For the Record: McWhorter

Divinity, via Cold Belly.

Apparently John McWhorter doesn't think being eminent in the field of linguistics qualifies anybody to talk about history or politics.

Took an undergrad course from him 20 yrs ago and he talked a LOT about Chomsky and how being a great linguist doesn’t make one an authority in any other field

— Gogi (@darealgogi) November 28, 2021

But it's OK if you're a Republican. That's where people really value amateurism.

Groomin'

Male chimps grooming (da da da da) on a Sunday afternoon, Via Cooler Insights.

David Brooks ("The Blindness of Social Wealth") begins with a story from Robert E. Hall's This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis That Imperils Home, Work, Politics, and Faith (2012) illustrating how you can you take a concept of "social wealth", understood here as a kind of capital of human relationships, as literal wealth, money in the bank, that you may be able to draw on in a tight financial spot, a share in a company you thought went bankrupt long ago and that turns out to be thriving:

Bob Hall was a rancher. In 1936, in the midst of the Depression, he was suffering from a cancer that was eating the flesh on the side of his face. His ranch had dwindled to nearly nothing, and weeks after bankers took the last of his livestock, Hall died, leaving his family deeply in debt.

His sons pleaded with anybody they could find to make a loan and save the family ranch. No one would do it. Finally, in desperation, they went to their neighbor, Buzz Newton, who was known for his miserliness, and asked him to co-sign a loan. “I always thought so much of your dad; he was the most generous man I have known,” Newton answered. “Yes, I’ll co-sign the note.”

Bob Hall’s grandson, also named Robert Hall, drew out the lesson in his book “This Land of Strangers,” noting: “The truth is, relationships are the most valuable and value-creating resource of any society. They are our lifelines to survive, grow and thrive.”

Which seems like a dubious moral to me; old Bob Hall had saved the ranch for his children not by the strategic investment in relationships but by heedlessly befriending anybody at all—all the decent people he'd been friends with turned the kids down. It was the least likely friend who came through, like the little man in the forest in the old fairy tales who gives the simple-minded third brother woodcutter a treasure in exchange for a charitably offered sandwich. Old Bob Hall wasn't a capitalist of friendship, he was a nice guy.

Yes I can—No you Kant—

Spitballer Dr. Johnson, sticking out his tongue, refutes the idealism of Bishop Berkeley. Drawing by Godescalc. Story at Frank's place (note that philosophically speaking Boswell was right and Johnson was wrong).

A seriously annoying op-ed in today's Times by Vlad Chituc and Paul Henne boasting that they have found empirical evidence that disproves an axiom from Emmanuel Kant, which is like saying you can disprove Euclid by baking a lasagna.

The axiom is the one leading up to the categorical imperative that "ought" implies "can", or:

one cannot be obligated to do something unless the thing in question is doable. For instance, there is no sense in which I am obligated to single-handedly solve global poverty, because it is not within my power to do so.

Apparently some analytical philosopher called Walter Sinnott-Armstrong contested that axiom in a celebrated paper of 1984 by the usual analytic method of combining a wild Talmudic imagination with a certain English linguistic prissiness, by constructing cases in which it would be possible to say that you are morally obliged to do something you can't do; as Chituc and Henne exemplify it,

Exchange: Trolled

Image via Scuzzfeed.

There was a troll in the comments to the Sarah Palin poem piece trying to bait commenter Avattoir. I don't block trolls, at least I haven't done so yet, but I do enjoy holding them up to public ridicule, especially when they are the kind of Breitbart commenter who thinks announcing he's gay entitles him to deny the validity of the trans woman's experience, and I'm much too vain to let my response languish at the bottom of the thread, so here it is:

stackedaktor  Avattoir • 3 days ago

Metaphorical overload.

Honestly, Palin did it better.

 

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  Avattoir  stackedaktor • 3 days ago

  In fairness, it's hard to out-dung an actual dung beetle.

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    stackedaktor  Avattoir • 2 days ago

    The rule that made my writing punchier:

    Omit needless words.

    -Thanks to Strunk and White.

Vowels of compassion

Some Americans, New York, December 2015. Photo by Esther Merono, Huffington Post.

This is about something that came up over at Alicublog over the course of the week involving linguistics, where I thought it might sort of be my duty to say something more boring than would be appropriate for the comment section there, as always the Best Party Ever, where you really want to look your nattiest at all times.

Also, while I may not actually have all that much to say, at least I'm going to spell it right, which is more than can be said for M.G. Oprea at the Federalist, whose post

How You Pronounce ‘Muslim’ Says A Lot About Your Politics

Ever notice how those on the Left pronounce ‘Muslim’ like ‘Mooss-lim’? Here’s what it means.

was the topic of discussion:

This pronunciation is code for “I’m not Islamaphobic.”

(That's how rightists spell "islamophobic", to show their contempt for traditional rules of word-formation, where a compound with an Ancient Greek stem like φόβια always uses the thematic vowel -o-,  still true in modern Greek incidentally.)

Cheap shots and a pair of Air Ernsts

Ron Fournier, via Ann Arbor Review of Books.

Dear Ron Fournier,

I hear that you wrote,

Count how many times Obama uses the words “I,” “me,” and “my.” Compare that number to how often he says, “You,” “we,” “our.” If the first number is greater than the second, Obama has failed.

The audacity of Pope

Image by FBarok via Ken's Birdhaus.

Buckleyist theologian Ramesh Ponnuru at Ten Miles Square:

“Inequality is the root of social evil,” Pope Francis wrote in a Twitter post yesterday, with words that thrilled the left worldwide more than anything he had said since denouncing “trickle-down theories” of economics. We could read the definite article in his latest statement as indicating that the pope believes all social evil has inequality at its root. The price of that reading, though, would be to render the statement absurd. (In an apostolic exhortation, Francis had called inequality the root of “social ills,” which also suggests that reading is mistaken.)

I don't know about the thrill among the worldwide left there, since I haven't heard about it in my own circle and Ponnuru doesn't offer any links, but I did think it was curious how he seems to think you could appeal to the tweet's English grammar as a window onto the Pope's thinking in what presumably started off in some other language, like maybe Italian.*

Sure enough, there's an original Italian tweet, and it seems pretty clarifying:

So

Not fooling anybody, but his piano teacher would be proud.

If you spend a certain amount of time listening to or overhearing NPR, as I have done in the mornings for years, you may not learn as much as you would from wider reading, but you do get a constant monitor on ongoing language change among the inhabitants of that Village and its friends, not only the catchphrases with a political significance but less obvious things, as when for instance people started using the semantically empty "going forward" at every opportunity.

So I've been noticing a really odd discourse pattern for the last several months, which—oops, there it is! When an interview subject begins the answer to a question with "so", in a [jump]

Cheap shots: Glitter edition

Liberal names start and finish with schwa, like "Amanda". From SodaHead.

The Washington Times ventures into the realm of linguistics:

A research paper by a team of University of Chicago political scientists found that liberals and conservatives, in addition to all of their other differences, have distinct tendencies when it comes to choosing names for their newborns. 

Names with the soft consonant “l” or that end in a long “a” — for example, President Obama’s daughter Malia — are more likely to be found in Democratic neighborhoods, while names with hard vowel sounds such as K, G or B — think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s sons Track and Trig — are more popular in Republican communities.

In fact the paper—"Liberellas versus Konservatives: Social Status, Ideology, and Birth
Names in the United States", by J. Eric Oliver, Thomas Wood, and Alexandra Bass—does not anywhere allege that /k/, /g/, and /b/ are vowels. Nor does it argue that conservatives give all their children boys' names (like Romney) and liberals give all their children girls' names (like Obama). For instance, Palin is a conservative but has given girls' names to some of her kids, though only the female ones. [jump]