Steven Poole seems to have gone on holiday, so it must fall to others to catalogue the emergence of new unspeak terms. “Rebalancing” seems to be the vogue word with British government ministers at the moment. It is used when the government wants to restrict the rights of people accused of crimes, to promote summary punishment of offenders, to impose harsher sentences, and so on. The open admission that the government wants to restrict civil liberties would cause many people to worry about justice. “Rebalancing”, with its tacit reference to the scales of justice, and its suggestion that this or that measure is merely the tuning of a delicate machine, aims to calm such anxieties. Authoritarian thug Home Secretary John Reid is a frequent user of the word, and I see that blogger Oliver Kamm likes it too .
From the category archives:
Linguistics
In my dialect of English, shared living arrangements (normally non-familial) can be described by three terms.
A housemate (or flatmate) is someone who shares your house (normally not your room, but this is open)
A roommate is someone who shares your room (normally not your bed, but see above)
A bedmate is self-explanatory.
In US English, “roommate” seems to cover all three, but US English speakers seem able to infer which is intended from the context. Can anyone help me with a usage guide?
The LA Times reports on the Philadelphia cheesesteak place that refuses to serve customers who don’t order in English. The message to customers is This is America. When Ordering “Speak English”. Just a few observations.
- I’m not sure what rule of English requires, or even permits, quote marks around the last two words in that sentence. I’m no prescriptivist, so I’m happy to be shown that this falls under some generally followed pattern, but it’s no pattern I’m familiar with.
- I’m very pleased that no place had a similar sign when I was trying to get fed in Paris using what could, charitably, be described as schoolboy French, as long as the schoolboy in question spent every class watching football rather than, say, studying French. And that pleasure is not just because if I had seen such a sign I’d have been like, Holy Cow, the Americans have captured Paris.
- This being the LA Times, they have to describe what a cheesesteak is: “a cholesterol-delivery device consisting of grilled strips of beef, melted cheese, onions and peppers on an Italian roll.” They also misquote the sign by removing the errant quote marks and adding a ‘please’. Those polite Southern Californians!
Mark Steyn has a way with words. Particularly other people’s. (via Bitch PhD).
[For an earlier instance, scroll to the bottom of this post].
“Tiktaalik, Dr. Shubin said, is ‘both fish and tetrapod, which we sometimes call a fishapod.’” (NY Times link)
It seems to me there is a missed opportunity in not calling them ichthyopods. Because then you could riff on Daniel Dennett – the whole ‘no skyhooks’ thing. You could pen an attack on ID: ‘ichthyopod crane and the headless horseman of natural selection.’ Something like that. (I suppose an ichthyopod would really be an organism with fish for feet. But, then again, so would a fishapod. Come to think of it, suppose we find an organism with the number four attached to the ends of its legs. What are we going to call it? Not a tetrapod, surely. A problem. Speaking of four, google only gives us four hits for ‘ichthyopod’, as of today. If you are feeling lucky, you see this.)
I’m about to jump on a plane to Europe, after jumping off a plane from Hawaii yesterday, but couldn’t resist blogging this aside from a recent Scott McLemee column.
At one point, they [‘Chairman Bob’ Avakian and his philosopher sidekick] note that the slogan “Serve the People,” made famous by the little red book, could be used—with very different intentions, of course—at a McDonald’s training institute. This is, on reflection, something like Hegel’s critique of the formalism of Kant’s ethics. Only, you know, different.
Chairman Bob is stealing a riff here from Damon Knight’s famous short story “To Serve Man,” which was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode. I imagine that Chairman Bob’s version is more laboured and less funny than the original: “Don’t get on the ship. The book, To Serve Man, IT’S A COOKBOOK!” has to rank as one of the best closing lines of all time.
In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I’ve recently been teaching about hate speech codes on campus. Well, it was contemporary a few years ago, and still interests me. So it was fair enough for one of my students to email me a question I can’t really answer:
Yesterday I found myself wondering why bad words are bad. I can’t seem to figure it out. I understand that some people find these words to be offensive but I don’t know why that is. Any comments?
I started an email rambling on about conventions, taboos, and common knowledge about certain uses (eg, various racist epithets enjoy their status as deeply offensive and hurtful words because we all now they are routinely used by racists for that purpose); and of course I realise that conventions depend on background practices and contexts (it is awfully difficult, in America, to come up with a hurtful and ‘racist’ term for English people, because, well, their just isn’t the social context or history to support such a term). But swearing doesn’t have exactly the same sort of route, and within each group of bad words there seem to be different paths. And, truth is, I feel that I’m just restating the existence of the phenomenon he’s wondering about. If you can answer his question I can either steal your answer and sound smart (and hope he doesn’t read the site) or just point him here.
This is fun: a quiz based on McDonald’s Happy Meal game instructions . Can you recognize the languages? (Via Des von Bladet ).
I had always thought there was a dialect of English where he could be used as a gender-neutral pronoun. That is, I always thought there was a dialect of English where one could say (1) without presupposing that the person we hire next will be male.
(1) The person we hire next will be able to teach whatever courses he wants.
Wandering around the blogosphere, I came across this rather interesting page. It seems to be a little outdated, but it provides an approximate count of the relative importance of different languages in the blogosphere. English comes first, unsurprisingly, then French. Portuguese is third, and Farsi fourth. This may seem a little surprising to those who aren’t familiar with the proliferation of Portuguese and Farsi blogs – both linguistic communities have also made substantial inroads into social network services like Orkut.com too. This leads to an interesting sociological question – why these communities and not other linguistic communities of similar size – have reached takeoff in the blogosphere. Equally interesting is the lack of any Arab language blogs on the list. This may be a result of how the authors have seeded their survey or parsed their results – but it may also quite possibly reflect reality. As far as I know, there are less than 70 Iraqi blogs (many of which are in English). I’m not aware of any substantial blogging communities in other Arabic-speaking countries – but I’m happy to be enlightened if I’m wrong. The root causes may perhaps include cultural factors – but I would bet that restrictions on Internet access and poor technological infrastructures also play a very important role.
Whilst English speakers doughtily plough on with our archaic and tough spellings, and have to acquire a tolerance for the inconsistencies between British English and American English (to name but two), the German authorities have fought to implement a thorough spelling reform. But it seems that implementation faces a major hiccough as some of the major German newspapers have had second thoughts. Scott Martens gives a rough but excellent account of developments and rationales over at Fistful of Euros. (In other news, I shall be travelling to Loughborough this weekend.)
Tyler Cowen says
If I could have the answers to five questions in political science/sociology, the appeal of Stalinism to intellectuals would be one of them.I don’t think this is as difficult a question as is often supposed.
Most of the intellectuals who professed support for Communism during the rule of Stalin (and Lenin) were primarily victims of (self-)deception. They supported the stated aims of the Communist Party (peace, democracy, brotherhood), opposed the things the Communists denounced (fascism, racism, exploitation) and did not inquire too closely into whether the actual practice of the Soviet Union and the parties it controlled was consistent with these stated beliefs. I developed this point, and the contrast with the relatively small group of intellectuals who supported the Nazis, in a review of[1] Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics