Take the good with the bad

I hear athletes somewhat frequently saying during interviews that they would need to "take the good with the bad."  This is an inversion of how the expression once was and for most of us (I believe) still is, namely "take the bad with the good."  The obvious idea of the latter is that what we want are the good parts of something, but inevitably, taking the good parts will have undesired negative consequences.  I want a piece of cake. That's the good stuff. Unfortunately, eating it is likely to have several undesirable health  consequences.

I struggle to understand what "take the good with the bad" is trying to suggest. Interestingly, the second Google offering for this phrase was to The Free Dictionary wherein it was transformed into "take the bad with the good."  So, it seems, Google gags on the phrase "take the good with the bad." However, I googled "young people take the good with the bad" and the fourth entry (but the first relevant one) referred me to a New York Times article.  I was not suprised that page referred to was in the sports section. The title of the story was

Mets Take the Good With the Bad (Again)

This title, as it turns out, is strange given the fact that seems to have initiated the story. The first two paragraphs read:

Even when the Mets have good news to report, they still cannot shake the dark clouds.

Such was the case yesterday when the club eagerly announced signing Lance Johnson to a two-year contract extension, but then revealed that pitcher Paul Wilson may need arthroscopic surgery on his right throwing shoulder.

The problem here is that this takes the misuse of the original "take the bad with the good" to another level. The original phrase has it that one must take the bad aspects of some single thing along with the good things one wants. I presume that the same holds for the inverted phrase "take the good with the bad." However this New York Times story involves two quite unrelated things, the signing of one player and the need for surgery for another. It wouldn't be the first time a sports journalist, even with a highly regarded (by some) newspaper, used language in a way prescriptivists wouldn't like.

I have a confession to make. As I typed this blog, I found myself writing "take the good with the bad" instead of "take the bad with the good." This is a bit puzzling because I don't commonly do that sort of thing. Why would I do that? As I play with the two expressions in my head, I find that "take the good with the bad" flows more tripplingly off the tounge and sounds better to the ear (if not the brain). Am I nuts? Well, of course I am nuts. But do you share my experience?

Sleeping with Hamas

Bin Laden seems to have put out a tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera in which he says, in the words of NBC, that "the West's decision to cut aid to the Palestinians proves it is at war with Islam." This "breaking news" story went on to say that OBL claimed that "the blockade which the West is imposing on the government of Hamas proves that there is a Zionist crusader war on Islam."

OBL is engaging in The Big Lie approach to rabble-rousing in saying that the withdrawal of aid to the Palestinians by Western countries is part of some Zionist plot. It plays well, I'm sure, in the Arab world, but just seems foolish, I suspect, to most others, including educated Arabs. There is definitely a cultural war going on, but it is not Zionist inspired. It is inspired by Al Queda and others who know to a moral certainty that western democratic values like freedom of the press and separation of church and state, as well as the materialistic values of the West, are a threat to fundamentalist Muslim values. But the initial European, American, and Israeli reaction to the victory of Hamas strikes me as quite foolish as well.

Some forty or more years ago, while I was teaching at the University of Illinois, Professor Charles Osgood, a psycholinguist, gave me a paper he had written called, "Conservative Words and Radical Sentences in the Semantics of International Politics." Naturally, it has been consigned to some landfill somewhere but I have reserved a book containing the paper and will be getting it very shortly. However, I am too impatient to wait for it before blogging onword.

Back when Charles gave me a copy of this paper, the Cold War was very much in the minds of Americans and others and our government was engaged in negotiating treaties with the Soviet Union on such matters as nuclear test bans and arms reduction. Many Americans felt about entering into treaties with the Soviet Union the way Amerindians must have felt about entering into treaties with the American government for a constant refrain at the time was that we couldn't trust the Soviet Union to abide by any treaty we signed with them.

One of the points Osgood tried to make in this paper, is that the idea that we should negotiate treaties only with countries we trust, is back-assward (not a term Charles would have used). If one made a precondition of any international agreement that we trust the people we are negotiating with, there would be no agreements except, perhaps, for little things like trade agreements. The point of entering into a treaty with an enemy, Osgood said, is that by doing so can one begin to establish a foundation for mutual trust. This was certainly true of the treaties negotiated by the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. We did gradually learn to trust each other, at least a little bit.

Israel does not trust Hamas and vice versa. The United States and our European allies, such as they are, do not trust Hamas and vice versa. Nevertheless, the Palestinian people elected sufficient Hamas candidates to give them control of the Palestinian government and they did so because they had more confidence in Hamas to help them than in the PLO or any other Palestinian organization. The withdrawal of financial support from the Palestinian government is guaranteed to have one effect -- it will hurt the Palestinian people, a people that has enjoyed nothing but pain for many decades. It will not hurt Hamas.

Obviously, the correct action for the US and our European allies, and Israel, to take is to provide support to the Palestinian government. The blog One Jerusalem unhappily reports

The United States has lifted its total ban on dealing with Hamas while Israel is "considering contacts." Both are using the excuse of providing humanitarian aid. The fact is that the aid will do less for the people and more for propping up the terrorist regime. Let Hamas, its Arab, Iranian, and Russian allies shoulder the burden of keeping the government standing.

This is the sort of thinking Osgood deplored.

The facts are these. First, Hamas was elected in what appears to have been as fair an election as one could reasonably ask for and we, ostensibly, support those who support democracy. Second, withdrawing financial support for the Palestinian government/people will hurt only the people. Hamas can surely get, as One Jerusalem noted, whatever money it needs from its friends. Third, it is only by working with Hamas that there is any hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and those who have pledged to destroy Israel.

One Jerusalem says

Israel, the United States, and all civilized nations should impose a total cessation in aid. Its not like the Hamas supporting states are without the means of helping their cohorts.

This is the worst idea of all. The correct idea is to reduce the need for Hamas to rely on the bad guys for support in the hope that over time, some sort of rapprochement between Israel and the Palestinian state can emerge. The Cold War took 50 years or so to end. It might take that long for an Israeli-Hamas rapprochement to occur. In the meantime, the US can make it known to Hamas that the ultimate consequence of a serious escalation of violence against the Israeli people is that they will be wiped from the face of the earth. Mutual assured destruction is, perhaps, the most effective instrument for the development of peaceful relations ever invented. In one form or another, it is the source of the Geneva Convention and of the "normalization" of relations between the US and Russia.

So, you ask, "What does this have to do with language?" As Osgood noted, if I still recall what he said, we constantly get hung up on what he called "conservative words," words that pop out automatically in a context such as this and come with a good deal of political baggage. Words like "terrorist" and "propping up" (One Jerusalem) and "Zionist" and "crusader" (OBL) evoke preprogramed reactions in people and as such are inherently conservative. What is wanted is radical sentences, sentences that liberate us from these automatic reactions.

1. Israel should create contacts between its government and the Palestinian government.
2. The US and Europe should provide aid to the Palestinian state.

Israel's creating contacts with the Hamas government does not mean sleeping with them. It means "talking to them." Providing aid to the Palestinian state does not mean supporting or "propping up" Hamas politically. It means supporting the Palestinian people economically. One cannot control all of the consequences of one's actions. Proviing aid to the Palestinian state may help Hamas retain control but it has already earned the trust of the people so its not as if this aid will create something new.

In my personal opinion, the election victory of Hamas is the best thing that could happen because it brings Hamas out in the open. The Brits needed the political arm of the IRA (its public face) to talk to even while hostilities continued between the Brits and the military arm of the IRA. Israel could have a similar sort of situation with Hamas if not now, then perhaps soon.

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Tags: Osama bin Laden, political language, Hamas, Israel, the West,

The Language of Winning and Losing

Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah have declared that Hezbollah won a great victory over Israel. The fact is that they got moved away from the border between Israel and Lebanon and most people would see that as a setback. Additionally, Lebanese and UNIFIL forces will occupy the void left by Israel as it pulls back to its previous border. But there is another fact and that is that Arabs never win wars against non-Arabs as we normally use the term "win." The best they ever do is survive. The Afghans on the other hand actually win wars against invaders. Ask the former Soviet Union if you can find it.

In general, the best Arabs have been able to do is survive wars against others. And, in that context since these societies need to see themselves as winning at least some of the time, surviving constitutes winning. Saddam Hussein won the first Gulf War because he survived it (more or less). His Republican Guards were badly damaged as the second Gulf War showed And, he got run out of Kuwait. But Iraq survived and he survived as Iraq's leader so he won. In fact, of course, the two "no fly" zones were created and UN investigators harried him so he ended up in pretty bad shape. Too bad Bush didn't take note of that and keep our troops in Afghanistan.

Now, Hezbollah, though pushed back from the border, still maintains it won a great victory and with respect to three criteria for "winning" of relevance to the Arab context, they did. First, they survived. Second, according to my morning paper, the Lebanese government has decided that if Israel couldn't disarm Hezbollah, they sure couldn't so they will be able to keep their arms. And, finally, they did something that Syria, Jordan, and Egypt couldn't do -- they fought as fiercely and as effectively as did Israel and stymied the IDF long enough to have survived with their arms intact. This last bit is of no small importance. Israel will think two or three or four times before it reacts with the kind of fury it did this time to the sort of military insult Hezbollah delivered that triggered the invasion. Hezbollah also has shown Hamas the way to deal with Israel. Dig in deep and get from Iran all manner of anti-tank weapons, missiles, and whatever else can be moved quickly that can also be used with deadly force.

I have a bad habit of reacting in a bipolar way to events that involve winning and losing including not just wars but also football games. Right now, I am on the depressed side of the scale in regard to the future of Israel. Now that they have been exposed militarily, they must either finish their Maginot line and find a way to make it defendable, something the French didn't figure out, or start negotiating with their Arab neighbors as equals. Israel is still relatively safe from invasion since Hezbollah did not win its "victory" by fighting in an offensive manner but by playing a purely defensive game. And, of course, Israel has its doomsday weapons, which, I suspect are all targeted on Iran.

George Bush has a "winning" problem of his own. How does he get us out of Iraq while seeming to win. Senator Aiken, a Republican from Vermont, suggested well before the end of the Vietnam war that we should simply declare that we won and leave. The New Republic has a nice bit on Bush taking just this position now. Of course, we didn't take the good Senator's advice when it was given and our departure from Vietnam was something of an embarrassing spectacle as helicopters lifted people off the top of the embassy in a desperate attempt to get people out alive.

Its too bad that the terminally stupid Saddam did not report to the UN that he had no WMD of any kind. His ego couldn't take such an admission because that would mean his great victory in the first Gulf War was an empty one. What good is a victory if you are left unable to kick some butt? I fear George has the same ego problem. The administration claims we can't leave because chaos will ensue. One might ask, of course, how that chaos would differ from the present chaos. Right now, the average Iraqi is less safe walking the streets than he was under Saddam. That is a very sad fact and it is the clearest possible signal that George has lost the Iraq war. The fact is that only the partitioning of Iraq -- actually the ratification of what partitioning has already occurred (by Shiites in Basra laying claim to the south and its oil revenue and the Kurds continuing a solidification of its control of Kurdistan, a process initiated by establishment of the Northern "no fly" rule. There will be continuing conflict because there will not be a meeting of the minds as to what this partitioned Iraq will look like. The Shiites themselves will not be of one mind since there will be oil rich Shiites and not so oil rich Shiites. The Sunnis will be odd man out since they will be left with part of Baghdad and the western desert. They will not be happy about that. So, the only real question is how many more Americans, Brits, and whatever other allies we still have there will die?

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Tags: Hezbollah, Israel, military victory, Geroge Bush, Iraq, dead Americans

Proper English

My post on "Pet Linguistic Peeves" continues to draw responses long after it was published and this inspires me to take on the Defenders of the English Language, namely those who are offended by those who don't like nobody who uses double negatives or ain't happy with people who use "ain't" or busy theirselves with criticizing those who do not use reflexive pronouns properly.

One thing that amuses me is how this "offensive" language is characterized. Some refer to it as "bad English," others say is is "incorrect English," and still others would call it "improper English." I especially like "bad English," as apparently does the rock group "Bad English." The title song of their first albumn was called "Bad English." Oddly, while the lyrics of the song "Bad English" are bad poetry, I wouldn't say they employ "bad English." Perhaps I missed something.

One thing we should be absolutely clear on is that nonstandard dialects, i. e., dialects that employ "bad English," are not linguistically inferior to standard English. In fact, in some respects they are superior. Consider, for instance, that nasty word "ain't." In Standard English, our paradigm for contracted negative forms of the verb "be" in the present tense is

I **** going. We aren't going.
You aren't going. You aren't going.
She isn't going. They aren't going.

where "****" signifies the lack of a form. One nonstandard paradigm is

I ain't going. We ain't going.
You ain't going. You ain't going.
She ain't going. They ain't going.

What is wrong with this latter dialect? One might say that the contracted forms don't distinguish among the persons. The problem with that is that Standard English doesn't do so in the plural half of the paradigm. We use exactly the same form. In any event, the subject pronoun makes perfectly clear whether the speaker is employing the first person, second person, or third person. One might argue that the nonstandard dialect doesn't distinguish the singular from the plural forms. Sadly, for that argument, neither does Standard English in the second person. Moreover, except for the second person, the subject in the nonstandar paradigm clearly indicates whether a single person or more than one person is going. So, the arguments against the nonstandard paradigm fall flat on their faces.

There is one quite compelling reason to say that the Standard English paradigm is inferior to the nonstandard one. This reason is the absence of a form in the first person singular. It can't be a good thing for a dialect to fail to give its speakers a form to use when they wish to say "I negative-be-form going" to an intimate or in a causal gathering of people where informal English is the norm. Speakers can employ "am not," of course but that is a construction more appropriate to a formal occasions.

Let the slings and arrows of outraged linguistic sensibilities loose.

Another example demonstrating my claim that nonstandard varieties of English can be superior to Standard English is provided by reflexive pronouns. In Standard English we have

I like myself. We like ourselves.
You like yourself. You like yourselves.
He likes himself They like themselves.
She likes herself.

Typical nonstandard varieties have

I like myself. We like ourselves.
You like yourself. You like yourselves.
He likes hiself. They like theirselves.
She likes herself.

In Standard English, we use posessive pronouns ("my," "your,","our," in the first and second person but accusative prounouns ("him" and "they") in the third person as the base pronoun. The pronoun "her" goes both ways. Why in the world would a dialect want to do a thing like that? It makes no sense whatever. The nonstandard dialect given above is perfectly regular, using the possessive pronoun in all persons. I would think that having a rule with no exceptions is better than one with exceptions.

A more complex, and perhaps problematic, example that arguably favors the nonstandard variety concerns negative sentences. In Standard English, we use the morpheme "any" to mark when a word is in the scope of negation (an occurence of "not" whether contracted or not), as in

He isn't going anywhere with anyone tonight.

The nonstandard variety has

He isn't going nowhere with no one tonight.

In this dialect, speakers mark elements that are in the scope of negation with a semantically redundant negative marker. This irritates the hell out of English teachers and other Guardians of Linguistic Faith. Arguably, the nonstandard dialect wins again for it is more iconic to mark when a word is in the scope of the negative (is part of what is being negated) with a negative morpheme than with some other morpheme with no inherent relationship to negation. Interestingly, the nonstandard dialect is not unusual for it is common to handle negation in this way in langauges.

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Tags: standard English, nonstandard English, social prejudice

Too Happy To Post

It seems that I am more engaged as a blogger when I am angry rather than happy.  The combination of venting in regard to the abortion controversy, Creationism and Intelligent Design (which is anything but intelligent), the Bush Administration, Bush himself, retarded views of language, deceptive advertising, deceptive and illegal practices in the prosecution of death penalty cases, racist, misogynist, and other offensive uses of language, etc. and the results of the last general election have perhaps made me too happy to post. Election night itself brought me to tears because of the election of Obama, which meant we would not have Bush III, the large Democratic majorities in Congress, and the comments of an African-American of my generation who remarked that he could remember demonstrating to open up lunch counters in the South to African Americans by way of contrasting how things were to how they are. I was brought to tears because I participated in a demonstration to desegregate lunch counters in downtown Houston in the late Spring of 1960, a demonstration that appears directly to have caused them to open up.

Houston at the time had the most segregated large school system in the South, which should indicate the nature of the situation there at the time. I went to the all-White Rice University and hobnobbed with wealthy racists at debutante balls (an amazing social institution, but one that did provide free booze, food, and an opportunity to dance) though I was more or less penniless. I developed a distaste for rich people and racists which has stuck with me for 40 years. In any event, in late Spring of 1960, some 7 or 8 of us White Rice students went over to Texas Southern University, an all-Black  school, and volunteered to join them in the upcoming afore-mentioned demonstration, a march around the City Hall building. It occupied a relatively small square of land and we managed to stretch all around it.

Shortly after we began our demonstration, some 15-20 motorcycle cops showed, which alarmed me somewhat. We were, after all, being quite peaceful.  A very large number of cops showed up in the first hour, a hundred or so.  I suspect they were there not to protect our right to freedom of assembly, but to protect the building.  In any event, it was intimidating to say the least. There were TV crews there, of course.

The right wing uncle I lived with (free room and board to go along with Rice's free tuition for all is why I could go to Rice, so I was grateful) saw the demonstration and TV and I was marked in his eyes as a radical in training if not a radical already. My voting for Kennedy later on cemented his theory that i was at least pink. But his loyalty to family kept him from tossing me out.  I am still grateful for his help.

The funny thing about this story is that the following summer, either Newsweek or Time ran a story praising one of the two big Houston papers for its journalistic excellence in some respect or another. A week later, as I recall it, Time magazine ran a story Blackout in Houston, which described a late summer agreement of African-American and White leaders to cause the integration of downtown lunch counters and an agreement by the press to embargo the news about this for a week. It was the news embargo, a phenomenon not in keeping with high journalistic standards, that upset Time. It was probably a good idea however, since, though the story does indicate word got out to some degree, it did make the integration of these lunch counters a fait accompli and so no counter-demonstrations resulted.

Why lunch counters? It seems like such a trivial thing. But as I noted above, this was a racist city and I suspect it is still is with the shift of focus being from African-Americans to Latinos (or Hispanics, whichever is now correct). There are parts of Houston now that have Thai or Vietnamese street signs (don't recall what language), so those Whites who busy themselves hating people different from themselves have a lot of work cut out for them. The lunch counters were important because a lot of African-Americans worked downtown and there was nowhere they could go for an inexpensive hot lunch. Buses and lunch counters were the first targets of the civil rights movements because they were of greatest importance to the poor.

It is my guess, with Texas Southern and Rice being about to open their doors for students for the new school year, White leaders in Houston decided that the best thing for White Houston was to get rid of the source of radical agitation so they did. Rice, by the way, is no longer all White. It is my understanding that to break the charter created by William Marsh Rice that caused Rice to be all White, the school argued, falsely I believe, that it would go broke as a no tuition school and thus needed the charter to be broken. The courts agreed. Apparently busting one provision of a charter busts the whole thing.  So, Rice integrated.

Rice was very important to my social, intellectual, and political development because of the very bright students I got to know and talk with and some very smart, good professors, not just good mentors but good people. I learned about DWB (Driving While Black) from the psych professor Trent Wann, the most influential man in my life, from his stories of the travails of a good friend who taught at Texas Southern. So Rice was all White but it wasn't all bad. The students were almost all conservative, of course, since most came from Texas, a state that didn't know yet that it was a Republican state.

I apologize for this pretty self-flattering story but I assure you I was not and am not now all good. What I hope young people will take from it is the fact that though we have much that we need to do to combat racism (and the other -isms), we have come a very long way.  I hope you will also take away from this the fact that protesting injustice can be effective.

Voice Risk Analysis

The on line edition of the Guardian newspaper, Guardian Unlimited, a British publication had a story claiming that insurance benefit claimants are "to face lie detector tests" using Voice Risk Analysis technology. John Hutton, who is Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the UK, is the person responsible for this introduction of this so-called fraud detection device. He says

"Our investigators are successfully using sophisticated 21st century techniques to stop criminals. The introduction of this cutting-edge technology will be another weapon in the battle against benefit fraud."

Use of phrases like "sophisticated," "21st century technology," and "cutting edge," must make all British citizens jump with joy at this resourceful high tech bureaucrat.

The article notes that insurance companies have been using this technology "for years" to weed out "fraudsters." Of course, if it has been used for years, that could mean it is not a 21st century technology but merely a 20th century technology and that it surely by now not "cutting edge." Actually, a little digging into the research on Voice Stress Analysis devices shows them to have very dull edge.

The fact is, first, that pieces of voice risk analysis equipment are not "lie detectors." They have much lower reliability than lie detectors and, as we all know, even lie detectors are not accepted in American courts as proving the truth or falsity of claims by defendants and witnesses. I don't know whether the Brits accept them or not.

I have searched for the most recent research on the accuracy of voice risk analysis machines and the most recent I have found and can get access to is a paper called "Evaluation of Voice Stress Analysis Technology," written by Hopkins, C.S., et al, published in Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference in System Sciences, 2005. In this study, voice samples containing claims known to be true or false, were submitted to five different Voice Stress Analysis devices and five different device operators, three of whom had 26 or more years of law enforcement experience.

Brits will, I think, be unimpressed with their results for the strongest claim they could make is that these devices were more accurate than flipping a coin (my choice of language). I give you here the raw results of the study.
What we see here is that 198 true statements were coreectly determined to be true but 118 true statements were incorrectly determined to be false. We also see that 127 false statements were correctly determined to be false but 73 false statements were incorrectly determined to be true. In short, 37.3 per cent of the true statements were adjudged to be false and 36.5 per cent of the false statements were adjudged to be true. These five machines were therefore more or less equally good/bad at sorting out true and false statements. I wonder if the consistency of the devices in dealing with true and false statements will be comforting to citizens of the UK. Of course, we Americans are surely in much the same boat at least in the case of private insurers.

The authors of the paper note that polygraph and voice stress analyzers, are not “lie detectors,” contrary to the Guradian headline quoted above, "Benefit claimants to face lie detector tests," but then editors of on line and print journals do tend to prefer lively leads into stories to attract attention to strictly true ones. I illustrated this preference for the the lively in my blog Present Tense in Journalism.

I am less concerned with the "little white lies" of journalists than with the use and abuse of language by law enforcement and businesses. There are numerous ways in which this occurs ranging from judges forcing the use of transcripts of audio tapes to a jury's listening to the tapes themselves to "admissible" instances of the use of hearsay evidence. The problems with the latter is that there is overwhelming proof that people cannot recall any more than the gist of what they hear and that any given person's take on the gist of what someone has said will be highly unreliable due to the fact what what we take someone to have said reflects our contextual expectations in the context in which we hear it and the fact that memory for what people say and do is notoriously unreliable. As I noted in a footnote to my blog The Evolution of Language -- III that my wife once said something like "The grass has sprouted and I need to take the netting off," but I heard something like, "The grass has grown and I need to mow it," my error being due to what I had seen on letting her dog out while she was out of town. This may be an extreme case of mishearing but mishearing is as comonplace as speaking itself.

Bad Words -- X-Rated. Parental Guidance Suggested

The sound of a bad word has nothing whatever to do with its being bad. Virtually any bad English word will exist in some language somewhere as a good word. We should should also remember that Carlin's two-way words also provide evidence for that. One can say in polite company, "Would you hold Peter?" but not "Would you hold my peter?"

Is it the subject matter, then, that makes a bad word bad? Not entirely, for sure, for we have euphemisms for bad words -- "poop" for "shit" or "take a leakk" for "piss" or "make love" for "fuck" and this suggests that the subject matter per se isn't the problem either. However the social contexts in which these euphemisms occur has a bearing on their acceptability. A mother can ask of her child, "Do you need to make "pee-pee"?" in a gathering of other mothers. However, I don't think a middle-aged middle-class woman would likely say, "Please excuse me. I need to pee," to a group of middle-class women.

It appears then that the sound of a bad word has nothing to do with its being bad and that while the subject matter provides the source for bad words we have bad words with unproblematic sources (religion being the best example). The inference I draw is that it is the the word itself that is the problem and its boundaries of use are socially prescribed. A guy can say, "I need to piss," to a drinking buddy in a bar but not to a group of people in a formal business meeting.

In addition to the social context, the culture one grows up in has a bearing on what is and is not a bad word and how bad a bad word will be. In 1995, I taught in England and while wearing a fanny pack (a somewhat outmoded small bag one straps around one's waist) and made the mistake of referring to it by that name. That got quite a response from my students. It seems that "fanny" in British English is equivalent to "pussy" in American English. That example provides further evidence that the sound of a word has nothing whatever to do with its being a bad word.

Once while a student at Rice in Houston I found myself in a small gathering of socially prominent people and a middle-agedwoman referred to a group of people as "coonasses." I, who am hard to shock, was shocked. I worried that the "coon" part might be a derogatory reference to African Americans and "ass" speaks for itself. That I was in very polite society and an adult woman had said it contributed to my distress. I later found out that "coonass" is just a slang word for cajuns, though not, I suspect, a totally nonpejorative word.

Not long after I moved to Ohio State, a lawyer in the Law School asked me to testify on behalf of a student who had been arrested for the use of "prurient" language (" Arousing or appealing to an inordinate interest in sex" -- Answers.com), which was against the law back then. Our late unlamented Vice President to President Nixon, Spiro Agnew, was in town and a group of Ohio State students was marching up High Street to downtown to protest his being there. As they marched a "street preacher" kept harassing them ultimately prompting one student to say, "Look, motherfucker, how come there's so many of us and so few of you?" A policeman heard this and arrested him on the spot. Later in court, he testified under oath that when he heard that, he instantly thought of someone fucking his mother. That would make the language prurient but it also made the cop either a liar or someone desperately in need of counseling.

I testified that, first, the cop's response was odd on the grounds that "motherfucker" doesn't mean "someone who fucks a/his mother." If it did, sentence (1) would be self-contradictory and it isn't.

(1) Look, motherfucker, I know you don't fuck your mother.

I also testified that in the case of many "fixed" or "frozen" expressions consisting of two or more morphemes, we do not normally "parse" them into their bits. When Barry Goldwater ran for President I didn't think of either gold or water and certainly didn't think of piss when I heard his name. And when I go down to our greenhouse, I don't think of it either as green or as a house. The same goes for "motherfucker." The force it has as an insult does not require that. Nor does the force of "cocksucker" depend on one parsing it into someone who sucks cocks. Another argument I made is that in different subcultures, a given bad word will vary in its force. Back in the 70's when I testified, I noted that "motherfucker" was very commonly used in the African American culture and I might (certainly could) have argued that among young White males, it was also commonly used. The high frequency of use in such subcultures leads to its loss of force. So, for the jury, which consisted of six middle-to-old aged White people, to convict a kid who lives in a subculture in which "motherfucker" is a commonplace curse word because it is shocking to them would be wrong.

Naturally, the jury convicted the kid. Fortunately, the Ohio Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the grounds I had argued at trial.

Three last notes. First, if you learn a language as an adult, it is very unlikely that you will be shocked by any of that language's bad words. Given this fact and the fact that the sound of a word has nothing to do per se with its being a bad word and that even the subject matter or meaning are insufficient to make a word bad, I think we must conclude that what any bad word is is a word our mamas and papas told us was bad. We are Pavlov's dog when it comes to how we react to bad words. Which is to say that we are still primitive people for we still respond to word magic. Second, I have never heard of a language that does not have bad words that are available for use to curse others, so there must be something very right about them. Finally, the more abusive and unacceptable a word is, the more likely it will be used, at least by American men, as a sign of affection for another man. That's the aspect of bad words I really like.

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Tags: taboo expressions, dirty talk, language, George Carlin

Playing God

I very rarely read anything in the Faith and Values section of my daily newspaper because it is really a Faith and Faith section. Yesterday, I was greeted by a story recounting an address by a "noted theologian" who claimed that evolution and intelligent design are not mutually exclusive. The headline for the story was quite silly -- "God and evolution can coexist" was how it was put. This is paired with comments by a paster and teacher at a Cleveland University. According to her, germline genetic engineering, that is, the altering of genes early in pregnancy, constitutes "playing God"? She also evokes the slippery slope argument asking, "How far do we go?" These religious persons seem to have wildly different conceptions of God.

The headline is silly because it links concepts from two different cognitive categories, that of beings (God) and a human cognitive construct (the theory of evolution). The theologian, unlike the headline, claims that evolution and intelligent design are not in conflict. This does not constitute a category error for both are human cognitive constructs. Where they differ is that those studying evolution make falsifiable claims and therefore are engaged in an empirical enterprise while those "studying" intelligent design do not make falsifiable predictions and are therefore not engaged in an empirical enterprise. For that reason, we must dismiss intelligent design as being nothing more than bad metaphysics.

I am reminded of picking up the great German theologian Paul Tillich at the airport in Houston, Texas in the late 50's or early 60's to take him to Rice University where he was to give a talk. I told him that the Texas legislature in its infinite wisdom had decided or was considering deciding to require all state employees and/or all teachers to affirm their belief in a "Supreme Being." Tillich's responses was: "Bah, bad metaphysics." He would be even more aghast at the notion of "intelligent design."

The theologian, John F. Haught, does say some useful things, namely that believers in intelligent design see God as having an engineering capacity. "They want a magician," he says. He prefers the view that God is a being who can create a universe that can create itself rather than a God who "is pulling all the strings directly." I have no idea what this means but it is fun to think about. What he seems to be saying is that God may have posited whatever amount of energy and matter that exists in the universe as an unstable ball which explodes and morphs into gobs of different things and that somehow the "laws" of physics evolve to regulate how matter and energy will behave. This would turn the "laws" of physics into necessary truths. As I said, I have no idea what this really means.

I am more interested in the pastor's claim that altering genes in fetuses constitutes "playing God." This presuppose precisely the view of God that Haught dismisses, namely that of God as an engineer, pulling all the strings. In fact, anyone who has carried a child or been with a woman who is carrying a child knows two things: it is a difficult 9 months for the woman and it is a crying shame if this 9 months were to end with a child with birth defects that were correctable. It would criminal to prohibit people from allowing such gene alterations for it burdens the parents and the child with problems that are extremely difficult to cope with. To reply that this would be "God's Will" is a load of crap unless you really like J.B.'s notion that "If God is God, God is not good; If God is good, God is not God."

Would it be good if every set of parents were to decide that they want a blond blue-eyed boy who has an IQ of 200 and the athletic talent of Michael Jordan and will live forever? No, it wouldn't. And the pastor is right to be concerned that genetic engineering will be used for purposes that are problematic. After all, after China passed its "one child" rule for parents, sonograms were used to determine the sex of fetuses and many parents chose to abort females, a practice that also seems to occur in India. And it is not unknown for parents to simply kill female babies. China has tried to take measures to strictly limit the use of sonograms. I do not know what India has done. It has been speculated that both countries will experience significant social problems as very large numbers of males will not be able to have wifes. So long as genetic engineering is restricted to correcting correctable problems not enhance an already sound fetus, I can't see how any reasonable person could object but I suspect someone will tell me how that is possible in fact.

Here are set of options for conceiving God as a creator: God creates a universe that creates itself, Haught's position; God creates a universe and stipulates its laws of physics as well as other constraints and leaves things alone; God does the latter but continues to meddle with the universe; God does the latter but also takes a personal interest in each of us, punishing us after we die if we are bad and rewarding us if we are good; God does the latter except that the punishments and rewards occur here; and finally God creates everything, stipulates the laws for whatever needs them, meddles in our lives, punishes us and rewards us in this world and after we die. I think I was trained to believe in this last conception by the church my parents made me go to (a view of god my mother, at least, didn't actually believe -- their motivation was social) and I am an atheist only with respect to those theories that have a meddling God who engages in punishment and reward. I don't care about the other conceptions but I am intrigued by my construction of Haught's position.

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Tags: God, intelligent design, evolution, playing God, infanticide, germline corrections, genetic engineering, atheism, India, China

Spoken vs. Written English

Many years ago, I had a large number of Air Force Academy language teachers in an introductory linguistics course I was teaching and they told me that they had learned that given the limited time they had to teach foreign languages, they decided it would be better to focus entirely on teaching cadets to speak and understand the language, totally ignoring grammar. The principle was simple: it was better that the cadets be able to understand and be understood than to be grammatical given how much time would have to be spent on the latter to achieve any level of success. In foreign language teaching, if successful communication is the goal, then teachers should also eschew a concern with reading and writing the language.

What I have said above will be controversial. But the fact is that children learn to communicate in a language before they learn to read and write it and learning to read and write it takes time and a lot of effort. One of the reasons for this, especially in English or Chinese is the disconnect between speaking and writing. In Chinese, the disconnect is complete as the writing system is logographic. Because of this, speakers of different Chinese languages who are unable to communicate orally, can communicate via the writing system.

In English, the disconnect between speaking and writing is nothing like as complete as in Chinese. We have a very poor "phonetic" (actually "phonemic") system. A phonetic writing system would have a different symbol for each actual sound speakers make. This is not a good thing for, in English, we would have to have different symbols for the vowels in "cat," "cad," and "can." The first is shorter than the second. The third is nasal while the others are not and it is long, like that of "cad." Speakers of English are normally completely unaware that these are three different vowels. As a result we represent them by the same symbols. However, thanks to the fact that the vowels of English underwent massive changes after the writing system had settled down, there is a significant disconnect between how the same vowel letter in related words will be pronounced. The first vowels in "sane" and "sanity," two clearly related words, are pronounced quite differently. This is because of the Great Vowel Shift.

There is a significant disconnect between the principles for writing formal English and the principles that dictate how we talk. In the simplest case, we separate separate words from each other with spaces. If we equate these little spaces with short silences, then how we speak is way different from how we write. In his great Movie, Annie Hall, Woody Allen "an agitated Alvy [Woody Allen] explains to his calm friend Rob (Tony Roberts), that he thinks an acquaintance has made an anti-Semitic remark in a Jew-baiting incident:

You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, 'Did you eat yet or what?' And Tom Christie said, 'No, JEW?' Not 'Did you?'...JEW eat? JEW? You get it? JEW eat?"

In fact, in casual speech, "Did you eat?" would likely come out "jueet?", that is, as a single sound sequence with no silences separating words and "did you" coming out as a sequence of just two sounds, the first sound in "Jew" and the vowel sound of "sue." The three sounds of "did" are reduced to a single "d" and this "d" is palatalized by the first sound of "you," which is a palatal glide much like the first sound of "yes, giving as its result a sound much like the first consonant of "judge." In short, this "juh" sound replaces "d + y." There are languages that routinely palatalize consonants. English is fond of doing that in casual speech.

Now, you would have to be a mad man to suggest that we write, "Did you eat?" as "jueet." It makes enormous good sense to separate individual words off from each other by spaces in written language for maximum clarity and enormous good sense to run the corresponding sounds together in casual speech by way of making speaking easier. Careful, precise speaking equals very slow speech and none of us have the patience for that.¹

So, just focusing on pronunciation, we can see that speech and writing are quite different systems. Speech is primary, of course, since speech came before writing historically (and there are spoken languages today that aren't written) and children learn to talk before they learn to write. This disconnect at the level of pronunciation and writing is so great that if you write a short story in which you try to reveal how your characters actually talk using the English writing system, you will go mad. The only way to do this is to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system many if not most linguists use to write down how people actually talk. If you did that, however, your readers wouldn't be able to read your dialog without learning the IPA as well.

There is also a disconnect between grammatical speech and grammatical writing but here is where right wing grammarians, who usually know nothing whatever about language, intrude their unwanted selves into the discussion by insisting that white middle class matrons, to take just one group, speak "correct English" or "proper English" as if "correct English" is like "correct answer" in an addition problem or "proper English" is like "proper dress." The reality is that people of different regions, different races, different genders, different ages, different social classes, and different language backgrounds (first vs. third generation immigrants, for instance) abide by different grammatical rules and calling one way of talking "good" and another "bad" is purely and simply the result of ignorance and prejudice.

Note well that I am talking about how we talk when I say that there are many "correct" or "good" ways of talking (as many "correct" and "good" ways as there are different ways of talking, as a matter of fact), but how we write English is an entirely different matter. It is of very great importance that everyone learn to write and spell (ugh!) a single kind of English for only if we do that can we hope to communicate with others within the borders of USA, as well as outside. I know that this blog is read by people around the globe. By now, it is entirely possible that at least one person in every country of the world has read at least a paragraph or two of this blog. As of 9:22 a. m. on Saturday, April 22, 2006, people from 15 different countries and a couple from unidentified countries had graced these pages. One can hope these "unknowns" are Chinese people who are thwarting the efforts of their government to censor what they can read on the web. As of that time, only S. America was unrepresented among the major land masses. This obviously would not be possible if I didn't write in something like Standard English. The real icing on this literary cake is that we can all read the English literature (literary, academic, religious, and historical writings as well as many other kinds of literature) of the past, going back as far as Shakespeare (with a little help) and Chaucer (with a fair amount of help). "Beowulf" (1100 AD), about three hundred years before Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," is written in a form of English we can't read. Had we standardized English writing at that time, then we would have almost as great a disconnect between our speaking and writing systems as is the case in Chinese.

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¹A closely related palatalization process can be found in the pair, "catch it" and "cat shit" and the pair "why choose?" and "white shoes." In both cases the pairs come out more or less the same in casual speech.

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Tags: spoken language, written language, Standard English

George Bush and Mrs. Malaprop

It is difficult to listen to George Bush speak and not think of Mrs. Malaprop, a very memorable character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, who had the habit of substituting contextually inappropriate words that often bear a certain (usually phonetic) similarity to an appropriate one. Another word that springs immediately to consciousness when thinking of characters in novels and George Bush is "falstaffian," which originated from the name, Sir John Falstaff, who was a character in Henry IV, Parts I and II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare. This character is famous for saying, "Discretion is the better part of valor" (because it saves ones life). President Bush definitely took heed of Falstaff's advice when he joined the National Guard during the Vietnam War. Let's focus, however, on possible accounts of President Bush's propensity to use contextually inappropriate words. I can think of four. Bush is a Nitwit; Bush is an Ignoramus; Bush is a Sociopath; and Bush may have some sort of speech disorder, perhaps a mild case of anomia.

George Bush has come up with some fairly amazing malapropisms, some of which are presented at the web site, Fun-With-Words, which provides examples from others as well.

(1) "I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well."
(2) "Natural gas is hemispheric... because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods."
(3) "The law I sign today directs new funds... to the task of collecting vital intelligence... on weapons of mass production."
(4) "Oftentimes, we live in a processed world, you know, people focus on the process and not results."

The question arises as to why George Bush makes so many such mistakes. One hypothesis is that he is a nitwit who is controlled by right wing zealots who do their best to protect him from himself by keeping him as far away from microphones as possible.

One might argue that this is hard to square with his Yale bachelor's degree and his MBA from Harvard. These are prestigious schools. The fact is, however, that a school like Yale has historically been a lot harder to get into than to get out of. But, if Yale is hard to get into, how did George Bush get in? It is clear that he got into Yale as a legacy admittee. According to the New Yorker magazine (I am quoting from a secondary source) Bush's verbal and math SAT scores were 180 points below the median for Yale, which suggests he may not have gotten in on his merits. But, of course, Ivy League schools are notorious for accepting legacy applicants because this encourages rich alums to give money to grease the admission wheels. Bush admitted he was a legacy entrant when he once replied to a question, saying, "I thought you were referring to my legacy," Bush said. "In my case, I had to knock on a lot of doors to follow the old man."

Once in, Bush had it made for Ivy league schools are also notoriously easy to get out of. In the 90's, the graduation rate at Yale was in the mid-90's. Maybe they have gotten lax, but I doubt it. So, it is reasonable to assume that President Bush not only eased into Yale, but he eased out as well. He was certainly not a very good student, saying himself in a Yale commencement ceremony, "To the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States."

It is alleged that George Bush was also a legacy admittee to the Harvard Business School as well, my source being the the article referred to that itself makes reference to the New Yorker. Certainly, someone who was not just a C student at Yale but also was in the 21st percentile of his class and who had never worked in business would not normally be admitted to the Harvard Business School. I have no data on how hard it is to graduate from the HBS.

So, the Nitwit Thesis has some legs as an account of Bush's propensity to misspeak. However, getting bad grades and getting into major private universities (dare I mention the National Guard as well?) because of who is father is, is not proof that President Bush is stupid -- that Karl Rove, as is believed by some, is Bush's Brain. Many perfectly intelligent people have skated through academia with bad grades but performed excellently in the post-graduate world.

There is a closely related thesis that might explain Bush's malapropisms and this is that he is simply ignorant -- this his education at Yale and Harvard fell on deaf ears. There is a good reason Ms. Condaleza Rice joined him as he tried to prepare to be President: he knew little or nothing about the world. And one characteristic of an ignorant person is that he or she will butcher the language in the process of trying to express himself or herself on matters of some complexity. I am myself reduced to false starts, monosyllables, and speaking with my hands when trying to communicate with carpenters, for instance. In my book on The Language of Politics (now going for the alarming price of $230 -- don't buy it at that price!!!) I discussed some problems President Reagan had with the language when speaking extemporaneously. In his case, I suspected he routinely did not understand the policies of his administration. Since I don't actually know what Bush did or didn't know at any given time, I won't pursue this Bush is an Ignoramus hypothesis attractive though it may be to some.

There is one particularly scary theory of the origin of Bush's malapropisms, and this is that Bush is a sociopath who is verbally facile when speaking of violence and punishment but falls apart when he comes to domestic policies. This Sociopath Thesis is due to Mark Crispin Miller in his book, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder. One can find a discussion of Miller's thesis in a Toronto Star story by Murray Whyte. This is an amazing thesis but Miller is not alone in holding it. Now, I can believe that most Right Wing zealots are sociopaths to a degree. How else can one explain their utter lack of empathy with those who exist in poverty and suffer from the psychologically damaging and economically limiting effects of racial and ethnic and other forms of prejudice? But the claim that Bush is a sociopath wants some proving. Since Miller's thesis is predicated on a contrast in fluency when talking about violence and when talking about such things as domestic policy, all it would take to knock down the argument is some examples of Bush waxing malapropistically when discussing war, violence, punishment, and the like. In fact, example (3) above would seem to be a case. But the principle underlying Miller's thesis is totally nutty, namely that if a person P is reduced to malaprops and other forms of gibberish when discussing topics of Type T1 but is fluent when discussing topics of Type T2, then there will be a psychological disorder that accounts for the fluency in discussing topics of Type T2.

I have long observed a person who was employed by a radio station in a city I once lived in whose verbal skills were even worse than Bush's. When he talked about sports, especially his favorite sports, he was typically reasonably fluent. But when the show drifted to topics within the sociology of sports verbal errors came flying out of his mouth at an alarming rate. Over time, he improved. He now has a national gig where his focus is exclusively on football and he does reasonably well. There are momentary problems but he is a competent and popular analyst. Now, is this person stupid? I am inclined to think that he isn't because he has a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of American football -- and believe me when I say that that knowledge is not easily acquired. He has a college degree as well but, as we all know, that means nothing but that the person is persistent. Suppose, then, that we move on to a hypothesis along the lines of Miller's Sociopath Thesis for Bush for this sports analyst. The problem is that there is no psychological disorder that can be associated with great verbal facility when talking football, but a lot of verbal blundering when talking about such things as the sociology of sports. This presents a bit of a problem with Miller's thesis since what is good for the goose (a psychological account of Bush's differential verbal skills) is good for the gander (a psychological account of our sport's personality's differential verbal skills).

There is another possibility that would cover both Bush and the sports analyst and this is that they suffer from some sort of verbal disorder that leads them to be exhibit a certain amount of anomia especially in contexts in which their knowledge is limited to some degree or the person is under stress (i. e., speaking to thousands or even millions of people). I have absolutely no evidence for this but it is the hypothesis that scares me the least. I would much rather believe that Bush has mild anomia than that he is stupid, ignorant, or a sociopath. I am not an expert on this but if any can direct me to an expert's discussion of this possibility I would appreciate it.

On Some Replies to the Abortion Blog

I write a blog about language and the abortion issue and to my great surprise the blog explodes with replies. There were many interesting responses and I would like to deal with a few here, rather in the reply section. But, first, I should thank the many positive things you said about this and other blogs on this site. It inspires me to continue.

Some persons -- notably Christian Pro-Lifers -- charged me with exhibiting bias. This is ironic since if I have an actual bias in regard to the abortion issue -- a point of view I bring to any thinking I do on the subject -- it is to oppose abortion. My wife and I dealt with an unexpected pregnancy by having our child. However, I have thought my way to the other side of the issue as the result of valuing other moral considerations over those I adopted as a result of early indoctrination by my religious teachers. One of these is my belief that I do not have the right to impose my personal morality on another person.

It was never my intent to debate the abortion issue but rather to speak to the role of language in this debate. Today I got a reply that leads me to engage in this debate in a small way to illuminate a more fundamental problem:

What reason is there for considering a human foetus not a human life? It is definitely made up of human cells, it is alive (if not aborted), and - as I illustrated earlier, it is uniquely individual. So what else is there?

What else is there? While the foetus may be "alive" in some sense of the term, it is not self-sustaining unless born in one way or another and even then requires constant supervision and nursing to stay alive. So, we have two things to think about here. The first is that the foetus can stay alive only within the womb of a woman for some period of time, which brings me to the second point. In a free society, it is understood that the government cannot interfere with what men do to their own bodies in ways that do not apply equally to women, such as restricting us in regard to what drugs we may consume -- either by prohibiting the use of illegal "recreational drugs" or limiting the use of legal drugs. Yet there are some that believe that the bodies of women who are pregnant are property of the state in that they can be required to carry a foetus to term. I find this differential treatment between men and women intolerable. As a man, I would never take the position that I could require my wife to carry a foetus to full term. I would have the option to divorce her if she didn't do so. Indeed, I exist only because a man -- my father -- did divorce his first wife because she had an abortion (actually three -- he was a bit dim about recognizing the outward signs of pregnancy so it took awhile before he could lay down his ultimatum). There are other reasons to come down in favor of Roe v. Wade of course but this is the main one.

Our Pro-Lifer had more to say, including

Really, to believe that a human foetus is not a living human being, one has to rely entirely on aesthetic judgements, right? If there is another way to come to such a conclusion, please enlighten me. You can leave a comment on one of the posts at my blog at [this site]

I gave "another way" to get to the position of defending Roe v. Wade in my preceding paragraph. What I would like to note now is that we have here the signs of someone who doesn't have a clue as to what would and would not constitute an argument against those who support the Roe v. Wade decision. Never, ever have I heard an "aesthetic" argument in favor of a woman's right to do with her body what she wants to do. What in the world would constitute an aesthetic consideration that would favor having an abortion? Could it be that this poster believes that those who wish to have an abortion do so only because they don't want their bellies to expand making them less attractive (an aesthetic consideration) to their husbands? What we have here is an example of what happens when our educational system fails to train people how to think, and that includes not just our K-12 schools but our universities as well.

The ability to think consists of an ability to (a) frame hypotheses, (b) recognize the difference between empirical and nonempirical hypotheses, and (c) recognize the strengths and weaknesses of hypotheses on empirical and logical grounds. A serious problem with the abortion debate is the inability of many or even most participants, especially on the Pro-Life side, to recognize the difference between relevant and irrelevant arguments (quoting the Bible does not constitute giving an argument of any consequence whatever) and to evaluate the distinction between good and bad relevant arguments. This same problem has infected the debate over creationism and intelligent design, but since I so far have nothing of linguistic interest to contribute to these controversies I shall not blog on them now. But as a citizen I find myself dismayed by the continuing effort of the Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist movement to force their views on the American people. If you are Pro-Life because you, like I, sang the bible school song starting off "Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so" and you have generalized that confidence in the Bible to other issues than whether or not Jesus loves you such as the abortion issue I worry about you. After 9/11, we should all recognize the danger of religious fundamentalism, including Right Wing Christian Fundamentalism..

Tags: language, abortion

How do We Know When a Policy has Failed?

In my morning paper yesterday, there was a story presenting Tony Blair's reaction to the escape of 3 suspected terrorists who were under "partial arrest." The Brits were holding them to keep them from traveling overseas to carry out terrorist attacks. In short, the Brits were trying to protect others from terrorist attacks. Blair wants to toughen the British laws for dealing with such terrorists. The predictable response of Civil-liberties campaigners to Blair's call for tougher measures was

"Punishment without trial is a failed policy on both sides of the Atlantic," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human-rights group Liberty.

This raises the question as to when can we definitively say that a policy has succeeded or failed?

For anyone to make a warranted claim that a policy has failed, one must articulate what one takes the goals of that policy to be and then demonstrate how the policy has failed to satisfy those goals. Our Civil Libertarian did not do that, and for good reason. He can't. The goal of the British and American anti-terrorist laws, however distasteful they my be, is to prevent terrorist attacks. And, since the 9/11/01 attack in the US and the attacks on the London transport system on 7/7/05, there have been no substantive terrorist attacks in these two countries despite the fact that they are the two countries which, not counting Israel, are most despised by Muslim terrorists. By any concrete measure of success or failure, one would have to conclude that the domestic security policies of the two countries have been successful.

It is always possible, of course, that the absence of terrorist attacks in the US and UK since those in 01 and 05 is not at all due to the special domestic security laws of the two countries. One could make an argument that conventional police work has been sufficient to stop most terrorist attacks. Sometimes it is the incompetence of the terrorist that causes a failed attempt. I give you Richard Reid. who wanted to bring down an airliner with a shoe bomb. He was caught by persons on the airplane after an initial effort to set the bomb off failed and then tried, convicted, and sentenced in an American court of law, not some secret military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.

It could be that the draconian Homeland Security laws have nipped specific attacks in the bud but officials aren't telling us this because they don't want to provide potential terrorists with information as to how we go about catching them. Or we have not heard about such successes because there haven't been any. This is the Catch 22 that the CIA was in during the Cold War. We heard about its failures but it didn't want to tell us about its successes. One of the reasons why they might not have wanted to tell us about their successes is that they might have been more disturbing than the failures. I have in mind the overthrowing of the Allende government in Chile.

I understand why the US government wanted its Homeland Security apparatus. Terrorists represent a special class of criminal. I presume that some criminals might be reformable but terrorists are not in that class of criminals. Bank robbers know they are criminals. Terrorists believe they are not. They do what they do for reasons that seem to them to be perfectly rational and they see their actions as fully justified. American criminal law is ill-suited to dealing with terrorists.

Suppose that we have two groups of people we believe intend to engage in criminal acts. One group plans to rob a bank. The other intends to blow up the bank and kill everyone in the building housing the bank. One cannot arrest either group without probable cause and, given the application of standard provisions of criminal law, one cannot detain either group for more than a relatively short period of time without charging them with a crime. In advance of their carrying out their plans, the best one could hope for is a conspiracy charge. Sadly, that would surely mean that they would be offered a chance to get out on bail and move forward on their plans.

On a well-scripted TV show, our two sets of criminals would be shown putting their plans in action with, perhaps, our terrorist group planting of C4 all over the bank. At the last second, our heroic cops come in and arrest the bad guys red handed. In reality, while we may be willing to let the odd bank robbery happen because we didn't have enough evidence to arrest and incarcerate the bank robbers before the act, we cannot allow the odd terrorist attack to take place because our ordinary criminal laws are insufficient to stop the attack. And that is the rub. The American system of justice is designed not to protect us from future crimes but to capture and punish those who have committed crimes. By its very nature, conventional criminal law is incapable of dealing with terrorists.

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?

There is an interesting story in the Washington Post by Susan D. Moeller noting the power photographs can have in moving public opinion. She sites specifically the Iwo Jima photograph which may be the most important war photograph ever. Ms Moeller notes that the image communicated that the US was winning the Pacific War at a time when the outcome was still, I believe, in doubt. The photographer, Joe Rosenthal, notes that 'World War II was the "good war.' And Americans were the liberators." A feel good picture for a feel good war, a war we had to win.

During the Vietnam War, there was a powerful photograph of a child who had torn off her burning clothes in the aftermath of a napalm attack in Saigon that may have had more influence than any 1,000 words I heard or read on the war. I talked to a veteran of that war who spent something like nine months at the border between North and South Vietnam, living in muddy trenches, about napalm being routinely used to drive back North Vietnamese trying to break through their lines. I asked if dieing from napalm burns was as horrible way to die as I imagined it was and he said, "Yes." He, of course, actually saw it happen. We worry about the effects of chemical weapons but no one worries about the use of napalm which is probably as bad as any chemical weapon. Napalm was the weapon of choice, along with grenades, in clearing out bunkers on South Pacific islands inhabited by Japanese soldiers. Bit I digress. The Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnam photo mentioned above was a feel bad picture of a feel bad war.

It is interesting to look at how it is that photographs have meaning. If you go back to my Blog on The Meaning of "Meaning," you will see that I make a crucial distinction between conventional meaning (literal meaning, more or less) and utterance significance, which is fundamentally dependant on context. We can say, for instance, that the utterance "Can you pass the salt?" has a conventional meaning in which it is an interrogative sentence for which, if taken literally, a "Yes" or "No" answer would be appropriate but would normally be used at a dinner table to request the salt. As such it has the significance of communicating a speaker desire that the addressee hand the salt to the speaker. In certain respects conventional meaning requires some reference to context -- who the referent of "you" is in that question/request would depend on context. Utterance significance depends on context in a much more fundamental way. This is also true of pictures. If you saw the Vietnam War photograph without knowing when or where or why it was taken, you would see horrified people running but would have no idea why the child has no clothes on and what sort of impact it might have had on viewers when it was published. For that you need context.

Photographs have something akin to conventional sentence meanings though there is no theory about how one should go about assigning a conventional meaning to a photograph. Any photograph can be thought of as a representation of some state of affairs (think "re-presentation of what was visible to the eye"). Had a reporter seen that state of affairs he or she might have described it verbally and this would be a verbal re-presentation of the visible state of affairs. It would take a very gifted writer to create a description that would match either of the photographs mentioned here in its impact.

The impact of a photograph is analogous to the significance of an utterance. The difference lies in the fact that there is no accepted theory of photograph interpretation analogous to the theories that have been proposed for how we interpret utterances. This is normally not an important consideration. Members of a family might sit around a bunch of family photos and talk about them in some informal way. No one ever says things like "Hey, you aren't supposed to interpret a photograph that way." There is no accepted way of interpreting photographs. Indeed, there is a very interesting description of the Thematic Apperception Test I suggest you may want to read in which psychiatrists or psychologists and others show photographs to people and ask them to describe what they are seeing. There wouldn't be such a test if people didn't differ a great deal in how they interpret photographs depending on their mental states or in the case of "normal" people on such factors as gender or race or culture.

There is one domain in which "objective" photographic interpretation becomes important and that is the law. Forensic photography is a critical aspect of crime detection because officers normally don't keep a crime scene open for repeat visits for very long and in some cases photographs can reveal things that the eye can't see, as when infrared photographs are used to document gunshot residue. Ultimately, what the detectives end up with is a bunch of photographs to study, the crime scene having long since been cleaned up. In this domain, methods of photographic interpretation become important. Naturally, of course, when a case goes to trial, the defense expert will tend to interpret the photographic evidence in the light most favorable to the defendant (without necessarily lying or obfuscating the facts) and the prosecution expert will offer the most incriminating interpretation of what the photograph shows.

Photographs are different from other sorts of graphic objects such as paintings, logos, and jewelry of various sorts. We think we know what a cross hanging from someone's neck "means" or what a swastika pin or tattoo "means" though the fact is that the "meanings" of such things can vary culturally. This is particularly true of the swastika. In some cases, when we see a piece of jewelry that is abstract in the way a swastika pin is, we suspect it has some significance. On CNN, the afternoon anchor said she ran across a guy wearing a pendant that she assumed had some significance but when she asked the guy what it meant he brushed her off. That afternoon she had a journalist on the show who had done research on "boy love" and "girl love" paedophiles and showed images of the "boy love" and "girl love" pendants paedophiles sometimes wear to communicate to others of their kind that they would welcome meeting them. The guy was wearing the "boy love" pendant.

So, I conclude this rambling post by saying that "No," a picture is not worth a thousand words both because but we can't really say what exact words would be equivalent to a picture and because in many cases no amount of words could have the impact of a picture. Indeed, I think poetry exists in part because ordinary language is inadequate to communicate feelings, emotions, and other important things. Indeed, we have coined the word "ineffable" for just such things.

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Tags: pictures, photographs, symbols, conventional meaning, significance, forensic linguistics

Cut and Run

In my morning paper, Ellen Goodman has an op-ed piece on the use by Republicans of "cut and run" to slur Democrats by suggesting that they are cowardly for urging creating a timetable for bringing our troops home. It says something about the character of Republicans that this is the best they can do by way of defending our open-ended war in Iraq. Since no American members of Congress are in any personal danger from attacks by insurgents and Shiite and Sunni militias, the question of their cowardice does not arise in a situation like this. If some soldier in Iraq says, "I want to get the hell out of Iraq right now" Bush could call him a "cut and run Marine."

Another pithy expression Bush and his supporters like to use against those who call for us to bring our troops home now is that we need to "stay the course." This, like the other expression, as Goodman notes, is a nautical term. Bush likes these military expressions. He is, after all, a self-proclaimed "War President," which is pretty good considering he took a coward's way out of the Vietnam War. I wonder what his Daddy would have done if the architects of our Vietnam War called up National Guard troops as frequently as his son does. Maybe get him in the Coast Guard?

In what has to be described as a cowardly "fly in and then cut and run" trip to Baghdad in which he did not even tell the Iraqi leader he was coming -- clear proof that he doesn't trust the Democratic Government he has caused to be installed not to leak this info to the insurgents -- Bush said in his radio address

"I traveled to Baghdad to personally show our nation's commitment to a free Iraq, because it is vital for the Iraqi people to know with certainty that America will not abandon them after we have come this far"

according to someone at the Daily Kos. (It is my policy not ever to listen to anything Bush says so I will have to take the writer's word for it. Its one of the things I do for my mental health.) Notice that Bush said "after we have come this far" not "after we have accomplished this much." Nothing has been accomplished in Vietnam (this was a Freudian Slip which I think I will not edit out because it reveals my true feelings about this war) with any lasting value other, I suppose, than deposing and then capturing Saddam.

You say, "Bush has caused a Democratic election to be held." I say, "Hitler came to power thanks to a democratic election." The fact is that the people are in much more danger today than they were under Saddam, especially those living in the two "no fly" zones. The fact is that Saddam was not a threat to his neighbors thanks to the two "no fly" zones and the fact that he had not rebuilt his army, one that we virtually destroyed the first time around. The fact is that Saddam was secular and the most likely outcome of this war will be an Islamic government. And it will be a government that rules brutally if the Shiite militias actions today can be taken as a fair example of what is in store once the Shiites take control of the South (easy) and the Central (not so easy) regions of Iraq. To pacify the West will require a level of brutality Saddam will admire. If smart, they will leave the Kurds and their pesh merga alone. In a story in the Christian Science Monitor, a Kurdish leader is quoted as saying

"Officially, there is no pesh merga, only the Iraqi Army," says Fareed Asasard, director of the Kurdistan Strategic Studies Center. "But still, you can see that the pesh merga remain. Maybe in some countries they have succeeded in changing militias into an army, but here, we continue to have pesh merga."

In fact, they will not go away just as Sadr's militia will not go away.

"Stay the course" is world class stupid as a policy no matter how good or bad the policy is. This sort of language is the work of intellectually and morally dishonest people who know that if they were to articulate the facts -- all the facts and nothing but the facts -- in support of their policy they would be forced to change course by getting the hell out of Iraq. About the only argument Bush can use now is that it is better to fight the terrorists in Iraq than here. But, of course, the terrorists wouldn't be in Iraq if we weren't there and so that argument says it is okay to use our soldiers as bait.

Bush's Best Case Scenario Thinking Goes Wrong Again

The Bush Administration has again been caught engaging in what I call "best case scenario thinking." My morning paper carried a NY Times article on Secretary of State Rice's admission that no one in the administration saw the Hamas victory in the election in Palestine coming. As was noted in the article :

LONDON, Jan. 29 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday that the United States had failed to understand the depth of hostility among Palestinians toward their longtime leaders. The hostility led to an election victory by the militant group Hamas that has reduced to tatters crucial assumptions underlying American policies and hopes in the Middle East.

As in the case of Iraq, the administration completely misjudged the likelihood that the people would respond in a positive way (i. e., in a way that would please George W. Bush) to the opportunity to have a democratic state and elect the "right" people. As Rice put it:

"I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

The article went on to say:

Immediately after the election, Bush administration officials said the results reflected a Palestinian desire for change and not necessarily an embrace of Hamas, which the United States, Israel and the European Union consider a terrorist organization sworn to Israel's destruction. But Ms. Rice's comments seemed to reflect a certain second-guessing over how the administration had failed to foresee, or factor into its thinking, the possibility of a Hamas victory.

In Iraq, we had the same failure to see that our actions, however nobly conceived, could go badly wrong. Bush and his administration did not foresee the looting of museums and other government buildings, did not appreciate the difficulties in rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq, and did notforesee the strong negative reaction to the overthrow of Saddam and, especially, to our continued presence in Iraq, to name just a few things that they didn't anticipate and plan for. This latter failure of foresight is especially telling -- what did Bush think the suddenly disenfranchised Sunnis would do? Why did he think that these Muslim people would not find the continued presence of Infidels to be offensive given the long history of such hostility.

It is pretty clear that the Bush administration does not worry overmuch about what might go wrong when we take action in the world -- keep the lid on Afghanistan, where, it seems, the Taliban continue to operate, overthrow Saddam and try to create a democratice state in Iraq, and aid and abet the free election of the leaders of the new (more or less) Palestinian State. These continuing failures to recognize and plan for what could go wrong in the Bush administration may simply reflect Bush's sunny disposition. Does he start every day singing "Oh what a beautiful morning, ...."? Or is it that he dismisses out of hand, information from our various agencies that suggest that actions he favors could have very bad outcomes. By now, I suppose the CIA doesn't bother to send over intelligence that conflicts with what Bush and his administration wants to do.

I cannot believe that the Israelis did not see a Hamas victory coming. If they did and they are our friends, they would surely have told someone in the Bush administration that there was a good chance this would happen. But, the Bush administration does not like to hear bad news. Too some degree, this failure and the Iraqi failure seems to reflect Bush's faith in the allure of democracy to people who have never experienced it. As Martin Indyk, a top Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration, said:

"But on the American side, the conceptual failure that contributed to disaster was the president's belief that democracy and elections solve everything."

This belief by Bush does not make him a bad person by any means -- it is a noble, and very idealistic, point of view. It just makes him a bad President.

An Advertiser Speaketh with Forked Tongue

I mentioned earlier that I may redo my book on the language of television advertising and that may still happen. In the interim, I saved via Tivo a number of final episodes of network shows to see what was happening in adult advertising (having skipped past most of them over the year). I ran across a really cute advertisement while watching Rocketman on BBCA, one that regularly runs on BBCA and perhaps other cable stations. It was an ad for CardioAssist. This name is a proper name or proper noun and therefore what philosophers have termed a "rigid designator" and as such ity is said to have no meaning -- it simply designates something. We know better -- at least those of us who accept my reasoning in "Individual Dolphins have Names?" blog. We know that there are two relevant kinds of meanings in play here -- conventional meanings and what I have called "understandings," which are a species of what I called "meaning as significance" in my blog "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." We associate significances with the things that proper names name and these may or may not reflect the meanings of the words that comprise them. In the case of "Michael Geis" we may be sure that whatever understandings you have of me which you have attached to my name do not reflect the meanings of "Michael" and "Geis."


This is not true of "CardioAssist." This compound noun immediately suggests that the product assists the heart in some way. Check out the two screen shots. The first claims overtly that this product lowers bad cholesterol, maintains good cholesterol, maintains triglycerides, and maintains homocysteines. The last three come with a disclaimer saying that the FDA has not evaluated the statements and goes on to say that "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

I am guessing that the first of these three claims does not come with the disclaimer in the first sentence because it has, say, oatmeal or something else that is said to lower cholesterol in it though possibly no more than a trace amount. I haven't looked. Perhaps someone will go into a health foods store, check, and report back. In any event, the last sentence of the disclaimer raises the question (no, it does not "beg the question," a misuse of language that gets on my nerves) as to why in hell anyone would want to take it. Though it may lower bad cholesterol, it may do so at a nontherapeutic, quite trivial level. They have said nothing that contradicts my strong assertion.

Finally, the ad gives us a picture of a happy heart, the product, and the phrase "Help your heart 4 ways" spilling out of a sketched heart. The phrase contains a classic "weasel word," namely "help." Put simply, if you ask me to help you move your sofa and I agree to do so but I pick up just one cushion and leave the rest to you, you will see me as having betrayed you, but literally speaking, what I said was true. I helped. In general, we use "help" to mean "help substantively" but advertisers do not. They have been doing this since I began studying advertising language and surely long before that --no doubt as long as there has been advertising. Advertisers do not have a free speech defense here since free speech has long been said to be limited to nonfalse claims and even on occasion nonfalse impicatures.

Commercials constitute a species of offer and offers come with what has been called by Speech Act theorists a "sincerity condition" according to which the offer must be a sincere one, that is meet the expectations of the addressee, that is, us in the viewing audience (you should watch Rocketman if you get a chance). Sincerity conditions are to offers and promises and questions and all other speech acts what truth conditions are to assertions -- indeed, the condition what what one asserts be belived to be true is the sincerity condition for assertions. If we cannot rely on people to tell the truth most of the time, we will quit listening to them. If we cannot rely on people to fulfill offers and promises, then we will stop listening to their offers and promises. As David Lewis noted, a convetnion of truthfulness is a condition on the existence of language. That claim should be generalized in the way I suggest. We clearly should not be listening to the advertisers of CardioAssist.

I confess that in my book on Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction I get rid of conventional speech act theory and nearly totally revamp the conditions on speech acts but not in a way that falsifies what I have just said.

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Tags: CardioAssist, speech acts, offers