Ticced Off

The fallout from John Davidson shouting "nigger," at this year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards continues. I'd like to say that I understand, but I don't. Jamie Foxx can claim all he wants that Mr. Davidson meant what he said, but the random shouting of obscenities (otherwise known as "coprolalia") is what Tourette's Syndrome is all about for many people, despite it not being a consistent feature of the disorder. (Not that Mr. Davidson himself hasn't joined in the pile-on, questioning why the BBC would chose to seat him near a live microphone.)

The word doesn't have intent grafted on to it. Its history is not an integral part of it. Yes, it had a lot of baggage. But there's no need to be saddled with that baggage, regardless of the circumstances. The word is a word. Nothing more, nothing less. And in this circumstance, it wasn't an expression of bigotry or anger; it was simply a vocal tic, of a sort that's been been known about for 200 years.

Beating up on the BBC is not going to make "nigger" go away. Just like accusing Mr. Davidson of bad faith can't suddenly rid him of his disease. And treating him as if he is just using it as cover for racial animus is to give into the generalized distrust that the Black community (especially here in the United States) seems to have for the rest of the world.

I'm still of the opinion that treating this as anything more than an unfortunate side effect of mental disease or defect grants "nigger" the very power that people seem so afraid that it has. Treating it much like any other six-letter word would go much farther towards defanging it than outrage and recrimination every time it appears on-air. 

Even Changes

Colloquial English has a habit of affirming things through negation of the opposite. One example of this is confirming that someone is correct about something by saying that: "They're not wrong." But since one of the functions of idiom is to make language more random, the meaning completely changes if "even" is added to that sentence; "They're not even wrong," is a way of saying that what the person has said is so completely nonsensical that it can't even be evaluated as correct or incorrect.

 It's interesting, in part because of the shift introduced by a change in the usage of "even," which is already one of those words where the meaning can't always even be inferred by context. The difference between the role of even in various negations, like "it's not even raining" and "that's not even a smart idea" sometimes simply has committed to memory.

The use of even in "not even wrong" has been traced back to theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was said to have used it to describe reasoning so faulty or speculative that it couldn't be discussed rigorously or scientifically. In the 70 or so years since the phrase was first coined in German, it's managed to find its way into English where it's become something of a general-purpose putdown of a person's argument, especially online. Which is kind of too bad, because it's a useful phrase; there are a number of times when speculation about a topic gets a bit out of hand, and the resulting conclusions come across as being completely out of left field.

You Say

Recently, large-scale layoffs at Microsoft have been the talk of the town, mainly because they've done quite a bit to erode people's confidence in the direction of the economy. The Trump Administration's haphazard tariff proclamations are unlikely to restore the high-wage jobs that are being shed, because they're not going overseas; they're simply being swept aside to make room for new technology.

When I was laid off from Microsoft just over six years ago, that's how I described it; I had been laid off from Microsoft. But now, a different way of talking about these things has emerged, with people referring to themselves as having been impacted by the layoffs.

I find it an interesting wording, because it makes the layoffs come across as a separate thing from what's actually happening to people. The layoff moves from an effect to a cause. And the loss of jobs is merely one of the effects of that cause. Whether it softens the blow, or this is simply people mirroring the way the company itself describes the events in question, I don't know. But I suspect that if this trend continues, it's going to lead to a change in the way people see both themselves and their jobs/careers.

And perhaps that's the point. While a lot of corporation-speak tends to strike me as essentially emergent, perhaps this particular turn of phrase is a matter of design. Language does, after all, shape the way people look at the world around them.

No Worries

We're choosing to spend more and more time with ourselves, more and more time, year after year, without feeling that special, important biological cue to be around other people. And that, I think, is something to be quite worried about.
Derek Thompson

I would like to think that this is the evolution of language in action. That "worry" is gradually shifting from, as Merriam-Webster puts it "to feel or experience concern or anxiety" to "work to make a change in a situation." Because worry, in and of itself, doesn't help anything. Taking action does. But maybe we aren't. Perhaps when journalists ask if people should be worried, and someone says "yes," everyone involved thinks that they're doing people a favor by adding just that much more concern or anxiety to the world.

If that's the case, it would be a shame. In Mr. Thompson's case, choosing to spend more time with other people, and less in solitary pursuits, is not particularly difficult to accomplish. It's uncomfortable for some, but most Americans could likely get away with it. It might even lead to some larger, and welcome, changes in the society at large. So why not just say "do it?"

To be sure, I have no idea. Maybe Mr. Thompson doesn't consider himself qualified to tell other people what to do. (Although I suspect that this isn't the case, from what I've heard of his podcast, Plain English.) Perhaps it's more likely that he understands that, isolating or not, people enjoy what they're currently doing. But that's simply speculation on my part, given that I'm not a mind reader. In any event, I do expect that a more active way of speaking about perceived problems would help. Sometimes, there aren't ready solutions to things. (Not that worry helps in those cases, either.) But when there are, having people go for it seems a better course of action than counseling concern.

Bad Words

Today's teapot tempest comes to us courtesy of National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, who during a recent episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, apparently referred to Haitans living in Springfield, Ohio as "niggers" before catching himself and calling them "migrants."

A prominent White Conservative referring to Black people as "niggers" should surprise precisely no one. It's about as newsworthy as water making things wet. The National Review is one of the big names in Conservative print media here in the United States, and I suspect that a portion of their readership refers to people as 'niggers" when they're out of earshot on a recurring basis. Even if Mr. Lowry personally finds such language abhorrent, I suspect that hearing it, and not just occasionally, was a regular part of his media career. So I'm not sure that the problem is that he said it.

In her X posting, Media Matters' Madeline Peltz notes: "Having a hard time coming to any conclusion besides the obvious one about what Lowry catches himself blurting out here." And I think that this is the real problem that Megyn Kelly, Mr. Lowry and Andy McCarthy are attempting to spin their way out of; the suspicion that the Conservative movement as a whole looks down on Black people, always has and doesn't have a problem with it.

Mr. McCarthy's explanation, that Mr. Lowry has used a short i sound when he meant to use the long version of the vowel, seems patently bogus. Because "ˈmīʹgərənt," with a clear "e" coming between the "g" and the "r," isn't how the word is pronounced, whether one says it ˈmī-grənt or ˈmī-grant. The idea that the otherwise articulate Mr. Lowry made such a bizarre error that just happened to make it sound like he said "nigger" strains credulity.

Racism is one of the few general-purpose charges that really sticks and is viewed a broadly disqualifying in the United States. For Mr. Lowry to have started out saying "nigger," and then catching himself, risks embarrassing the whole of the mainstream Conservative movement. Mainly because while the movement might not wish to be associated with White Nationalists, Antisemites, neo-Confederates et cetera, there's a belief that as long as such things aren't openly spoken of, those belief systems are tolerated, and thus Mr. Lowry was "saying the quiet part out loud."

Everyone understands that most political movements can't really afford to antagonize or jettison their radical elements and still remain politically viable unless the other side(s) also do so. The Left and Right of American politics are no different. But those radical elements threaten to tar the entire enterprise; which is part of the reason why so much political rhetoric is about making accusations that the radicals are really calling the shots. And the fact of the matter is that most partisans would be okay with the radical viewpoint on things. It may go father than they would themselves, but they tend to be more concerned with falling short of the mark than overshooting it. Non-partisans, however, have much less tolerance for radicals who take viewpoints to extremes. And this creates an incentive to appear less tolerant of radicals, and their language, than one might actually be.

C*rses

One of the things that I don't understand about swearing is why there is such a need to pretend that people aren't. It's common to hear things that would have scandalized people when I was young. Especially given that, when I was young "hell" was still considered to be inappropriate language in some quarters.

And so when people want to put "swear" words on book covers and have them sold in national chains, they simply replace the vowel with an asterisk... like so:

I can't imagine who they think won't know what these titles say.

So... why bother? It's not like people won't immediately recognize the titles as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Let That Shit Go. If we're not going to be Puritanical as a society, why on Earth would we pretend to be? Sure, there's still something of a taboo about using these terms around preadolescents, but even that is rapidly going the way of the dodo; I've been around children who "swore" like sailors.

References to sex, body parts/bodily functions and waste have pretty much lost all of their shock value, much like "damn" has. So why not just let them go? Language evolves, and sometimes rapidly, there are already new words that are moving onto the list of Think That One Shall Not Say, some of the ones that are currently there, accordingly, can go on to other things.

Vocal Insight

It's fairly common to see posts on LinkedIn that concern themselves with character. Some of them offer heuristics for determining character, like this one:

"A person's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation."

Mark Twain

So, here's a question: Can a person's character be learned from the accuracy with which they attribute quotes?

Because (as I'm sure you've guessed), this is not a Mark Twain quote. Let's unpack this a bit.

It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman: The Optimist, “Conversation” 1850

Samuel Clemens' wife, Olivia, is thought to have written the paraphrasing (using the language of the time) in her "commonplace book" as a teenager. And that's likely why this particular item became associated with him. As near as I can tell, it doesn't appear in any of Mr. Clemens' works - I was unable to find an attribution that came with a citation. The closest was one attribution with a date of 1907.

"Conversation" is an essay about the art of, well, conversation, and after the quote above, Mr. Tuckerman notes that whether someone is enthusiastic, dogmatic, subdued, acute, soulful or so on, can be determined by the words they use to describe the world around them. It's a fairly obvious point, when one thinks about it; it's common for people to understand the way a person speaks as indicative of not only their current mood, but their broader personality. People alter their speech patterns to convey a certain impression of themselves, even when the impression they're aiming for is authenticity; and they scrutinize the way others speak to look for clues for everything from past actions to future plans. Given that it's currently campaign season, examples of this abound.

Likewise, impressions are part of the goal of LinkedIn posts, or for that matter, a blog; for the writer to convey something about themselves through what they write, and what they write about. I don't know that I, personally, do a great job of that, being a rather... haphazard author. Although I'm sure that people have picked up on the fact that I can be a bit wordy at times.

It's Not Okay To Be Okay

D. C. United (because American soccer teams need to have names that make them sound like they're European soccer teams) have fired their head athletic trainer. The offense? Making a "discriminatory hand gesture." Despite the fact that "The 'OK' hand gesture — making a circle with the thumb and index finger while the other three fingers point out — is typically used to indicate that all is well," White supremacists and the sort have apparently started using it; the idea here being twofold. One is that, viewed in a certain way, the "okay" hand sign becomes the letters W and P, for "White power." The other is that, because it's also the okay sign, that when someone calls a person out for using it, that person can claim innocence. After all, it's just the okay sign. This all has led at least some people have started to think that it should be ceded to the far Right and abandoned by the rest of society.

This, as the saying goes, is why we can't have nice things.

To be sure, I'm not particularly worried about a slippery slope here. As with a lot of things, the decision that "okay" is now fit only for White supremacists is a completely arbitrary choice. Maybe the next time, the conclusion will be different.

What I find irritating about this is the fear. A small minority of the population has been able to, in effect, force a change in the visual lexicon of the United States because people are afraid of them, what they represent and the idea that their ideology is attractive enough to spread out of control.

Part of this is politics. National Republicans have put themselves in a position where they can't just kick the farthest of the far Right to the curb, and be done with them. This leads to a creeping anxiety that, at some point, that a combination of political expediency and negative partisanship will lead to the Republicans openly supporting the sort of racist and segregationist politicians that many people today want to think died out in the Deep South in the period immediately after the Civil Rights era.

But part of it is the realization that these sorts of ideologies often appeal to the disaffected, and there are an awful lot of disaffected people out there. And no one seems to be doing anything to make their lots in life better, because that would upset the apple cart that is the current status quo.

Now, I haven't seen the photograph in question. It's entirely possible that the former head athletic trainer for D. C. United is, in fact, a White supremacist. Personally, that doesn't strike me as a firing offense, but I don't work in D. C. United's human resources department, so what I think doesn't matter. Someone whose opinion of these things does actually matter may have seen some context in the picture that buttresses the choice they made.

The National Public Radio story on the whole thing, however, doesn't provide any information that would allow someone to conclude that the sign wasn't something innocuous. Part of the reason behind the fringes of the American Right adopting the sign, the logic goes, is that it's so ubiquitous that everybody does it. Calling it out, therefore, is likely to result in a high rate of false positives, and strike a lot of people (including myself) as hysterical.

Treating the White nationalist (or whatever else one wants to call them, or they're calling themselves) as if they were ten feet tall seems like an error to me. But I understand that fixing the underlying problems that they're taking advantage of is difficult, especially in a country where the idea that different groups are working at cross purposes over a zero-sum pie is taken for granted. But the reactive mode of dealing with them isn't going to work. History should have taught everyone that by now.

Detoxed

Let me start by admitting that I don't get it.

I suppose that what Steve Kelly is getting at is the idea that "toxic masculinity" is simply a lifestyle choice, and one that's somewhat appealing to a particular group of women. Okay... so? I'm pretty sure that there are men out there who prefer women with chins... not to mention skulls that aren't a full quarter of their body height.

But I guess what this cartoon is really about is Mr. Kelly leaning into the idea that that "toxic" and "traditional" (read: "stereotypically conservative") masculinity are one in the same. This sort of redefinition of terms that originate with people that the stereotypical conservative doesn't like is common enough that if I'm talking with a conservative acquaintance and a term like "wokeness" or "toxic masculinity" comes up, I immediately stop them and ask them to define the term for me, so I know what they're referring to. Otherwise, things are likely to go South quickly, as we talk past one another. Which, to be fair, happens often enough anyway. Usually because this or that conservative thinker swears that the idea that "toxic masculinity" refers to something genuinely corrosive is yet another hateful Leftist plot against America, and the person I'm talking to refuses to entertain that their favorite pundit may not have their facts straight.

But even with that, this is just a guy with noodles for arms and questionable fashion sense. I've met people who look every inch the part of urban hipster but would never have anything to do with Liberal politics. Physique and clothing choices aren't really very good indicators of broader social attitudes.

And I guess that's why I don't get it. The guy in the cartoon could be anyone. Sure, he'll never make a Marlboro advertisement, but the presumption that he's somehow incapable of espousing or living "traditional" masculine values is to make that box even more confining than it already is.

Wordy

I've been out of town for a bit (hence the recent gap in posts) and so spent some time catching up on LinkedIn this morning. One of my contacts reposted a link to a YouTube video about four ways to find meaning in life, drawing on the life experience of Doctor Viktor Frankl. The video never defined "meaning." An old manager of mine linked to a New York Post article decrying Woke movie reviews. I was pretty sure that the author had no idea of what "Woke" meant (or rather, was intended to mean), other than people whose politics they found to be too liberal/not patriotic enough.

The lack of a clear definition for "meaning" in articles that talk about how to find it is something I've gone on about before, so I won't bore you with it again.

What I'm really interested in is how people consistently use language in a way that implies that whatever definition they're using (or expect) for a term is universally held. Part of this is simply the way that language evolves; a given usage of a word makes it into everyday language and it crowds out previous usage in an informal process of substitution. While it can be alleged that the bastardization of the term "Woke" by Right-leaning commentators is part of a broader campaign to discredit their political opponents through linking their slogans to negative ideas (after all, Christopher Rufo has been quite open about wanting to link the term "Critical Race Theory" to policies that the general public would find frightening), the fact of the matter is that most people don't learn how language is used from reading dictionaries. Rather, they copy the usages that they encounter other people using when dealing with unfamiliar terms.

And this creates a phenomenon that can be described as definition without definition. The video on Viktor Frankl and meaning was vaguely inspirational and uplifting, the sort of mishmash of carefully selected anecdotes from a person's life that are trotted out when a certain image of the person is to be put forward. So while it never defines "meaning," it's inaccurate to say that to doesn't attempt to get across an idea of what "meaning" is, at least as far as the video's narration is concerned. It's the same thing with the complaining about Woke movie reviews. The article, rather than define Woke and then show how the reviews fit into that framework, makes attributions about people the author considers Woke, and leaves the audience to infer the contours of a Woke mindset from that.

But in either case, it leaves the audience without a clear understanding of any actual definition. When I ask people what is meant by "meaning," they tend to have a hard time coming up with anything other than the word itself. It leans towards the famous "I know it when I see it" standard.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

And from there, people's confidence in the objectivity of their own perceptions and worldviews takes over. But, as philosophers are often quick to point out, there's no way of knowing what is in other people's minds. And this leaves open the possibility that even if we all know meaning or Wokeness when we see it, that we don't all see the same things.

Up A Notch

[Oxfam] believe[s] that this growing economic divide is leading to death – from starvation, from lack of health care, from climate disasters, from gender-based violence exacerbated by financial pressures.

To describe these consequences, they use the term "economic violence," a term used in academic circles to describe the harm caused by, for example, taking away someone's income or damaging their property.
Oxfam says the rich got richer in the pandemic, and the wealth gap is killing the poor

It would have been nice for National Public Radio to state which "academic circles" they were referring to, but I know better than to expect that by now. In any event, I decided to look up "economic violence," because the term is new to me, and I've learned that when punchy new language comes on the scene, it's not always being used in the spirit in which it was coined. I found a definition in the European Institute for Gender Equality's "Glossary of definitions of rape, femicide and intimate partner violence," and that lends it more context than the NPR mention did.

Proposed definition of economic violence
Any act or behaviour which causes economic harm to the partner. Economic violence can take the form of, among others, property damage, restricting access to financial resources, education or the labour market, or not complying with economic responsibilities, such as alimony.

Personally, it strikes me as an over-broad definition of "violence," but I can understand the viewpoint, as the document seeks to catalog the ways that people do injury to one another in the service of gender-based violence.

I wonder, however, about the escalation in rhetoric. While definitions of violence have expanded to encompass fairly minor acts, such as "a verbal insult," I don't think that the common conceptualization of violence had caught up to it yet. That is, the mental picture that people have of violence is narrower, and more severe, than the conceptual space that many definitions of the term have sought to fill. At least here in the United States, anyway. Perhaps people in Europe have a broader understanding that takes into account that anything from skipping a child support payment to outright warfare all count as violence, and so there's a need for greater nuance than the word alone can provide.

I'm somewhat bummed that I came to a fascination with the way language evolves so recently. I wish that I'd paid more attention to linguistics when I was in high school and college. But, latecomer or not, here I am and one of the nice things about watching the evolution of language is that there isn't a bad seat in the house.

I don't know how long this will be top-of-mind for me, but I think I should keep an eye on terms like "economic violence," and see how they propagate through societies. I suspect that its inclusion in the NPR piece will lead to it popping up in other areas, especially if NPR's audience starts to expect to see it in other outlets they frequent. And given the partisan nature of discourse in the United States, it's likely to be enlisted in the Culture Wars. But only time will tell.

You Don't Say

John McWhorter has a rather snarky column in The Atlantic that takes aim at the Brandeis University Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center’s "Oppressive Language List." And I agree with his overall dismissive tone, as I myself find the list ridiculous. In no small part because one can see how it would spiral wildly out of control (after all, I've already used at least one idiom that could reasonably be placed on the list, and possibly two, and this is only the third sentence of the post) and the explanations that they give speak to specific people's specific sensitivities.

For example, according to the "Identity based language" sub-list, "African-American" can be oppressive because:

For Black folks born in the United States, hyphenating their identity can be interpreted as othering. Some folks do prefer to use African-American, particularly in connection to their ancestral roots, while others may identify with other ethnicities. We recommend using Black as a default, but being open to adjusting if asked to.

I don't at all relate to this. I use "Black" instead of "African-American" because in American English, the term African-American is, first and foremost, a descriptor of appearance, rather than place of (presumed) origin. Despite the fact that Tunisia and Egypt are both in Africa, Tunisians and Egyptians living in the United States are not considered African-Americans. The term is reserved for people from Sub-Saharan Africa, or, as they used to say, Black Africans. So if the term groups by visible characteristics, why not use a visual indicator?

One of the things that Mr. McWhorter points out, in the service of describing the entire exercise as more or less a fool's errand, is the "euphemism treadmill," coined by Steven Pinker. The basic gist of the treadmill, if it isn't obvious, is that negative connotations of words are not actually attached to the words themselves, and so when one term, like "moron," is replaced with another, like "retarded," the negative connotation follows, and becomes attached to the new term. In this way, terms that were once neutral, or even embraced, like "having special needs," acquire the same negative connotations of the terms they replaced.

So here (some four paragraphs in) is where I get to the point. Words become loaded by mutual consent. If someone calls me an African-American with the intent to "other" me, and I then feel set apart from other Americans, we've both agreed on that usage of language. If I shrug it off, and work to prevent myself from internalizing the supposed difference, then the speakers intent no longer carries any weight. If they don't intent to set me apart, then how I feel about their words relies on what I believe about what they've said.

There is nothing inherent to the term African-American that makes it oppressive. It's not a riot baton or water cannon wielded in anger. The Oppressive Language List says as much. "Can be interpreted as" does a lot of the heavy lifting. There will be people that tell me that an interpretation as "othering" is the correct one, there is a different group of people who will say otherwise. How I will feel about that word rests on which group of people I choose to believe. And it's that choice that imbues language with power. If someone intends to use language to oppress me, and I refuse to cooperate, what error have I made? What responsibility am I shirking when I decline to be offended?

And this is the genuine failure of projects like the Oppressive Language List. The PARC claims to recognize "that language is a powerful tool that can be used to perpetrate and perpetuate oppression." But what other "powerful tool" can operate only with the consent and cooperation, tacit or express, of the subject it is used on? If wood were able to say "yeah, I'm not feeling it today," and render saws impotent, would we still regard them as worthwhile? The power of language comes from the way we are taught to interact with it. Education and emotion, not linguistics, are what drives the euphemism treadmill. If "fetch" can be prevented from happening, "rule of thumb" can have its bogus folk etymology ignored.

Monster Mash

Languages change over time. And, occasionally, in real time; or so it seems. For example, the definition of "racism" is in a state of flux. When I was young, it was more or less understood that racism referred to an active dislike, if not outright hatred of, one or more groups of people based on their, well, race. The actual number of races and their boundaries was never really all that well defined, but if someone felt that all Asians were shifty or all Jews were greedy and dishonest, they were a prime candidate for the label.

Presently, there is a sizable constituency, mainly on the political Left, for the idea that racism is a form of wrongthink about race. The actual number of races and their boundaries are still not at all well defined, but if someone feels that Black Americans are actually in a somewhat decent place, or that there are broad cultural concepts common to all Latin Americans, they're a prime candidate for the new label.

But the old definition isn't actually dead yet. Unlike "terrific" which has pretty much lost any connection to "terror" over the past 150 years or so, the shift of the term racism from active hatred of a group of people to a systemic social force isn't yet complete. And so for a lot of people, the terms racist and racism still conjure up monsters, like literal Nazis, the old Skinhead movement or Ku Klux Klansmen; people who one would expect to do genuinely terrible things to people, simply for the crime of being different.

And I suspect that this monstrosity that lingers on the term is a large part of the reason why it's become so difficult to talk about race in the United States. A person who considers themselves "woke" may call out someone else for being racist for their support of something seen as cultural appropriation, but that someone else hears themselves being lumped in with the 20th century's worst villains. There might be many degrees of racism, but in day-to-day language one word to rule them all simply makes for confusion.

Not to mention shutting down conversations. Two parties to a conversation may realize that one of them is simply defending what they've come to think of as a neutral meritocracy. But if the only way to describe that is with the same words one would use to describe someone who's open bigotry allows them to assault or even kill someone, it's going to lead to a lot of misunderstandings.

But it's the nature of the beast. Language refuses to remain static, otherwise, modern English might still bear a passing resemblance to it's medieval roots. Eventually, I suspect, the transition will be complete, and racist will have lost much of its sting, that having been loaded onto another term for monster. But in the meantime, an unwillingness to recognize that language isn't the same thing to everyone will continue to torpedo attempts to communicate.

Placement

As I watched the House of Representatives debate its proposed $3 trillion relief bill last week, it occurred to me that no one was quite saying the obvious thing: We are all poorer now, and nothing the government does will fix that.
Megan McArdle. "We’re all poorer now. Nothing the government does can fix that."

This is going to be a post about language and baselining.

I find Ms. McArdle's use of the term "poorer" to be interesting, even though it is an accurate way of putting it. American English, as it is commonly spoken, doesn't require a positive, even when a comparative is used. It does, however, often imply one. That is to say, one can, as Ms. McArdle has, use the term "poorer" without someone or something having to be first "poor." But the use of "poorer" often implies "poor." And I wonder to what degree this sort of phrasing primes people to see themselves, either as individuals or in an aggregate, as poor. After all she could just as easily have noted that "We are all less wealthy now," and it would have conveyed the same point.

America’s per-capita gross domestic product stood at $58,392 in the fourth quarter of 2019. If that were to decline by a third, that would put our per-capita income back to roughly where it was at the end of 1993. Needless to say, 1993 was not a Hobbesian dystopia where lives were nasty, brutish and short.

But it was "poorer." And I wonder if that paints it as less desirable than it would appear if it were described as "less wealthy." Of course this all (quite literally) semantics, but I am curious about how the priming effect of such language works. If I say that Alice is poorer than Bob, and also that Daniel is less wealthy than Carol, how would a listener's mental images of Bob and Carol compare? Even though the listener knows nothing about how Alice and Daniel, or Bob and Carol, compare to one another, would they believe that they understand the ordering? While Daniel < Carol < Alice < Bob would be a perfectly plausible ordering of the four, would that be just as likely to come to mind as Alice < Bob < Daniel < Carol?

And this is where the baselining comes in. When we say that Alice is poorer than Bob, does it imply that both of them are poor, but in different degrees? Or only if it's also noted that Daniel is less wealthy than Carol? As you have likely gathered, I believe that it does in either case, but that could be just me.

And so I see an implication in that. An implication that 2020 and 1993 are both "poor," just in different measures, even though the positive measure of "poor" is never used to describe 1993 or 2020. Saying that to return to the GDP of 1993 makes us all poorer assigns poverty to it, even if we understand that life then was neither nasty, brutish nor short. In contrast, to say that one person, or one time, is less wealthy than another implies that both are wealthy; that they lie above whatever arbitrary baseline that divides wealth from poverty. But to say that we become poorer when we move from 2019's GDP to that of 1993 makes us poorer sets both of those times below the baseline. The tragedy is accentuated, as people become more acutely aware of their own feelings of poverty and deprivation and anticipate them becoming worse.

Or, maybe, it's just the language pedant in me, seeing a problem where none exists. Here's hoping.

New To You

As much as the pedant in me may find the word "unprecedented" to be wildly overused, it's reasonably clear to me what the news media is driving the definition of the word away from genuinely "having no precedent," which is how Merriam-Webster online currently defines the term, to something more akin to "unusual (perhaps highly so) in the current cultural context." Used in this way, "unprecedented" can be thought of as a form of neologism, although semantic shift is the proper name of the process taking place.

And this shift seems to be driven by the fact that in modern American English, "unusual," is a fairly mild world, since it can refer to anything that lies outside of the speaker's experience, even if it it commonplace for others. And so "unprecedented" is being moved into the open space left by the fact that there isn't word that means "(highly) unusual to more or less everyone." Or, at least, the speaker believes that it's unusual to their entire audience.

And it makes sense that this shift would be driven by the news media. Time is often at a premium, hyperbole often comes with the perception of genuine importance and there wasn't another readily-accessible word to be used. Interestingly enough, it fits the precedent.

Lowered

In The Atlantic, Megan Garber has an article on what she sees as the death of apologies from public figures. I'm not sure that I agree with her premises.

"There was a time" she notes, "In American public life when atonement was seen as a form of strength—a way not only to own up to one’s missteps, but also to do that classic work of crisis management: control the narrative." And it's worth noting that when Ms. Garber quotes Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and (George W.) Bush to back this up, all of them took or acknowledged responsibility. But none of them apologized, in the sense that their statements "clearly admitted wrongdoing." And this leaves aside the fact that the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra and Hurricane Katrina were not personal acts on the parts of the Presidents. Rather, the problem arose with failed government action. And this sets them apart from Louis C.K. and President Trump, whose actions, as noted in the article (Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct and President Trump's mocking a supporter he'd mistaken for a critic), were personal. Taking responsibility for the poor performance and/or missteps of an organization that one is in charge of is not the same as apologizing for a personal act of wrongdoing. And so this leaves us without the apples-to-apples comparison that would allow us (at least within the context of the article) to evaluate whether those perceived as powerful had been more forthcoming with mea culpas in the past.

In any event, the reasoning is that many public figures today operate within a relatively recent paradigm one "in which the true sign of power is not responsibility but impunity." Personally, I would argue that impunity is always a true sign of power, or at least significant power, although it may be more accurate to say that it is impunity that grants power in the first place. This is another reason why I am dubious that there was a culture of apologies at the top in earlier years.

By way of explanation of what may have changed, Ms. Garber notes: "And when humility gets confused with humiliation, defiance becomes a point of pride." This strikes me as somewhat akin to saying: "When carmine is confused for scarlet." Humility and humiliation are not terribly different from one another. Both words, unsurprisingly, have their origins in the Latin humilis, or "low." The difference between humility and humiliation is not in the end state, but how it is arrived at: whether it is one's own choice or imposed from without. It's like another derivative of humilis, "humble." "To be humble" is a different thing than "to be humbled," although again, the end state is the same.

In this, the idea that apology and humility were once seen as forms of strength represents a certain contradiction, but an explanatory one. Offering to lower oneself is often seen as magnanimous, but that doesn't mean that people are actually taken up on it. If we presume that Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Bush were offering genuine acts of contrition, then we must also note that it really went no further than the offer. While President Kennedy was assassinated, this didn't seem to be a direct reaction to the Bay of Pigs incident. President Reagan remained popular enough that George H. W. Bush was able to succeed him in the White House and President George W. Bush's tenure was marred by the "Great Recession" rather than the Hurricane Katrina response.

At one point, Mr. Garber quotes psychologist Harriet Lerner thusly: “For some men, the very act of apologizing, of simply saying ‘I was wrong, I made a mistake, I’m sorry,’ may feel unmanly, uncomfortable, if not intolerable.” And here I think is the important piece: The impunity that gives power also means that people who have it, generally men, don't have to lower themselves, nor suffer themselves to be lowered by others. And I think that it's worth noting that for many people, both humility and humiliation are undesirable in their leaders. Given this, it seems unlikely that the pattern that Ms. Garber sees will go away any time soon. There isn't enough benefit in being low that it's a universally rational choice.

Scrubbing Bubbles

On my list of words that I would like to remove from everyday English is "brainwashed." Mainly because, at least in my experience, it's become a moral distinction, rather than a simple description. While no-one likes to be deceived, it's generally possible to describe someone as having been fooled by a person or a circumstance without really calling them out as being morally lacking. But the term "brainwashed" carried no such forbearance, being loaded with not only the idea that the person doing the persuasion is malevolent, but clearly so; being brainwashed by someone is usually a mark of a level of credulity that's outside the norm (even when the supposed brainwashing is said to have happened to large numbers of people).

Not that the term doesn't have its legitimate uses, but I often encounter it as a term of derision for those that the speaker has decided are too stupid (another term that's more a moral differentiator than description) to remain right-thinking in the face of obvious falsehood. And it's this lack of compassion or understanding for other people that rankles me. Yes, I realize that expecting compassion or understanding from people is my first mistake. But still, given their potential to improve the world we live in, removing some of the barriers to them, especially linguistic ones, would be nice.

Stick or Stone?

Sticks and stones, according to the saying, may break one's bones, but words will never hurt one. It's a convenient aphorism that's often deployed when children complain that some or another child has called them a name. But it's rarely, I suspect, an effective one. And this, I believe, is mainly because for all that adults are willing to tell children that words don't really matter, they'd never really believed it themselves.

President Trump, when he said that certain unnamed United States Representatives should go back to their "home countries," kicked off yet another coffeepot conflagration. And a lot of discussion has been ignited over whether or not the President is racist. While I understand that it's something that a lot of people want to talk about, I think the focus on whether or not the term "racist" applies, either to the President directly or to his comments draws attention in the wrong directions.

When I was in high school, many of my classmates had no qualms about calling me "nigger" to my face. The common understanding of the reason for this was that those classmates were unreconstructed racists. But as I grew older, I started to realize that perhaps it had nothing to do with racism at all, rather, it was the fact that I was put out by being called nigger that prompted many of the people around me who used it. Or, to be more accurate, it was the expectation that I would be put out by being called nigger. In other words, a certain set of my classmates would call me nigger because they understood that this was an effective was to get under a Black person's skin.

And I suspect that President Trump, who reminds me of some of my more unpleasant classmates in other ways as well, is working under this same logic. When he Tweeted: "Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough," I suspect that this had nothing to do with their ethnic backgrounds. Rather, he was calling them out as "un-American" in a way that was easily at hand, and would resonate with the people who supported him. While the first is a guess on my part, based on past experience, “when the crowd at Trump’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday trained their eyes on Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, chanting ‘Send her back!’ in a play on Trump’s own words from a few days before,” the latter was proven.

Given this, does the label of "racist" make any particular difference? I understand those who feel that spades must be identified as spades, but the battle lines here were drawn some time ago, and the rhetoric has had its effect. The President's supporters have, once again, their proof that the President resents who they resent. Whether the President's resentment is real or feigned, in support of them or for reasons of the President's own, is beside the point at this stage. Representative Omar (and the other members of "The Squad") represents something threatening and un-Americans to them, whether that be the encroachment of non-Europeans/non-Christians or the abandonment of America's peculiar implementation of Capitalism, and the President's Tweets showed that he understood that. Race was tangential, not central, to that. Likewise, the American Right is coming to expect the charge of racism whenever it clashes with a non-White public figure, so much so that the term is losing any force that it may have had. Not that such force was universally useful in any event. Like any large collection of people, the American Right is diverse enough that it can be expected to have constituencies that will respond in a number of different ways to any given stimulus. There were always going to be people for whom the term "racist" simply wasn't important. I expect that President Trump is one such. He's unlikely to be motivated to put more work into his messaging, or be less direct in showing his followers that he understands their concerns, simply because Democrats call him on it.

Eventually I learned to disinvest in what my classmates would say about me. Not because it offered me any control over the situation; I'd come to understand that when it came to the verbal slights that were thrown in my direction, there was no control to be had. Instead, there was a certain peace. Not being caught up in something that I couldn't influence allowed me to shift my attention to more important things. To be sure, maybe for the people who find the charge of racism important, it is the highest item on their list of priorities. But if it's not, that energy may be better spent.

The Extremists' Censor

So Nike had apparently created a line of shoes for this Fourth of July with the flag attributed to Betsy Ross on it. They then pulled said line of shoes, after they'd already made and shipped them, due to complaints from Colin Kaepernick. At least, this is what the Wall Street Journal reports. From what I understand, this was based on anonymous sourcing, so I couldn't tell you how accurate it is. Of course, is being taken as ironclad truth, especially on the conservative side, some of whom (at least on LinkedIn) are now loudly decrying the lack of love of country on display.

But I get it. This sort of thing happens all the time. There is an understanding that White Supremacist and other "Alternative Right" groups have adopted the "Betsy Ross" flag as a symbol.

And... so?

Why cede this particular symbol to them? While I understand people being upset about Nike pulling a shoe with what is commonly regarded as a symbol of American history on it, it may have made more sense to push back against the idea that people who wish to deploy that symbol in the name of racism and nationalism should be allowed to retain it.

True, this sort of thing is par for the course. The swastika has been effectively given over entirely to the former Nazi Germany and those who would resurrect its ideology in the modern day, without any real thought to the other people who understand very different meanings for it. I'm of the opinion that we've done them a disservice, but that's neither here nor there. Fleeing from any symbolism appropriate by the wrong sorts of people, lest one be considered the wrong sort of person (or someone who sympathizes with them) oneself is unlikely to go away anytime soon. So instead, people are left to argue over what symbols should or should not be abandoned and whether ulterior motives or "hateful agendas" are actually at work.

The desire to purge discourse of symbolism used by extremists (however one defines that term) is understandable. The fear that extremists will use innocuous-seeming items to communicate and coordinate their actions in the public square, to the detriment of the public, is rational. But it's a game of whack-a-mole that can't ever be won. There are a few words and images that are so ubiquitous that attempting to use them as codes would be fruitless; but a lot of the language is fair game, and so the codes, like euphemisms and dysphemisms, will simply drift from one thing to the next. And the language, and the general body of speakers, will be the people who end up poorer for that.

Misuderstanded

The Black English gap, as one might call it, matters: It can affect people’s lives at crucial junctures. In 2007, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dissent claimed that when a black woman said, in terror, “He finna shoot me,” she may have been referring to something in the past, when in fact “finna” refers to the immediate future. “Why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dog?” Warren Demesme asked the police when accused of sexual assault in 2017. The statements one makes to law enforcement after requesting a lawyer are inadmissible—but Demesme’s rights were ignored because, it was argued, he’d requested a “lawyer dog,” not an actual attorney.
John McWhorter. "Could Black English Mean a Prison Sentence?"

These don't strike me as mistakes made by people who don't understand Black English. Or, to use it's longer name, African-American Vernacular English; "Ebonics" in the vulgar tongue. And while John McWhorter's broader point, which is that court transcribers who are unfamiliar with how many Black people speak can place into the record distortions of what people actually intended to say is well taken, it's worth separating that from what appear to be cynical attempts to use the fact that many White people find the way Black people talk to be something between bizarre and bastardized as a weapon against them.

Although I'm black myself, I don't speak Black English. Mr. McWhorter's opening example of “He come tell ’bout I’m gonna take the TV,” may as well have been Greek. The fact that “He come tell ’bout,” negates whatever comes after it (presumably, it means "he lied about") was complete news to me. But despite the fact that I haven't lived in a majority Black neighborhood (outside of my freshman dormatory in college) since I was too young to remember, I'm well aware of the fact that “finna” is short for "fixing (as in "preparing") to" and that in Mr. Demesme’s case, "dog" is effectively a synonym for "dude," "guy," "bro," mister," "pal," buddy," "fella" et cetera. These aren't particularly obscure usages. After all, I heard them on television all the time.

People who are tasked with either finding ways to win a person's freedom or place them behind bars don't really care if Black English is deficient or alternate when compared to Standard American English, or any other dialect of the language. What matters to them is that the language is different enough from what likely jurors and or judges are familiar with that nonsensical definitions of “finna” or “dog” will sound plausible.

And in that case, even the best educated and precise court stenographer won't make much of a difference.