault.

13

David in NY 11.26.07 at 6:07 pm

Oh, the hell with it.

14

JP Stormcrow 11.26.07 at 6:08 pm

(“Mother Theresa: My Cocaine Hell”).

I’m afraid Christopher Hitchens already beat you to the punch on this one.

cf. Mommie Dearest
The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

15

Casper Milquetoast 11.26.07 at 6:29 pm

A “line” on a piece of paper is probably best described as a rectangle.

If you’re going to insist on this, then don’t forget the “height” of the graphite on the paper. The drawn line is really three dimensions, although Linelanders and Flatlanders lack the persective to see things this way.

16

LizardBreath 11.26.07 at 6:30 pm

Yeah, I think Ogged’s right, and there’s nothing much wrong with the sentence. (Something dreadfully wrong with the thought underlying it, of course.) The idea is that the line between saint and sinner is both fine (saints can come very very very close to doing the same things sinners do) and blurry (the line isn’t just fine, it’s hard to see where it falls at all.) But Giuliani is just so good that he can tell that someone like, say, Kerik, who might look like a small-time crook to the unenlightened, is really a saint rather than a sinner.

The thought expressed is contemptible, but the words the Newsweek writer picked express it just fine.

17

Jason 11.26.07 at 6:31 pm

Curse you, Hitchens!

18

abb1 11.26.07 at 6:39 pm

It must be something like being simultaneously guilty of Moral Relativism and Moral Equivalence.

19

engels 11.26.07 at 6:41 pm

Yes, Lizardbreath is roughly right. To put it slightly differently: it is all too easy for someone to turn from a saint into a sinner (fine line) but the exact transgressions which would effect this transformation are unclear to us (blurry line). I don’t find this idea contemptible, personally, although I can see how it might be abused.

20

LizardBreath 11.26.07 at 6:47 pm

The contemptible bit is using it as a description of Giuliani — “the exact transgressions which would effect this transformation are unclear to us” but not to him, because he was “raised to understand that fine, blurry line.” Anyone else doing something that looks immoral is a bad person, but for Rudy, it’s proof that he’s just that good. Feh.

21

engels 11.26.07 at 6:56 pm

Fair enough.

22

Mr. Bobby Blurry 11.26.07 at 6:57 pm

What’s my line?

23

P O'Neill 11.26.07 at 7:29 pm

It’s that same fine blurry line as between liberalism and fascism, soon to be revealed in Jonah’s book. In fact we now know some chapter titles: “Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left” and “Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism”.

24

Michael Bérubé 11.26.07 at 7:33 pm

Fie on all your crooked-timberish shilly-shallying with these fine and blurry morals. The important thing is that sometimes the line between saint and sinner is crystal clear: we know, for example, that according to Saint Rudy, Patrick Dorismond was no altar boy.

25

kid bitzer 11.26.07 at 8:02 pm

24–
and even if he had been, there are times when the altar boy crosses the fine and blurry line, and has to be shot to death. for his own good.

look, i’m not saying it happens often. it’s a rare event.

but when it happens, you can trust rudy giuliani to pull the trigger.

and you can trust him to pull the trigger when it doesn’t happen, too.

ah fuck it–something about this communion wine is making all the lines blurry.

26

mpowell 11.26.07 at 9:16 pm

If a line was very thin and your view of it also very blurry, then you wouldn’t actually see the line at all!

Maybe that’s the point here: Rudy Giuliani doesn’t see any difference between saint and sinner. The only difference that matters is between friend and not-friend.

27

uppity kitty 11.26.07 at 10:45 pm

They are just throwing Rudy out there, knowing he can’t win, so that less attention is paid to some others Rethugs who might be recycled in 2012.

They know they can’t win in 2008 and are doing everything to control the outcome of the Dem who will.

28

mollymooly 11.26.07 at 10:48 pm

I’ve never liked the “fine line” cliché: I’ve never really understood it. If X is good and Y is bad and there’s a fine line between X and Y, does that mean X borders Y, à la comment#6? What’s the alternative to a fine line: a wide no-man’s land? A high fence? Should we just stay over on the far side of X rather than risk inadvertently straying into Y?

Or is it that X and Y are both bad, and we have to walk the (fine) line between them?

I want answers, dammit!

29

Henry (not the famous one) 11.26.07 at 11:14 pm

Felix Frankfurter used the same formulation, couched differently, in describing the secondary boycott provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, which require the drawing of “distinctions more nice than obvious.” The fineness/niceness of the distinction indicates that there is not much separating the two sides, but heavy consequences once you cross the line between them. The blurry/not obvious quality of the distinction only compounds the risk but does not change its fineness or niceness.

You can have fine/nice distinctions that are marked by non-blurry lines (it’s illegal for an employer to fire strikers, but not to permanently replace them), but I think the addition of a fuzzy criterion makes the fineness/niceness that much more obvious to us.

Frankfurter was no stylist, and this is the sort of formula that you can only pass off in quotation marks, given its musty 19th Century quality, but he was a fairly careful writer. Can’t say the same for our Newsweek writer, who may have been reciting from the catechism of cliche. But all the talk in the world can’t change the hard facts of the situation.

30

lemuel pitkin 11.26.07 at 11:21 pm

I want answers, dammit!

The answers are yes, either, yes, and no.

You’re welcome.

31

DB 11.27.07 at 2:32 am

that line is also bright but sometimes hard to discern!

32

Oskar Shapley 11.27.07 at 2:40 am

width: 1px; transparent: 50%;

33

doug 11.27.07 at 2:54 am

the line can be fine but the boundary can be blurry. so the boundary isn’t a line, but if it were, it would be fine. furthermore, we’ll drink no wine before it’s time.

34

Master Mahan 11.27.07 at 4:57 am

It’s quite simple. The line is blurry for anything Guiliani does, and exceedingly fine for everyone else.

35

Mike Otsuka 11.27.07 at 7:43 am

I’m having a hard time visualizing a fine, blurry line.
________________________________________________

Kieran: I see from your ‘Simpsonize me’ post that you wear glasses. So try looking at the above fine line with your glasses off. With mine off, it still looks fine (slender). But it also looks blurry (indistinct).

36

engels 11.27.07 at 2:54 pm

Here is an informative discussion of how to use graphics tools to create fine, blurry lines (using Gaussian blur, motion blur, etc) to avoid problems that fine, sharp lines cause with interlacing.

Some other uses on the ‘net:

State’s Fine Line on Dipnetting Blurry to All Anchorage Daily News

This score caught Howard Shore between “eXistenZ”(1999), a film that shared a few similarities – particularly the fine blurry line between dream and reality – and “Lord of the Rings”(2001) – an epic where he reused most of the unusual instruments chosen for The Cell (like the monochord and the Ghaita).” Miguel d’Oliveira, Composer

There was a fine, blurry line between justifiable and unjustifiable rudeness, and it tended to move depending on the extent to which my pride had been wounded. “et-tu?” blog

37

a very public sociologist 11.27.07 at 3:41 pm

Quantum mechanics?

38

Jon H 11.28.07 at 5:05 am

It looks sharp as long as you don’t look too closely.

39

goatchowder 11.28.07 at 6:29 am

How many angels can dance on the head of a fine and blurry line?

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