Suffering through the Morning Paper

If you are interested in a really good article about responding better to those patients in the hospital who need help, read this article from today’s New York Times. If you would rather hear me kvetch about current language use, keep on reading because that’s what my fingers want me to talk about today.

Here’s the first one.

Whether it’s a request for ice water, help getting to the bathroom or a plea for pain relief, an unanswered call light leaves hospital patients feeling helpless and frustrated. And for nurses, often the first responders to these calls, the situation is frustrating too: Short staffing and a heavy workload often make it impossible to respond as quickly as they would like.

“…as quickly as they would like.” Is that really worth anything at all? The Mavericks are going to play the Heat tonight. Will anyone at all on the losing team say that they didn’t score “as many points as they would like?” Is the gap between what you would have liked to do and what you did really the most useful comparison? Hardly ever.

In politics, it’s mostly a gesture intended to avoid responsibility. The whip promises the Speaker that the bill will pass, but it fails. The whip tells the press the bill didn’t receive “as many votes as we would like.” Right. It also didn’t receive as many votes as you promised; as many votes as you calculated; as many votes as the people who rely on your competence and good judgment had every right to expect.” And all those bases of comparison are more useful than the one you used. Hm.

The “as much as I would have liked” gambit turns every failure into a comparison between what happened and what your preferences were. There are, as I illustrated above, other alternatives and nearly all those alternatives are more useful in finding the glitch or allocating the blame or placing the event within some shared body of expectation.

I’m really tired of “as much as they would like.” You could tell that, right?

Next up, the use of “around” as a preposition of interaction. Here’s one.

“We’ve really fundamentally changed the way we interact with our patients around their needs,” said Lauren Cates, the hospitals’ chief operating officer.

We’ve gone to “around” in many cases where one used to say “on.” I have seen people write that an argument is “based around” a theoretical premise common in the field. Why on earth would you base it around the premise when, with any diligence at all, you could base it “on" it. Is there any particular merit in placing the first floor of a house “around the foundation” you poured for it? Would “on the foundation” really be any worse? It would likely be better if you were thinking about earthquake insurance. Also, routinely making a first floor larger than the foundation will be routinely more expensive. More expansive also.

Is it just my imagination, or do “as much as I would like” and “based around” slide away from common usage in the same direction? For the same reason? Are they unrelated? Is there a conspiracy?

I probably wouldn’t have noticed this next one with anything more than a passing irritation, but I has just been treated to “rounding” as a word referring to regularly checking on patients to see if they are OK. But I was still puzzling over that—I think I was wondering whether, if they start on the first floor, they call it “rounding up” and if they start on the top floor, “rounding down”—when I got this.

Dr. William Southern, chief of hospital medicine at Montefiore, says, “Call bells are something that me and my entire staff think it’s important to answer.”

I think that is an admirable sentiment. I like Dr. Southern’s attitude. His grammar, not so much. Are call bells really something me think it is important to answer?” And not only do me think it, my staff thinks it, too. Me do and them do.

And finally, although it might be final only because it is in the last paragraph of the story, we get this: “Bottom line, never leave anyone in the hospital overnight by themselves immediately after a procedure or birth, even if they tell you it’s O.K.”

It is by now an old complaint that “they” has become the proper pronoun for “anyone.” In this sentence, it is just sloppy but there are times when you really need to know what a plural pronoun refers to. That’s why the agreement in number—singulars go with singulars; plurals with plurals—has always been a part of the foundation of grammar. Being a part of the foundation, of course, means that many uses are “based around it.”

If you are not prepared to say “he”—the old neuter form of the pronoun—or “he or she,” which is a lot of trouble, you might want to consider using a plural noun. You might say “Never leave people in the hospital…” There are a lot of alternative phrasings—as I recall, I was once baited into handing out a paper listing eight of them—that keep singulars with singulars and plurals with plurals. It’s just something you need to think is worth doing. I suppose someone needs to think it is worth teaching.

None of these complaints, by the way, should be lodged with Tara Parker-Pope, who wrote this piece for the New York Times and who writes so well that I routinely read whatever topic she is writing on. Um…”on which she is writing on.”

The Loneliness of the Inframarathoner

I offer this post in the spirit of Steve Martin’s character Harris K. Telemacher, who begins his narration of L. A. Story by saying that he has had "seven heart attacks, all imagined."

I was up on Wildwood Trail running today when a redheaded runner with a race bib numbered 6063 came around a corner. “So, what’s the race?” I asked her. “Oh,” she said, “it’s an ultramarathon. I’ve done 30 miles and have one to go.” Since I knew the end of the race, given where she was on the trail, was going to be Lower McCleay Park, so I knew she had nearly two miles to go, but I didn’t say that.

I said, “Oh, I’m running an inframarathon myself and on this same trail.” I think I might have wanted her to laugh, but she had already done thirty miles, so that was asking a lot. And I was pretty sure I didn’t want her to think there was another race on the same trail on the same day. So I said, “At least if one is infra- and the other ultra-, the runners won’t be running into each other.” She didn’t laugh at that either.

I complain a lot about people who use words based in Greek but who don’t know how to handle the plurals. I get “criterias” every term in essays at Portland State. These are people who have never heard the word criterion and if they had, they would think the plural was criterions. So I complain.

On the other hand, it offers opportunities. Just a few years ago, I invented the hyperdermic needle, which was really great because, of course, it was painless. People who are more strict than I am about medicine pointed out that if it didn’t get under the skin, it wouldn’t do any good, but I think you have to balance the loss of pain against the loss of benefit.

Oh, It's Just Spin

I might be on a roll on what I am calling “polar words.” I raised the question recently of the Oregon campaign against a measure that was “too extreme,” for instance. This is going to be one of those deals where you tentatively call an experience something and as soon as you call it something, you start having it every time you turn around.

I’m thinking of a You Tube video I saw recently called “The Power of Words.” It’s a beautiful little two minute clip of a woman who re-writes the sign of a blind beggar, resulting in a lot more people stopping by to give him money. Interestingly, she didn’t give him any money. All she did was re-write his sign. I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere, but I’m in a hurry.

I showed this video to a friend who immediately renamed it “The Power of Spin.” Spin. Hmm. How long has it been since you heard that word used in a positively connoted way? Other than as a preparation for weaving, I mean. So “spin” is bad. We will now begin looking for “un-spun” communications.

How’s it coming?

No, it’s OK. It’s a slow MONTH. I can wait.

We could dicker a little, I suppose, about how to define spin, but I don’t see the point to it. Besides, wouldn’t you just try to spin the definition one way, while tried to spin it the other? Spin is a message that has a context or a subtext or an intention and in which the words are chosen to push any of the three either into the foreground of the message or into the background. When it word was coined, in its present context, it referred to some extreme state of message-mongering. You don’t have to tell ME about spin. I grew up during World War II when absolutely everything was marketed with the war in mind: beauty products, pens and pencils, financial instruments, motor vehicles. The subtext of nearly everything was “Win the War” or “Kill the [favorite ethnic slur here]”

Bob Newhart nailed spin in one of his monologues where he led off an account of a disaster on a submarine by saying that the most important thing to be said was that it happened on a slow news day. OK, Bob.

If I ran the world, spin would be (again) a name we use for an emphasis on the effect of a word that is wholly out of keeping with the meaning of the word. “Slow news day” is not what you want most to know about a submarine disaster. “No product is better than X” is not what you want to know about a line of products that are all equally effective. “Not as good as he hoped” is not what you want to know about a disastrous outcome of someone's project.

And if we call things like that spin, we get to have our regular old language back, where it is taken for granted that words have contexts and subtexts and intentions and that’s just fine. It is the perversion of those stable features or our language that deserves to be called spin. Now, as you might have noticed, I do not, in fact, run the world so my hopes for this proposed return to sanity are not high.

Roman Agriculture in Early Britain

It is well known that many English words come to us from the languages of other nations and from other periods of history. Sometimes entire phrases are lifted out of one specialized context and placed in another and come, in time, to seem puzzling.

Take the case of Roman agriculture in Britain, for example. Much more is known about the routine practices of their agriculture once established than about the Romans' first development of virgin farmland. It is therefore not well known that their customary procedure for first putting the plow to new land was the "round' system. A plot of land thought to be capable of cultivation was chosen first; then the farthest perimeter of plowable land was established. This perimeter was called the first round. The second was just inside it, toward the originally chosen plot, and so on. Depending on the ambitions of the Roman agriculturalist or his access to sturdy native labor, the first round might be as much as 10 or 12 rounds away from the center.

Native labor was quite important because the horses were kept exclusively for the use of the Roman army and the rocky British soil would have, in any case, daunted even a sturdy draft animal. Still, as in the United States many centuries later when human beings were called on to do what animals could have done better had they been available, so in Roman Britain humans were used as draft animals.

Not Roman humans, as a rule. There was always the 'sturdy native labor" alluded to earlier. The sturdiness of the natives was never in doubt. Hadrian's Wall was built in testimony to the ferocity of the northern tribes, some of whom objected to the Roman presence in the most colorful and direct ways. Of these tribes, the Picts were among the fiercest and most relentless. Pict warriors were quite strong as individuals and together, as a fighting force, they challenged even the legendary military discipline of Rome.

Building a wall to keep them out was, therefore, only a short term strategy. Finding some way to use them as "agricultural laborers,” if serving as draft animals can be dignified by such a term, was the preferred long term solution. A standard part of Roman strategy,
once that was seen, was directed to dividing the attacking Picts, not simply holding them off. Then an effort was made to capture isolated Pict warriors and carry them south to serve the Roman cause by putting new fields to the plow.

Often it took several captives to drag the crude plow on the long first round because the perimeter was so long and the ground so hard. Occasionally, a particularly powerful Pict would show himself capable of making the entire first round by himself. It was a point of pride for a Roman landowner to have acquired such a powerful worker and he was very reluctant to part with him. Since he would be valuable to any Roman agriculturalist, however, there was sometimes a brisk bidding for the services of such a worker and on occasion the price, driven by an amalgam of ego and necessity, reached ridiculous heights.

Although the circumstances in which the expression first arose have been forgotten for centuries, there are many owners in America even today who would sell their souls for a first round draft Pict.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A Living Language

I don’t know whether language is “living,” as some say, but I do know that language users are living. They have preferences about meanings of words; they have preferences about the ease of communication. And, ordinarily, they will act on those preferences.

So let’s begin by asking, as President Bartlet asked of a “proportional response,” in the first season of The West Wing, “What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why is it good?" In the context of military retaliation, it’s an interesting question, but today I just want to look at the word virtue. It derives from the Latin vir = man; that’s man as in a male human. Derivatively, a virtue is manliness of some sort and by extension a valued quality of some sort. So, laying the etymology aside, a virtue is “moral excellence; right action and thinking; goodness or morality.”

Since I first learned of this derivation, I have had quite a few quiet smiles about stories that feature young women losing “their virtue” only because "losing their manliness" seems so discrepant in that context. In fact, in some cultures, boys gain their “virtue” in the same act and at the same moment that the girls lose theirs. Isn’t language wonderful?

I got to thinking of this when a Rose Festival Princess—for those of you who don’t live in Portland, RFP is a big deal—told about how she put aside the views of all those people who criticized her for the way she looked and declared herself to be beautiful. I have nothing but respect for her courage in standing up for herself, but I think she is going to have to share the language with people who have meant other things by that word for many years now.

The Princess said, ““I broke through my shell and learned that I am beautiful not because I am glamorous and perfect, but because I am a strong, intelligent, confident and capable young woman.” That is a perfectly adequate meaning of the word for internal speech, but when she starts talking to other people, and particularly if she wants to be understood, she is going to have to look at that word again. Will people use the word beauty to mean “strong, intelligent, confident, and capable young woman?” No. They won’t.

I have seen panels of legislators browbeaten until they were willing to call every failure “a challenge” and every disabled person a “differently abled person.” But when the browbeating witness had departed, eyes were collectively rolled and the word that was used in the statutes being discussed was used again. Challenge is now used as “challenge,” and given a little ironic stress so that the coach who calls falling behind in the first half by 45-12 a “challenge” will not be taken by the interviewer or the television audience to be an idiot. It will be “a challenge” for us, says the coach, with that little facial twitch that serves as “air-quotes.”

The users of language are living and they respond to impediments by surmounting them or finding new paths. If, ten years from now, there are “beauty contests,” to see which young women are most strong, most intelligent, most confident, and most capable, there will be some other contest—called something else, surely—for those women who meet that culture’s standards for physical attractiveness.

Sometimes you just can’t make people use words the way you would like and I say that as someone who has often tried and sometimes succeeded. I do have a thought experiment for you, though. One of my practices has been to collect English words that mean “of, by, or pertaining to [some kind of animal].” So I can talk about the feline qualities of cats or the hirsine qualities of goats or the vulpine qualities of foxes. By the same logic, I can speak of the anatine qualities of ducks and could even, with conventional rules in use, speak of “anatinity,” a noun referring to those anatine qualities. Puddles (below) has anatinity, as evidenced by the pushups he did during the football season--one for every accumulated point and this year, there were a lot of accumulated points.


It’s a little quirky, maybe a little word-wonky, but I wouldn’t get a lot of pushback from it. Eye-rolling, maybe. But now let’s say I use anatine in place of virtue. I emphasize the value of “duckliness” rather than the value of “manliness.” If I had enough power and if I were willing to expend it in forcing people to say that an athlete, say, had “deeply anatine qualities” meaning that he or she was a good player, I could get away with it for the moment. It might even compete with "intestinal fortitude."

But in Oregon, where one of the most prominent meanings of Duck is “not a Beaver,” it would be a very hard sell and I don't want to be the one to try it.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

I haven’t visited my “getting old” label for a while although, as nearly as I can tell, I have continued to get old at the same rate as before. I have given a fair amount of time to Erik Erikson’s The Life Cycle Completed and I want to pick up a part of that. On the other side of my brain, I have been working with B. F. Skinner’s Enjoy Old Age: A Practical Guide. Two more different approaches can hardly be imagined and I like them both.

Tonight’s blog comes from that background. I was reading Skinner a few days ago and came upon a passage I am eager to share. This comes from a section called “Forgetting How to Say Things” in Chapter 4, “Keeping In Touch With the Past—Remembering.”

The problem he is working with is that old people, when speaking, digress and lose their way. Skinner’s solution is to stop digressing. That way, you won’t have to remember what you were trying to say. Here’s the passage that so tickled me.

Something of this sort is especially likely to happen—at any age—when you are speaking a language you do not speak well. Then it is always a mistake to embark upon a complex sentence; you do much better with simple sentences. And that is true in old age even when you are speaking your own language.

So what’s so funny about that? Well, Skinner’s sentence (…always a mistake to embark upon a complex sentence…) is a complex sentence. I think that Skinner and co-author M. E. Vaughn and Jean Fargo, who helped with the manuscript all skipped over that because they all knew what he meant. He meant that complicated sentences are likely to get you into trouble.

But he didn’t want to say “complicated,” because “complicated” is only a complicated form of “complex.” Except that it isn’t. Complex is, in fact, a term of art. It actually means something. It is the name of the kind of sentence Skinner has put together, with two independent clauses joined by a semicolon. “Complicated,” by contrast, is not a term of art. It means “not simple.”
Skinner’s prose is a pleasure to read. The font is large, for one thing. The sections are short. The sentences are simple. But it is his urge to simplify that drove him from “complicated” to “complex,” when I really should not have.

It isn’t a major point, as you have seen. But it is Saturday Evening and that is when I like to be sure to publish a post.

Bah! Humbug!

It's the day of Christmas Eve. If this post is going to get written, this is definitely the time. "Bah! Humbug!" is probably the most famous line delivered by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge. For family, I will take the trouble to point out that this is NOT Charles Dikkens, the well-known Dutch author.

Is Christmas a humbug? It seems to be a question worth asking, although by the time I finish, I hope to have shown that no good answer can be given. "Bah!" need not delay us much. It is phatic speech, so we don't need to look for a meaning. It is an expression of disgust and is clearly appropriate to Mr. Scrooge on the occasion of Christmas. But what is a humbug?

Ordinarily, I turn to etymology for help, but this time some people offer guesses and other just give up. Skeat thinks possibly hum, an old verb meaning “to hoax or cajole” and bug, a contraction of bugbear, “a spectre or ghost.” You have to admit that isn’t very much help.

But a humbug, and this word was in use with this meaning at least a century before Dickens brought it to our attention, is “something made or done to cheat or deceive,” a fraud, a sham, a hoax. That gives us something to work with. Is Christmas a fraud, a sham, and a hoax?

We come now to the question of what “Christmas” means to those who are putting it on and what it means to those who are receiving it. That’s not a lot of analysis, but it is enough to establish that something may be offered as a sham and received as a genuine gift or offered as a genuine gift and received as a sham. This isn’t like “valuable property” in Florida which, when you examine it, turns out to be a swamp. This is like a thoughtlessly given present that turns out to be absolutely perfect and that turns the recipient’s day into a glory of celebration. Where’s the humbug?

If the humbuggery of Christmas is a matter of a transaction between persons, then both how and why it is offered and how and why it is received, matter a great deal. A superb receiver can make “Christmas” truly wonderful in exactly the same way that an engaged student can make an otherwise mediocre lecture wonderful or an ardent parishioner can make a mediocre sermon wonderful. (I was going to say “an uninspiring sermon,” thereby falling into my own trap is attributing the effect to the product as if the spirit in which it was received could not redeem it—oops.)

So I think I would say that Christmas could be a humbug to many who trade upon the season and to many who endure it because they cannot find an acceptable way to evade it. But the moment you say “… a humbug to…” the meaning is transformed. Anyone with the wit, the insight, and the self-discipline can un-humbug Christmas for himself and for everyone around him.

Daunting, isn’t it? Merry Christmas to all and to all, a good night.

Just a Little Paranoid

I want to ask a question first. I want to ask it as open-mindedly as I can and that means posing it first because when I start writing about language, I get engaged and that wide-open mental aperture shrinks to the size of a pinhole very quickly.

Let’s put the question narrowly first. What is paranoia? It is, first, a term of psychiatry just as psychosomatic once was. We all saw how that one turned out. “Is it real, Doc, or just psychosomatic?” Paranoia is a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions as of grandeur or especially of persecution.[1]

If you listen to words, and you probably do or you wouldn’t be reading this, you have heard people say they are “a little paranoid.” I have never heard anyone say that a person is “just a little sociopathic” but if he did say that, it would put the meaning in the same tension with the word that paranoid does.

If we want to talk about the array of words that might show up on the path that led, at its very end, to paranoid, we find that there are a lot of them. A person might be said to be troubled or dubious, or shady. He might be suspicious, or wary, or even fearful. But we don’t want that. We want to take the word at the end of the line and say we have just a little bit of it.

Why do we do that? Don’t know any of the other words? I don’t think so. We use all those words in other contexts. I think we want the pop of the big one—I’m PARANOID—but just the meaning of wary. Is it like getting cranberry juice concentrate and adulterating it with water? Or is it like getting battery acid and diluting it so it is not quite at full strength?

In Oregon recently, there was a political ad opposing something or other and using the slogan, “It’s too extreme!” Hello? Extreme means the very furthest away, the “furthest out,” we might say. But “too extreme?” What does that mean? Would an advocate say, “No, no, they are just saying that to frighten people; actually, it’s only moderately extreme.”?

There is probably a word for words that have that function. I call them “polar words” because they occur only at the pole (the very end) of the range of meanings. You could say that someone is nearly paranoid, I guess and you might be able to say that something is “nearly extreme.”
But those aren’t the only kinds of words where this problem pops up. People don’t use unique as a sliding variable term because they don’t know any others. Anyone who listens or reads comes across “very unique” as if unique meant “different.” Unique mean that there aren’t any others like it.[2] Unique is a polar word. It represents only the very end of the continuum. Is unique so valuable that people draw against it by using it where “different” would be correct? Does calling a new kind of cracker “a little big unique” help sell crackers?

This week, I saw an ad for something—it might have been a new phone—that said they were becoming more ubiquitous all the time.[3] Of course, if it is ubiquitous, there is nowhere else for it to be. Is this like unique and paranoid in that there is a certain pop you get by using the polar terms, even if you have to cut back on the actual meaning? It’s hard to think so. Does ubiquitous have a lot of pop?

Some gentle soul is going to say it is just ignorance, but you notice that all these deviations from established usage move in the same direction. These are not random changes. This is a substantial portion of American English which is being moved in a particular way. That way is that terms that were once “end of the line” terms are now being used as “anywhere along the line” terms.

Which brings us to the question I promised in the first paragraph: Does this really hurt us? Probably not. It is painful to people, like me, who were trained to respect such terms. It is not just their meanings, but their existence as polar terms at all. If all the terms that were once polar, standing at the ends of the axis of meanings, become relative so that they can legitimately be modified by adjective phrases like, “a little,” or “a substantial amount” or even “excessively,” which imagines a “just right” meaning somewhere in the center and says this one is too far out? I don’t think so.

I think people like me—in my previous essay about my perspective on language, I called myself “Conservative and Proud”—will probably serve the language by pointing out what is going on and by raising the question of whether the language suffers (and thereby, all its users suffer) by this new kind of language. So I offer this essay as a reflection on a kind of change I see taking place and I ask whether it is a big deal or just an irritation.

What do you think?

[1] The etymology of a word often adds depth to its array of meanings. Paranoia occurs in a mind, nous, that is para, “beside” itself. We say a person is “beside himself” with grief or with anger, but that just shows that an etymology is not the same as a meaning.
[2] And for those of you who have a theological appetite as well as a lexical one, the Greek monogenēs, which the KJV translates “only begotten,” also means “unique” rather than "only." Isaac, the son of Jacob was monogenēs and had a brother, Ishmael.
[3] The word we could really use is ubiety (yoo-BY-i-ty), which means “the condition of being in a particular place.” This emphasizes its “whereness.” Ubiquitous, by contrast, matches ubi, “where” with que, “any,” giving us not “anywhere,” but “everywhere.”

Telling Stories

I’ve been thinking lately about how stories affect us. I’m not thinking principally of stories-with-a-moral, like Aesop’s Fables. I’m thinking about do-you-remember-the-time-we… stories.

Stories are “nomic” agents as Peter Berger likes to say, or “ordering” agents.[1] There are three nomic mechanisms available to us. There are the principles, like “stealing is wrong.” You level your own behavior against that that rule and see how you look. There is no disagreement that our thoughts and relationships are ordered by principles and rules.

There are stories which have the principal function of illustrating some rule or other. I said I think of Aesop’s Fables as a good example. My mother used to read the story of the (harmless) stork who was trapped in a net set for the (harmful) crows, but who deserved his fate, in a way, because…wait for it…”You are known by the company you keep.” I was a mouthy kid and, if I had had the wit, I would have responded, “Wow! What bad news for Jesus!” But I didn’t.

Then there are the other stories, which are the ones I want to consider today. We tell the stories we like to tell and both the telling and the hearing affect us. And why do we like the stories we like? Some are just fun to tell. Some evoke a good time of our lives or a good event. Some, we say, we “resonate with,” which is a powerful, if obscure, way to characterize them.

Paraphrasing Aesop, I think I’ll say that we are known by the stories we tell. Further, I think there is a sense in which we even know ourselves by the stories we tell. How can this be?

First, stories are told from a point of view. There are, for instance, “victim stories,” and “winner stories;” there are “benefactor stories” and “beneficiary stories.” Which ones have resonance with us tells a lot about either who we are or, at least, where we are in our lives at the moment.[2] It is more than that, though. It is also that the characters in these stories serve to attract us or repel us. If I like to tell “beneficiary stories,” for instance, the good guys are the people who provided the benefits, and the people who noticed that I might need some. I am not, in these stories, the prodigal who has squandered his 401(k); I am only a person who was in need of help at some point and who was delighted to receive it. My guess is that makes me more attentive to situations where I could be the source of beneficence and might even make me less likely to be judgmental of a person who could use a little help. You’d like to think it would work that way.

But when I started this, I was thinking about the effects of stories on groups. Maybe family groups. I have always liked to hear and tell Hess stories. The women I have married have liked to tell the old Way and Miller and Brendle stories and, over time, some of the Hess stories in which they have played a part. Or college years stories. Do you remember what we found under the ivy on one of those ivy covered walls? I love all those and they bear on who “we,” whatever “we” is on our minds at the moment, are.

Some stories tell about an “us” that extends back in time a long way. Does “David v. Goliath” still affect us?[3] Does the old Kemmis family story of a defiant wife during the colonies’ revolutionary turmoil still affect the Kemmises of Missoula Montana? Of course it does. Does the old story of the Anabaptist fugitive who turned back to save his pursuer from drowning still affect Anabaptists? Yes, it does. Does Galileo’s defiance of papal authority still cause fans of the Enlightenment to salivate? Yes, it does. And no one I know saw “Cap’n John” Kemmis’s wife rebuke the British or the Anabaptist pay with his life for his compassion to an enemy or Galileo defy the church. How do these stories affect us? I mean, by what means do these stories affect us?

I have three means in mind. These three means are what I am calling the second way stories affect us. The first, remember, was the choice of point of view. Let me lay them out and you can turn them over in your mind and see if they make sense. I got these from an old book, too.[4] Snell and Gail Putney say that we need others as our mirrors, our models, and as the receivers of our actions. I have worked with that simple little three-part division for a long time now and it very often brings clarity.

Following this line of thought, “our stories”—the stories that belong to some “us” that extends over a very long time—affect us by providing mirrors, models, and recipients. Let’s imagine, for instance, that I have been told Hess family stories my whole life. The Hesses in these stories come off looking pretty good. If you are a member of a multigenerational family with a sense of itself, that won’t surprise you. My paternal grandfather, Abram Z. Hess, was, according to the story that has been passed down, strongly opposed to the building of a platform in their church. I suspect he thought it was incipient elitism. They discussed it a long time and then voted. He lost. So he showed up the next morning as part of the work party that had assembled to build the platform.

This isn’t an Aesop-style story, but as I identify with the only clearly drawn character in the story, I imagine his indignation at this stupid idea and his frustration at being on the losing side. I reflect on what he did with those feelings so that he could whole-heartedly affirm the generous collegiality that sustained the work party. I think, not with the middle of my mind, but off at the margins somewhere, that maybe I should be that way. I’ve been losing the textbook debate in the Political Science Division for about ten years now. Maybe I should stop pouting and join in finding a more agreeable solution. That is clearly where the sympathies I gave my grandfather would take me and I believe that the models in our stories affect us just like that.

If our stories offer models, they also offer mirrors. I look at myself in the light of the stories I know. Like a bat, I send little sounds toward the stories and I get back the echoes that tell me where I am and, if I am in luck, whether there is food in the area. I push off of the villains in the stories, assuring myself that I am not like them. I hope I am like the heroes in the stories and listen to the echoes to see whether I am. There is a constant self-assessment imbedded in knowing these stories and it is an assessment not only of “me” but of “us.” If this were all conscious, I might think about my family, “We did pretty well”—remembering both the stories that illustrate the goals some family member has reached and also the failures some family member has had to endure. But it isn’t conscious. It is not only below the radar. It is before the radar.

Third and finally, we need receivers of our actions. Social roles tend to come in pairs (or “dyads,” if you have a social science background) and the simple fact is that if I want to be a beneficiary, you will need to want to be a benefactor, and vice versa. If I broadcast my victimhood, I will attract victimizers. If I love steadfastly through good times and bad, people will have my back through good times and bad. That’s not just mutual obligation or tit for tat. It’s playing out the roles in the stories we all know. I am sure that is true of individuals and I suspect that it is true of groups as well. If I were in a family that had an ancient clan rival, I would know for sure.

I think that is the way stories affect us, particularly if the “us” is a group with a long historical tail. And it’s all the more powerful because it isn’t conscious. We reach out emotionally to the good guys in our stories and lean back away from the bad guys. These are not so much the stories that belong to us as they are the stories by which we belong to each other.

[1] Berger is best known for the book he wrote with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. I stumbled across it at a bookstore at Syracuse in 1967 and have lived in it ever since.
[2] One of the things I noticed, for instance, about my brush with depression in 2006 was the speed with which my loser stories aligned themselves into something that felt like a net when it dropped on me and even more like a net when I tried to get out of it. None of those stories was new, but the speed with which they reassembled themselves in my mind truly astounded me.

[3] Apart, that is from the well-known maxim that if you don’t have size, you will have to depend on outside shooting.
[4] This is 1964 in downtown Dayton, Ohio. The book is, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society.

Well, Sh**t, I Dropped the Noodles on the Floor

One of the things that always puzzled me when I was a kid was that there were words that were “not to be said.” In my family, there was a familiar series of reasons why we were not to use certain words, but beyond that, I knew that the phenomenon was general even if the reasons varied from one family to another.

It seemed more reasonable to me that things were “bad,” rather than words. Body parts or body functions that had to do with sexual practices or excretory functions, for example, could be “bad.” I was OK with that. What confused me was that anus, for instance, was a good word, while asshole was a bad word. It was the words, apparently, not the things. How odd.

I’ve thought about this from time to time since then and as I now see it, we imagine a word scale that goes from -1 through 0 (neutral) to +1. These vary, as I pointed out in my post “Conservative and Proud,” from one setting to another. Asshole could be a -1 word in one setting and a +1 word in another. I get that. But what about that zero? What is that?

This brings us to the question of euphemisms and dysphemisms and that brings me to George Carlin. Shit is a word Carlin loves to say. As I let my mind wander back over the years of Carlin I enjoyed with my kids, I remember uses of shit as a noun (pot, mostly), a verb, an adjective, and an adverb. How he missed conjunctions and prepositions, I can’t imagine.

Here’s Carlin on saying and hearing the word “shit.”

Shit's a nice word. It's a friendly, happy, y'know, kind of word. Handy word. Middle class has never really been into ****, y'know, as a word.No, not really comfortable.Not completely into it. Y'know, not really relaxed with it. You'll hear it around the kitchen if someone drops a casserole, y'know, "Oh, ****! Oh! Oh, look at the noodles! Oh, ****! Don't say that, Johnny, just hear it. Oh, ****!" Sometimes they say 'shoot'. They can't kid me, man. 'Shoot' is 'shit' with two 'o's.

I’m guessing that all those quadruple asterisks are to stand for shit, although that is puzzling since shit is the first word of the paragraph. There is so much to play with in that paragraph. Maybe if I just say what they are, it will help me focus on the use I had in mind when I called it up. The middle class has not been comfortable with the word. Hear it, Johnny, but don’t say it. But the one I had in mind was, “shoot is just shit with two o’s.”

Is that right? Is shit, shoot with two o’s? Is shoot, shit with an i-? Is one of those forms real and the other a fraud? Which one? This brings us to the need for the 0 in the center of the scale. So I drop the casserole on the floor and I am angry and upset. Am I looking for a neutral denotation or a neutral affect equidistant between shit and shoot? Nope. Not.

How about if I say “Gajurgis!!”? You never know for sure, but I intend that as a nonce word—like the one time pad in the spy novels—that means nothing at all. On the other hand, that j- in the middle could be said with a lot of gusto. And you could kick off the whole word with a very robust g-. You could even hang onto the sibilant at the end if you didn’t feel purged yet. As a “word” you could say when you were really upset, it is harmless.

Which accounts, I think, for what such words are used so seldom. The boundaries of “good speech” and the sensibilities of “good people” are so clear that we may feel that we have not really expressed our anger if we have not violated at least one of them. Several violations would be better. “Shit!” as a response to dropping the casserole is really very good. It evokes excrement where you really don’t want it, i.e., in the kitchen, and it is really not something “nice people” say, which further expresses just how angry you are. Breaking out of the prison of “what you ought to say” helps you express your true feelings. “Gajurgis!” probably does not.

Conservative and Proud

I’m a language conservative. Everyone who knows me knows that and I might as well acknowledge it up front. I’m not an ideologue, though. I don’t believe, as many of my fellow conservatives do, that there was once a golden era when language was carefully spoken and eloquently written.

On the other hand, I reject the position of the language liberals entirely. The bumper sticker caricature of their position is “Language Changes (so what?).” The actual argument is that “so long as we can still understand each other” is a good criteria.

Let’s start there. A good criteria? You did understand what I meant, didn’t you? Some standard should be adopted (just one) to validate language use and the intelligibility of speech is that standard. But since you know me, you might have just stopped at the expression “a good criteria.”

Criteria is one a class of words used in English and the members of this class are proving troublesome. Many Greek nouns have plurals that are more different from the singular form than English plurals are. The singular criterion and its plural criteria make up one example. Here are some others that will be familiar. Datum/data is a distinction nearly lost, even in academia. Professors have said “the data shows” for decades; now we are beginning to hear it from academic deans and provosts. The people who have a faint sense that something is wrong—or who are adroitly sidestepping the whole conflict—sometimes say “data points.” A data point is a datum. I still say “the data show” but it puts extra pressure on me, as someone who is interested in being understood, and when I get tired of the pressure, I will cave in. Is it “realistic?” Is it “cowardly?” Is it a betrayal of my “class?” Does it contribute to the decline of civilization?

So how do you feel about stigmata? “Being too “white” if you are black and being too “middle class” if you are poor are both stigmata. Who still says “stigmata?” I still see it written sometimes, but I haven’t heard it in years. I do hear “stigmas.” And, say the liberals, what’s the harm? My answer: probably none. I, myself, have always said "gymnasiums," where my father insisted on "gymnasia."

I used to be careful to say that newspapers were one medium of communication and TV another medium. I now use media as a singular form. I fought it for years because it is wrong and I am a conservative.* But usage has moved on. The texts I assign now use media in ways that alternate back and forth between singular and conservative and sometimes provide new uses that move beyond the distinction entirely.

*This was a footnote in the Word document. A liberal and a conservative are dining together. The waitress says, stopping by the table, “Are you OK?” The liberal says, as everyone now does, “I’m good.” (Theologically, this would be a controversial claim, but this is only dinner.) The conservative says, “I’m well,” and immediately wishes he had said nothing. Good and well are ordinarily the alternatives. The distinction has been set clearly in the jibe “doing well by doing good.” But good and well don’t work in the restaurant. It’s not an insoluble problem. I say, “I’m fine, thanks.” But there is a frictional cost to the language in shifting away from good/well and besides, sometimes the waitress will provoke the dilemma by asking, “Are you good?” My mind is flooded with Bible verses I dare not use.

My father’s introduction to the social sciences came at a time when folkways (cultureal habits)were routinely distinguished from mores (important cultural norms). We’ve shifted away from Greek, you’ll notice: folkways is Germanic; mores, Latin. Obviously, folkways is plural and the singular is folkway. Mores is also plural, but no one knows the singular. I have never heard it spoken in my entire life as a listener, except, of course, by me. Not that it matters, the singular form is mos.

So there’s a collection of instances. I reject the liberal position, which is “living languages change, so change is good.” I reject the liberal criterion, which I have caricatured as “it doesn’t really matter so long as communication is still possible.” I reject the idea that there is one and only one criterion. Those would be the three planks in my platform if I had a platform. So where does that leave me?

Well, I’m a reasonable sort of person, my conservatism notwithstanding. I think there should be several criteria, not just one. I think language conservatives perform a service, even the most militant among us—Lynne Truss, of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, is an example—provide a service to society. I think language conservatism which, in this paragraph only, I am willing to define as “identifying and rewarding correct speech,” serves as a counterweight to other trends which really ought not to rule us by themselves.

Those three make up my program for language conservatives. Let’s take the last one first. What other language forces are "checked and balanced" (I teach American government) by conservatism? How about “Ooooh, you talk like a white girl,” which was a criticism slapped on a very young Michelle Obama? How about being required to “make an ask” at a business meeting? What about having to say, in order to be understood, that a good running back is one who can “run vertically?” (I agree, that would be a really really good running back.) My point here is that if there were no notion of “correct speech” the racists, the barbarians, and the antigravitarians would rule absolutely and everyone would be forced to comply. The thing about egregious behavior is that it gets you thrown out of the group.

My second point is that the service language conservatives perform can be likened to the traffic lights on freeway on-ramps. They are an inconvenience—there is no point in denying it—because they make you stop when you are in a hurry. Their function is to allow “new traffic” onto the freeway at a rate that allows it to merge with the “old traffic” already on the freeway without causing accidents or traffic jams. The liberals are right when they say that language changes, but that does not establish that any rate of change is as good as any other. My position is that slow steady change in language is good. It allows new traffic and it helps prevent accidents and traffic jams.

Let me give you an example. Advocate was once a transitive verb, like identify. When someone says “I identify…” you expect him—there’s another knot, “him”—to say what he identifies. Now we “advocate for…” You don’t have to advocate anything in particular; you just have to “advocate for” certain people, or, commonly, “advocate on behalf of” certain people. We can’t use the word both ways. It will represent the people whose views we are supporting or it will represent the idea we are supporting. It will not do both jobs at once and alternating them like a committee of running backs, is worse. “Advocating for” functions like “Mistakes were made.”

That brings us to point one. My first point was that there should be other criteria than simply “is communication still possible?” What criteria? Here are some candidates. Speech can be beautiful; why not aspire to that? Speech can be pellucidly clear; why not aspire to that? “People who use language skillfully and with respect” can be an identifiable group so that people can aspire to belong to it. That’s a good thing. Careful users don’t have to be “grammar nazis.” A lot of companies pay good salaries to people who can use language well. I don’t mean just attorneys, whose lack of precision could cost a company millions of dollars. I am thinking also of a catalogue I used to get which contained delightful and whimsical descriptions of the clothes in the catalogue—at roughly triple the price you would pay for them elsewhere without the description. I never bought any of the clothes, but I relished the descriptions for many years and appreciated the companies who hired the writers.

That’s my pitch as a language conservative. It is not our job just to say No to new uses. It is our job to protect the integrity of the language as a whole by providing for the gradual assimilation of new uses, even bad ones, so there are fewer accidents and traffic jams. It is our job to continue to value language for its beauty and its clarity, as well as its short-term effectiveness. It is our job to make good usage a value on its own, so that other values, racism for instance, will not will not be able to slash and burn without opposition.

Conservative and proud.

The Star-spangled Banner

I've just spent some time with "The Star-spangled Banner." I don't really have anything new to say about it, but I want to say it anyway. This is the kind of post that has, in times past, induced friends to say, "You need something to do." But, honestly, this is what I like doing.

Some historical background helps a good deal, as this piece by Isaac Asimov shows. And I know I'm jumping ahead a little. The bombardment of Fort McHenry didn't occur until the night of September 13--14 and as I write this, it's still August.

It's in iambic pentameter. I didn't know that. It occurred to me to check when I noticed that "dawn's early light" from stanza one and "morning's first beam" from stanza three had the same stresses.

The experience of trying to find out what "the Banner" says is as good an argument as I have found for teaching the diagramming of sentences. There really isn't any other way to tell what it means. For instance, "twilight's last gleaming," "through the night," and "morning's first beam" identify the three relevant sightings. The first two are actual, the third only potential. It is the third one that provides the dramatic tension in the song. Those three together say, "We saw the flag last night at sundown and then again by the light of the explosions in the night. I wonder whether we will see it again at dawn."

The flag is "spangled" with stars in the sense that they mark the blue background as brightly as if they gleamed as metal would gleam. A spang, in Middle English, is a buckle or a clasp; spangel is a diminutive. So, "a little buckle." The stars, being cloth, do not gleam, of course, but they are as prominent, in "the morning's first beams" as if they really did gleam.

There is a roaring ambiguity in the fourth stanza. How are we to understand "when" in the phrase "conquer we must when our cause (it) is just?" Does it mean that our cause is just and therefore we will conquer? Does it mean that on those occasions when our cause is just, we will conquer--but not on other occasions, when our cause is not just? A plain reading favors the second interpretation. The occasion on which it was written favors the first.

I don't know what Francis Scott Key's own religious framework was, but I'd guess he was a Deist, as most of the Framers were. I notice, for instance, that of the three references to God, one uses the word "God" (In God is our trust), one uses "Heaven" (the heav'n-rescued land) and one "Power" (that made and preserved us a nation). It sounds like Jefferson's "the laws of nature and of nature's God" to me. Not that it matters. Maybe Key was just being poetic.

And finally, a summary of the account the poem gives, at one point per stanza. Stanza one: (In the morning) Can you see the flag? Stanza two: Yes, there it is. Stanza three: But the bad guys are gone. Stanza four: May we praise the Power that has delivered us!

A Nice Dilemma We Have Here

I began to be attracted to dilemma when I was an undergraduate at Wheaton and got to sing as part of the jury in a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial By Jury. "A nice dilemma we have here," sing the principals, "which calls for all our wit." It was mostly a nostalgic memory for me. Then, in 1974, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published. It contained some very practical advice for people facing dilemmas.

"What Phaedrus had been presented with by the facul­ty of the English Department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma, which is Greek for "two premises," has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull.

If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise, that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objec­tive or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.

Phaedrus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren't so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific de­tectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies "anything you like." Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three. In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, "rhetorical" ones. Phaedrus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.

One may throw sand in the bull’s eyes. He had al­ready done this with his statement that lack of knowledge of what Quality is constitutes incompetence.

One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Phaedrus could have told his questioners that the answer to this di­lemma was beyond his humble powers of solution, but the fact that he couldn't find an answer was no logical proof that an answer couldn't be found.

A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena. Phaedrus could simply have said, "The attempt to classify Quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it. I have already said it is undefinable," and left it at that."

I had just finished writing my dissertation at the time and was still very much attracted to the idea that you didn't always have to choose the horn on the left or the horn on the right. It also struck me for the first time when I read this passage that lemma meant something. Whoodathunkit?

So what kind of dilemma does a dilettante have? Since dilettante is defined, etymologically, as I do it, by what the person delights in, it doesn't sound too bad. Still, just as there are events you attend to on the basis of skills you attend from--more about both terms in a moment--there is the dilemma of what to pay attention to. If these are not the "horns" of a dilemma, they are...oh...the cushions.

I am hoping only to introduce in this post how it is that a dilettante would necessarily have dilemmas, so I will touch these two ideas, illustrate each, and send the post on its way. I think of "attending from" and "attending to" as a physical matter and as a cognitive matter. For those who are interested in the ideas themselves, the best short account is probably Michael Polanyi's marvellous little book, The Tacit Dimension.

Physically, I take all the infrastructure of hitting a baseball for granted so that I can attend to the ball itself. I attend FROM my stance in the box and my grip on the bat and the weight of the bat, et cetera, TO the ball. The dilemma is that you can't attend to both. Nothing works then. You have to attend TO the one FROM the other. And all is well if the infrastructure is stable and effective. It it isn't, you have to pay attention to it. Is my stance too wide? But then you are attending TO something you really need to be attending FROM if you are actually going to hit the ball. Batting slumps and other disasters ensue.

Cognitively, I assume certain things so I can attend to others. I assume that the behavior of public actors of all sorts, politicians for instance, is self-interested. To be fair, "self-interest" is a good thing and it may be minimal, as in staving off electoral disaster, or maximal, as in milking every situation for its maximum benefit to ME. Attending FROM this assumption, this lemma, I can observe acutely and accurately, the behavior of whatever public actors interest me. Should I be forced to doubt my assumption, to attend TO it--maybe there are kinds of instances or kinds of persons where this lemma does not hold-- rather than FROM it, the whole regime of observations goes awry and I fall into an "inference slump," which is like the batting slump, but harder to find and fix.

Even people like me who are spontaneously attracted to the delights of his own life face this dilemma. If you take real satisfaction in understanding what you are doing--that has been a prominent part of my life since the age of four--you have a source of satisfaction that is rich and extensive. But if you take pleasure in the events themselves, in the experience of them as opposed to the understanding of them, you find yourself facing the attending TO v. attending FROM dilemma.

I really suspect that my life would be richest and most satisfying if I attended sometimes TO and sometimes FROM, but that mealy-mouthed bit of advice is useful only if you know which is which, or rather when is when, and I confess that I do not. At least, I don't all the time.

A nice dilemma I have here.