Recently in Language Category

We were out for a walk today, and Sophia and Ethan had gotten ahead of the rest of us. As they approached a road, we called them back. Ethan stopped, and Sophia kept going. So Ethan went over to Sophia, picked her up, and carried her back toward us. Sophia protested in a way that imitated Ethan's usual protesting (which in turn imitates what his teachers say to him when telling him a general rule about not saying no to teachers or some such thing. Here is the exchange that began with that. The first line itself would have been funny enough, but she doesn't stop there.

Sophia: It's not ok to bring little people back to their moms and dads.
Me: Are you a little person?
Sophia: Yeah.
Me: Is Ethan a little person?
Sophia: Yeah.
Me: Is Bear-Bear a little person?
Sophia: Yeah, and so is Isaiah.
Me: Is the baby a little person?
Sophia: Yes, they are.

So she assumes a fetus is a person (whereas some philosophers I know might wonder if Isaiah is a person on their account of personhood, or perhaps they'd think his personhood is just now beginning to emerge now that he's beginning to communicate better). But she also thinks her stuffed bear is a little person. (In both cases it means she's working from a conceptual framework that doesn't require consciousness or the capacity for pleasure or pain for personhood. I'm not sure if there's some condition her assumptions about personhood require, though. I think for the bear she might be speaking in the world of her imagination or something.)

Then she does a third interesting thing. She goes on to use a singular 'they' with the correct grammatically-plural but semantically-singular verb (as opposed to saying "they is", which occurs in some colloquial English dialects even for a real plural "they" but not ever in standard colloquial English, which still says "they are" for a singular referent when gender is unknown). What's funny is that she and Ethan are in full disagreement about whether the baby is a boy or a girl. She wants a sister, and so she must be getting one. Ethan is expecting another brother. [We'll be happy if Isaiah thinks more of the baby than he would a stuffed animal he can throw things at, since that's exactly what happened the last time he was near a newborn. He nailed it in the head with a pretty hard plastic toy. That boy can really aim, but he needs some more discernment of targets.]

Anyway, Sophia isn't going to go out of her way to avoid using male or female terms for this kid. It's just so natural for her that she used the singular 'they' (and got it right) without thinking that she has this view she's putting forward about a baby sister. She's learned the language better than a lot of cranky language prescriptivists who think this expression is some offensive innovation in recent years (even though it occurs in the King James Version of the Bible, not to mention Shakespeare and Jane Austen).

I saw this several months ago but didn't get around to linking to it, and I've been spending all my online time looking at the bevy of activity on the Supreme Court blogs, so I wanted to post something that didn't take much time (and I had to drudge the dregs of my potential blogging list to find this). According to Justin Taylor in the above-linked post (there's no citation or link, so I'm taking his word for it), Hillary Clinton seemed to admit in January that she was allowing her supporters to die of exposure at one of her rallies. How so? Well, she said it was so cold that her supporters at the rally were literally freezing to death.

It's so funny that the word 'literally' is one of the most common words used to mean something other than its literal meaning. Here's another example that I love repeating. The great philosopher William Alston told our Christian philosophers' group about a decade ago that he had once heard a football announcer say, "and when he gets down into the red zone, he literally explodes!" I knew football was dangerous, but I didn't know how bad it really was!

What's going on here linguistically is that the word 'literally' is being used as an intensifier rather than to convey its literal meaning. This usage of the word is roughly synonymous to other intensifiers such as 'really', 'truly', and 'completely'. There's nothing linguistically inappropriate about it. Words don't always mean their literal meaning or their usual meaning. What's funny about it is how easy it is to intensify a metaphor by adding the word 'literal' without meaning it literally at all. In this case, it's particularly unfortunate, because if you did take her literally (and she did use the word that might in many cases indicate that you should) she would be admitting to what may well be gross negligence of the sort that could lead to many people's deaths.

In my last post on this subject [see links to all the posts here], I said I was covering the first of two posts that have seriously challenged the thesis I've been defending about the God of Christianity and the God of Islam. This post looks at the second post, Who's Allah? by Kevin Courter.

Kevin's argument is much more difficult for the position I've been taking than any of the other arguments I've been responding to. I actually think it's devastating to the position as I've sometimes stated it, but it shows that taking the biblical data seriously requires a position that's neither exactly what I've stated nor what the other side is saying. I do think my position is revisable to deal with the text he points to, and I don't think the other side is revisable to deal with the texts I've mustered or the arguments I've put forward.

Kevin presents two biblical arguments. The first is from II Corinthians 11:4:

For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. [ESV]

This way of speaking shows that Paul thinks someone who teaches a different gospel is teaching a different Jesus. Kevin also points to the discussions in I Corinthians 8 and 10 about eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul speaks of such idols in two ways. At one point, he flat-out says that the idols are nothing, and there's nothing in principle wrong with eating meat sacrificed to non-existent beings (unless there are weak brothers or sisters around who would be led back into a life of idolatry if they saw mature believers doing that).On the other hand, Paul insists that there are demons standing behind them, and involvement in idolatry is involvement with demons. Kevin thinks that's a good reason to think false worship involves inadvertent demon-worship, and thus there must be some being Allah who is a demon rather than the word referring to God or not referring to any being. My argument assumed that the word 'Allah' either refers to God or does not refer to anything.

I'll come to the demon argument at the end. I think the more serious difficulty comes from the other issue, so I'll look at that first. I want to narrow my view down to its fundamental root. My original point in all this was twofold. One side of it is that you can speak of Muslims talking about God, and they do talk about God, the actual God that I believe in as a Christian. The other side of it is that they're getting it so wrong that it's wrong to speak of them as worshiping God if you mean a certain thing by that. I don't think any of what Kevin has said threatens either of those points, although I do think I need to modify how I put it to account for the two points he makes. There's a tension in scripture between (1) passages that speak of false worship as wrong worship of God and (2) passages that speak of false worship as not worship, false worship of God as not being about God, and false views of Jesus as not being about Jesus.

The discussions of whether Muslims worship the same God as Christians have continued in a few places since my recent post. Two posts in particular deserve some attention, raising issues that didn't really come out well in my own post or in my previous discussions of this subject. I'll treat them in separate posts. The second one will probably appear tomorrow.

The first is another Justin Taylor post. Justin quotes a section of a book by Timothy Tennent, in which he argues that 'God' in English is a descriptive term, while 'Allah' in Arabic is more like a proper name. I disagree. He's right about 'Allah', but I think 'God' in English also functions like a proper name. Otherwise we shouldn't capitalize it as a name. We should speak of the god but not of God. So the two are used similarly. But there's a more interesting argument that I thought was worth responding to:

The phrases "God of Muhammad" and "Father of Jesus" are spoken by communities of faith with important books of revelation that provide hundreds of predicates, all helping to set forth the full context for the meaning of thee two phrases. From the perspective, I must conclude that the Father of Jesus is not the God of Muhammad.

I'm with Tennent that it sounds so wrong to say that the God of Muhammad is the Father of Jesus. I'm even close to him on why it sounds so wrong. But I don't think he's quite clarified what the problem is. That sentence involves two terms that aren't mutually acceptable. No Christian will say that God is the God of Muhammad, since that means he's a true follower of God. No Muslim would say that God is the Father of Jesus in the way Christians mean that. So putting the two expressions together in an identity statement is extremely funny, linguistically speaking, and it's strange to affirm such a sentence. Affirming the sentence seems to amount to affirming that both descriptions apply, and no faithful Christian or Muslim would do that.

But you can say all that while still thinking that the referent of the two funny statements is God, even if in one case you think the expression gets something fundamentally wrong about him (just as I can refer to the red-haired man across the room drinking champagne when the guy is actually a bald woman in drag drinking wine in a champagne glass while wearing a red-haired wig). It's technically false that the guy with red hair across the room drinking champagne is my English teacher, even if the woman I'm referring to is my English teacher, and I don't know she's a woman. I still refer to her when I describe her that way. So I don't think this argument counts against the view I've been defending.

Rick Love and John Piper have reinvigorated the debate over whether Muslims worship the same God as Christians. See Justin Taylor's summary of the reasons for the Piper position. I'm of course on record taking the opposite view (see here), but in contributing to the comments on Justin's post I ended up putting my reasoning in a different enough way that I wanted to post it here as well. What follows is a slightly modified version of my comment on Justin's post.

First, let me present an issue in the philosophy of language. There's some difference of opinion about how words acquire their reference, i.e. how it is that a word comes to refer to the thing that it does. The dominant view in philosophy of language today is that a word comes to refer to what it refers to because of an initial "baptism" that declares what it refers to, along with various processes that happen along its continued usage. But there's a causal chain back to the original "baptism".

The name "George W. Bush" refers to the guy who happens to be the current president because his parents gave him that name and continued to use it to refer to him without changing it, and he continued to use the name without changing it. Its reference is because of that causal chain back to when his parents declared it to be his name.

Now suppose someone comes along and enters into the causal chain, calling him George W. Bush and engaging in the normal process of using the name. But this person starts claiming that the guy called George W. Bush is a clone of the original and has only existed for a few years. That amounts to denying an essential property of George W. Bush, i.e. his origin. Someone can't be him without having that origin. Nonetheless, the person with the cloning theory successfully refers to the real George W. Bush, despite having a view that denies one of his essential properties. So it can't be that denying an essential property of a being means you're not referring to that being. Some claim that because one of God's essential properties, according to Christianity, is his existence in three persons, then someone who denies that element of God's nature must be talking about a different (and non-existent) being. Not so. That's not how language works.

Muslims use certain words to refer to the being they worship (to remain neutral at this point). The linguistic practice that involves those words referring to the being they worship traces back to the time of Muhammad, who wrote a series of Surahs that ended up becoming the Qur'an. In these writings, Muhammad claimed to have received them from an angel, and they spoke of the being worshiped by the Christians and Jews. The word 'Allah' was initially a description for a divine being in Arabic, not a name, although perhaps it now functions in a namelike way, much like 'God' in English. 'Allah' thus referred explicitly to the God that so far had been worshiped by Jews and Christians. Muhammad went on to say a whole bunch of things about God that Christians would deny, including some things that amount to denying some essential properties of God. Islam is a false religion that is worthless in terms of knowing God, according to Christian teaching, and the worship of this being under Islam does not count as genuine worship.

Nevertheless, it seems completely ludicrous to me to claim that this being that is falsely and ungenuinely worshiped by Muslims is not God. Muhammad intended to refer to the God long worshiped by Jews and Christians that Muhammad when he said all those false things about God. The being he misrepresented and twisted all sorts of things about is the God of the Bible. I don't know how the historical facts can get around that.

There is an issue of how a Christian should make this point. Perhaps Love didn't go far enough in distancing himself from how people might hear it. But that doesn't mean what he says is false.

Paul Cassell looks at a definition of 'terrorism' that I find problematic. What's central to terrorism, on this account, is causing harm to innocent civilians. That seems pretty far off to me.

First, it can't be just harm. It has to include threatened harm. Someone who threatens to blow up the Empire State Building if you don't fork over $1 billion is clearly engaging in terrorism, even if they never blow it up. Second, it can't be restricted just to harm to civilians. It's terrorism if you plant a bomb in the office of a high-ranking military officer. Third, terrorism doesn't always threaten harm, at least not directly. Eco-terrorism can include things like putting spikes on a road foresters need to use to cut down trees. No one might be directly harmed by this, and yet it's clearly a kind of terrorism.

What makes it terrorism is that the perpetrators intend to cause them to stop using the road by destroying their tires every time they do. Eco-terrorists have been known to cause far more property damage than that without causing direct harm, including blowing up people's houses because they work for a polluting company, choosing to do it when they're not home. That's even more clearly terrorism, and yet it's not about direct harm to civilians. I suppose if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of what counts as harm, then these might not be covered, but it's not intuitively the best way to get at what terrorism is. There are clear cases with no harm anyway, e.g. kidnapping in order to get some money or to get some political goal achieved when there's no intention of harming anyone, although there might be an implied threat of harm.

Haig Khatchadourian's The Morality of Terrorism opens with a very nice discussion of how to define 'terrorism'. He distinguishes between predatory, retaliatory, political, and moral/religious terrorism in terms of the motives, but all have one thing in common: there are immediate victims and a separate real target. There are lots of uses of coercion or force that aren't terrorism. What makes it terrorism is that the intended effect on the primary target is accomplished indirectly by doing something to an immediate victim who isn't the primary target. You do or threaten something to loved ones, civilians, a structure, and so on in order to get someone else to do something. That seems to me to be exactly what's definitive of terrorism.

The relevant section is also reprinted in the first two editions of James E. White's Contemporary Moral Problems: War and Terrorism. (I'm not sure why he removed it from the third edition, but what it does include doesn't strike me as being quite as insightful on this question.)

I've been reading through the second edition of D.A. Carson's How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Last night I came across a passage that I had to read a little differently now than when he first wrote it in his first edition of 1990. Carson was responding to the view that predestination-language in the Bible is basically referring to God knowing ahead of time what people outside his control will do, which takes its start from Romans 8:29's "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son". Consider his criticism:

This way of wording things, of course, makes the human being the pivotal "decider"; God's decision is not predestination in any meaningful sense, but a kind of ratification-in-advance. Moreover, too little attention is paid to the fact that this text does not speak of foreknowing that such and such will take place, but that God foreknows the person. Many have shown that in Semitic thought "to know" a person can have overtones of intimacy: if a husband "knows" his wife, for instance, he has sexual intercourse with her. For God to "foreknow" certain people, especially in the context of Romans 8:28-30, means (as most serious commentators point out) that God has a personal relationship with the individual in advance. Those whom God foreknows in this sense, he predestines "to be conformed to the likeness of his Son". Besides, it is a strange method that takes a doubtful definition of one occurrence of "foreknowledge" and pits it against the many references in which it is clearly stated that God has chosen his people (e.g., Deut. 4:37-39; 7:6-9; Ps. 4:3; Matt 24:22, 31; Luke 18:7; John 15:16; Acts 13:48; Gal. 4:27, 31; Eph. 1:4-6; 2 Tim. 2:10; 1 Pet. 1:2).

This is part of Carson's longer argument that theological discussions of free will shouldn't first assume a particular meaning of a controversial term (in philosophy, there is no consensus on what counts as freedom) and then read the biblical text in terms of such an account of freedom, particularly if the text itself assumes a different concept of freedom. Three things came to mind as I read this paragraph.

1. Given that this use of "foreknow" is based on the Semitic concept Carson explains (which I think is highly likely if not almost certain), there is an alternative interpretation of this passage as merely corporate. God choose a people and then lets individuals decide if they want to be in it. A lot of Wesleyans and Arminians hold such a view about other passages involving predestination. I find it thoroughly implausible for other reasons, but given its availability and commonness, it's a little strange that this individualist interpretation at odds with the Semitic language persists.

2. This view makes the predestination-language pretty dumb. Why should Paul bother to add it in? If all God is doing is seeing that someone will do something and then agreeing that they will indeed do the thing that he sees them doing in the future, what's the point of saying that he predestines people? If predestining is simply foreknowing, then it's redundant, in fact tautologous. It basically means, "For whom he foreknew that they would do it, he agreed that they would do it." That's not very informative unless you're inclined to think God engages in self-deception. I'm not too fond of interpretations of Paul that make him out to be an idiot.

3. The first sentence struck me as extremely funny given a certain political moment of a couple years ago. Carson doesn't use the exact term "the decider", but by implication he's saying that God is the ultimate decider, and the view he's responding to makes humans the decider. This is pretty much the exact sense of the term the president was using when people made fun of him for calling himself the decider. So a very intelligent professor from Canada with a Ph.D. from a top U.K. institution, one who I note is very particular about his language, can write in a way that pretty much got universally made fun of as dumb Southerner hick language when the president of the United States used it. (Carson does acknowledge something funny about using the term this way by putting it in scare quotes, but the president was speaking extemporaneously, and Carson was not only writing in a prepared way, but it passed through the editorial review process and then did so again when he revised the book five or six years later.)

I read a lot of student papers and exam essays. I see a lot of repeat errors. It gets really annoying after a while, but one interesting fact about language acquisition becomes pretty clear after a number of instances of the same error. Some of these errors seem to be a result of people learning vocabulary by hearing without ever reading the term in question.

One common error I see (and I see it online quite a lot also) is referring to a transition between one subject and another as a segway. No, a segway is a two-wheeled device that moves around while you stand it. A transition between two subjects is a segue. But you don't have to be a non-reader to make this mistake. It took me until well into my undergraduate years to figure out that the word that I thought was pronounced "seeg" was the same word that people kept pronouncing "segway". I don't know how anyone ever does figure this out, in fact, including me.

But not every instance of what I have in mind is like that. For instance, I sometimes see people referring to the "rank-in-file", which is not a normal English expression at all. They meant to be talking about the rank-and-file. One of the most annoying is one I see extremely frequently in philosophy papers, especially on issues in metaphysics. Spiderman and Peter Parker are one and the same person. It's sort of an old-fashioned expression (which I sometimes see written as "old-fashion", a bothersome construction in itself). I would never use it. But if I were to use it, I'd get it right and not speak of Spidey and Peter being "one in the same".

I'm convinced that these mistakes result mostly from people who never read (or perhaps only read people writing on the internet who never read). There are certain mistakes that people who read would never or almost never make. These students are basically signaling to me that they hardly ever read anything when they do this sort of thing. Yet they have no idea that they're doing it, and they wouldn't be in a position to know that unless they read more.

I'm stuck in grading and can't get finish off a post I'm pretty excited about but am not ready to post yet, so here's something in the meantime from a while back: lying by imperatives. I saved this and never got around to posting it, probably because I had something to say about it, but I don't have the time to read it carefully again and see what that might have been. I suspect it had something to do with the ethics of lying. Maybe I'll post an update tomorrow if I come up with anything once I'm through my last class of the semester.

Update: I think I remember what I might have wanted to say, but I'm not entirely sure this is exactly the point I had in mind. The lying guard says. "Don't bite me" in place of the usual "Bite me", as if the imperative has a truth value, which it doesn't if you're actually going to be precise about the semantics. But we understand what's going on here when someone commands the opposite of you want to do as an instance of being a complete liar, because there's something truth-related about imperatives. Imperatives often assume propositional content that does have a truth value, and they communicate propositional content that does have a truth value.

Another example would be if I tell you to stop poking me. That's an imperative, but the act of saying the imperative, even though it has no semantic truth value, does pragmatically convey the information that I think you're poking me and the information that I want you to stop. So whether a speech act counts as lying might depend not just on whether you deliberately communicate false semantic content. Deception can occur when you communicate false information pragmatically, and the cartoonist seems to understand that in having a lying guard present the opposite imperative of what the guard wants the person to do. It doesn't even have to be a speech act. It can simply be an act. You try to communicate that you're home by leaving the lights on when you're out. If lying is a deliberate attempt to deceive by communicating false information, then you don't need to say something that's semantically false to lie. You can say something semantically true but misleading, expecting to communicate an additional falsehood. You can say nothing at all but by your actions intentionally communicate something false.

This has implications for the moral issues involving lying. Some people hold that lying is always wrong no matter what. I know people who hold such a view but then stick to the letter of the law about not expressing falsehoods semantically while being fine with deliberately deceiving people pragmatically. I would suggest that what's bad about lying is still present in such cases, whether we call it a lie or not (but I would prefer to call it at least a lie of sorts). If any case of deception is ok, why shouldn't it be ok to lie semantically in such cases?

[For more on the ethical issues, see my earlier post on the ethics of lying.] 

I've heard of people getting away with serious academic work based on the Harry Potter series, but I think this one takes the cake. Molly Diesing is a linguist who has written on the speech-acts of spell-casting in Harry Potter. I wish I had the time to read her paper, because it sounds fascinating to a language geek like me. I'm not entirely sure I'd understand some of the technical linguistics, but that wouldn't stop me if I didn't have other time constraints that I do have.

I've always been baffled by the expression "the exception that proves the rule". It never made any sense why an exception could prove a rule. Shouldn't it prove that the rule isn't true?

I once heard an erroneous explanation that it has to do with the older sense of 'prove' as in testing or trying. The exception tests the rule and makes it harder to establish itself. That made a little more sense, but it turns out to be wrong.

The real explanation is much simpler. I was assuming this was supposed to be some absolute rule. The exception that proves the rule does actually confirm the rule, but it confirms it logically rather than empirically. If it's an exception, there's got to be something it's an exception to, i.e. a rule that it goes against. It obviously can't be an exception to an exceptionless or absolute rule. It's got to be an exception to a true generalization. But it can't be an exception without some such rule that it's an exception to. That's how an exception proves a rule.

Now there's still an illegitimate use of this expression, and I see it all the time. Whenever anyone states a rule as an absolute, and someone shows that the rule is false by finding a counterexample, they can't respond by saying that it's the exception that proves the rule. No, it in fact disproves the rule, since the rule was stated as an absolute without exception. So what I was objecting to all along was indeed an illegitimate rhetorical move. It's just that the expression has its origin in a perfectly legitimate point that can be made. It's just not what people usually mean by the expression now.

For more information, see the Wikipedia entry on this. (Yes, unbelievably, it's got its own Wikipedia entry.)

I'm trying to figure out if aboriginal Australians count as black. I'm not asking if Australians call them black. Australians call people from India black. Aborigines are actually more closely related to Asians than they are to Africans, so even though some Australians, including other aborigines, are happy to use the word 'black' to refer to them, it doesn't tell us if aborigines are black in terms of what Americans mean by the term. I want to know if the word 'black' as it is used in the United States (or perhaps Canada, the U.K., or other places) includes aboriginal Australians among the group it refers to. (In case it turns out that people from different geographical locations would respond differently, it would be nice to know where you're from if you're going to leave a comment.)

In response to a question a couple days ago about whether he expects to be Swift-Boated, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said the following:

I have no doubt there will be some of that — trying to make me into this foreign, odd, clearly black person and to scare people," he said. "When people try to Swift Boat you, you have to respond forcefully, you have to respond immediately and you have to respond truthfully. ... We are prepared for whatever they will throw at us.

I know what I think he means by "clearly black person", and I know what I think he's trying to say. I'm curious what other people think, though. Can you paraphrase what you think he's saying? I'm not so interested at this point in whether this is accurate, appropriate, insulting, or offensive. (If what he's saying is what I think he's saying, it's possible that it's all four.) I'm simply curious what people think he means. What exactly was he trying to say?

A colleague of mine where I teach is sort of a stickler for assigning grades according to the traditional but now completely obsolete approach whereby a C is average. He seeks to have the median student in the class earning grades in the C range, with an equal number of people in the D range as in the B range and as many failing as earning an A. His argument is that this is what these grades have always meant, and grade inflation is a violation of the meaning of the grades.

It struck me today that this argument is very similar to the argument language conservatives give against gender-inclusive language. The English language has changed since the time the ordinary English speaker could hear a sentence like "Surely every moral man must be appalled at the judicial execution of the innocent or at the punishment, torture, and killing of the innocent" and not wonder what the author thinks about moral women and children. (The sentence is from Kai Nielsen's "Against Moral Conservatism" from Ethics 82 (1972), which my students had to read this week.) Gone are the days when a sentence like that could make it into publication in a top philosophy journal.

So too have the standards changed when it comes to what letter grades mean. A grade of a C just doesn't indicate merely satisfactory anymore. Students know this. Most faculty know this. You can pound your fists and complain about this sorry state of affairs, and maybe you're right that it's regrettable (although I see no reason why we should have to stick with any particular arbitrary assignment of letters to standards). What I don't think will ultimately pass muster is sticking to your guns and giving people grades in a way that's wholly inconsistent with what the standards in fact are by basing it on some system of giving grades that hardly anyone follows anymore. Doing so means you're not giving people the grades you think you're giving them. This is why I can't in good conscience follow my colleague's policy.

This is not to say that college students today are as competent as in the past, which may well not be the case. It doesn't mean the work that now counts as satisfactory is what should count as satisfactory. Those are completely separate issues. All I'm saying is that the meaning of the letter grades has changed in a way that those who hold onto the traditianal system of assigning grades have been resisting to the point where the grades they assign are dishonest, even if not deliberately so. Grade inflation may be a problem in other ways, but one element of grade inflation is simply a fact, and resisting it in the way my colleague does seems to me to count as academic dishonesty.

I've decided to begin a running feature on things I discover in students' submitted work that annoy me or amuse me. Usually these will be pet peeves. Sometimes they will just be odd expressions or statements. I'll begin with one that I see very regularly, and it's not just in student papers but all over the internet. It's the expression "close-minded".

It amazes me how common this is, but it doesn't make sense. No one is saying that your mind is close to something, which is what "close-minded" suggests. Even if your mind is a material object (which it isn't), this isn't about having your mind physically close to anything. What people mean is that someone is closed-minded, i.e. their mind is closed. Somehow the 'd' has become elided in how we pronounce it, and people who don't read have spelled it the way they hear it. It has become so common a way of spelling the term that there are more Google searches for "close-minded" than there are for "closed-minded".

Dictionaries do unfortunately include both, and I'm not trying to say that this is incorrect. I think it's reached a point where I can't confidently say that. But it is nevertheless stupid and annoying that it's gotten to that point. The question is whether I can justify correcting it on students' paper.

Here's one suggestion. One of the things a college course involving academic writing should teach is how not to come across as ignorant or as a non-reader. If enough people will conclude that upon seeing someone write "close-minded", then it might be worth correcting for the sake of how viewers of the writing of the student in question will see it. But I think that argument might apply to things I don't think I should correct (e.g. the singular "they", which I eagerly encourage).

I thought this site was pretty funny. Quotation marks may well be the most abused punctuation mark. I've seen several people linking to this since I first saw it here, and one of them was a couple days ago, which reminded me that I wanted to link to it at some point. I thought now would be a good time, since I'm running out of things to post that don't take a fair amount of time to think about or to write up (but not, of course, of things that will take some work, which just keep forming a longer and longer list).

Mark Liberman at Language Log wrote an interesting post a few weeks ago on journalistic quotation practices. He gives several examples of the use of direct quotation marks, which most readers assume means they're reading the person's exact words, when in reality the author of the piece has significantly altered what the person being quoted had said. Liberman writes:

These are not isolated errors. They're representative of the normal practice of journalism. The superficial issue is that journalists -- as a culture -- don't act as if they care whether quotes are accurate. The deeper issue, in my opinion, is the role that such quotes play in journalistic rhetoric. They're usually not treated as <i>data</i>, facts about the world in need of explanation, but rather as illustrations or expressions of the writer's opinions and conclusions, put into someone else's mouth because the rhetorical norms of the profession require it.

Often, such quotes are made to order by getting sources to answer leading questions, over and over again, and ignoring all of the answers that don't fit the framework that the writer has in mind. In other cases, bits and pieces of quotation are taken out of context and strung together in order to create a meaning that suits the writer's intent (which may or may not have been the speaker's intent).

I have direct experience being treated in exactly that way when interviewed for a news story by someone who had a particular point she was trying to get me to confirm. She took me out of context, ignored the main emphasis of what I was saying, and used a minor concession I was willing to make as if it was my primary concern. After a discussion of a presentation of the value of waiting until marriage for sex, the reporter asked me a number of questions, most of them leading, and I wasn't biting on most of them. But then she asked me if I thought the discussion might have discouraged some from considering Christianity's broader claims, and I said I thought that might happen but that some issues are worth discussing even if most people would be turned off. She quoted me very plainly and simply as saying that I thought the discussion would turn people off to Christianity. That strikes me as deliberate misquotation and in fact pretending I was saying something that I wasn't saying. I was her mouthpiece.

Even ignoring political bias complaints about mainstream news outlets in the U.S., it's a bit arrogant and completely out of step with the news reality to hear people like Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather saying that they aren't biased but simply report the news. There's no chance that any major news outlet isn't at least to some degree coloring their reports with what they hope to get across, although I imagine some of that comes from less deliberate manipulation than what I experienced. This can easily happen, and I'm sure it does, from journalists of any political stripe. It's not a left or right thing. But once you factor in the fact that most of the people working in the major news outlets indicate political preferences that are considerably to the left on average when compared with how the general poplulace describes themselves, it's a no-brainer why so many people think the mainstream media are biased to the left. That's why I can't help but laugh when I hear so many people on the left acting as if the media is monolithically biased to the right, as if they're trying to help the current president whom the majority of journalists detest so much. But this is a problem that's not on any political side. Immoral reporting is immoral reporting.

Eugene Volokh has an excellent post on the use of terms that might be regarded as offensive. Three paragraphs struck me as offering an interesting argument, one I haven't thought through very carefully yet, but one that nonetheless intrigues me:

If handicapped people learn that some people say "disabled" and others say "handicapped," and that neither is evidence of hostility, a few might still bristle at one (or the other); but many will be satisfied by the explanation that decent people use both. But say that everyone is told that "disabled" is the one right term, and some decent people don't go along, whether because of force of habit, strong preference for "handicapped," or just bristling at being told what to say. Then handicapped people who hear the term may well become more offended, because they've been taught that the word is offensive.

People who might even prefer to shrug the term off might feel almost obligated to take it as an insult. If someone calls me "Gene" rather than "Eugene," I'm a little annoyed (that's just not the name I prefer in English), but I assume that it's just because they've fallen into that habit with other Eugenes they know, who do go by Gene in a way that I don't. I assume the speaker's intentions were good, and I think I'm happier for it.

But if someone started a campaign of insisting that calling me Gene is actually rude, perhaps even insulting (because the diminutive implies a diminution of my status), I'd both hear "Gene" a bit less often, and be much more annoyed when I do hear it, precisely because I'll worry that it's a deliberate violation of the New Good Manners Rule and thus a deliberate slight. Those who make the handicapped/disabled issue into a matter of identity politics rather than just a matter of apricot/apricot (or even Gene/Eugene) may thus increase the amount of hurt feelings on both sides.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy is disturbed by the rhetoric of the following statement by President Bush yesterday morning:

Those determined to find fault with this [immigration] bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don't like. If you want to kill the bill, if you don't want to do what's right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people.

The complaint seems to be that the president is treating those who disagree with him on this bill don't want to do what's right for America. I think the complaint relies on an ambiguity in the expression. Absent any context, principles of charity, or assumptions about what someone might mean, you can take the expression in either of the following two ways:

A. This bill is right for America, and if you want to kill it then you don't want to do this thing that's right for America.
B. This bill is right for America, and anyone who wants to kill it must agree that it's right for America and therefore must have a desire to harm America or at least to resist anything that's right for America.

Now I acknowledge that someone could use the language the president used to mean the second thing. However, I find it extremely unlikely that that's what he meant. In context, he was discussing a particular bill and arguing that the bill itself is right for America. The very fact that he was arguing with those who disagree with him on the particular bill, and that he was making an appeal to doing it because it's right for America, means he does think those who disagree with him on the bill want to do what's right for America. So taking him as if he thinks the opposite is at odds with the context of his speech. He wasn't speaking to a closed-room, partisan audience in order to smear his political opponents. He was trying to persuade people who disagree with him.

It therefore makes much more sense to interpret the president as fitting within his rhetorical situation rather than opposing it. It's always best to take someone in the most charitable way possible given all your information, and it's more charitable in terms of intellectual coherence to take him as saying A. It's also more charitable in moral terms, since it would be immoral to intend B by the sentence he uttered.

But there's no reason to think he did, and intending A is perfectly fine. So I'm at a loss to understand why there's supposed to be any problem with what he said (aside from whether it actually is best for America, but that's something he's in the process of trying to argue for, and mentioning that he thinks it's best for America is perfectly legitimate in that context).

Update: Even Peggy Noonan has joined the insanity. I'd never have predicted her to be the sort who would read this president's words in as uncharitable a light as possible. She sometimes disagrees with him, but she's not usually willing to engage in this kind of libel.

It's sometimes said that the word 'jihad' in Arabic derives from a word for striving and thus doesn't mean war or holy war. Mark Liberman points out that the English word 'war' is also derived from a root that has nothing to do with war, although in this case it is confusion rather than striving. It's easy to see how either might eventually end up meaning war. (It's a little more difficult to see how the etymological root of 'war' eventually became the German word for sausage.) But both words do actually mean war.

Now, as Mark acknowledges, this doesn't stop people from using either word metaphorically to refer to something else. Muslims do use the word 'jihad' to refer to an inner, spiritual quest that involves struggling to be a good Muslim, but in fact the English word 'war' can also be used in such a metaphorical way, as can several other words that literally mean violent conflict. Some words have even more commonly come to mean nonviolent moral missions (e.g. 'crusade') and hardly ever mean war.

I have no problem if a Muslim wants to use the word 'jihad' in this way. I'd be much happier if all Muslims did no more than go through inner struggles in their personal jihad. I do have a problem if someone wants to pretend that the word never means "holy war" or especially the historically revisionist line that Muslims never meant it as war. I do have a problem if someone tries to act as if this nonviolent use of the word is standard in a way that nonviolent uses of the word 'war' are not. But even aside from the parallels between the two words, I think it's worth resisting the etymological fallacy that takes a word to mean something simply because it was derived from an archaic root that means that. The classic counterexample of 'butterfly' in English comes to mind. It doesn't have much to do with butter or flies.

I've read a number of criticisms of Justice Kennedy's decision in Carhart v. Stenberg, which upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban. One theme I've seen several times is the claim that Kennedy's use of the term 'abortion doctors' is somehow pejorative and inappropriate. In fact, this meme seems to have initiated with Justice Ginsburg's dissent. See here for Justice Ginsburg's words in making this criticism.

When I first read about this, it seemed an unfair and illegitimate complaint, but I didn't really spend much time thinking about it or looking at the use of the term 'abortion doctor'. I decided to look around a little when I saw this post by Stuart Buck, which points out that one person now making this complaint had only two years earlier used the same expression in an entirely positive context. I did a Google search for "abortion doctor" OR "abortion doctors". Here are some of the results.

1. a directory of abortion providers
2. someone's explanation "Why I Am An Abortion Doctor"
3. a 1998 CNN news story about the murder of an abortion doctor
4. a 2003 AP news story about the execution of someone who killed an abortion doctor
5. the amazon.com entry for the book associated with #2
6. a 1997 pro-choice website seeking to organize the pro-choice movement against a murder charge an abortion doctor was facing
7. a 2003 Fox News story about the same events of #4 above
8. a 2007 Los Angeles Times piece on an aspiring abortion doctor still in medical school, which I have to note is (a) very positive about her and (b) significantly after the Kennedy opinion
9. another article about the 2003 case, this time hosted at a site about dangeous cults that places this killer in a larger category of anti-abortion extremists
10. an abortion provider directory at abortion.com, which as far as I can tell has removed whatever reference it had that placed it in the listings for this Google search

A little while ago, Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy wrote a brief but interesting review of the new Tolkien novel The Children of Hurin. One statement stood out to me as especially interesting:

The story also emphasizes Tolkien's view (perhaps influenced by his experiences in World War I) that waging war against evil often requires time and patience, avoiding both premature defeatism and premature large-scale offensives.

I don't know whether this is accurate to Tolkien's intent, but I thought the ensuing discussion in the comments was very helpful in terms of why he takes Tolkien this way. But what's perhaps more interesting to me is that this seems like a perfectly normal use of the word 'evil', one that assumes nothing in particular about the metaphysical or moral content of the term. Speaking of fighting against evil in this sense does not involve any assumption about some force of evil in the world, never mind about whether such a thing is as powerful as any good force.

It amazes me how many philosophers I know think that using 'evil' as a noun in this way somehow reveals a hidden Manicheanism or dualism in one's view of good and evil (i.e. the view that good and evil are equally powerful forces). Sometimes the claim is put that President Bush is "ontologizing evil" by using the word 'evil' as a noun in this way, which is philosophical shorthand for the same point. A friend of mine called me up last week for other reasons, but the conversation degenerated to a series of his gripes against some of the views I've argued for on this blog that he'd been holding in for a couple years and had to get out before he leaves town (at least that's what it seemed to me he was doing), and at one point he just couldn't fathom how I could possibly think President Bush is not a dualist of this sort given how often he uses the word 'evil' as a noun in this way.

This kind of abstract language isn't all that uncommon. Are people ontologizing cancer as if it's some all-powerful force in the universe when they say that we're forming a crusade against breast cancer? Are Mothers Against Drunk Driving treating drunk driving as some evil force on the level of divinity if they speak as if they're waging a war against drunk driving? Are politicians ontologizing corruption as some spiritual force as powerful as God whenever they speak of fighting corruption? I don't see how it's any different when it comes to fighting terrorism, fighting terror, or fighting evil. It's a credit to the Volokh Conspiracy readers that no one repeated that meme in the comments.

From an actual church sign: "Hurting people loved here"

I count at least six disambiguations given in the post and the comments, most of them not good.

I was going to post this a week ago, but I didn't get around to it. Rick Mansfield found an occurrence of the singular 'they' in the Oxford American Dictionary.

If you're a pro-choice Republican running for president, by all means go ahead and try to downplay your pro-choice views in order to emphasize what unites Republicans. Feel free to try to make the case that pro-life Republicans should bracket that issue. You won't convince everyone, but I have no problem if you make the case.

But please don't try to use disingenuous rhetoric masked as an argument when you try to make your case. It's simply deceitful to pretend your opposition to laws against abortion is emphasizing "what we are for" rather than "what we are against" and that others' promotion of the inherent worth of the unborn is "what we are against" rather than "what we are for". Virtually any policy you approve of can be characterized in terms of being for something or against something, and Rudy Giuliani himself regularly characterizes his view on abortion as being against putting people in jail for having abortions, which is a disingenuous mischaracterization of the pro-life view to begin with, but even aside from that it's very much being against something.

Thanks to Nancy French for noticing this.

One more voice enters the fray to support the minority report that Don Imus' primary offense is against women, with his offense against blacks only secondary. Roland Martin (who it is worth recognizing is black) argues that, while the nappy-haired qualifier restricted Imus' comment to black women, it's very clear that calling them hos made it an attack on women.

I wouldn't say some of what he says, and I'd word some more of it very differently than he does. I think you could be critical of Hillary Clinton as an opportunist without basing it on her violation of gender stereotypes that we'd prefer her to conform to. But I do think enough of the criticism she receives comes from what he's getting at. The same is true of Condi Rice. People can criticize her views or even slander her character without necessarily being sexist. After all, they do the same to other members of the Bush Administration, most of whom are not women. But sometimes it takes on a particular flavor with her in ways that you couldn't see if the attack were against a man. The same is true of Janet Reno. Just consider the SNL parodies of all three of these women, especially Will Ferrell's Reno.

Compare someone who refers to some black people (sex unspecified) as nappy-headed and someone who refers to some women (race unspecified) as hos. The former makes fun of someone's physical characteristics, deriding a distinctive characteristic of the appearance of black people. The latter invokes a double standard (men who are promiscuous have no similar negative term) and usually involves a moral judgment about sexual behavior based on evidence that often isn't closely (or isn't at all) tied to sexual behavior. It is a particular insult against women to take part in that game, regardless of whether the insult in a particular case is restricted to a particular sub-group of women, even if the context also insults that sub-group.

Both are immoral, but the second seems much worse to me. So when both are done together, why is it that people focus just on the former? Is it that we're just incapable of seeing an insult against black women as being an insult against women? Or is it that we've got a heightened sensibility toward seeing slights against black people that we don't have toward seeing slights against women? Or is it some combination of the two?

Don Imus' recent racist and misgynist comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team have gotten him suspended from his MSNBC morning show and the CBS radio network for two weeks. Two weeks? Forget the nappy-haired bit. How many people do you think could call some college students hos on a major cable news network and not be fired permanently on the spot? Not very many. All Imus gets is two weeks of presumably unpaid vacation. ABC and CBS are basically collaborating to let him get away with this with minimal impact on his career.

Isn't it interesting that the people who have been bearing the burden of responding to this are black people who have been offended by the racist connotations of his "nappy-haired hos" comment (and the more explicit epithet of his conversation partner)? Why aren't we hearing as much of a response from feminists about the misogyny of calling college women hos, even aside from the race issue? I wonder if it's got something to do with the fact that most feminist don't consider themselves-as-women insulted when it's only black women who have been spoken of this way. The lack of feminist response itself is an interesting example of hidden racism.

A friend of mine overheard some university students yesterday morning talki