Recently in Language Category

I've discovered the need to adopt a new way of speaking about people who are recently-descended from Africans. We've learned in the last couple decades that we ought to emphasize someone's personhood above any other characteristic, and thus it's thoroughly immoral to use any adjective in front of 'person'. We need to use predicate nouns instead. We no longer have sad people, for example. We simply have people with sadness. We no longer have short people. We have people with shortness. We don't want to define people with sadness as if their sadness is more important than their personhood, so we have a moral obligation to put the noun form after the word 'person'. Grammar does always indicate metaphysics, after all.

One sphere of language in which this lesson has never been properly applied is in the area of race. Why are we still talking about black people, for instance? Do we really want to define people solely in terms of their race? Do we really want to signal that their blackness is so central to who they are that we're going to pretend that people with blackness aren't people? If we call them black people, then we are treating their blackness as if it's a greater part of our conception of people with blackness than their personhood is. People with person-firstness have instructed us that we should never put disability-related adjectives in front of a noun or pronoun referring to a person, because we don't want them identified with that condition. But we've also learned from the same people that having a disability is not negative, which means this policy is not because disabilities are bad. Therefore, we ought to apply it to other cases when something is not bad but might wrongly be taken by someone to be bad, just as we would apply it to things that are genuinely bad. If race is not to be a negative, then I am not a white person. I'm a person with whiteness. It does make it a little awkward to speak of people with Asianness or people with Australian-first-people-ness (i.e. what used to be called aboriginalness). But it's worth the awkwardness of expression to avoid any chance of identifying them with the racial or ethnic group whose membership they possess.

Even worse, it's especially pernicious to say that someone is black (or African-American or whatever racial term we might choose). After all, using predicate adjectives amounts to making identity statements rather than merely ascribing a property to someone the way we would have thought that adjectives in English, even predicate adjectives, do. It's much more preferable to say that someone has blackness than to say that she is black. People aren't anything except persons. I'm not philosophical. I have philosophicalness. Glenn Beck is not unfair to his political adversaries. He has unfairness to the people who have political adversariness with him. President Obama is not bad at speaking without a teleprompter. He has badness at speaking without a teleprompter. I shouldn't say that I am Christian. I'm a person who has Christianity. I shouldn't be identified with my faith. I should claim, rather, to possess the entirety of Christianity, as if it belongs to me. We need to avoid identifying people with any property ascribed to them other than personhood. It's much better to say that they possess the entirety of the thing that formerly we would have used to describe them.

For more explanation, please see here (except you can ignore the sections explaining how people with blindness and people with deafness have offendedness at the obviously-correct way to refer to them, and you certainly shouldn't read person-with-autism Jim Sinclair's reasons for disliking person-first language).

I've firmly occupied the middle ground in the so-called inclusive language translation debates. Both sides have a point, and good translation needs to take both factors into account. There are things I like about how several recent translations do things, but no translation philosophy has gotten it quite right. I'm firmly convinced that the English language is changing, and there's no going back. In certain quarters it's changed enough that certain English speakers simply can't hear the so-called non-inclusive language as meaning what it once meant (when such language was actually inclusive: hence my use of "so-called" before speaking of the new style as "inclusive"). But I also think the complaints of sexism in the mere use of grammatically-masculine pronouns for gender-indeterminate or gender-unknown referents are exaggerated and overblown.

My main concern is not with the intrinsic worth of either way of translating. There's probably a place for both, with each serving a populace more comfortable with that translation method. But this should be non-absolute. A translation must have a tendency that it can go against, because there are cases where the method you predominantly use can obscure what the text says if you do it in a way that the other audience picking up the translation might hear wrongly, and I don't mean in interpreting "sons" to be only male or "he" to be only male. I mean in just hearing the text to say something it doesn't say in other ways.

The ESV of II Kings 23:10 reads:

And he defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.

To someone used to the use of "his" as a gender-inclusive pronoun, this is no problem. Josiah is the referent of the first "he". Josiah defiles Topheth so that no one might burn their own son or daughter. The way I just put it is the more contmporary way of saying it, and it precludes thinking that Josiah is worried about people burning Josiah's own son or daughter. But the way the ESV translates it, someone used to the more contemporary, so-called inclusive translations is going to think Josiah is scared to death of people going after his son or daughter, and so he defiles Topheth to prevent it. When I hear the ESV translation, it's the first thing I think, and I know better. Someone unfamiliar with the storyline is going to be pretty confused.

So I conclude that the ESV, in its consistent refusal to hear how contemporary English-speakers of my generation will hear a text like this, is actually translating in a way that conveys the wrong meaning. This is thus a mistranslation for a certain segment of the population (a growing segment). There are examples that go the other way, where the insistence on the so-called inclusive language obscures some important aspect of the meaning of a text. But this particular example is the kind of thing that gets ignored in Bible translation, and I thought it was worth drawing attention to it.

In every translation I've read of Aquinas' discussion of love, I find a completely worthless translation of the two categories of love he discusses. If you translate them with a formal-equivalence model, you get "the love of desire" and "the love of friendship". What he means by those is that the love of desire is when you love someone or something for the benefit you get from it or them, and the love of friendship is when you love someone in a way that takes what they desire as becoming among your own desires, and you desire it for its own sake and not just to get something out of them.

To an English speaker, the expressions "the love of desire" and "the love of friendship" suggest no such thing. They sound more like the thing you love is desire for the first, and the thing you love is friendship for the second. A much better translation would be "desire-love" and "friendship-love". Those preserve the connection with desire and friendship rather than paraphrasing them, but they change the form of the grammatical construction in order to remove the different sense that the form carries in English.

A formal-equivalence translation has this danger. It preserves the form as a higher priority than the basic meaning of the expression in its context, and you get this kind of misleading nonsense that someone teaching the material then has to explain. Isn't it better just to translate the expression in a way that conveys its meaning? If this can be done without altering the basic linguistic units, as my translation above does, then that's ideal. The problem with most dynamic-equivalence or thought-for-thought translations is that they don't do that. They might translate this as something like "self-seeking love" and "unconditional love". Such a translation would make no sense of Aquinas' attempt to explain why love having to do with desire is self-seeking and why love having to do with friendship is unconditional. It doesn't translate what's said but adds to it based on the background knowledge about how Aquinas is using the terms. It's probably rare that you can find the happy medium that I've come to with this case, where you avoid both extremes, but that seems to me to be the goal.

In the KJV and some translations that it's influenced, Genesis 2:18 describes Eve as "a help meet for" Adam. Somehow this has come into English as a noun "helpmeet", which (judging by how it was used in circles I grew up in) seems to mean "helpmate" or something like that. Since I hardly ever use the KJV, I don't look at this expression all that much, and it never occurred to me until recently that this understanding of "help meet" completely misunderstands the language of the KJV, which actually translated the Hebrew very well into the languge of the day but completely misleads the reader of today, as is so often the case with archaic translations.

What the KJV says is "I will make her a help meet for him." In archaic English, "meet" in such a context means "fitting" or "suitable". She is a helper who is meet for him. She is fitting for him, well-suited to him. That's exactly what the Hebrew says. To garble this as a noun "helpmeet" completely obscures the point (not to mention sounds meaningless to most speakers of English who weren't raised on the KJV).

The word 'type' is a self-antonym.

As used in Christian theology, a type is something that looks forward or back to an anti-type. The usual idea is that the type is a partial or incomplete reality looking toward a more complete reality. So David is a type of Jesus as a precursor of a Messiah with some messianic elements, or the temple is a type of Christ as taking a form that looked forward to what he would institute in the church. The temple is also a type of the church (the people, not the building), where the church is God's dwelling.

I was listening to a Bloggingheads conversation between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and McWhorter used the term 'type' in this way. He said Jesse Jackson is a type, meaning that he exemplifies some elements found within a generalized group of black leaders.

In philosophy, a type is not the specific instance, where someone has some elements of some general form. The type is the general form, and the tokens are the specific instances. The type would be black leaders of a certain sort, and Jesse Jackson would be the token.

I don't think it's just immersion in philosophical circles for 15 years that makes me think the philosophical use is the closer of the two to ordinary usage. I've always found the theological use to be strange, but it's only just occurred to me that it's not just strange but backwards. Every time I hear someone use it in a sermon without explaining it, I think the ordinary person isn't going to get it, and it's just occurred to me why. If you say David is a type of Christ, people will think that means he's a kind of Christ. In loose usage, that doesn't mean he's a category rather than a person, but theologians who say such things don't remotely mean that David's a messiah. They mean he's a precursor of the Messiah.

I don't think the ordinary usage is exactly opposite the theological usage, but this kind of funny use, which becomes second-nature for some with a lot of theological training, is at odds with how most people will hear the term, and that's something preachers would do well to keep in mind.

"Faith, to hear most people talk about it, and certainly in a religious context, is the permission that people give one another to believe things for bad reasons, and when they have good reasons they immediately rely on the good reasons." -- Sam Harris on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday a few weeks ago

On one level, this is complete nonsense. My faith is not my giving anyone permission to believe things. If I have faith, that's trust in God, not permission for others to believe things. I'm not sure why Harris thinks it has to do with your attitude toward others' beliefs. No one really believes that, and I would include Harris in that.

But what he's saying reflects a common attitude toward what faith is. Perhaps he's even right that in most contexts the English word turns out to mean something to do with believing things without good reasons (which isn't the same as believing things for bad reasons, I would insist). That's at least how many people have used the term since Kierkegaard's corruption of the concept of faith.

This is not, however, how faith has historically been thought of. Augustine saw it as a kind of knowledge, just not one based in the usual sources. Its grounding comes from God and his role in giving us the faith. Thomas Aquinas distinguished it from knowledge but saw it as equally well-grounded as knowledge, just from a different source. Both of them, in fact, took the Bible to be God's word, and thus they took it to be a reliable source to get the information God wanted to convey. God is, in fact, the most reliable source of any information, and thus believing what God says is a pretty good method to get beliefs. Those who don't accept the Bible as God's word would not accept that conclusion, but what they say follows from accepting that about the Bible. The Bible itself takes faith to be simply trust in God and what God says, and it does not treat faith as some irrational acceptance of things we probably shouldn't believe.

There are plenty of debates about whether religious beliefs can be justified or warranted and how they could be if they can. I certainly have my views on that. But there's a problem before you even get to that point. There seems to be a huge discrepancy between what a lot of religious people mean when they talk about faith and what most people mean when they talk about faith. Several recent Bible translations pick up on this and use only terms of the belief-family and trust-family for the biblical words usually translated into the faith-family of English words. I think there's something to that. But might this not be a fight worth having? Sometimes it's worth giving up a term because of the confusion about what it might mean. Do we want to give up on the faith-family of terms?

We probably don't need the term, but if we give up on it there's at least one unfortunate consequence. People will completely misunderstand much of the tradition, including Bible translations that use it in the traditional way. So I'm not ready to give up on it. It's a bit of work to explain ourselves when we use the term, and it will take work to convince those who are out of touch on this point that they actually need to do that, but it's work worth engaging in, in my view.

Joe Carter points to an interview with sociologist Rodney Stark (who is not a historian, despite often being called a historian of religion) that complains about the use of the word "mainline" in the expression "mainline Protestant denominations". This term usually refers to the more liberalizing denominations within each major Protestant grouping. So for Presbyterians, it means the PC-USA. For Methodists, it's the United Methodists. For Baptists, it's the American Baptists. For Lutherans, it's the similarly-ironically-named Evangelical Lutherans (who are much less evangelical than the Missouri Synod). Episcopals are usually seen as part of this group, and the United Church of Christ is also commonly included.

Stark's point, which Joe agrees with, is that these groups aren't really mainstream anymore. They're dying off. As they shed central and historic beliefs of Christianity, they become less mainstream within Christianity. I fully agree with that observation, but I think it's a mistake to complain about the use of the term "mainline".

What's going on here, as I see it, is that the term "mainline denominations" no longer functions as a description. It functions as a name. So in terms of the semantics of the expression, it doesn't really matter that it's ceased to be informative. It's like complaining that you park in driveways and drive on parkways. It's an interesting irony in the etymology of such terms, but it's not a problem with the language. Names often originate in circumstances that make their etymology seem ironically opposite to their current reference. The problem is not that anyone uses the term to refer to the groups it refers to. The problem is if they, in so doing, think they're using the name as a description rather than as a name.

It's wrong to think the mainline denominations are all that mainstream. I suppose it's true that they're closer in their ethical and theological outlook to secular America than the more evangelical congregations and denominations are, but there's enough counter-cultural Christianity present that large swathes of them are not mainstream in that sense. But they're not as mainstream Christianity as the more evangelical congregations and denominations are (and when I say "more evangelical" I mean it; it comes in degrees). Stark is right about that. But that doesn't make it illegitimate to continue to use the name for the group it's come to refer to any more than it's wrong to continue to use the name "Rhode Island" to refer to the entire state, even though it originally was only ever meant to refer to the island that constitutes Newport, Portsmouth, and Middletown. The name has come to refer to the entire state, and its inaccuracy as a description doesn't change the fact that it does refer to the whole state.

from Wikipedia on Attorney general, commenting on one of my pet peeves:

Some people think the word "general" used in that way entitles the official to the honorific "general", but this is strictly only appropriate for military generals. The word "general" in "attorney general" is an adjective modifying "attorney". However, in the Supreme Court of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States and Solicitor General of the United States (for which office the same rule applies) are addressed as "General" by the Chief Justice. The plural of "attorney general" is "attorneys general." The history of the term dates back to Norman England when many of the French legal terms were imported into English common law. In French, the adjective often comes after the noun and so Attorney General meant General Attorney.

It's maddening that so many people insist on treating this as a rank like in the military, just because the word adjective "general is used". It makes no sense to address the U.S. Attorney General as General Holder, for example, given that he isn't being said to be a general of the U.S. attorneys but rather simply to be the U.S. attorney responsible for the government in general. You'd think the plural form "attorneys general" would signal to people that the word "general" is an adjective here.

But I think this is one of many cases where people are trying so hard to do something they see as correct but largely unrecognized that they end up being incorrect. (Another example would be those who use expressions like "Phil and I" as the object of a sentence after being told that you don't say "me and Phil", not realizing that it's only in a subject that you don't say "me and Phil" and that it's actually correct to say "me and Phil" in standard English.)

Direct discourse reports what someone said with an exact quote. Biblical authors almost always never intend exact quotation. They use indirect discourse, reporting the basic content of what's said rather than the actual words used. When the biblical author is reporting in translation (as most of the gospel accounts do), this is even a translation of a summary of the actual words.

There's a common way of reporting indirect discourse by summary in the Hebrew scriptures that the ESV handles by expressions like "thus and so". It usually occurs to avoid repetition. Biblical Hebrew often reiterates something very closely for emphasis or for structural reasons. Sometimes it does so to show that a prophecy or command is being fulfilled exactly as given. But sometimes the author sees no need to repeat everything again. So you'll see these cases where someone will be told something who then reports it to someone else, and the second occurrence is something like, "and he told me thus and so". I noticed an interesting occurrence where that may be going on, but it may be something else.

1 Then Elisha the prophet called one of the sons of the prophets and said to him, "Tie up your garments, and take this flask of oil in your hand, and go to Ramoth-gilead. 2 And when you arrive, look there for Jehu the son of Jehoshaphat, son of Nimshi. And go in and have him rise from among his fellows, and lead him to an inner chamber. 3 Then take the flask of oil and pour it on his head and say, 'Thus says the Lord, I anoint you king over Israel.' Then open the door and flee; do not linger."

4 So the young man, the servant of the prophet, went to Ramoth-gilead. 5 And when he came, behold, the commanders of the army were in council. And he said, "I have a word for you, O commander." And Jehu said, "To which of us all?" And he said, "To you, O commander." 6 So he arose and went into the house. And the young man poured the oil on his head, saying to him, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I anoint you king over the people of the Lord, over Israel. 7 And you shall strike down the house of Ahab your master, so that I may avenge on Jezebel the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord. 8 For the whole house of Ahab shall perish, and I will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel. 9 And I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah. 10 And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the territory of Jezreel, and none shall bury her." Then he opened the door and fled.

11 When Jehu came out to the servants of his master, they said to him, "Is all well? Why did this mad fellow come to you?" And he said to them, "You know the fellow and his talk." 12 And they said, "That is not true; tell us now." And he said, "Thus and so he spoke to me, saying, 'Thus says the Lord, I anoint you king over Israel.'" 13 Then in haste every man of them took his garment and put it under him on the bare steps, and they blew the trumpet and proclaimed, "Jehu is king."[II Kings 9:1-13, ESV]

In verse 12, Jehu uses an expression that for all I can tell can be an instance of the above phenomenon. The author may simply be saving us some time by not reiterating everything the prophet had told Jehu, and the sense is that Jehu explained it all to them but that we're not going to have to hear it all explicitly. So when he says, "Thus and so he spoke to me" it means he actually told them the prophet's words or summarized them more fully than we see, but we only get "Thus says the Lord, I anoint you king over Israel". We're getting discourse within discourse. The author is reporting what Jehu says, and Jehu is reporting what the prophet had said, and it's possible the "thus and so" is an abbreviation of what Jehu says.

On the other hand, it seems just as possible to me (and perhaps the Hebrew precludes either option, but I don't know enough to know about that) that the "thus and so" is intended more like a direct quote from Jehu, and he is using it himself to abbreviate what the prophet said. Jehu has already shown his reluctance to tell his army buddies what went on, so it wouldn't be surprising for him to brush off their question by a quick summary, giving them the basic point that he's now been anointed king but leaving aside his responsibility to eliminate Ahab's house and the specific details of what will happen to Jezebel.

So if this expression is functioning the way I think it's functioning, then there's no semantic reason to prefer seeing it as Jehu's abbreviation of what the prophet said in order to brush off their question or the author's abbreviation of what Jehu said in order to spare us the repetition. There may be contextual clues that make one more likely, but it seems to me to be a semantic ambiguity that stems from the particular way this expression functions, and the Hebrew language (as far as I know) lacks a modifier to tell us whether direct or indirect discourse is going on, and so we can't (again, as far as I know) be sure just from the grammar which is intended. It does slightly affect the interpretation of the passage, since it may be another instance of Jehu's reluctance to embrace the kingship and/or his mission to eliminate Omri's dynasty, or it may just be an instance of the narrator sparing us a speech that repeats what we'd just heard.

If anyone who knows Hebrew has any information that helps here, I'd love to hear it.

My post on slaves and sons reminded me of a point I've been thinking that I don't think I've ever discussed with anyone or written anything about. The term "gender-inclusive" has come to be associated with a certain translation philosophy in Bible translation, namely the translation philosophy that considers it accurate to translate terms referring to multiple genders only with terms that in contemporary English can apply to multiple genders. In other words, using "he" to refer to a gender-unknown or gender-unspecified person or using "sons" to refer to a gender-mixed group would not be gender-inclusive.

It strikes me, however, that the term "gender-inclusive" is actually ambiguous, and the translations that use "sons" for a gender-mixed group or "he" to refer to a gender-unspecified or gender-unknown person are actually the gender-inclusive ones in one sense of the term. After all, they're using usually-masculine terms in a gender-inclusive way, right? They're using a sometimes gender-specific term in a gender-inclusive way. So why is it the opposite approach that always gets to be called gender-inclusive?

[cross-posted at Evangel]

Sophia: Ethan, stop arguing.
Ethan: We're not arguing. We're bickering.
Sophia: Ethan, bickering means arguing.
Ethan: Yeah, but we're still not arguing. We're bickering.

Later in the day...

me: So, Ethan, what's the difference between bickering and arguing?
Sophia: They're not the same?
Ethan: Yes, they are!

It's rare that I post on something I encounter that I have almost nothing to say about, but I was just catching up on Mark Heath's blog, and this post struck me as brilliant. Mark notices all the slave language and son language in the New Testament for believers and wonders what's going on with followers of Jesus being adopted into God's family but then called slaves of Christ. How can believers be both adopted members of the family and slaves to the master?

Mark wonders which is more fundamental or which is the way we should more strongly think of ourselves. But then he notices something that makes such a question seem completely in the wrong direction. He observes that the primary way God is addressed is as Father, and the primary way Jesus is addressed is as Lord. He thus suggests that we should think of ourselves primarily as sons* with respect to the Father and slaves with respect to the Son.

What's striking to me about this is that I think most Christians think of the Father as sort of a more distant figure to respect and pray more formally to, whereas the Son is more down-to-earth (literally; pun intended) and brotherly. The way the first two persons of the Trinity are addressed in the scriptures, however, is backwards from that. Now of course the very fact that we are told to address the Father as Father is a lot more significant than most of us reflect on. The immense privilege implicit in the first two words of the Lord's Prayer means we've been told outright how we should see God the Father, at least in terms of our praying, and it's not so much as a master as as a parent*. That tells us something about God and his attitude toward us.

OK, so I didn't have nothing to say about this. That's something. But I think Mark's observation is pretty interesting, and I didn't intend to have anything to add myself.

[*Note on inclusive language: I deliberately use the masculine here, because "sons" in NT usage would culturally have included far more in terms of inheritance and status than "daughters" or "children". That this term is applied, in my view, suggests that women who are children of the Father are treated fully as sons would have been expected to be treated, and I think something gets lost if it is translated more inclusively, at least for readers who understand this about the ancient Hebrew and Greco-Roman cultures. So I prefer to keep the gender-inclusive "sons" that is jarring in contemporary English if meant inclusively, since pretty much no one talks that way outside uber-traditionalist hyper-formal-equivalence translation circles.]

[Note on apparent typo: Yes, I know there's an extra "as" there, but it's actually correct with it and incorrect without it. I couldn't resist.]

[cross-posted at Evangel]

On a paper or exam last semester (I don't remember which), a student described someone who might "prepare for death by amending for their sins". My first guess as to the student's intent was that they meant "atoning for their sins". But why choose this word to confuse with "atoning"? I suspected maybe it had to do with making amends, something that seemed to me to be foreign to the idea of atonement, which (according to biblical teaching as I understand it) isn't accomplished by you. You don't atone for your sins. It's something that has to be done on your behalf, whereas making amends is something you do for someone else.

But this was probably a Roman Catholic student, probably raised with a simplistic understanding of what Catholicism teaches (given the bulk of the student body where I teach). Perhaps it's less strange to connect atonement with making amends if you think you earn your own atonement by doing good works, as I think a lot of nominal Catholics think their church teaches (it doesn't quite; at least, it's not as simple as that, because of the strong view of God's grace that stands behind any good work that God brings people to do). If you're thinking of working to repay God for your sins or something crazy like that, then you might think atoning is something like making amends to God for all the bad you've done. Someone of that mindset might easily confuse the two concepts.

But suppose you were to take this at face value. What would it even mean? I would understand grammatically what it would mean to amend your sins. You add something to them. I'm not sure if that would be good or bad, since it might be amending your sins by complicating them with further sins, or it could be amending your sins by removing some of the sinfulness. But amending for your sins? Amending what for your sins? Don't you need a direct object? It's at least grammatical to speak of amending an essay for my sins, but I'm not sure what it would even mean to amend for my sins without a direct object.

student comment in response to the idea that there might be a bad afterlife for bad people:

Furthermore, it is hard to believe that a higher being would wish for the suffrage of mankind, because any higher being would be above that and not involve themselves in petty nonsense.

I agree that a higher being would be above giving us suffrage. After all, wouldn't a higher being know better than us? Giving us a voting role in ultimate decisions wouldn't really serve any good. I don't see how it would be petty, though, and I don't see how this point supports the idea that there couldn't be a bad afterlife. That a higher being would be above giving us suffrage actually supports the possibility of a bad afterlife despite our protests, since it doesn't matter whether we approve.

In the U.K., people often speak of losing the big picture because of the details by saying that someone can't see the wood for the trees. Usually in the U.S., we say "forest for the trees". It's long occurred to me that the U.K. way of saying it conveys exactly the opposite here as it does across the pond.

In the U.K., a natural way to refer to a wooded area is to call it "the wood". That means the wood is a level up from the trees in terms of big picture vs. details. But in the U.S. you would never say "the wood" unless you meant the material that makes up the bulk of the tree's matter. To refer to a wooded area, you'd call it "the woods". So when you compare the wood with the trees in the U.S., you're actually talking about the tree and what it's made out of rather than a bunch of trees and the forest they comprise. That means the wood as heard in the U.S. is smaller and more detailed than the trees. The trees are a level up in terms of details vs. big picture.

So if you say someone can't see the wood for the trees, I always do a double-take, because it always sounds to me, at least at the initial hearing, as if you're describing someone who can't see the details because of some rigid big-picture view that they can't get away from. I'm familiar enough with the expression now that I quickly adjust, but it's a very weird phenomenon. This expression first conveys to me the exact opposite of what it means.

I previously posted my worries about the glossary entry for the word 'gay' in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment. I'm worried about the following entry also, for several reasons:

Heterosexism: A bias toward heterosexuality that denigrates and devalues GLB people. Also, the presumption that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality or prejudice, bias, or discrimination based on these things.

I'm reading through the glossary in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment, which I've been reading for an invited book review, and I noticed something that seemed odd to me in the definition for 'gay':

The preferred term for a person who engages in same-sex relationships and identifies as a member of this community. It is preferred to the term homosexual, which has scientific meanings that apply specifically to same-sex behaviors and does not consider a person's identities and relationships. Gay can refer to both men and women, although many women prefer the term lesbian.

Ethan's speech pathologist sent home his report from his evaluation for his upcoming triennial review. Two things about it seem a little strange.

1. One of the tests aimed to discover how well Ethan uses appropriate pronouns. The speech pathologist seems to acknowledge this particular problem. The report says:

On many occasions, Ethan provided an appropriate response to the given sentence, however since it was not the targeted response, credit was not allowed (e.g Ethan was shown a picture of a school choir and given the sentence "the choir has a song to sing -- who will sing a song". Ethan replied with "the choir", however the targeted response was "they will").

In ordinary English, "the choir" is actually a more natural response to that question than "they will". Ethan's response is actually superior to the officially-accepted one, taking just the question in isolation. Only if you know that the rules of the game expect you to respond with a sentence including a pronoun will you prefer "they will". Even then, it sounds sort of artificial, but a student who understands the pragmatics of the conversation might do all right on this question. A student with problems involving the pragmatics of conversation will almost certainly not. Ethan has problems with the pragmatics of conversation, which means this question will not test what it's supposed to be testing, which is the proper use of pronouns, but rather the pragmatic ability to discover the conversational rules of the language game being played. So this seems to be a badly-designed test. I wonder how the rest of the test is. This is the only example she gave.

2. Another test involved recognizing semantic absurdities. Presumably with an eight-year-old kid they won't be asking things on the level of the liar paradox, but I would hope they could do better than the example the speech pathologist gave in her report. She says that he couldn't recognize that the sentence, "The plumber fixed the lights" is silly. I can't either. My uncle was a plumber, and he probably fixed lights at some point in his life. He did own his own house, after all. That sentence is perfectly meaningful, and there's nothing absurd about it. I could see how this would be a nice sentence to test actual understanding of semantic absurdity, because some kids might be fooled into thinking that it's semantically absurd, when it's not. But the test actually has it doing the opposite. The kids who can see that it's a meaningful sentence come out with a lower score for vocabulary recognition.

The speech pathologist concludes, "This indicates that Ethan demonstrated difficulty understanding the target words in the sentences that were used incorrectly." Maybe there were other sentences where that's true, but this example shows nothing of the sort. Ethan knows full well what the word "plumber" means, and that's the most difficult word in the sentence. One of the tests the psychologist gave to him during this process tested his vocabulary at the level of the second half of sixth grade (he's in third). His problem wasn't that he doesn't understand the vocabulary in the sentence but that he knows something the test designers didn't, which is that the sentence in question is perfectly meaningful in English and could easily be used without anything silly going on. Unlike the first example, the speech pathologist didn't seem to recognize this fact.

Update: I should say that I accept that you can derive an absurdity from this second example, if you provide a particular context, e.g. if you're told that the plumber is carrying out a job as a hired plumber and doing only that job. If you say enough that someone who understands English fully competently, together with the pragmatic rules of conversation, will understand all that information, then perhaps such a person would think such information tells against thinking the plumber will be fixing lights. But that's precisely my point. You need a pragmatic context to derive the absurdity, and this isn't a test of pragmatics but of semantic absurdities. There's nothing semantically absurd about that sentence.

Has anyone else ever thought that they get the Law and Order categories backwards in the credits for Law & Order? They list the police detectives, who enforce order, under the heading Law, and then they list the lawyers, who deal with the law more explicitly, under the category of Order.

I suspect this comes from the old slang method of referring to cops as "the law", so it's not without explanation, but it does seem backwards to me in terms of the actual roles of the various characters.

In The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis unwittingly provides evidence for a thesis that I think is likely to be true but isn't the sort of thing that you'll find much evidence for, one way or the other. The claim I have in mind is that singular "they" or "their" is not precisely gender-neutral. At least I'd say that the conditions under which it's most commonly used (and thus feels most natural) are sensitive to one kind of gender concern, and there are some instances where it would seem awkward to use it when you know you're speaking of one person whom you and the audience hearing you know the person is male. I think this is true to the point where I almost always assume that someone using it of an individual person to disguise the person's gender is almost certainly talking about a woman or girl.

I think it's well-established now that singular "they" has a long history in the English language and is not the result of feminist machinations in the last few decades, as I've heard some claim. It occurs in the King James Bible and in Shakespeare, so there's no arguing that it's a recent innovation. I also discovered it in C.S. Lewis, but what was interesting to me is that he doesn't use it consistently. He has two very similar sentences in two scenes near the end of the book, one from Aslan to Shasta and the other from Aslan to Aravis. When walking alongside Aslan to Narnia, Shasta asks him why he wounded Aravis. Aslan's response:

"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own."

Then later, when Aslan appears to Aravis, Bree, and Hwin, Aravis asks about what will happen to her servant because of her running away. His response:

"Child," said the Lion, "I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own."

Lewis, probably instinctively, refrains from using a generic male pronoun when generalizing from the initial case of a girl, when he did use the generic male pronoun when generalizing from the initial case of a boy. This isn't direct evidence exactly of my claim above, but it does suggest an unconscious gender-related difference in treatment in Lewis' writing, and remember that this book was published in 1952. He seems to have thought a singular "their" was inappropriate when the primary person being referred to was male but not when the primary person being referred to was female.

I noticed an interesting translation issue as I was reading Jerome Walsh's commentary on I Kings. The longstanding debate between favoring the grammatical form vs. favoring the sense of a text comes up full force in I Kings 11:1-4. Consider the NRSV translation of these verses:

King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the Israelites, "You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you; for they will surely incline your heart to follow their gods"; Solomon clung to these in love. Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David.

Walsh makes the following comment in a footnote (p.134, n.2):

Hebrew uses the same word (nasim) where English has two different ones, "women" and "wives." The NRSV tries to capture the proper nuance to translate each case. My discussion tries to reflect the way nasim becomes a motif word in the Hebrew text.

Some people favor the sense over the form, most noticeable in translations sometimes called dynamic equivalence (e.g. in Bible translation, the NLT is a good example, and the NIV and TNIV tend in that direction often). One good thing about this kind of translation in cases like this is that you get to capture the nuance of the word in different contexts. The same Hebrew word can mean both "wife" and "woman". In different contexts, it might have the flavor of one of those rather than the other, and here it has each flavor a verse apart. If you translate them both the same way, that's harder to capture. In particular, if you talk about Solomon's women rather than Solomon's wives, in English you get the sense that it's talking about his harem. But then with Solomon you actually are talking about his harem, so maybe it's not that big a difference in his case. Still, one might argue for translating the word as "wives" in all of its occurrences so as to avoid that sense instead of translating it consistently as "women" the way Walsh does. You lose something either way, but you lose something if you translate it differently in different instances also.

I think it's easier to tell from the context what the sense might be, so it's less necessary in these verses to seek to distinguish between the senses the word can have by translating as the NRSV does, as one in one verse and the other in the other verse. What Walsh points out, though, is that you miss something important about this passage if you emphasize sense over form. The repetition of the word conveys something in the Hebrew that you lose in an English translation if it distinguishes between different senses the word can have throughout this passage. There's a literary element of the passage that the NRSV translates away.

This sort of thing often happens in the so-called dynamic translations. Translations that emphasize form, while sometimes missing elements that a sense-for-sense translation will convey, does capture some elements like this that you won't see in a translation like the NLT and often won't see even in the NIV or TNIV. There are those who regularly deride translations like the ESV or NASB as if they have no positive features as translations, seeing them as wooden artifacts of archaic language that barely make sense as English and are too hard for the average English speaker to understand. Whatever element of truth there is in that characterization, there are certainly things that the ESV and NASB preserve that you don't find in the sense-for-sense translations, and it's one reason I always like to have one around.

(The ESV does translate them the same way the NRSV does, as "women" and then "wives", I should note. This is a theoretical point about Bible translation, not an argument for a particular translation as a whole.)

I've been pretty busy teaching two intensive summer courses for the last few weeks, and I didn't have easy access to a computer for a good part of that time because Dell's next-day contract isn't exactly giving me next-day service due to some backlog problems (I still don't have full resolution from a problem that began something like 13 days ago.) But I did catch some people commenting that President Obama said that the U.S. would be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world if you just counted all the Muslims in the U.S., and I did see some people juxtaposing that comment with his claim during the election that the U.S. isn't a Christian country, claiming that he had contradicted himself.

There is a real tension between what he's doing with those two statements, but I don't think he contradicted himself. It turns out that one of his statements is hopelessly false. According to a Pew study, Muslims are about .6% of the U.S. population, which brings the total to less than 2 million. It seems France and Germany have more Muslims than the U.S. does, and most Muslim states are higher than that also. See Mollie Hemingway for some sources and some graphical presentations of the information. But the statements can be consistent even if one of them is false.

We need to ask first what it takes for a country to be Christian or Muslim. 1. Is a country a Christian country merely because its majority is Christian and its traditions are largely influenced by Christian traditions? 2. Or does there have to be an official declaration of Christianity as the nation's religion? 3. Or is that even enough, given that Christianity itself is a decidedly non-nationalizing religion, with strong resistance to seeing faith in the nationalized way that old-covenant religion in Israel was. The expansion to include all nations resists the very possibility of a Christian nation, according to Christian theology.

But what many people mean by using the adjective 'Christian' in this context is not any such thing but more that the government's structure, the legal tradition's views of human rights and assumptions of common law, and the nation's broader traditions are Christian-influenced in a strong enough way.

You have a very different situation with Islam. A nation can be Muslim in the weaker sense. It can also be Muslim in the second sense of being an officially-Muslim government, and in fact most nations that are Muslim in the first sense are also Muslim in the second. (I believe the only ones that haven't been have been controlled by a minority hierarchy of non-Muslims). But Islam explicitly affirms the third kind of being a Muslim nation, something Christianity never condones for itself. So that does change things, I think. It can much more easily be the case that a nation is unambiguously Muslim than it can be for a nation to be unambiguously Christian (in fact it's impossible for Christianity).

But will this help resolve the tension between the two Obama statements? I doubt his understanding of biblical theology is sufficient for him to come up with the view that it's impossible for a nation to be Christian in the third sense, but it's quite plausible that he meant the second sense when he said that the U.S. is not a Christian nation. It's pretty obviously not true if he meant it in the first sense, especially with his fairly broad sense of what it means to be a Christian. [And his view of Christianity is broader than mine, since he does consider himself a Christian, and I find it hard to include him given his denial of any afterlife, his conception of prayer as talking to himself, his reducing of the Holy Spirit to anyone's coming to see something that's true, and his conception of Jesus as merely bridging the God-human gap rather than having dealt with a serious problem of human sin interfering with any connection with God's holy nature. (See my Is Barack Obama an Evangelical? for further details on all that.) So with a broader conception of what counts as Christian, the numbers of Christians and the influence of Christianity in the U.S. will only appear to be stronger to someone like him than it would to someone like me with my more restrictive views of what is genuinely Christian.]

What about his statement about the U.S. being one of the largest Muslim countries if you only counted the Muslims. Even though the statement isn't even close to being true, I'm interested in what he meant to see if it's consistent with his statement about the U.S. not being a Christian nation. If he meant it in the second or third way, it's obviously false. I think he must have meant it in the first way. But saying something like that and meaning it in the first sense with Islam is perfectly consistent with resisting something along the same lines about Christianity and meaning it in the second sense. So I don't think his two statements are actually at odds, at least in terms of the consistency of the two things he meant with each statement.

Nevertheless, there might well be a tension between the pragmatic purpose of what he's trying to do in one case and the pragmatic purpose he's trying to achieve in the other. In the later case, he was looking toward a major speech trying to win over the Muslim world, so he wanted his audience in that speech to see that he was being positive about Muslim participation in American society. What was he doing in the first case? He was probably trying to satisfy the left's continued insistence that the religious right shouldn't control policies that people might disapprove of if they have other religious convictions or none at all. So the surface motivation is to be inclusive, a similar purpose to his later claim about Islam. Nevertheless, I do think the statement he made, in the context of why people do claim that this is a Christian nation, serves to send a message that Christian concerns are not to be included at the table when discussing certain kinds of policies. To the extent that that's true, I do think his statement serves an exclusionary purpose with socially-conservative religious voters, who were by and large turned off by his statement.

What he literally meant shouldn't have offended by it, but what he was trying to accomplish certainly does treat their concerns as unimportant. For that reason, I don't think those who are criticizing him for being inconsistent with these two statements are entirely wrong. There is something behind the first statement that is at odds with what he's trying to do with the second, at least if he wants to treat all religious expressions as legitimate and positive, which he at least says he wants to do.

I spent a little time looking at Peter Leithart's Brazos commentary on I & II Kings a couple weeks ago. I'm not a big fan of this series, and I haven't found this volume much better than others I've looked at (despite being told by several people that it's pretty strong on certain things I care about). There's a lot of extremely strange speculation about the significance of the number of times a word is repeated, and I thought a lot of his connections across different texts were very unlikely. He also usually doesn't answer the burning questions I have when I read a text. But Leithart's strength is in critiquing others' views. One instance of his critique of a certain position that got me thinking was his discussion of certain Christian advocates of nonviolence (this was on p.40 for those following along at home). Leithart finds an interested tension between one mode of Christian pacifists' insistence on decrying all violence and a view on the atonement that you do find among some such pacifists.

Some of the Christian pacifists will often speak of non-physical violence, such as various kinds of coercion and systematic oppression. They want to say that various kinds of evils that aren't really violent should count as violence anyway because of what they do on a deeper level. So certain kinds of oppression such as racism, sexism, and poverty (which I note is a category mistake to call oppression) count as violent, even if no physical violence occurs. Leithart notices, however, that some of the people who make this move nevertheless want to resist seeing any violence in the atonement because they want to separate our salvation from having been achieved in a violent way. They thus reduce all combat language about Jesus' victory over the powers of evil as metaphorical for his non-violent methods coming to supremacy and violent ways being reduced. An example of our application would be I Peter's discussion of wives of non-believing husbands submitting to their husbands for subversive reasons, not because they advocate the particular things their husbands want them to do but in order for Christian living to win them over to Christ.

The problem Leithart notes is that this is every bit as coercive and violent as non-violent racism, sexism, and whatever policies causing poverty they might have in mind. That means those who are holding this particular combination of views are just using the word 'violence' in effect to mean "actions that I disagree with". Their opposition to violence then becomes trivial. This does seem to me to be a real abuse of language. If you want to oppose violence but then say that non-violent things are also violence, while saying all violence is wrong, you better be pretty careful about how you assign the term 'violence'. If it's just any kind of manipulative behavior that might influence someone against their preferences, then it's hard to see the very things they do approve of as nonviolent methods escaping their classification, and then the nonviolence they prefer to violence becomes just as bad. That's certainly not what Christian pacifists want to say. Wouldn't it be better just to restrict the term 'violence' to physical violence or to methods that actually destroy in some more significant sense?

One problem any teacher encounters is how to present material that many in the class will be familiar with but others will not. It's one thing to refer back to earlier material in the course, which students should but often won't remember by the time you get back to it when you encounter the same issue from a different point of view. But other background information might not have been covered earlier in the class. When I teach 300-level ethics classes, all my students should have taken the two-semester historical introduction to philosophy classes. But so many people teach those and do them so differently that there isn't any content that I can assume they've covered. It's also taught in such different styles that there isn't any basic philosophical framework that I can assume every member of the class has had.

The same problem arises in preaching. Some people hearing a sermon might know the Bible wel enough that you can refer to the sin of Achan or David's conflict with Absalom without any further information, and they'll know what you're talking about. You can mention a particular, relatively well-known chapter or section such as Romans 8, the Sermon on the Mount, or Ezeiel's vision of the temple, and some people will need no further information to be reminded of the full sense of what occurs in the section in question. At the other end of the spectrum are the biblically-illiterate who don't know that Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot, aren't familiar with the biblical concept of a covenant, and would hear the expression "whore of Babylon" and think there must be some biblical character who was a prostitute in Baghdad.

One solution I've seen is to give the hearers the benefit of the doubt. I'll sometimes hear a preacher saying "of course" as an unconscious transitional marker in the middle of explaining something that only some of the people present will probably get without the explanation. It serves to signal to those who don't need the explanation that the preacher isn't treating them as if they don't already know this. The problem is that it makes those who don't know this feel sub-par for not knowing this thing that the preacher says "of course" about, as if anyone should know this. Another way of putting it would be to say, "as you know" before saying something that some people in the room do not have any knowledge of at all.

I find myself cringing inwardly at this kind of language. There's a sense of not treating those who are less-informed as important when you treat them as if the basic common denominator is higher in understanding than they are. There are certainly ways of being dismissive of someone that are worse than this, but there is a kind of insult behind this kind of language, even if it's not intended. Little things like this can have an effect on people, and this is such an unconscious habit that someone can get into when developing public speaking skills that it's easy not to think about what you're actually saying when you say this kind of thing.

In writing philosophical essays for a popular audience, I've had to think very hard about how someone with no philosophy background is going to read something I say. I hear my philosophical colleagues talking to their students with vocabulary and concepts that I can't imagine most undergraduate students understanding. Spending time in places where English isn't the native language and having to have serious conversations about Christianity and philosophy via a translator has certainly influenced my abilities to try to explain things more simply than I would if talking to a graduate student in philosophy.

So I'm at least sensitive to the fact that this is a problem, and I do know a fair number of places where it could arise that I tend to avoid it. But that isn't a solution to the problem, since it doesn't mean it won't occur where I'm not going to notice it, since I won't know sometimes that the terms I'm using have no meaning to the person I'm talking to. It also doesn't solve the problem of how to avoid giving those who do understand more the sense that they're being treated like children. But I do think this is something worth thinking through that I doubt very many people spend much time thinking about.

In the following interview excerpt (source) from a few months ago, then-President George W. Bush misunderstood Charles Gibson in a way that I've just realized has implications for a hotly-debated but obscure-for-the-ordinary-person philosophical debate:

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?
BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?
BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.
GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.
BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

Here are the two ways to read Gibson's question "If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?":

1. Holding the content of the intelligence the same as it is in the actual world, the rest of the world would have to have been different for the intelligence to have been right. If that situation were true, would the war have occurred? In other words, if what the intelligence reports actually said had turned out to be true, and Iraq's WMD programs were not just on hold because of sanctions, if there had been stockpiles of WMD in fact, would we have invaded Iraq?

2. Holding the rest of the world constant, for the intelligence reports to have been true, they would have had to say something different from what they actually said. If that situation were true, would the war have occurred? In other words, if the intelligence reports had said only that Saddam Hussein's WMD programs were not actively producing weapons but were merely on hold so that he could have such weapons within a year if the sanctions ended, would there have been a war?

It's hard to say which interpretation is more natural. I can see how Gibson's might be thought to be more natural, because there doesn't seem to be any reason to ask the question if he'd meant what Bush took it to mean. But for the hearer to come to that conclusion, it requires being aware of both interpretations and considering that the first wouldn't be worth asking in comparison with the second. Most hearers interpreting it in a way that seems most natural to them will probably hear it one way or the other, and thus (like President Bush) won't be going through that reasoning process to conclude that the second is the more likely intent.

On the other hand, I can see how someone might more naturally take it the way Bush did. I can think of a much clearer way to ask what Gibson wanted to know. He could have asked what would have happened if we'd had better intelligence or more accurate intelligence. By referring to it as "the intelligence", Bush took it to be referring to the actual intelligence. It's a lot harder to find an alternative way to say what Bush took it to mean. You'd need a much more roundabout expression like "if the information we based the war on from intelligence reports had turned out to be the accurate description of Saddam Hussein's WMD status".

I thought that was an interesting ambiguity, anyway.

[Sidebar to philosophers: At first I thought it had larger implications, because it seems very close to a debate in the semantics of counterfactual expressions. David Lewis takes counterfactual claims of the form "If A were true, then B" to mean that in the closest possible world (by which he means the possible world as much like ours in material composition) where A is true, B is also true. I've always found that view implausible, and I had at first thought this would be a good test case for people's intuitions on that matter. But then I realized that Lewis' theory is a theory for the truth conditions of counterfactual propositions. This is a case where it's ambiguous which proposition is even meant, not a case of how to evaluate whether a clear counterfactual proposition is true.]

I saw this posted on the side of a gas pump in Pennsylvania:

If a fire starts, do not remove nozzle then back away immediately.

I'm sure many people will get exactly what this is supposed to be saying. Nevertheless, it doesn't say what it's supposed to say. If just spoken, it's ambiguous between the following two meanings:

1. If a fire starts, what you shouldn't do is remove the nozzle, and what you should do is back away immediately.
2. If a fire starts, here's what you shouldn't do: remove the nozzle and then back away.

The first is the intended meaning. I think the second is the more natural interpretation when spoken. But this is actually written, and there's one thing that settles which meaning it has: whether there's a comma or some other separation marker between 'nozzle' and 'then'. There isn't. That means that, as written, it clearly does mean 2 and not 1.

It's one thing to invent all manner of conspiracy theories about how you lost an election (see 2000 and 2004). Thankfully, the Republicans don't seem to be doing anything on the same order as that in 2008. Pretty much the only questions being raised by mainstream Republicans involve an organization that's actually under investigation by the FBI on the issue in question, and hardly anyone is claiming that the election was stolen or that McCain would have won easily if not for illegal vote-stealing of some sort.

I think part of that might have been that McCain was doing so well in the polls until the financial meltdown, and then Obama clearly had that crisis to thank for his win and for McCain's inability to get back in the game. If it had been closer, maybe things would be different, and there might be more charges that voter fraud actually affected the outcome. Nevertheless, I think it's noteworthy that Republicans largely aren't pushing it to that point, and I'm glad for that. I can't honestly say that I'm sure Democrats would do the same thing were the tables reversed, and we have history to support my doubts on that.

What amazes me, though, is all the sore winners in the 2008 election. It isn't enough just for a Democrat to take the popular vote for the first time since Jimmy Carter and to win the electoral college handily [clarification: I meant winning a majority, not simply a plurality; Clinton obviously won a plurality twice]. People have to complain about the states that did go for McCain, claiming that all the white Southerners who voted for McCain were doing so merely because of racism rather than because they think Obama's policies would be awful. See Sam's post on that. Today we heard some caller on NPR's Talk of the Nation talking about how she's glad she doesn't have to listen to Palin's voice anymore, and I thought it was perhaps some preference against the pitch of her voice, but it turned out she really meant her regional accent. She was talking as if someone is ignorant for dropping the 'g' in words ending in '-ing' and several other colloquialisms.

After hearing this woman's snotty bigotry against the kind of accent you can hear not just in Alaska but across the Midwest, Sam wondered out loud why people like that caller think it's a good idea to alienate such a large swathe of voters. People did it with Bush, but he'd won, and they needed some outlet to express their frustration. So they tried to feel better than him by pretending his accent was equivalent with being an ignorant dolt. I'm not sure what people think they're accomplishing by complaining about those on the losing side, though, with these exaggerations of racism in all anti-Obama voters and by making fun of a quite common accent in a large stretch of this country. It certainly does feel like sore winning. What's the motivation for that?

Update: I was originally planning to link to this in the post, but I reworked it enough times that I forgot to put it in the final version somewhere. I did want to give Senator McCain credit for what is absolutely and indisputably the best and most honorable concession speech I have ever heard from a political candidate. He knows how to lose gracefully and respectfully.

There are some interesting moral issues related to the use of expressions that are perfectly ordinary and inoffensive in most situations but are used offensively within a small subset of the population, particularly when there are some among those on the receiving end of such expressions who don't know of the ordinary, inoffensive use of the term in question. It's usually good to show moral deference to the ignorant, if we haven't been in their position of ignorance, giving them the benefit of the doubt. But the ignorant in these cases include both (a) those who use the expression without knowing or the offensive connotation that it has in certain contexts and (b) those offended but its ordinary usage because they don't know about anything other than its offensive use. At the same time, there's always the questions of (c) whether those in (a) ought to have been more aware of what offends people and (d) whether those in (b) ought to have be willing to throw out such serious moral charges based on an ignorance that many might not easily excuse.

I've defended the use of such expressions in many contexts, emphasizing (a) and (d) above while perhaps too easily dismissing (b) and (c), or at least not explicitly laying out the reasoning for why I tend to favor (a) and (d) as more decisive in these kinds of cases. One example that came up in my post was the old expression "call a spade a spade". This one actually goes back to Plutarch in the second century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although he used a different metaphor that was later mistranslated by Erasmus in 1542. (It's not generally accessible online except with a password to get through a university firewall, or I'd link to it.)

When I was talking about these cases with my friend and colleague Chuck, who occasionally comments here, he decided to go check the OED to get the history of the expression. He noticed a particularly funny quote that the OED used to exemplify "call a spade a spade".

1647 TRAPP Marrow Gd. Authors in Comm. Ep. 641 Gods people shall not spare to call a spade a spade, a niggard a niggard.

Those who have followed the recent history of offense over normally-inoffensive terms will remember that the black mayor of the District of Columbia fired one of his white aides for using the term 'niggardly', a word that only sounds like a racial epithet if you aren't listening very carefully. Even the NAACP chair, Julian Bond, thought it was crazy to criticize someone for using that word. But I suppose we've now got solid proof that 'niggard' does refer to black people, since Trapp in 1647 used it in parallel with "call a spade a spade". Or does this show that "call a spade a spade" is tied to offensive language because its connection with niggards goes back at least to 1647?

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland represents a Georgia district in the U.S. House. He's recently come under fire for a very puzzling comment:

Just from what little I've seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity

As might be expected, he's been criticized for using the word 'uppity' when he was talking about a successful black couple. But then there's his defense:

I've never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of 'uppity' is 'affecting an air of inflated self-esteem -- snobbish.'

I've certainly heard it used in that sense, although it's never been from the mouth of someone who meant it. It's always been someone describing someone else's negative attitude toward "uppity Negroes". I'm not sure it's in common use anymore among genuine racists, but I wouldn't know, since I don't run in those circles. But I can imagine someone who doesn't travel in racist circles who also doesn't travel in very racially aware circles, where people might put it in the mouths of racists they're discussing. Such a person may have never heard the expression "uppity Negro". Sure, it's possible.

But there are two problems even if he really hasn't heard of that expression. The first is his claim that 'uppity' and 'elitist' are synonymous. I don't think that's true. To be uppity is to extend yourself above your place, which assumes there's a proper place you're supposed to remain in. To be elitist is to think oneself higher than others, which assumes you think you're better than others. The former is an attitude toward a place that someone else has judged fit for you. The latter is an attitude toward people you yourself have judged lower than you. So the elitist charge reflects badly on the views of the elitist. Saying someone is uppity reflects badly on the views of the person saying it. That's an important difference. Westmoreland may well not know that difference, but that would just show that he doesn't understand how the words are used.

If he's going to give this defense, he has to say not just that he was ignorant of a way of putting Negroes in their place that was very common in the place he represents in Congress, certainly during his own lifetime (he was born in 1950). He also has to admit to being pretty ignorant about the word's basic meaning even in a non-racial context.

But there's something even more puzzling about his statement. Read it carefully. He doesn't say that the Obamas are uppity, as a racist would. He says they think they're uppity. That means (if he understands the word, anyway) that he thinks they think they're rising above a place that they themselves would describe as their proper place, something they shouldn't rise above. Does he really think the Obamas think that's true of themelves? I doubt it. And that means there's yet another aspect of how the word 'uppity' is used that he doesn't understand. I'm beginning to think he just doesn't know much about the word at all. Perhaps he's heard it once or twice and somehow formed some false beliefs about how the word functions. I know I've found out real meanings of words that I had thought meant something else, usually inferred from a few occurrences in books I've read when I've used context clues to figure out the term but never bothered to look it up. It's possible that's what's happened here.

If that's right, he probably isn't lying when he says he's never heard it in a racial context. Someone familiar with that context isn't likely to misuse it in both of the ways that he does. But it's hard to say that it's not an ignorant statement. It's (at the very least) ignorant about what the word itself means and how it functions syntactically. I've only seen two news stories, a blog post, and a very long comment thread on this, but it's a little disturbing that I didn't see anyone making either of these points. Is the American public at large that ignorant of how this word is used? Maybe it's just left our national vocabulary except when referring to how racists talk, and that isn't enough to clue people in to how the word functions. Can that really be?

Eugene Volokh uses scare quotes to refer to The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and The Jewish Conspiracy, both of which he then goes on to admit to being a member of (along with most of the contributors to his blog). Scare quotes usually indicate that you believe there's no such thing, and I'm sure that's actually his view. But then he says he's a member of both. This is an interesting set of views.

He must think these terms refer to the groups that Hillary Clinton and anti-semitists (respectively) call by those names, and those groups really exist (because a group is just a group of people), but the groups don't have the features believed to be true of them (among other things, being a conspiracy). If that's right, then he's taking the names as proper names (and not definite descriptions, which wouldn't refer to anything) and taking them refer to exactly the groups the people whose false beliefs generated the existence of those groups (or at least generated their social relevance if the group exists simply because the members exist).

It struck me that this is almost exactly what the majority view in philosophy of race says about races. Races are social kinds whose existence (or at least social relevance if the group exists merely because its members exist) was caused by false beliefs by those doing the classifying. But the difference is that everyone uses race-terms, even those who pretend there aren't any races. Most people, on the other hand, don't believe in either of these so-called conspiracies. That's why his speaking this way sounded funny to me in this case, almost as if it requires saying it tongue-in-cheek.

In the Mutants and Race piece that I'm trying to get into its final form, I'm trying to figure out a good way to avoid using a certain word. Philosophers sometimes use the word 'categorical' to refer to terms that denote categories of various sorts. But there's also the meaning of the word that Kant means when he talks about the categorical imperative, which is opposed to hypothetical imperatives. A categorical imperative is universal (applying to everyone) and absolute (applying in every case). A hypothetical imperative applies only in certain cases, given certain hypotheticals that may not always apply. So the term can mean "absolute/universal" or "having to do with categories".

I explain some problems with thinking of mutants as a race, even if there are analogous features. It really is an analogy, which means it can be pushed too far if you assume the category mutant is an actual example of the kinds of categories that we call races. Yet characters in the various X-Media regularly speak of mutants with racial language? I then try to capture how sometimes this sort of thing can be perfectly fine as long as we don't take the language too strictly. Here's the sentence as most recently returned to me by the editors (with the following sentence for a little context):

On the other hand, we often speak loosely and use certain categorical terms in an extended or even metaphorical sense. For example, people sometimes refer to co-workers as family.

The word 'categorical' was inserted by an editor, and I removed it in my next draft. I'm not entirely sure whether it's supposed to mean that some terms that are normally absolute are sometimes used in an extended sense, i.e. not absolutely, or whether it means that some terms for categories can be used to include things not technically in those categories. Either one is consistent with what I meant. But it's ambiguous, and good philosophical writing removes ambiguities. Also, it's a technical term, and this is a popular-level work that's supposed to explain technical terms. I thought it best to avoid it, so I rewrote several sentences to say what I meant without needing it. A later draft then came back with the word inserted once again. So I'm not sure what I want to do to avoid the word and yet also express what I mean and whatever the editors thought was unclear without that word.

One thought is just to replace 'categorical' with 'category', but I suspect whichever editor keeps inserting this term doesn't approve of that word as an adjective. They obviously didn't like it the way I had it without adjectives, though. I haven't been able to think of a good word instead of 'categorical' if I don't change it much. I'll put the two paragraphs discussing this issue below the fold. I've love any suggestions.

I'm not a big fan of semicolons. I could actually find the passage I'm going to go by searching for a semicolon in the document. It took ten seconds. I don't use semicolons very often. So imagine what I'm thinking when the following passage:

We just don't pick out features that depend on genetic structure. We sometimes oversimplify, and some people defy categories. There are borderline cases. We haven't thought to put a name to every category that might be useful in explaining voting behavior or political philosophy.

comes back from the editor changed to this:

Granted, we sometimes oversimplify; some people defy categories; there are borderline cases; and there are categories that might be useful in explaining voting behavior or political philosophy that we haven't thought to put a name to.

It's not just the succession of semicolons. The final item in the series has an 'and' in front of it, as if it had been a series of commas. When you combine two sentences, it's perfectly fine to use a semicolon or to use a comma with 'and'. When you have a longer list, you can use several commas, and then the last item has a comma with 'and'. Some people like to use semicolons for a longer series. I don't like to, but it's not a grievous punctuation move. But you don't put an 'and' after the last semicolon the way you would with a series of commas. That seems to me to be as bad as putting after the sole semicolon when you're just combining two sentences into one.

But then I don't like what happens when you do it just with semicolons:

Granted, we sometimes oversimplify; some people defy categories; there are borderline cases; there are categories that might be useful in explaining voting behavior or political philosophy that we haven't thought to put a name to.

Also, the editors clearly preferred something like what they did rather than what I had. What I'm hoping is that they'll accept this:

Granted, we sometimes oversimplify, some people defy categories, there are borderline cases, and there are categories that might be useful in explaining voting behavior or political philosophy that we haven't thought to put a name to.

Or does anyone have any better suggestions?

I was reading through a section of my dissertation that I haven't looked at in a while, and I found myself reading about vague joints. I didn't remember using that expression, so it was kind of interesting to notice it there.

It doesn't exactly sound like the kind of thing you'd see in a Ph.D. dissertation. Of course, neither do gunk or stuff. Metaphysicians come up with some great technical terms sometimes. Of course, metaphysical discussions of holes really are about holes.

Oh, and if you don't have a sense of what vague joints might be, here's a hint.

The boys were at their Occupational Therapy, and it was Isaiah's turn. Ethan and Sophia were playing with a game in the gym, which abuts the therapy room. This was late enough for the room to be empty, since they do their therapy from 5:00-6:45 pm, and this was after 6:00. The sanitation engineer, a woman wearing a pink shirt, came in the room to change the trash bags just as I was poking my head into the therapy room to see how Isaiah was doing. When I went back, Sophia said the following:

Daddy, we were sitting here, and that pink lady came in, and she said hi, but we didn't either, because we were too shy.

1. Sophia still refers to people as having certain colors not because their skin is a certain color but because they're wearing clothing that color. She used to do this regularly when she was just beginning to speak in complete sentences. She clearly knows how to distinguish people according to skin color, but she's got a clear enough sense of accuracy not to call anyone black or white, since no one actually is those colors; Mommy is brown, and the rest of the family is peach. It still doesn't stop her from saying a person is the color the person is wearing.

2. The word 'either' seems to be doing the job of 'also' or 'too', either of which would have sounded very strange, so she substituted something that sounds syntactically ok even if it's semantically crazy. Her error-correction has problems in terms of its positive solutions, but she certainly can catch something that doesn't sound right.

3. Many kids are shy. Some will admit to it occasionally if you ask them. What kind of a kid will volunteer her shyness as an explanation for not saying hi to someone, when you didn't ask for an explanation, didn't know to begin with that the person had said hi and she'd refused to respond, and really wouldn't have noticed if you'd never been told? She realizes that she's being shy by not speaking to the woman, but she has this compulsion to tell us not only that she didn't respond but that her shyness is the explanation why she didn't respond. It's as if she has to speak her inner monologue aloud all the time whenever she's just with us, but she won't say a word to other people. That's a weird combination of being shy and being very much not shy.

4. She doesn't just tell us the events that occurred. She's engaging in behind-the-scenes explanation of why she does certain things, and she attributes it to a somewhat abstract quality of herself, her shyness. Do three-year-olds typically engage in such second-order reflection? This is new for us. Since her brothers are well behind her in such things, we have no idea when this sort of thing normally begins.

A few weeks ago I was looking for something that I was sure I'd written down somewhere, and I found myself saying to myself, "I should have written it down." I did not mean that it would have been a good idea to write it down, and it's too bad that I didn't. I had failed to do something I should have done. When I tried to think about it more carefully, though, I wasn't sure what exactly I had meant. I didn't mean that I had done it because it was a good idea. What exactly is 'should' doing in the sentence?

I meant something like what we mean when someone asks us where the comb is, and we say it should be in the bathroom, fully expecting it to be there and ready to be a little upset upon finding out that someone had moved it. But what's different about this case is that there's no other person involved. Is it that I expect it to have been written down, and then I'll get mad at myself for not doing it if it turns out I didn't? I'm not sure at all what's going on here and how the components of the sentence contribute toward what I thought I was saying when I said it.

Here's a good example of the kind of stream-of-consciousness monologuing Sophia engages in most of her waking hours.

Sophia: Daddy, I want to wear my ugly dress today. It's in my closet hanging on a nail, just like my nail polish. My nail polish is over here. Daddy, look. See, my nail polish is melting off.

She'll often move across several different tenuous connections like that within the course of 20 seconds, and sometimes she even goes on for several minutes. We pick up very little of it most of the time because of how quickly she moves through the various stages.

She also likes to throw in lots of irrelevant information just because she likes to talk about it, so she'll tell me where her bear is (next to her blanket) and have to say that the blanket is a certain color or colors and that her Mommy made it for her. Sometimes she ties things to certain occasions or just mentions some term for a day a while back (often Saturday, which just means a while ago as far as she's concerned).

We got to see her cousin last week, who is only six weeks younger, and I was curious to see if she does the same thing. Not remotely, as far as I could tell.

Oh, and I have no idea why she calls it her ugly dress or why she nevertheless likes to wear it.

Gorgias has argued (see here and here) that there isn't anything and (see here) that, even if there were anything, you wouldn't be able to think about it. Now he argues that, even if there were anything and you could think about it, you wouldn't be able to communicate it to anyone.

1. We communicate with language. Language about things that are is not the things that are. So we don't communicate the things that are. We communicate language. The only thing that gets transferred to another person isn't the thing we saw but our words about it. We can't make perceptual images into sounds and vice versa, so we also can't make external objects into language. So the things that are, even if they could exist and be thought of, could not be communicated.

2. Language comes to us just as flavors do. It's an external thing we perceive with senses (visually or aurally). We might be inclined to think of this as language revealing some external object, but that's backwards. We have the language, and we posit an external object to explain the language just as we posit an external object to explain the image we see or sound we hear. (We posit a Grand Canyon when we hear someone tell us they went there.)

3. Language isn't really an object the way visible and audible things are. Even if it is, it's not similar to visible objects. It's grasped by a different organ. So language doesn't reveal these objects that are dissimilar from it.

4. Objects can't reveal each other's nature. So language, which is even more different, can't reveal other objects.

Responses:

1. Couldn't there be something in our mind when we hear them describe something that's similar to what's in someone else's mind when they see it?

2. We do posit an external object when we hear about it or read about it. We also posit an external object when we see it or touch it. How does that mean the object doesn't exist? How does it mean we can't communicate about it?

3. Language is distinct from the things it is about, but that doesn't mean it doesn't represent those things in a way that it can cause us to think about them. It doesn't mean we can't communicate something by using it.

4. Language doesn't connect us with the very essence of the things it's about, but it does communicate something that allows us to envision some features of those things.