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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.

The first thing to notice is that this is a disjunctive definition. It lists three different things, any of which it will count as heterosexism. This isn't problematic in itself. There are plenty of words that can apply to a number of different things. Some of them are due to plain old ambiguity, e.g. the word 'bank' can mean a financial institution or the sandy shoreline alongside a river. More often a term can refer to several phenomena that all fit under the same category.

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.

Now I can think of three different things that could be distinguished here:

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.

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 talking about this in Starbucks. They were actually defending Imus on the grounds that the people he was talking about really do have nappy hair. Even aside from the racial issues some might raise about such a statement (which I'm guessing people will disagree about), isn't it kind of silly to defend someone who called some people "nappy-haired hos" by saying they do have nappy hair? It's kind of like defending someone calling a Jewish person a "Jew-nosed liar" by saying that since the person really is Jewish then it sort of follows that they have a Jewish nose and then not even mentioning that they accused the person of lying too.

Update: I didn't hear about this today, but some are comparing this incident with a similar one in 2003 when Michael Savage called someone a Sodomite and wished he'd get AIDS and die. MSNBC fired him on the spot. Now wishing someone's death on the air is much worse than what Imus said, but does one justify immediate firing and the other just a two-week vacation'? I have no idea if this piece is trustworthy, but it suggests that Imus is just too connected to influential people for this to affect him long-term.

Update 2: Apparently MSNBC has fired him now. See the comments. I'm curious how they're going to spin their change of mind. They very clearly had not wanted to do that and were hoping a slap on the wrist would pacify any outrage.

Someone arrived at my blog via the following search this morning: 

is +"gal" a derogatory term

Excellent question. If a derogatory term requires that the speaker intends it to have a negative connotation, I don't think it's derogatory. And I do think that's what it means to be derogatory. But I've never been comfortable with the term. It's always seemed like a diminutive. I understand that it's intended to be a substitute for 'girl' to refer to people who are supposed to be old enough that 'girl' feels inappropriate but who aren't quite women yet. Or at least that's the intent. There's never any negative intent with this word as far as I've ever known, but something about it just rubs me the wrong way.

I heard someone on the radio today refer to radio as terrestrial radio (as opposed to internet "radio"). A quick Google search reveals that this inaccurate term has become fairly standard. Now internet "radio" is not radio but simply music selected by someone else to listen to coming via another medium. People do that over radio waves too, and they just wanted to capture the feel of radio stations but in a different medium. I could understand internet television, since that term is not tied to the medium the signal is carried in. But the word 'radio' is, or at least it used to be before whoever started talking about internet "radio" hijacked the term.

It's always seemed a bad idea to me to call that radio, but I think it's worse to refer to actual radio as terrestrial radio. Something is terrestrial if it is on the ground. Radio waves go through the air. What's worse, however, is that internet "radio" is much closer to the ground than actual radio. Internet cables can run through the air but can also run along the ground or underground. It would thus be much more accurate to call radio by its name, 'radio', and to refer to this thing they're calling internet "radio" as terrestrial radio. It wouldn't be accurate, but it would be more accurate than what they're using the term for now. But I guess people who coin words don't often think about what they're doing, and we've now got a case where terrestrial radio is not terrestrial, and internet radio is not radio. At least they're not distinguishing between AM and FM internet radio.

Someone found this blog searching for the following question:

should you capitalize bible

I'd be surprised if the searcher is ever going to see this post, but what would be the best way to answer that question? I was always taught to capitalize it, but I was also taught to capitalize pronouns for divine persons, and I've since concluded that that's not just unnecessary but a bad idea entirely. So should we capitalize the initial letter of 'Bible' or not?

I don't think the arguments against capitalizing divine pronouns apply here, since those arguments rely on the ambiguity of pronouns in terms of who they refer to. The issue is whether it's a proper name of the sort that we should capitalize. We capitalize proper names, which is why I mark it wrong when my students use the word 'god' with lowercase when they are referring to a divine being as if with a name. Some people think they shouldn't capitalize the word if they don't or aren't sure they believe in God or one god, but we capitalize the name 'Gandalf', and no one believes he exists.

But is it different with the expression 'the Bible'? After all, we're not capitalizing the first letter of 'the', and the presence of that definite article to begin with is unusual in a name. But then other names do begin with articles, e.g. the Superbowl, the Beatles, the Boston Celtics, the Kama Sutra. So there's no assumption that you really believe the Bible is holy. It's just treating the name as a proper name of the same kind as the rest of this list. My conclusion then (in the absence of any argument to the contrary or any considerations undermining the one consideration that I've given) is that we ought to capitalize the initial B in 'Bible' when using 'the Bible' as a proper name. This reasoning would not support capitalizing the adjectival form 'biblical'.

I guess this means I need to be making a note of this also in my students' papers. I'd been thinking this was the sort of thing people could disagree about in a way that isn't true of 'God'. But it appears that's not so. You get it wrong when you talk about the bible as opposed to the Bible (at least when you're talking about the Bible and not some TV show's backstory guide for the writers of the show, which is indeed a bible).

Andrew Jackson is criticizing Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice for referring to the border between Turkey and Kurdistan. Given one geographical and cultural entity that the name 'Kurdistan' refers to, he is right. Kurdistan is a region that is larger than the region within Iraq occupied by Kurdish people. Parts of it are in other countries, including most importantly a part that is in Turkey, and thus there could be no border between Turkey and that Kurdistan.

However, the term 'Kurdistan' is ambiguous, which Wikipedia's disambiguation page for the term demonstrates. One legitimate use of the term 'Kurdistan' is to refer to the province of Kurdistan in Iraq. One might argue that it would be politically inexpedient to refer to the border that way when talking to someone in Turkey, but she was speaking in the U.S. Congress about problems that in context very clearly had to do with Iraqi Kurdistan, not the larger Kurdish region. In context, then, what she said was not inaccurate and not an error. There is in fact a border between Turkey and the Kurdistan she was referring to, and anyone who knows the name of that semi-autonomous region in Iraq would have been able to register that she meant that Kurdistan rather than the larger, culturally-identified, non-political region that Andrew has in mind.

Update 3-3-07 10:54 pm: The State Department has issued a statement. Andrew describes it as follows: "Condi Rice backsteps and clarifies that northern Iraq is not Kurdistan, no matter what they want to call themselves." But what he links to sounds like the State Department is explaining what she meant and not taking it back. All it says is that she was referring to the region of Iraq that goes by that name. It's thus more akin to my defense of her statement than to an apology or retraction.

Kenny Pearce has a thoughtful post on the continuum between what some might call more literal and what they would call less literal Bible translations. I wish I had time to comment on it myself, but I thought some readers of this blog might appreciate it.

Mentioning a word does not count as using it. Mentioning it means you are talking about the word itself and not endorsing its usage. You are not using a word simply by mentioning it. This distinction is extremely important in philosophy. When I say that the word 'green' has five letters, I have not used the word 'green'. I have simply mentioned it. The distinction is also important in our moral evaluation of what people do with offensive terms.

Edward Wyatt of the New York Times doesn't care about this distinction. I don't know much about the show Grey's Anatomy or the actor Isaiah Washington. Apparently he's been accused of using the word 'faggot' as a deliberate slur against someone who is gay. If so, then I agree that what he said was immoral. This word is offensive when used to describe a gay person (rather than a cigarette or a piece of split wood, which have an older history of use), and I cannot see any defense of it, even given Christian views about gay sex being wrong. Calling someone a faggot does a lot more than indicate views that the person engages in behavior you disagree with. It certainly doesn't amount to speaking the truth in love, as the apostle Paul commands Christians to do. I do not use the word in any of those contexts myself, even the two unrelated to homosexuality. But notice that I was just willing to mention the word twice.

I don't know what happened back in October, but if Washington publicly denies using the word and in so doing mentions it, it is simply bad reporting to say that Washington "publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months". It looks as if the second time was not another occurrence of his using the term but rather a mention of his use of it, one that very clearly in context did not amount to endorsing its use but in fact the reverse.

I can understand how some people might disagree on whether it's offensive to mention offensive words. I almost never even mention the n-word. There's too much associated with that word for me to consider it appropriate for someone intimately connected with black people even to mention in most contexts. But clearly it's worse to use it than to mention it, and I wouldn't even consider doing that. Whatever you might think of the wrongness of mentioning this word, it's just insane to think that mentioning it is the same thing as using it. It's a little strange, then, that the second occurrence has provoked a firestorm, when the first wasn't even on my radar back in October.

For some more detailed discussion by linguist Arnold Zwicky, see his Language Log post.

Leland Ryken's Choosing a Bible: Understanding Bible Translation Differences is not really a guide to different Bible translations, as a the title might suggest, but a very short polemic against popular Bible translations that fall under the category commonly known as dynamic equivalence translations (e.g. the New Living Translation and to a lesser degree the New International Version) and in favor of what he calls essentially literal translations (e.g. the New American Standard Bible or Ryken's preferred translation, the English Standard Version). Dynamic equivalence translations are less concerned about matching every word with a word in English (or some smaller unit of meaning) and more interested in capturing the sense or basic meaning of each sentence (or some larger unit of meaning).

I'm generally in agreement with Ryken on some of the issues that drive his arguments in this book, but I think he way overstates his case far too often to give this book a good recommendation. Here is where I agree with Ryken. We ought to be more careful in translating the Bible than some of the more dynamic translations often are. When there is an ambiguity in the text that scholars do not tend to agree on, we should seek to preserve the ambiguity in the translation. When translators can avoid working too much interpretation into their text without sacrificing genuine English language grammar and semantics, they should do so.

However, Ryken does not stop at such moderated claims. He argues that it is always wrong to interpret the text when translating, which is impossible. English words are usually not exactly equivalent in meaning to Greek or Hebrew words, and any translation will be inexact. Sometimes inexactness in one way is better than inexactness in another, but Ryken seems to disallow any interpretation at all, which strikes me as ignoring the fact that translators must interpret before figuring out how to translate. How do you know which words to translate in which ways unless you know what they mean in the particular context? That takes interpretation.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has come up with a term to describe one of the most idiotic plagiarism techniques I've ever heard of -- text laundering. The usual method is to save time and effort by copying someone else's work and submitting it as your own. But it's so easy to catch people doing that from online materials that some students are masking their trail by substituting words to fool Google, using a thesaurus to find synonyms and so on.

There are at least two problems with this (purely from the perspective of not wanting to get caught). One is that such use of a thesaurus is likely to lead to awkward enough sounding phrases that anyone reading it who is slightly informed will suspect something is up, and creative enough use of Google will easily find the source anyway. At least that's so unless the student is so thoroughgoing to be immune to Google, which would seem to be the point of text laundering. But such Google-proofing would take up so much time that the student might as well have learned enough of the material to begin with to write a competent essay just from class materials. Can you imagine how long it takes to replace every important keyword in a document one is plagiarizing with alternatives from a thesaurus, all of this after having combed Google for sources to begin with and spliced them together into a format that resembles an academic paper enough that they think it will fulfill the assignment? If plagiarizing is supposed to save time, and text laundering is supposed to make the time-saving effort harder to catch, there doesn't seem to be a good way to achieve both goals simultaneously.

One way to be inconsistent is to hold two views that are inconsistent with each other. Another is to do something that, whether you realize it or not, is inconsistent with your official view. I'm regularly complaining that people confuse these two things. Only the latter can ever accurately be called hypocrisy, and only then if it's done regularly with the full knowledge of the person doing it. A slip here or there is not hypocrisy. It's just humanity.

But pragmatic inconsistencies are still worth pointing out, because people who engage in them ought to change their view or seek to change their behavior. Arnold Zwicky at Language Log has an example that seems to me to be exactly the kind of inadvertent pragmatic inconsistency that I wouldn't call hypocrisy but do think ought to lead to some revision of belief or practice. Jennifer Gilmore reports on the behavior of her Jewish parents:

My father, who is 100 percent Jewish, has always been obsessed with Christmas. He grew up in Minneapolis, in an unobservant household, and he considers it part of his childhood. "I remember the lights, the trees," he used to say to my little sister and me. "It was magical." He decorates the mantel with Christmas cards and tapes mistletoe to the doorways, and one year he even tried to get my mother, also Jewish, with a much more observant upbringing, to allow an evergreen wreath on our front door. ''I can't live with that,'' she said. "I just can't. Nothing on the outside of this house. We're Jews, for Christ's sake."

Now there's a separate issue of the inconsistency of allowing it on the inside but not the outside. That seems to me to be a deliberate allowance of the behavior in private but not in public, which is outright hypocrisy of a very crude sort. It's ok for us to do this, as long as no one knows about it. If it's ok for you to do, then you should be able to do it without embarrassment, and if it's not then you shouldn't be doing it anywhere.

But even aside from that, I think there's a much more interesting kind of inconsistency going on here. There seems to be a tremendous resistance to being seen as doing anything related to Christmas. The reason is because they're Jewish. This is a line that I've heard often enough from Jewish friends, despite the fact that Christmas trees are a non-religious symbol of a secularized holiday. Some Christians might choose to endow Christmas trees with some religious meaning, but as most Americans practice Christmas there is no symbol to the tree that has anything particular to do with Christianity.

Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log has an interesting post about his dislike of the term 'people of color'. I've never been taken with the term myself, but I don't think there are any very strong objections to it that don't also apply to other terms that I readily use. For example, it seems funny to act as if white people have no color, but we do speak that way when we call white people white and non-white people non-white. If it's bad to speak of people of color, then it's bad to speak of people who are non-white. In terms of economy of words, it's awkward to say "people of color" as opposed to "colored people", but the former doesn't have the negative connotations now usually associated with the latter, and if grammatical sleight-of-hand allows for a good result without changing the actual terms much is that so bad? There's no really strong linguistic or moral reason against it. So why not?

Well, Pullum just doesn't like the term. That's it. He doesn't judge anyone as linguistically or morally on the wrong side for using it. He just doesn't like it and doesn't use it himself. I'm not sure I dislike it as strongly as he does, but I've never been especially excited about it, and it has nothing to do with the reasons he gives in his slightly unfair characterization of conservative views on race. (I say slightly unfair, because I think what he's describing does happen, but he doesn't seem to allow for people who have views very similar to his on the moral questions but different views on the political ones, which is exactly where I stand.)

I first encountered the term during orientation in my first year of college, and it struck me as very strange. I can't say I've taken to it more over the years, but I don't have any reason I can think of why I shouldn't like it except ones that rely on bad arguments. I suppose it's better than 'non-white' in one way, because it's not defining people in terms of what they aren't.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I can think of a way that 'people of color' makes any sense to refer exactly to the people it refers to except in the sense that they aren't white. So maybe I just find it deceptive as a way to avoid saying something else that might offend some people. In other words, maybe it avoids overt offense by relying on offensive assumptions that aren't immediately discernible without reflection. But I think this might take more argument than I'm prepared to give at this point.

I've been catching up on some really old posts at Language Log, and I noticed one by Bill Poser that I really think misses the boat on a few points. The post is about a general phenomenon of using nicer-sounding words that convey more positive connotations in the place of words that would cast a more negative light. Some of the examples he gives are clear euphemisms that might rightly be called doublespeak. When he comes to the use of language for the abortion issue, however, I think he gets several things wrong. I'll quote the entirety of what he says about abortion rather than summarizing it, because I think in this case the particulars of what he says are important:

It may be true that abortion rights advocates prefer to avoid the term "abortion", but I think there's more to it than that. Describing one's movement as "pro-abortion" suggests that one actually favors abortion, that is, considers that abortions are a fine thing. Few if any advocates of abortion rights take such a position. Their position is, rather, that women should have the right to have an abortion if they consider it the best choice: "pro-choice" really is a more accurate description than "pro-abortion". In the abortion debate if one wants an example of the use of propagandistic use of language, it is the use of the self-designation "pro-life" by opponents of abortion rights. Opponents of abortion rights are not in general advocates of a "pro-life" stance: many of them are quite sympathetic to military activity and favor the death penalty, both of which are considered by many others to be "anti-life" stances. And those who oppose abortion under any circumstances, even when the life of the mother is threatened, are not "pro-life" even in this narrow context. Rather, they take a position that values the life of the foetus over that of the mother. So "anti-abortion" is a much more accurate term than "pro-life".

Update: I hadn't read the article very carefully and was taking the ESV blog's tying together of the Tickle quote with the issue the post was raising, which was functional equivalence. My brother pointed this out to me, and I looked again at the article itself, and he's right. The ESV blog (they don't indicate who is responsible for the post in question) has tied Tickle's quote to something that it's not even close to being about. [Update: They have now added some clarificatory words, and some of my criticism here no longer applies. I have removed some of it.] This post has now been edited several times to correct several errors and to focus on the main issue rather than the original portrayal of Tickle's words. The comment thread may not be as understandable now, but I want the post itself to represent the argument I had originally intended to give, without distractions from things that turned out to be mistakes that aren't really relevant to begin with.

The ESV Blog points to an article by Daniel Radosh in The New Yorker that discusses Bible translations. The ESV blogger's presentation of the quotes from the article was originally confusing. They quoted an argument from Phyllis Tickle against adding all sorts of commercialized nonsense to Bibles to attract younger readers but placed it in a context about functional equivalence that seemed to indicate that Tickle was against functional equivalence translations. They have since partially fixed that problem (but not good enough for me), so I will focus mostly on the post's argument and not that other issue in what follows. The rest of this post is therefore an argument why I think functional equivalence translations can be very good (even if there are plenty of circumstances in which I would rather have a formally equivalent translation, of which the ESV is the one I use the most, for the record).

I mentioned this back in the early days of this blog, but with yesterday's resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld all over the news, I wanted to offer a little tribute by recalling of one of my favorite Rumsfeld moments. Whatever else you think of the guy, you have to admit that he's a very intelligent man who chooses his words with great care. At least that's what I would expect any intelligent observer to notice. But some group called the Plain English Campaign was apparently too stupid to figure this out when they gave him the Foot in Mouth award at the end of 2003, calling the following statement "the most baffling statement by a public figure":

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing grammatically wrong with that statement. It makes perfect sense syntactically. It also has pretty clear semantic content, and he even states each point in two different ways just to make sure it comes across correctly. As for its truth, it's even a moderately insightful recognition of a kind of ignorance that we don't often focus on. We need to distinguish between the things we know we're aware of, the things we know we have no idea about, and the things we don't know but think we know. He was admitting that there were things someone might not know but without being aware that they don't know it. What's so baffling about that? It's a recognition that we can be ignorant when we think we know something. Duh.

Anyway, I just consider it a cool achievement to have been awarded the foot-in-mouth award for saying something that's actually pretty insightful, an action that revealed more about their own stupidity than it did about the intelligent comment they were making fun of. And then there's what Scrappleface did with this.

At Better Bibles Blog, Wayne Leman and several others often complain about inverted negatives in the ESV. [See Wayne's comment here, for instance.] Inverted negatives are a kind of construction that you find regularly in the KJV and some of its heirs that do not ever appear in contemporary English unless someone is deliberately trying to sound archaic. Yet the ESV continues it, largely out of respect for the KJV tradition and a desire to avoid changing the language many of the biblically literature find familiar to them and expect in a Bible translation.

Matthew 6:13 is an example. The ESV translates it "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." The normal English way of saying this in our day would be "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil." The archaic reversal of the negative is simply not contemporary English, and it's contrary to the purpose of translating into contemporary English (to be understandable to ordinary readers not familiar with Biblese) to translate with inverted negatives.

Contemporary translations not in the Tyndale tradition tend not to translate with inverted negatives, however. The HCSB, a translation similar in many ways to the ESV, translates Matthew 6:13 as "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." The NET gives exactly the same translation. This rendering is much better as contemporary English than the ESV translation. The GNB (TEV) says, "Do not bring us to hard testing, but keep us safe from the Evil One." The ISV has "And never bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." The NRSV translates it as "And do not bring us to the fiery trial, but rescue us from the evil one." I think this is more likely referring to temptation than to trial, and there's no indication of anything fiery in this verse, but the structure of the sentence here is correct (and "rescue" is far better in contemporary English than the old-fashioned sounding "deliver").

This morning I was reading the TNIV of the Luke parallel (Luke 11:4), and I discovered that it uses the inverted negative. In fact, it's exactly the same translation as in the ESV. This is also true of Matthew 6:13, and it's true of the NIV renderings of both verses. That led me to check several translations, and the other one that struck me as interesting was the NLT: "And don't let us yield to temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." That raises an interesting translation issue that I think is worth spending some time thinking about.

Judge Robert Armstrong in California has ruled that a law against disrobing in front of a minor applies only to men and not to women, even though no mention of gender occurs in the law. How could that be? It says "exposes his person". [See also here for further details. Hat tip to How Appealing for the last link. I found the story initially from a Google search for something entirely different.]

Now I'm a strong defender of inclusive language, as anyone who has been reading my blog for very long should know, but this is pretty stupid. Just because most of the English-speaking world now does not speak the way this law was constructed does not mean that the law as written means to include men by the pronoun 'his'. Either the judge doesn't know that anyone has ever used grammatically masculine pronouns for gender-indeterminate or gender-unknown people, or this is strict constructionism gone wild. Originalists distinguish themselves from strict constructionists for reasons much like this. No original reader of the law would have interpreted it like this, and the writers of the law surely didn't mean it this way. But if the strict meaning of the literal text is what counts, regardless of what anyone at the time would have understood it to mean, then you get this kind of thing. It strikes me as being in the same category as insisting that there is too milk in the fridge and thus you don't need to go to the store to get more, then pointing at a tiny puddle of milk in the bottom of the vegetable crisper to demonstrate this claim.

Mark Roberts is doing a series called What is a Church? Biblical Basics for Christian Community. I especially like the four posts he's written so far under the title "When a Church is not a Church?" These look at the Greek word usually translated as "church" in the New Testament, 'ekklesia', which means "assembly" or "gathering" (and not "called out ones", as many erroneously claim because of some bad arguments from etymology).

The fourth post in that series within the series raises a point very much worth emphasizing. It makes no sense to say that you're part of a gathering that you don't show up for. In a sense any Christian is a member of the gathering around the throne of God in heaven, but we also speak of ourselves as members of local congregations. The average congregation has about 60-70% of its membership regularly attending. Does it make sense to call the others members of a gathering that they don't ever gather with? Treating a church like an organization with a membership list does have this particularly unfortunate consequence, even if there are legal reasons (and perhaps other reasons) to do so.

There's lots of other good stuff in Mark's series, but that struck me as a pointed observation about this attitude about what the church is among a large enough population in contemporary evangelicalism.

Three members of the ESV Bible translation committee are very vocal against the use of inclusive language for human beings when it means using different forms in English than the original language has. That's why the ESV tends to translate 'adelphoi' as "brothers" rather than as "brothers and sisters" or "dear friends" as some of the inclusive language translations are now doing (cf. the NRSV, NLT, TNIV, and CEV). The inclusive language translations tend to avoid using masculine pronouns when the group they refer to includes women or girls, and thus some of the inclusive language translations will use the singular 'they', which is pretty much standard in contemporary English but is not really new to English in recent years anyway, despite the claims of those who have resisted it. It's recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

So it is indeed a great irony that the ESV itself contains an unambiguous example of the singular 'they'. Peter Kirk discovered it, and Rick Mansfield has some further thoughts on it. I agree with their general assessment that this is a problem for a translation that explicitly states in its translation policy that it does not translate in this sort of way. That suggests that someone in the editing process did not notice that a translator had done this, either out of a rushed job or because the editor in question, like the translator in question, is so familiar with the singular 'they' that they did not notice. So I'm in full agreement that this is in itself evidence against the view that the singular 'they' is bad English. I do, however, have some reservations about how we might frame our criticism of the ESV on this. In particular, I think we need to be careful not to treat the Grudem-Poythress-Ryken view as representative of the ESV translation committee in general.

The BBC has put up some excerpts from Richard Dawkins' new book The God Delusion. I could say a lot about his screed [Update: see Siris for some of that], but one thing struck me as worth a quick post. In the second excerpt, Dawkins takes on the very idea of calling terrorists evil, because I guess he doesn't think it's possible to try to understand why someone does something while calling what they do evil. I guess he can join some in the religious right on that one. Explaining someone's actions and evaluating them as good or evil are two entirely different tasks. Anyway, in that context Dawkins decides he should complain about the phrase "war on terror". He thinks those using this phrase are thinking "as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own".

One academic I know fairly well has made fun of the president for speaking of evil as if it's a great force that we are at war with, and I think Dawkins has made the same mistake. Dawkins complains of people who take the Bible literally in the first excerpt of this book. In the second excerpt, he makes fun of people in a way that shows that he's taking something literally that was never intended to be a literal statement. No one thinks that Western nations have engaged in a war with some abstract force with a mind of its own. That's not what anyone thinks the war on terror is. It's an example of a very common literary form called metonymy.

But here's what's interesting about Dawkins' statement. I've never seen him make fun of people who engage in a crusade against breast cancer, as if breast cancer is some abstract spiritual force that takes over people's bodies and makes strange things grow where they shouldn't be. I don't see snide remarks against those who engage in the war on poverty, as if poverty is a spirit with a will. I haven't even found any comments on the war on drugs, although I'd be less surprised to see those. Dawkins isn't really serious about this linguistic claim, or he'd be applying it more universally. I think he's simply saying anything he can when it comes to his pet issues, because he knows it can be rhetorically effective among the civilized crowd (i.e. the ones who don't take the Bible very seriously and don't admit that anything is evil once you can explain why people do it). The problem is that he has to sound linguistically insensitive to score such points. I don't consider that a good trade.

Update: Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkins' book is here. I can't do justice to it by summarizing, but he gives the book a real thrashing.
Update 2: Here's another review [hat tip: Trent Dougherty]

Suzanne McCarthy posts about 'human' as a noun. I'm not sure if I've ever encountered anyone saying that 'human' is not a noun. I consider it to be a strange enough view, given that the word 'human' clearly does gets used as a noun in all sorts of contexts. That's just a fact about the English language, and any dictionary that fails to acknowledge that is simply displaying ignorance. But then people who think some arbitrarily selected body of people can arbitrate prescriptions for what counts as English will come up with all sorts of features of common English that they will declare to be wrong.

While I do think it's a mistake to think 'human' is not a noun in English, I also think there are times when people use it as a noun that sound very unnatural to me. Sometimes it sounds much more natural to say 'person' or 'human being' or to change the syntax so the noun is 'anyone' or 'someone'. This is not because 'human' cannot be a noun but because using it as a noun suggests a contrast with other sorts of creatures. We can talk about what's true of a human as opposed to an ape. It seems strange to say that you went to answer your doorbell, and you discovered a human there. When you say that, it sounds as if you were expecting the neighbor's dog, an ogre, or aliens from another galaxy. Since Suzanne's post was about Bible translations rather than just good English grammar or style, I have to suggest that contemporary translations that use 'human' as a noun need to be careful to do so when it's natural to do so. Since that isn't always the case, other methods might be preferable so as not to give the wrong sense.

A lot of people complain loudly and frequently about what they call "interpretive translation". Most of these people are criticizing what is commonly called dynamic translation, which includes translations that tend to translate the sense of an expression as opposed to favoring the formal properties of the sentence. Either favoring can obscure the other, and good translators will know how to find the right balance to express the original meaning best. But the complainers don't understand the complexities of translation very well, or they would realize that sometimes capturing the sense of the original means sacrificing the ability to capture its form. Thus translations such as the NIV, TNIV, or NLT will come under their wrath, and they will favor translations such as the ESV, NASB, or NKJV.

One deep irony of this is that lots of interpretive translation goes on in those translations that people are, following the ESV translators, now calling "essentially literal". Wayne Leman points out one example. A lot of these translations that are supposed to avoid interpretive translation do exactly that all the time in ways that their supporters consider the right way to translate those passages. Wayne's example is in capitalizing words like 'son' or 'man' when the translators interpret them to be referring messianically to Jesus. But this is indeed an interpretation, even if the interpretation is based on other scriptural passages that quote it and apply it to Jesus.

Someone wanting to translate this way might defend it on the grounds that interpretations based on other parts of the Bible are infallible and thus can serve as the good kind of interpretation. After all, if Hebrews or Acts quotes Psalm 2 about Jesus, then can't we be 100% sure that it's simply talking about Jesus? If we believe the Bible to be infallible in its quotations, then this kind of interpretation is God's own interpretation, and thus it's true. Whats right about this is that someone who takes the Bible to be infallible should see the Bible's quotation of itself as infallible, i.e. it couldn't be an error in quotation. What's wrong about this argument, however, is that our interpretation of what the quotation is doing might be wrong. If Acts 13 applies Psalm 2 to Jesus, that doesn't mean its original referent is Jesus. It might be referring to the Davidic line in general in most of what it says, with Jesus representing the ideal Davidic king and thus fitting into its reference but not encompassing the entirety of its reference. Those who capitalize the pronouns about Jesus or the word 'son' are thus engaging in the bad kind of interpretive translation in this case, because it might actually give the wrong result.

I'm way behind on my Language Log reading, but I just noticed Wayne Leman blogging about this Mark Liberman post about an instance of the singular 'they' in the KJV. I know there are manby older instances, but this is the KJV.

This isn't new to me (see here), but one counterargument in the comments on Wayne's post is worth responding to. The anonymous commenter argues that it couldn't be a singular 'they' but must instead be some roundabout form (particular to this example and not usable in other singular 'they' examples from the same period), and the only real argument for this is that the verb seems to be plural. It's 'have', not the singular 'has' that would be expected if you had a singular subject.

There's one major problem with this. Singular 'they' (in the newer dialects of English that have it as a regular feature nowadays) does not take a 'has' but a 'have'. It's a singular 'have' as well. The following sentence clearly has a singular subject and verb in the second clause: "Someone took my pencil, and they have it on their person." So why couldn't we read 'have' in the KJV as singular, just as it is in today's English?

I was sitting in the law school library one night a couple years ago, and a law student asked me if I could remind her the names of the Supreme Court justices. Bear in mind that this was before Roberts and Alito. The Supreme Court at the time had been the same people since something like 1993. This particular law student had probably been in junior high when President Clinton had appointed Justice Breyer. When she found out that I wasn't a law student, a law professor, or a lawyer but merely a philosopher, and yet I could name them off in like three seconds, she was feeling a little Bashful.

Speaking of which, have you heard about the latest poll purportedly showing that the seven dwarfs are more famous than the Supreme Court justices? I've seen it several times now, but most people aren't noticing what Mark Liberman at Language Log has picked up on (see the links within that post, since it doesn't say much itself). It's good reading in general to see how misleading polls can be, indeed how misleading they can be designed to be. Suffice it to say that there's little to be trusted about this poll. It has all the hallmarks of manipulative poll-spinning.

When I'm reading a philosophical work, and I have to put it down, I usually have to skim through the paragraph or two before I stopped to put myself back into the train of thought necessary to move on. I picked up my Cambridge Companion to Augustine to resume my reading of the chapter on his political thought, and I skimmed the paragraph I had just finished before I put it down. (Mind you that this was also in a darkening room at the end of the day without yet having the light turned on after several hours out in the sun.)

This is what my mind interpreted the author as saying: "Augustine intimates in one place that rubber bands count as societies." Something didn't sound right there. Augustine wouldn't even know what a rubber band is. So what was it that I had just misread? Oh, right. I'd even typed up notes on this earlier today. Somehow replacing 'rubber' with 'robber' didn't occur to me without having to go back and read it again to remember what it really said.

I wonder if this is partly because 'rubber band' functions as one word in my mind and not a compound of two things. It's not a band that's rubber. It functions as a unit. Also, the different kind of band plays some role here too. I was trying to figure out what other kind of band Augustine might be talking about, and nothing came to mind, because a robber band isn't another kind of the band in the sense that a rubber band is a band.

Here's a really stupid argument:

1. Term X can be used in a racist way.
2. Other uses of Term X are therefore racist.

It's got to be one of the poorest excuses to call someone a racist I've ever seen. Yet people insist on doing it to unsuspecting politicians or other public figures. It's for this reason that Governor Mitt Romney of Massachussetts has been bamboozled into apologizing for an action that is in no way wrong. Tony Snow has also been criticized for using the same expression in its original, non-racial sense. A tar baby is generally a sticky situation, and nothing about race is implied by this use of the term. It's origins come from an African folk tale, and its function in accounts of sticky situations has continued undisturbed by those who ignorantly coopted it for racist purposes. In the northeast, where Romney is governor, most people have probably never even heard of the racist use of the expression, and those who do encounter it might easily forget it as so far out of their vocabulary that it doesn't enter long-term memory.

Another example I've encountered (in this case only very recently) is "call a spade a spade", which simply means to identify something for what it is. Some racists in the South have apparently called black people spades as a derogatory term. Since I've never hung out with those people, it never would have occurred to me that someone would do so. Why should an uncommon use of a term in a localized region, a use I've never even heard of, make my use of a perfectly normal idiom somehow immoral? Those who treat such statements as racist seem to me to be linguistically unaware at best and incapable of moral reasoning at worst.

I recommend Eugene Volokh on split infinitives. In short: there's nothing grammatically wrong with them, they've been a part of standard English since long before the language police decided they were evil, and the decision to call them ungrammatical stems from a desire to pretend English is Latin. If you decide to, following my advice, click on the link, you'll also discover that some split infinitives are just so ridiculously awkward as to not be worth using, and some are impossible to avoid without losing some key component of what you want to say.

The first split infinitive in the last sentence is a good example of the former. The second isn't really a good example of the latter, since the splitting could easily have been avoided, but I needed to say what I wanted to say rather than what would have made a good example, and it's too late to spend more time thinking about if I could do it right and say what I wanted. For good examples of obligatorily infinitives from two different linguists, see the Language Log posts here, here, and here.

For the record, I try to avoid split infinitives whenever possible in my own writing, just because I know some people will perceive them as a sign of unintelligence. But there's nothing ungrammatical about them, and it's probably inaccurate even to call them infinitives given that they don't have a form that operates similarly to standard infinitival forms in other languages but do have this splitting function.

Great D.A. Carson quote:

When I was a boy of about nine or ten, my father called me over to listen to him reading an editorial or a letter to the editor (I cannot remember which) in The Montreal Star, one of the leading papers in eastern Canada at the time. The writer was inveighing against all those stupid Christians who believe the Bible is the Word of God, when it speaks so ignorantly of the sun "rising" in the east: any schoolboy knows that the sun does not rise, but that the earth rotates on its axis. My father asked me what I thought of the argument. I looked at him rather nonplused. He grinned, and calmly turned to the front page of the paper, and drew my attention to the line, "Sunrise: 6:36 am."

[The formatting and spelling may be affected by the process of scanning the article, as is often the case at this site, so I wouldn't assume he really misspelled 'nonplussed' or that he didn't italicize the name of the newspaper.]

The book review this comes from starts here. It's very long. The particular location of this quote is on this page.

Rick Mansfield has started what looks to be an excellent series on his favorite Bible translations. So far he's done the HCSB and the TNIV. I have to say that I agree with him in the main, with some disagreements expressed in the comments. I'm especially appreciative to see him liking the TNIV for what it is and seeing what it's good for (enough for it to come in second place) while preferring a more formally equivalent translation for his own primary use, because that's exactly my own attitude.

In the comments on the TNIV post, I challenged one of Rick's statements. He says, "From a grammatical standpoint, one of the most controversial aspects of the TNIV's implementation of inclusive language is the use of plural pronouns for singular antecedents. This is in keeping with the way we informally speak, but technically it's a grammatical error." I responded that this use of 'they' is actually singular and pointed him to the linguists at the Language Log blog. He replied that he's never seen it in a grammar book and thus won't believe it until he does. I tried to respond, but Haloscan wouldn't let me leave a comment with lots of links, so I'm just posting it here instead.

Well, it is in a grammar book, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Here is an interview where one of the authors of that book, Geoff Pullum, explains and defends the view on this issue taken in the book. Pullum also blogs at Language Log, and several posts there argue for this view. I managed to dig up a few posts on this here, here, and here.

There's also a strong history of the singular 'they', including a number of the finest writers of the English language and the KJV translators.

Something most white people would never pick up on without help is that it's sometimes insulting to compliment black people. In particular, it's insulting to say something nice about someone who is black that you wouldn't say about someone who is white. Such a compliment assumes that it's surprising that this would be true of someone who is black. A good example is the common practice among media types to speak of certain black people as articulate (see Mixed Media Watch for an example). How often do you hear white people being called articulate? I don't think it's all that common. Pay attention, and you'll discover that it's a good deal more common with black people, especially young black men. I've never heard a young white politician being called articulate, except I think in the case of one who happened to be a teenager, where there might be less expectation for such a thing. But Barack Obama, J.C. Watts, and Harold Ford, Jr. get it all the time. You don't generally hear it of professors of linguistics, unless it's John McWhorter. You won't hear about economics professors being articulate, except when it's Thomas Sowell.

Now I'm loath to call this racism without explaining more carefully how I'm using that word. Such a statement would be received as nonsense by most white people, because most white people (indeed, most English speakers) use the word 'racism' to refer to a deliberately negative attitude, and that's not what's going on here. This is why academics who specialize in race matters have come up with terms to describe this sort of thing to distinguish it from the more standard and obvious cases of racists. This is unintentional racism. It involves racist structures in society. It involves residual effects on the attitudes and actions of well-meaning non-blacks. But I think this is a case of that sort of racism, at least generally. See MW's comment in the Mixed Media Watch post for good reasons to think this is often a kind of racism even when you don't think it is.

This is something I've been aware of since reading John McWhorter's Losing the Race. As I said, it's not the sort of thing that most white people would notice otherwise, even ones who are more sensitized to these general sorts of issues. I paid attention to when I heard the word after I read McWhorter's discussion of the issue. What few occurrences I encountered did seem to fit the mold. But then a few weeks ago I heard someone call Ann Coulter articulate. Does this refute the claim that calling young black men articulate stems from some kind of racism?

I've been thinking through the ethics of deceit with respect to April Fools jokes and other kinds of false statements that may or may not be considered lying. The Jill Carroll case has raised an important further sort of case that I hadn't been thinking about. What about when someone says something they don't believe to be true under duress? For background on the details of her case and her deliberate statements (under threat) of things she didn't agree with, see the Moderate Voice's excellent roundup. There seem to me to be at least three issues that may have a moral bearing on how we should evaluate such false statements, and I think the end result is much more messy than we would generally like moral issues to be.

Sheila Jackson Lee's attempt to get hurricanes named things like Jamal or Chamiqua isn't new to me, but it was surprising to see it turn up on snopes.com. I'm not surprised that someone might be offended at the particular email that they're confirming the basic facts behind, given the nature of the speech used in the email's last paragraph. (I'm not going to quote it here. Go read it for yourself.) I'm a little surprised that what's offensive is supposed to be that it's racist. It seems to be quoting a general tendency within a certain subset of African-Americans (and not exclusively among African-Americans either). Can it be racist to put words together that accurately reflect how the mainstream of the hip-hop community actually speaks? How is accurate representation of real people supposed to be racism? Unless it insinuates that all black people are like this, which it doesn't, I can't see how it's racist. It's certainly an offensive way of speaking, but the offensiveness is not something the email author came up with. It's something the email author is simply representing accurately. The most famous hip-hop artists speak in such an offensive way, and they are represented as major moral leaders by many African-Americans.

This is uncharacteristically uncareful for Barbara Mikkelson, who usually does an excellent job with the snopes.com site in sorting through what is accurate and what is not. She just seems to have a strange sense of what counts as racist.

Sophia has been learning all sorts of words, and she's using them in the right contexts. She's long surpassed Isaiah in the use of words at the right times, though she's got a ways to go before she catches up to Ethan. She's well beyond where he was at this age, though, particularly with respect to asking for things. But there's one thing she just can't get. When we say the word 'yes', she'll repeat it, so we know she can pronounce it perfectly. But when we ask her if she wants something we know she wants or if she likes something we know she likes, she always answers quite emphatically, "No!" with a big smile. So all that feminist indoctrination I had during my orientation when I was an undergrad seems to have been just wrong. From the very beginning of their use of language, girls really do mean yes when they say no.

By the way, Sam's posted several pictures that I haven't yet linked to. Here are several of all three kids from about a month ago, all three kids on the couch, Ethan's birthday a couple weeks ago, Ethan's building projects last month, fun with dinner ware, and Sophia at 14 months in a storage bin.

Last week, I picked up a copy of the Syracuse University Daily Orange, and it had an interesting article [registration may be required] about some students who wanted to start a chapter of N.O.W. on campus but decided against it because N.O.W. is a top-down organization that wouldn't let them promote the issues as they wanted to promote them, and there was also some hesitation related to the perception that N.O.W. consists largely of rich, white women. That was an interesting enough issue, but I have little to say about it. I do have something to say about one thing in the article, however. They include a quote from Marcia Pappas, president of the New York State division of N.O.W. Pappas says, "If you can't control your own reproductive system, you can't control anything."

Really? I'd like to see some evidence that societies that illegalize abortion are forced to prevent women from having jobs or to decide what kind of car they'd like to have. Show me even just a strong correlation between restricting contraception and removal of things like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and other freedoms that someone who can't control anything wouldn't possess. I'd be interested in any sign that those whose reproductive choices are restricted will somehow lose control of all their limbs and be unable to control what words come out of their mouths. That's what her statement implies. She probably just meant that those without good control over their reproductive options have far fewer options on matters of great importance, but her way of saying it makes it sound as if she can't distinguish between having fewer options on matters of great importance and not being able to control anything in your life. Probably even worse is that she's insulted anyone who struggles with fertility issues. Her statement implies that their lives are completely out of their control simply because they can't control their reproductive system.

Whatever you think of the views N.O.W. puts forth, this sort of ridiculous overstatement does not in any way serve their purposes, because it just makes her sound really stupid. People are then going to associate stupidity with the agenda of N.O.W. On one level I have welcome this sort of rhetorical blunder, because I think the N.O.W. agenda is ultimately evil, even if most of the people promoting it have good intentions. Still, I regret that anyone would say such foolish things and thus bring the entire public debate over abortion down to this kind of idiocy. It's bad enough that both sides ignore some important philosophical issues that aren't always obvious. It's much worse if we support our views with statements that are this obviously false while also insulting to a significant enough portion of the population.

From last week's Christian Carnival, Bruce Alderman has one of the funniest posts I've seen in a long time.

Better Bibles Blog has three recent posts worth reading. Wayne Leman tackles the singular 'they' and 'them' in contemporary English with respect to inclusive-language translation. Read the comments, too. At one point he lists some very old uses of the singular 'they', including one going back to Chaucer in the 14th Century. This isn't some recent innovation.

Also, Peter Kirk decided to look into whether J.I. Packer's support for the ESV and criticisms of the TNIV amount to the kind of ideological rage that others who have criticized the TNIV have engaged in. He finds that Packer is much more balanced and simply doesn't like the way the TNIV does things but hasn't been calling it inaccurate or some of the other nonsense that has passed for a concern for purity in Bible translation. I hadn't looked into Packer's particular role in this discussion, so I'm relieved to hear this. He does soften his conclusion a bit in the comments, but I think where Packer is on this is much healthier than the position of some notable others.

Suzanne McCarthy isolates an interesting translation issue that has spawned a whole translation, the use of language that assumes knowledge of church history and current church practice, in A Non-Ecclesiastical Bible.

Also, not at the Better Bibles Blog, Kenny Pearce discusses the theological significance of linguistic facts. I agree with those who dismiss the idea, defended by Wayne Grudem and Vern Poythress, that facts about inclusive language in any particular language should be taken to illustrate a theological truth. But some of the issues Kenny points out soften the more general claim that some people use to support the dismissal of the Grudem-Poythress view.

Sometimes people will be unsure of something they think might happen. They will then say "if and when it happens, we need to be prepared" or some such thing. I have never understood what this is supposed to mean. If they just said, "when it happens...", then they would have been assuming that it would happen, when it might not happen. My guess is that somehow, to avoid that impression, someone started saying "if and when...", and then they were sure to have covered all their bases. The only problem with this is that you can do that simply by saying "if it happens...", because that allows for both possibilities -- its happening and its not happening. So were the people who first started using this odd conjunction simply unaware of that?

What's worse is that they made it a conjunction rather than a disjunction. If they thought of 'if' and 'when' as two distinct possible introductory connectives, then they should have said "if or when...", but that's not what people say. What is 'if and when' even supposed to mean, then? I think it just means the same thing as 'if'. I think it also means the same thing as 'if or when'. It's a strange sort of redundancy, though, because it's not analyzable in terms of its components as 'if or when' would be (though that's redundant also, just a more easily analyzable redundancy). So what's going on here? When annoying expressions are as commonly used as this one, it's a great relief when someone can explain them in a way that makes them much less annoying, but no one's ever done that with this one. Is there something I'm missing?

"A fool's tongue is long enough to cut his own throat." -- Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15 (2004), p.102.

Waltke is summarizing a bunch of statements from Proverbs on wise use of words, and right in the middle of his summaries (usually followed by a bunch of verse references) he has this one proverb of his own (with no verse references). I guess when you write a 1200+ page commentary on the book of Proverbs, you begin to think in proverbial form. I have to say that it's quite an image.

There's a slightly cheesy but still funny passage two pages later that doesn't fit the same description, but I thought I'd include it while I'm quoting Waltke:

As these means of obtaining wealth show, it is a matter of character, not of method. Proverbs is a "how to be book," not a "how to" book. Solomon is a better theologian than Frank Sinatra: Sinatra sang, "Do-be, do-be, do"; Solomon sings, "Be-do; be-do; be."

The Syracuse University Daily Orange has an interesting article about the LGBT group making a list of bathrooms that would be more favorable for transgendered people [registration probably required], particularly so that they know which bathrooms are single-occupant and which have offensive graffiti. I don't want to get into the general issue of why this is or isn't a good idea or what we should think about the transgender phenomenon as a whole. I've commented on some aspects of those things previously. (It's not clear in the article, but I don't think anyone here is advocating making all bathrooms co-ed, since that would surely make many more people uncomfortable going to the bathroom than the current situation.)

What struck me as very strange, though, was a quote from a student:

The directory is a good idea because people should not feel nervous about going to the bathroom," said Sarabeth Schoeneck, an undeclared sophomore in the College of Human Services and Health Professions. "SU claims to be "no place for hate, and people being discriminated against in the restrooms is a form of hate," she said.

This seems to me to be a huge mistake. I think I have a pretty clear idea of what hate is, and I think I could give plenty of examples of when discrimination stems from hate, but the mere fact of discrimination is simply not hate. Sometimes discrimination occurs unintentionally. Sometimes it's from something like residual racism, where someone might have an immediate response of fear or discomfort because of someone else's race even if they rationally cannot stand the fact that they have such a response and really try to overcome it. Yet it might unconsciously affect some of their decisions and actions. Anyone who thinks that sort of discrimination is hate is morally insensitive.

What's even worse is confusing institutional discrimination with hate. Many authority positions are occupied disproportionally by white males, and white males tend to have disproportionally white male friends, both for largely innocent reasons with respect to their own choices. Given these realities, the practice of favoring people you know in hiring has a disproportionate effect on racial and gender lines. Those who aren't white males will tend to be less likely to be hired. That's a simple statistical fact, and this one practice will offer resistance to overcoming discrimination. So an institution or an overwhelming tendency in society can promote discrimination without any intentional discrimination. That seems to me to be exactly the sort of discrimination you might call this. How, then, is it hate? I think we're just so unaccustomed to seeing real hate in these matters that we have to invent it to have something to talk about. What's ironic is that most people making claims like this wouldn't know real hate if it bit them on the leg, and yet it's pretty common in academia. But hatred of those whom it's politically correct to hate doesn't count as hatred, while mindless processes and attitudes people are desperately trying to overcome do.

In a summary section before a reading on Plato in her Voices of Ancient Philosophy, Julia Annas has the following sentence about Plato (p.235):

He always avoids writing from authority in his own person, since it is important to him that the reader think about ideas for herself rather than accept them on the writer's authority.

Did Plato really expect women to be reading his dialogues? I kind of doubt it. If not, this sentence seems as bad as "If anyone is a misogynist, she might have a hard time accepting women as equal to men." Plato might have thought it would be within the realm of possibility that women would read his work, but it might also be within the realm of possibility that a woman could be a misogynist. It's not as bad as, "Anyone considering having an abortion really ought to think through his reasons for doing so before acting rashly", but it still seems to me to be the wrong sort of place for inclusive language. It's when the speaker genuinely intends to include people who are female that alternating, inclusive, or whatever sort of device meant not to sound exclusively male is appropriate.

Christian Carnival XCIV is at Wittenberg Gate. Dory is in need of future hosts, so if you're interested follow her link at the top of the post. The Bible Archive is doing a series on Genesis. I especially want to direct your attention to his nice post on what Genesis 1 does say. All the debates about how to interpret the days and whether it's consistent with evolution easily distract from what the passage is about to begin with, and Rey brings our attention back to that. If you want to see his summary on those other issues, it's here, but why is our focus so often not what the focus of the text is? Walter Snyder has a good explanation of how it is that Bible publishers can justify charging royalties for the use of what is God's word (and thus should be free). [Hat tip: ESV Bible Blog] Belgium declares names and titles to be no longer capitalized. Well, I guess it's just politically incorrect names and titles. Actually, they've just singled out 'christ' and 'jew'* just to show how arbitrary they can be. Or is this arbitrary? [Hat tip: Sam] *Well, for 'Jew' it's only when the reference is religious rather than ethnic; if ethnic, it's still capitalized.

The latest comments on my post about the English expressions 'more unique' and 'more pregnant' raise an interesting argument against strict constructionism as a method of interpreting the Constitution (as opposed to originalism, which I myself hold; see this post for the distinction). The preamble to the Constitution reads:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A strict constructionist interprets an expression in an exact and literal, according to what the basic fundamental terms mean. An originalist (of the Scalia variety, anyway) interprets according to what the expression would have meant when it was written. The expression 'more perfect union' illustrates nicely not just the difference between the two but why strict constructionism is unworkable. The original meaning of that expression is pretty much the same meaning it would have in our mouths today, at least with respect to the use of the word 'perfect'. As I say in the post on 'more unique', something can be closer to something and be called "more unique". The expression in that context simply means closer to uniqueness. The same is true of being more perfect. The union will be closer to being perfect according to the preamble. That's how an originalist will interpret this. A strict constructionist, however, has to take the expression according to a literal, wooden application of strict rules about words and their meanings, without the common understanding I just explained of how this expression isn't like most expressions of something being "more X". A strict constructionist has to take the expression 'more perfect union' to be referring to something that is going to be literally more perfect than it already is, which is impossible. If it's perfect, it can't be more perfect. If it's not perfect, it can't be more perfect. There are basic linguistic reasons why it's wrong to correct people on this in ordinary discourse, but a strict constructionist can't avail themselves of these, because they don't involve strictly interpeting constructions.

Those who have followed my posts on translation, particularly Bible translation, can apply this lesson to the so-called literal translation issue as well. I'll leave that as the cliched exercise for the reader.

[Crossposted at OrangePhilosophy] My fellow OrangePhilosopher Dave Bzdak and I just had a conversation with Don Arentz, one of our colleagues in teaching at Le Moyne College, about what seems to be an empirical question but seems difficult to see how it might be empirical. How big is your vocabulary? It would seem that the question is indeed an empirical matter. Yet how would you go about empirically investigating it? Dave suggested maybe it would be in principle possible but only if you kept track of every single word you ever encountered to get a list of all the words that might be in your vocabulary, and then you investigated to see if they were still in your vocabulary at a given time. Could you do this, though? I'm not worrying about the possibility of coming up with a list of all the words you've ever encountered. Suppose you could do it. That's in principle possible, I would say, even if in practice it would be amazingly difficult to implement. Given that list, could you determine which of those words are in your vocabulary at any given time? It seems that, if you could, then you would know how big your vocabulary at the time was.

So suppose I want to know how many of those words are in my vocabulary right now. I could presumably go down the list to investigate which ones I know, right? I'm not sure it's so easy, though. I could recognize some words that I know. But wouldn't there be others that I know and don't recall the meaning of just by seeing the word in isolated form? There are some whose meaning I would remember if I saw it in the right sort of sentence that would trigger my memory. Of course, there would be others that I don't know but would get from context, in which case I've just added a word to my vocabulary. I shouldn't count those. I wanted to know how many were in it before I started the investigation. What if I'm not in a position to distinguish between the cases when the sentence triggers my memory of what a word means and cases when the context helps me add a new word to my vocabulary? It's not clear to me that I could tell the difference. If that's right, then the exact count of my vocabulary isn't really empirically discoverable after all. That's really weird. Does that mean the size of my vocabulary is not really an empirical question?

A friend of mine read from the preface to his KJV on 'thee' and 'thou' and 'you' in the KJV. According to that preface, 'thee' and 'thou' are used exclusively for singulars and 'you' and 'ye' exclusively for plurals. I'd always been told that 'thee' and 'thou' were the familiar second person pronouns and 'you' the formal, with 'thee' and 'ye' as the subjective and 'thou' and 'you' as the objective. Does anyone have real information on which of these accounts is correct or if somehow there's something to both of them?

Many of my students don't bother to use spell-checker, and it shows. Occasionally, I can tell that someone did use it, because some word they obviously didn't intend appears and was probably its suggestion for a word they spelled wrong but simply the wrong suggestion. In an exam I'm grading at the moment, a student says the following about Augustine's view of what takes place with the disordered state of our emotions at conversion:

"Conversion involves a reordering that starts in this life and explains how people become more vitreous."

This was from one of my best students, someone at the top of a class composed entirely of above-average students. She got a perfect score on this essay question, as it happens, and that's not easy in my classes. She just wasn't paying enough attention when her spell-checker suggested this for however she misspelled 'virtuous'. It's never good not to use spell-checker, but you have to be careful. Things like this happen, and misspellings that are real words never show up.

Language complainers like William Safire and Richard Lederer often complain about the misuse of 'which' and 'that'. In school I learned the standard SAT usage of these two terms, and it made complete sense to me, because in my dialect you just didn't use these terms the way some people do. Linguists who observe the way the English language really works (as opposed to how Safire and Lederer want it to work) point out that the so-called misuse is not a misuse. It's a normal part of the English language. Arnold Zwicky even claims that virtually everyone uses 'which' in exactly the ways the style manuals say not to, including the writers of those manuals.

Well, I want to say that there is something bad about this normal part of the English language. It is a stylistic issue, and it's one that conveys something about the speaker. It's not grammatically wrong. It does sound uppity, though. In my dialect, you would never say "hand me the phone which is on the table" unless you wanted to sound like a snob. You might say "hand me the phone that's on the table". You might say, "The phone, which is on the table, is not plugged in." You wouldn't really even use 'that' unless you needed it. "Hand me the phone on the table" is much better than either, but the one with 'that' sounds ok. The one with 'which' just sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect someone with lots of money and private tutors to say.

I often hear statements involving an acronym and then one of the terms the acronym stands for immediately after. So it might be something like talking about the NIV version of the Bible (New International Version version), the GOP party (Grand Old Party party_, the HIV virus (HIV: Human Immuno-deficiency Virus), your ATM card's PIN number (PIN: personal identification number), or the ATM machine itself (ATM: automated teller machine). See Wikipedia's entry on RAS Syndrome (RAS: Redundant Acronym Syndrome) for many more examples and further discussion of this phenomenon (though, as I will explain, I find their conclusion that this phenomenon is incorrect to be itself incorrect; they do go on and give justifications for doing the technically incorrect thing, but I don't even think it's right to say it's technically incorrect).

What I hear people saying frequently in such cases is that "NIV version" is redundant (or whatever example it might be; this isn't about Bible versions but about acronyms). In most of these cases, the final word that the acronym stands for is repeated immediately after the acroynm, and that's said to be repeating something that the meaning of teh acronym already contained. Therefore, it's redundant. I used to think this was the right thing to say. Now I'm not so sure. Is "NIV version" redundant? Is "HIV virus" redundant? Is "PIN number" redundant? I say no.

Adrian Warnock found the Oxford English Dictionary statement on the use of 'they' as a singular in contexts of unspecified gender:

The word they (with its counterparts them, their, and themselves) as a singular pronoun to refer to a person of unspecified sex has been used since at least the 16th century. In the late 20th century, as the traditional use of he to refer to a person of either sex came under scrutiny on the grounds of sexism, this use of they became more common. It is now generally accepted in contexts where it follows an indefinite pronoun such as anyone, no one, someone, or a person, as in anyone can join if they are a resident and each to their own. In other contexts, coming after singular nouns, the use of they is now common, though less widely accepted, especially in formal contexts. Sentences such as ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.

Adrian's comments are also worth reading, as is his suggestion as to the best way to deal with one issue in gender translation. The translation he gives of the verse he considers is, I think, the best solution I've seen. It's certainly more fitting with standard spoken English, and it's just about the most common way to say this sort of thing even in the formal settings I often find myself in. Things are in flux with how positively to deal with it (though it's clear that the negative step of rejecting inclusive 'he' and so on is established), but singular 'they' is pretty much accepted in formal contexts enough of the time that I'd say it's grammatical not just in informal English.

Eugene Volokh points out the WordSmith word of the day: mopery. He's a law professor, and he'd never heard of this legal term. I guess he never saw Revenge of the Nerds. I don't even remember the context, and I'm not even sure of the sketchy details that follow, but I think someone (Booger?) had been arrested, and he described the reason as mopery. In response to the quizzical look that followed, he explained it as "exposing yourself to a blind person". I don't know if that was supposed to be the definition of the term or the description of the particular action that led to the mopery charge. If it was the former it was inaccurate, but if it was the latter it was probably correct. That may well be mopery. It's about as trivial a crime as there can be. According to Volokh, the OED definition is: "The action of committing a minor or petty offence, such as loitering, etc.; contravention of a trivial or hypothetical law, esp. when used as an excuse to harass or arrest a person against whom no more serious crime can be charged."

One reason I thought this was funny is because I just saw Fletch Lives, and one of the characters in that movie tells Fletch that he's in jail for molesting a dead horse. I've always thought of these two scenes as a pair for some reason. I wonder if it's because molesting a dead horse would be mopery as well.

We went to a wedding on Saturday, and I heard a very strange use of the word 'family'. As the man officiating at the wedding welcomed everyone, he referred to the guests in the customary way as friends and family. Then he began to address each person as a friend or a family. He continued on for a few minutes, referring to individual people by talking as if each person was either a friend or a family. Has anyone ever heard this sort of thing?

It sort of parallels how some people in the military use the word 'troop'. People at Language Log don't like it, but my friend who was in the Air Force says they referred to one airman as a troop all the time, from basic training all the way to the top of the ranks. It's apparently a pretty standard usage in the military. I can sort of hear talking of one troop as one person, though. One person as a family just doesn't sound like English.

I find it funny that a number Protestants have been insisting on calling the pope the bishop of Rome. Anglicans consider the pope the bishop of Rome, because they consider all the bishops of equal authority, and they consider the pope the only bishop in Rome. Eastern orthodox have the same view, though they didn't adopt it to justify a king's adultery that Rome wouldn't allow. They simply believed the bishop of Rome was claiming more authority than was really his to claim. Protestants (besides Anglicans) generally don't consider the pope the only bishop in Rome, so why do they think 'the bishop of Rome' refers to him uniquely?

Protestants generally recognize that the word 'bishop' in older English translations of the Bible refers to the local elders of a congregation, the spiritual leaders who carry out the normal teaching function of the congregation, oversee spiritual leadership, and discipline members of the congregation when necessary. Each congregation thus has at least one bishop, ideally a plurality for any local gathering. A leader Protestants wrongly call the pastor should count as one of these elders or bishops, but ideally there will be others in a team, all of whom will teach, even if one or two will be paid full-time. A Protestant might even think Catholics should be calling their whole priesthood bishops or elders rather than priests, since everyone is a priest anyway, and the priests serve the functions that elders do in the biblical records. It just strikes me as funny to see those who believe in many bishops in Rome calling the pope the bishop of Rome, as if that expression is uniquely referring.

Jonathan Ichikawa raises some questions I've been wondering about since this post, but he puts it in a different enough way that I'd like to highlight his argument and then develop it in a different direction. It seems pretty silly to use the kind of rhetoric often found in the religious right over an issue as boring as what a word means in the English language. Linguistic matters really don't have much moral weight, especially given how rapidly natural languages change. That's why a charitable observer will try to find a more charitable interpretation of all the harsh rhetoric about this vast gay conspiracy to redefine the English language. How it could it be that immoral merely to seek for one word to mean something else? It can't just be about language. There must be some real moral issue behind the scenes.

I ran across a sentence a few days ago that sounded jarring. I had the form:

"A number of ... has ..."

I understand what the author was thinking. The word 'number' is singular, so it should have the singular verb 'has'. For some reason this just sounds completely wrong to me, though. There are plenty of words that function this way, singular terms that refer to a collection of things. Yet a number of other terms aren't like this (there we go: I used it the way that sounds right to me, and you probably didn't even notice). As I thought about it more, my thinking turned into outright armchair linguistics, i.e. ordinary language philosophy. Here is how my hearing of the terms like this (that I can think of) lines them up:

I've been struggling with the idea that we have no shorthand for the view that homosexuality is abnormal and morally aberrant. Most who hate such a view call it homophobia, but there's a clear distinction between those who have this view and those who truly don't like people who are gay, are uncomfortable with gay people being involved in their life in any way, etc. Well, now I've seen a term that sounds to me as if it's just simply descriptive of the view in question. Someone who considers heterosexuality normal and/or normative is heteronormative. I think there are already a few ambiguities in the term, but it's better than anything else I've seen so far. The biggest problem is that the people who coined it seem to rule out the possibility that it could be ok to be heteronormative, as evidences by those of the Harvard-Radcliffe Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) who are criticizing Jada Pinkett Smith's comments last week at a Harvard multi-culturalist event, a criticism that itself raises some interesting moral questions.

Someone searched Google for "do women really enjoy equal rights" and got my Equal Rights and Gay Marriage post. I was wondering what the person was looking for, because that sentence is ambiguous. It could mean "do women really have equal rights?" That's a usage of 'enjoy' that seems to me to be departing from the English language, at least around here, but in parts of the English speaking world, particularly among more educated people, you might see it. I would lean against this interpretation, just because I can't imagine someone wanting to ask that question and wording it that way, but I guess it's possible.

It could also mean "do women really enjoy having equal rights?" or "would women really enjoy having equal rights?" assuming they don't have them. That was my first thought as to its meaning. After reflecting on that for a bit, I realized that there's another divergence of meaning, this time over 'equal rights'. It's not an abiguity, this time, though. The words 'equal' and 'rights' mean the same thing in both cases, but what counts as equal and what counts as rights are matters of debate, and that's why someone might even think to ask the question while others would think the answer is obvious. If certain things count as equal rights, then I don't see why women wouldn't enjoy them. If other things count as equal rights, I can understand why women wouldn't want them forced on them to make them be just like men in every way. Amazingly enough, the post this search led the person to, even though it's about gay rights, does get into that issue a little. If the person read far enough, this badly formed, ambiguous, open rather than quoted, sentence actually might have found the what the search was designed to find. Of course, it was on page two of the Google search (and now isn't even there anymore), so that lessens my surprise a bit.

Update: Apparently, even though some seem to have understood what I meant from the outset, others did not. I'm not going to remove any words, but I'll clarify in brackets, in a few places at length.

I'm de-linking World Magazine's blog, and I'm encouraging anyone who feels strongly enough about this to do the same. There's a fairly reputable view that the English language has no semantically gender-neutral but grammatically masculine terms. I think that's true of the dialects of most people I interact with on a daily basis, though I don't think it's true of every native English speaker. They think the view is false altogether [and have a history of very harsh comments to the effect that those pursuing translations according to this view are pursuing an anti-Christian agenda].

I have no problem with that view [though their language has been way over the top in the past]. I disagree with the views expressed on that site from time to time. That won't stop a link. Most of the sites I link to express views I disagree with. One of the reasons I wanted to link to them is because I really like Gene Veith, who posts there regularly, and Marvin Olasky was the source of what George Bush calls compassionate conservatism, which I think is generally the right sort of view to take and why I like him so much. It really came from George Will, but Bush got it from Olasky. [I should also say that they're one of the best news sources in the Christian blogosphere, largely because of the amount of content.]

A question for all you language gurus out there: when discussing a corporation or university or other institution, do you conjugate as a singular or as a plural? Basically, which is correct, "Microsoft is releasing product X", or "Microsoft are releasing product X"?

I can't believe no one I've read has come up with what seemed to me to be the absolutely obvious explanation of why President Bush used the plural 'internets' at the second debate. Anyone who reflects on their own contemporaneous speech should understand what happened. On just my first listen to him say it, it sounded to me as if his pauses indicated that he was searching for the right wording as he put this sentence together. Perhaps he couldn't remember 'blogs'. Maybe he wanted a more general term but couldn't think of one in the short time he had before his pauses could get too awkward (and we're talking not much more than a few seconds here). He was obviously thinking in the plural, and when he realized he wasn't coming up with anything he went with 'internet', and it came out plural because he was looking for a plural. Most people do that sort of thing all the time.

The kids decided to empty a huge boxed filled with class notes from high school and college, along with what I have left of my role-playing game days and a bunch of magazines I collected during college. They decided it would be nice for the box to look nice and neat with nothing in it but air. (They clear tables for neatness's sake also.) Unfortunately, it meant covering our entire dining room floor with papers that were now no longer in any semblance of order. Then they took all the books off one of the bookshelves in there and spread them out over the top of the papers just for kicks. So I spent the morning sorting through all that instead of doing anything else that I might have been able to do in the time I had before coming to campus to teach at 11:30. It took two and a half hours.

While I was doing that, Ethan walked into the dining room with a pack of microwave popcorn, as he is wont to do, and tried to give it to me to show that he wanted some, which is one of his ways of avoiding asking for things. Sometimes, much more often than he used to, he will say things like, "Want some popcorn?" This, of course, is what we say to him when he wants popcorn, but he doesn't quite understand the indexical nature of personal pronouns and the fact that different sentences are contextualized to who is saying them. So he tells us what he wants by saying what we say when he wants them. I told him to go ask Mommy, because I know she wants to limit his popcorn intake but have no idea what her criteria are for when he can and can't have it (for instance, he had three bags of microwave popcorn one day, but other days he can't have it presumably because he had some the day before; sometimes he's allowed to share a whole bag with Isaiah, and sometimes they can only have half a bag). I prodded him out of the room, and I had to exile both of them at one point with the new Veggie Tales "Sumo of the Opera", which they received in the mail from my mom yesterday.

Well, after that was over Ethan came back in the room with the popcorn, not having asked Mommy anything, and he handed me the popcorn. I handed it back to him and was about to say something, when he said "Go axe Mommy", thinking he was repeating what I had said to him last time. (He does this too, saying things like "That's Isaiah's" when we try to stop him from doing something that has nothing to do with Isaiah. All he knows is that it's what we say when we don't let him do something.) Now I don't exactly know where these violent tendencies are coming from, but I told him I don't have the proper equipment for such a procedure. Well, eventually I asked her, she said it was fine, and he had his popcorn, but what struck me as interesting in this was the combination of a normal child development issue with one of his abnormal developmental issues. Not understanding the semantics of pronouns and other person-relative expressions is normal for kids learning language, but it usually gets picked up in a short time. Kids with autism-related problems take much longer to learn that sort of thing. But reversing the 'k' and 's' in 'ask' is something kids usually take a long time to get right, and there are entire dialects of English in which it's correct to reverse them from how standard English does it (in pronunciation anyway, not in spelling). But Ethan is usually extremely good at pronunciation even without knowing the meanings. He even does the accents of the Wiggles or Veggie Tales characters. So it was weird to see him flat-out saying 'aks' for 'ask' without even thinking there was a problem with his pronunciation. He usually knows when he's wrong.

I've written at length about gender-neutral language with respect to pronouns (e.g. whether 'he' can be gender-neutral in some English dialects). I didn't say anything there about the gender-neutral 'man' or 'men' for humans as a whole without regard to gender, but I found a good example of how the Geoff Pullum view on 'he' can't be true of this usage of 'men'.

The Pullum view is that what we have taken to be gender-neutral language isn't really. It's genuinely sexist language in that it assumes a male person unless the context clearly indicates someone to be feminine. I was arguing that in some dialects (not mine) it might be that sometimes it's really gender-neutral, and I had to offer an alternative explanation for why certain sentences that don't clearly indicate maleness still sound wrong (e.g. 'Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself'). My explanation was that whenever anything in the context forces us to think about the gender of people, even if it doesn't say specifically what the person's gender is, then it's impossible to think of the person as gender-neutral and thus impossible in these dialects to use a gender-neutral 'he'.

Now I don't want to assume that 'man' is analogous in every way to 'he', but I stumbled across a sentence today that seems to confirm my explanation of what's going on over Pullum's at least for the gender-neutrality of 'man':

The abortion rights era wasn't the first time people denied personhood to human beings by fiat without argument. It's happened before with slaves in the United States and apparently also with women in Canada, for very different reasons.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied full personhood to slaves (not to black people as a whole, as some have claimed, and not to black people exclusively but to any slave regardless of race, and there were white slaves) only for the sake of counting how many representatives a district would have. It's not as if the denial of rights came from this. That was already assumed. It would be silly to claim that slaves have 3/5 of a person with 3/5 of the rights of a person. This was merely a compromise between the northern states that didn't want non-voting slaves to count for representation when only the much smaller voting population would wield all the power those slaves would give them and the southern states that wanted more influence without giving the people who gave them that influence any vote.

According to Bill Poser at Language Log, a Canadian woman became some sort of magistrate, and some lawyers opposed it on the grounds that she wasn't a person and couldn't carry out her duties as a magistrate. This was in 1916. It sounds unbelievable, but once you see the legal argument for it you can tell it was just a silly lawyer's argument with no basis. Once that's clear, though, it has an interesting consequence for the debate over gender-neutral language to describe groups whose gender is mixed or indeterminate.

Michelle Malkin is on C-SPAN's Washington Journal right now, and she just contradicted herself unintentionally. I'm not sure why, but in the last few weeks I've seen a much higher concentration of misuses of the term 'disinterested' to mean uninterested, whereas it really means not biased. Her whole point was to say that the major media outlets went way out of their way to focus on every little detail of Bush's National Guard service only to discover that there was no story there, while they've been dragged kicking and screaming even to mention all the stuff now with Kerry's Vietnam service, an issue he himself has placed so prominently in his campaign as to invite it. That's pure bias. Then why does she go and say that the major media outlets are disinterested, which means they're not biased? She's intelligent enough that I'd expect her to know the difference between being disinterested and uninterested. This isn't exactly a picky point of language. Her actual statement contradicted her main point. Aside from bad arguments for conclusions I agree with and unfair presentations of views I have sympathy with, there isn't much that a pundit can do to annoy me besides mangling the English language so much that the very argument they're making gets undermined. This particular mistake has been so common recently that it seems as if there's a major movement to annoy me.

Tim Challies has a good post about the uses and abuses of 'amen'. He doesn't discuss my favorite abuse, but my comment over there does, so I won't repeat it here.

Sidney Morgenbesser, philosophy professor at Columbia University, died yesterday. NPR had a little tidbit on him this afternoon, demonstrating that a famous urban legend really happened. One of his colleagues was on the air recounting it.

J.L. Austin was giving a talk formal semantics and pragmatics or something like that, and he said something about double negatives canceling out and making a positive but that double positives never turn to a negative. Morgenbesser, under his breath and not expecting to be heard, said "Yeah, yeah..." Everyone in the room did hear and of course broke out in laughter.

I heard this story without any names and without it being said to be even related to philosophy. I think it was "Yeah, right!" instead. I had assumed it was just another urban legend like most stories about professors, but it turns out to be a true urban legend.

I keep hearing these quick news blurbs on the Arminian churches that have been attacked in Iraq, and I've been wondering why it is that they've been targeting the churches that emphasize human freedom in salvation as over against God's sovereignty. Why wouldn't they target Calvinist churches also? I just don't get it. Is there something about the emphasis on human freedom that the terrorists think is more threatening? Well, isn't Calvinism also known for its connection to the middle class in Europe and the drive to prosper economically? Sure, it has nothing to do with what Calvinism is really about, but I wouldn't expect Islamicist terrorists to know anything about what really drives Christians, so I don't buy this explanation. What was that? They weren't targeting Arminian churches? They were targeting Armenian churches? Well, someone better tell all the news anchors at CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and everywhere else that's been misreporting it! I wonder if they're using Christian bloggers as their source of information. After all, a number of Christian bloggers in the circles I've been reading tend to contrast two different theological positions -- Calvinism and Armenianism. Last I knew the Armenian Orthodox were closer to Russian and Greek Orthodox than to anything else (though there are still big differences). A good Google search can pull up some good examples of this phenomenon, but I'm going to be nice and not point anyone out.

Here's some more stuff I've decided not to have longer posts on.

At Writing to Understand, Kris gives some reasons not to be so harsh with Fahrenheit 9/11. There really is something to be learned from it, even if you have to know a lot about the issues to be able to evaluate which bits are something to be learned and which are complete fabrications.

I knew video games were good for something.

Also from McConchie, a debunking of numerous claims about fetal stem cells. Destroying embryos doesn't seem to be worth it even if you ignore the fact that you're killing a human being.

Mark Liberman of Language Log has more on Bush's supposed disfluencies. This time an extremely respected linguist, George Lakoff, says Bush proved himself to be an excellent debater when running for governor. He describes him as eloquent, quick on his feet, and able to get out complicated sentences smoothly and without hesitation. Liberman considers a few theories as to why he seems to have become less that way during the 2000 presidential race and during his presidency. Interesting stuff.

Linguist Geoff Pullum finds another example of someone finding an animal that can learn through conditioning to form associations between words in human language and actions or things in the world and then acting as if the animal has understood human language. It's a perfectly fine experiment to see what the cognitive capacities of dogs are, but Pullum says this is like teaching a goldfish to associate a Greek letter with a certain action and then saying it understands Greek. It's not quite as bad as that, but it's really close.

Bill Poser at Language Log has defended the expression 'more perfect'. His reasoning is that we can speak of things being absolutely perfect, and therefore we already admit of degrees of perfection. So those who say that once something is perfect it can't be more or less so are ignoring the semantics of the word in its regular use. It also impugns the United States Constitution in its use of 'more perfect' to describe our hoped approach toward perfection as a country ("in order to form a more perfect Union"). Christians have a similar notion, expressed in Paul's descriptions of believers growing more and more like Christ, though I don't know if the Greek ever has an expression parallel to this one. The concept is clearly there, though, and that's all you need to show that there's no grammatical insanity or contradiction in such expressions.

This got me thinking about other constructions like this. Grammar police (as distinguished from legitimate grammarians who study grammar as a discipline wihtin linguistics) often fume at 'more pregnant', since one is either pregnant or not pregnant. How can a binary property with only two values admit of degrees? Once you think about it, it shouldn't be hard to consider how almost any supposedly binary term can admit of vagueness. Philosophers like 'flat', since it's got an absolute reading according to which nothing is flat but ideal geometric planes, but all sorts of things are more or less flat without being absolutely flat.

Many people consider it an article of faith that you should capitalize every word that could possibly be related to God. Those who don't think about it much will just capitalize the personal pronouns. Occasionally it extends to adjectives (e.g. "God is a Holy God.") Sometimes adverbs, nouns referring to divine attributes, or even verbs join in the fun. For a spoof on this, see this piece at The Holy Observer.

I don't even capitalize divine pronouns, and I have very specific reasons. It's not out of lack of reverence for God. My reasons are largely biblical ones. The Bible doesn't say not to capitalize these words (though it doesn't say we should do so either). It does fail to capitalize them itself, at least in the original manuscripts (except when it capitalizes every letter). Hebrew doesn't have a distinction between capitals and lowercase, and Aramaic uses the same alphabet (I think). Greek does have the distinction, but the New Testament manuscripts are either all caps or all lowercase.

I've got too many things to blog about again, so here we go.

Jonathan Ichikawa has a nice post at Fake Barn Country about obesity and determinism. I think I agree with everything he says. (It's also at his own blog, but there aren't any comments there yet. If you're interested in looking at all possible comments, it's worth checking both.)

Tiger! Tiger! has a great post on arguments for atheism. The author is an atheist but is acknowleding the insufficiency of the best arguments for atheism. I think I agree with every word up to a certain point. At the end, there's an appeal to a hermeneutic of suspicion as a final method of arguing for atheism, but I wonder if again this is at best at argument for agnosticism, since of course you can apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the atheistic framework as well (and the atheistic explanations of evidence and experiences pointing to theism) by explaining the atheistic worldview in terms of Romans 1 and the fall of humanity.

Saddam's doctor gives some inside dirt. (via The Limitless)

Stuart Buck puts Brian Leiter in his place with a careful examination of a new poll that shows the overall increasing mistrust of the media from both political parties. Leiter was trying to use it to show that Republicans are stupid for not trusting C-SPAN and that Republicans are simply mad at the press for questioning Bush and no longer groveling to him (as if they ever did). Stuart points out that the poll shows that Democrats are growing distrustful of all the media sources, that the Wall Street Journal is the biggest drop in trustworthiness according to Republicans, that Democrats and Republicans trust both Fox News at nearly statistically equivalent rates to each other, and Democrats are distrusting enough of C-SPAN that they fall prey to his charge of stupidity if Republicans do (not that the charge applies anyway if you understand what they are distrusting, on which see his argument).

Eugene Volokh, as far as I can tell, is a standard pro-choice libertarian, but he's willing to acknowledge that, even though both sides of the abortion debate are guilty of euphemistic and dysphemistic language, the mainstream media really do show a bias toward the euphemisms and dysphemisms of the pro-choice side of the debate.

Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping notices how Bush's order in 'women and men' sends a strong signal to Muslim practices that marginalize women. It's little things like this that show that Bush really isn't like a lot of Republicans of the past (or at least of the era since the 60s when Republicans were the civil rights party). The Bush Administration consciously thinks about things like this.

Joanne Jacobs connects talking to kids (including to babies), grades/test scores, class, and the racial achievement gap. I don't think everything she says follows from the data, but it's fascinating stuff. My comment there is sufficient to show where I disagree.

Jollyblogger has an excellent post on metaphor and whether Harry Potter can be morally redeeming for a Christian who believes the occult is evil. It's one of the best defenses of popular fiction with elements hyper-fundamentalists would reject that I've seen in a long time, using the examples of Hosea's marriage to a practicing prostitute and Isaiah's walking around "naked" (both commands from God) for an interesting point. He didn't say what I thought was the most obvious thing to say, which is that magic in Harry Potter isn't what's condemned in the Bible, since it's a natural ability of the characters in that fictional world rather than a supernatural ability not of one's own but sought out through practices involving demonic beings.

[Disclaimer: I hope people don't find this post irreverent or anything. I hold President Reagan in the highest regard. He was easily among my six favorite presidents, and he defined the presidency for me in my formative years (ages 5-13). If you don't know me well, just be aware that I'm happy to discuss something I care about an awful lot with cold detachment and dispassion, and I'm doing that here. This is about the issues and not the man, and I don't seek to dishonor his memory in my wondering about language use regarding corpses and what they become. We all die, and we all talk about what's left over afterward. This is just the occasion of my wondering about that.]

I heard someone on the radio this morning talking about carting Reagan's remains around various places. That sounded strange to my ears. I'm used to hearing people talk about where someone's remains are buried, but that brings to my mind the idea of someone who has been dead long enough for the body to have decayed significantly. Thus the remains really are only what remains of what was originally buried. To use 'remains' of a corpse of someone who died a few days ago doesn't seem to me to be correct usage. You would call this his body. Only after it's decayed a bit should that become inappropriate, with the need to call what's left his remains. Or am I missing something? Is this a regional dialect difference?

I've been wondering about a common rhetorical trick that really offends the opposing party in a debate. Often in arguments, we present unfair portraits of others' views, unfair because they wouldn't themselves describe it that way. But if it's an accurate description of their view or the results of it, and they just don't acknowledge that their view has that consequence, why not describe them as holding that view? The charitable opponent will recognize that they just don't see the consequence and therefore won't believe it. I once thought it was always worth describing things the way people would describe their own views. It's only fair to ascribe to them only the views they themselves hold and not the views that others wrongly take them to hold. I'm now beginning to think that it's not so simple as that.

Mark Liberman at Language Log debunks the "Bush mangles 'Abu Graib' pronunciation" story. His overall rating for Bush is a solid B. His overall rating for the Reuters transcriptions of Bush's pronunciation is a weak C-. (In a later post, Geoff Pullum seems to give Bush even more credit.) Liberman thinks Bush should have done better as often as he's had to hear and say it, but the fact that everyone around him is probably getting it wrong gives me reason to hesitate endorsing his conclusion. By the way, the proper transcription in English should be something like 'Ghurayb'. Given that, I'm not even sure I've heard one person pronouncing it right.

Someone with too much time came up with a county-by-county map of dialect differences for referring to soda (though I still think 'coke' fails to refer to anything that isn't at least cola, regardless of how many people use it with that intent). A breakdown of percentage of people shows what the other map doesn't, that 'soda' is the majority term.

It quite amazes me how many people don't know that 'pop' refers to what's basically a piece of candy on a stick that you put in your mouth and suck on. But then many of these are the same people who don't know what a bubbler is, instead referring to it by the word for statues in parks that spit water out of their mouths. 'Drinking fountain', however, is acceptable but too long for casual use. It would be like using 'carbonated beverage' for soda.

Other studies of dialect differences are here, including maps and a page for each state including what percentage of people answered which way. Thanks to Language Log for the links.

In a continuing effort to shorten my list in the sidebar despite constantly adding to them, I'm removing my two posts on the same God issue with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and linking just this one that refers to both of them.

The first was simply an argument that the one being called God in English is the same being that Muslims refer to with the name 'Allah', though they believe very different things about this one God, which makes all the difference. The second looked at some arguments in N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God about first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity and their relevance to this issue. Partly it helped clarify my position, and partly it helped me express my reasons for thinking this a little more clearly.

Update: This comments on this post about on freedom, rights, and 'under God' in the pledge of allegiance also has a discussion about the same issue that reflects a development of my thought on this issue. The basic idea is that I don't think there's one sense in which an expression might refer to God. An act of false worship may in one sense be worship of God but done so wrongly that it's immoral and worthless. The same act of false worship may in another sense not count as genuine worship of God and therefore count as worship of a false god. I think the former sense is primary and the latter secondary, as the terms in English are standardly used, and John 8:41-44 and II Kings 17 contain examples of the two senses in the Bible. The correct theory of reference-fixing for terms like 'God' and 'Allah' should explain why there are both senses, but it may still turn out that my view that the one of II Kings 17 is the primary one in English.

Update 2 (March 2008): The conversation picked up again in response to a debate between Rick Love and John Piper. In Muslims Worshiping God But Not Worshiping God, I present the argument in a different enough way that I thought it was worth linking to it here, and I respond to the objection that Muslims deny an essential property of God and thus must not refer to him when they use God-language.

Then in Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? I respond to a couple arguments from Timothy Tennent. He argues that it doesn't seem right to say that the God of Muhammad is the Father of Jesus, and I point out the real problem in that statement is that no Muslim or Christian should accept both labels for God, but that both could refer to God in the same way that mistaken descriptions of mere human beings can refer even if they get things badly wrong (e.g. the red-haired man across the room drinking champagne, when it's a bald woman in a wig cross-dressing and drinking wine out of a champagne glass).

Finally, in Islam and a Different Jesus, I respond to a more difficult set of arguments from Kevin Courter and Dale Tuggy. What about Paul's statement in II Corinthians that those who teach a false gospel are teaching a different Jesus? What about his statements in I Corinthians about demons lying behind idols? What if Muhammad actually received the Qur'an from a demon? This post offers a slightly modified view that can handle these objections, and it argues that, since you won't be able to modify the alternative view to handle the difficulties I've raised for that position, my view is the most reasonable way to handle the tensions within the scriptures that bear on this issue.

Someone on one of the music lists I'm on sent some bits from English translations of French and German Reviews of Proto-Kaw's new album Before Became After. Some of these are great.

A couple weeks ago Volokh blogged about 'thee' and 'thou'. One thing he mentioned that I've known for a little while but seems so contrary to popular opinion is that 'thee' and 'thou' were the informal and more personal versions of the second person pronoun, and 'ye' and 'you' were reserved for more formal situations. The informal 'thee' and 'thou' eventually became archaic, and their association with old-fashionedness, which also somehow got associated with formality, led to the dominant myth that 'thee' and 'thou' are more formal.

Should people use these terms when praying? Should people prefer a Bible translation that uses them with respect to God? I've encountered a number of people who prefer them and some who insist on it. I've also encountered probably a much greater number who have preferred 'you', many of them insisting on it. The issues become quite complicated, simply because most people don't understand the history of their own language enough to know why these words were chosen in older translations (and the archaic on this matter NASB) when referring to God.

I've always wondered why old people are always depicted with southern accents. On a Farscape episode when John Crichton was made to age unnaturally, somehow he acquired not just gray hair and wrinkles but a southern accent. On a Stargate episode the same thing happened to Jack O'Neill. How does age make you acquire an accent from a region in which you perhaps have never even lived?

John McWhorter gives an explanation for this in a post at Language Log. Back when TV role stereotypes were developing, there had been mass migration from rural to urban locales, and older people tended to have more rural manners of speaking, including stronger southern accents in some cases. Somehow the more rural ways of speaking got associated with age. He points out that this makes no sense given today's demographics, but it makes even less sense given a science fiction character's unnatural aging. Why should your accent change if your cells prematurely start to degenerate?

Anyone interested in improving your writing should read this piece by Paul Robinson on punctuation. He makes several very insightful arguments about why punctuation use, misuse, overuse, and underuse have more significance than just following rules. They affect readability and understandability. He gives specific examples to illustrate. I don't agree with every sentence, but the one I disagree with isn't that significant, at least compared with the other points he makes. Thanks to Rebecca for the link.

I tend to think of dumb things to write about when I have a huge stack of grading to do, and here's yet another one (actually I think about them all the time, but I write about them when I have stuff to put off doing). Arianna Huffington was on NPR today. One thing she said caught my attention. It's a common enough saying, but it struck me today how odd it is. She was describing President Bush's response to the dead and very slowly rising economy after 9-11 by cutting taxes. She said that this response is the very definition of insanity. Leaving aside the tendentious nature of the proposition she was trying to express with this sentence, let's consider how the sentence is supposed to express that proposition to begin with. After all, how can his action be the very definition of anything? My first thought was simply that she must not be thinking about what a definition is. It's not an action. An action can illustrate a definition as a clear case, but it's not itself a definition.

The time has arrived once again when I have too many things to blog about and not enough time to do it, so before some of this stuff gets too old I'll at least link them and say something about them.

Discoshaman comments on the scientists on the verge of creating life in a laboratory to the effect that someone's going to start denying that it's happened on the grounds that only God can create life. Read the first comment, the one about the dirt. It's hilarious and exactly the right to say here.

This one's been old for a while, but I just found it. Philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson has been a gradual convert to conservative thought over the course of his life. He wrote this before the big brouhaha over liberal professors in academia of the last few months, but it looks at why so many liberal thinkers think conservatives are stupid in a way that's neither insulting to liberals nor favorable to the position that conservatives tend to be stupid.

Speaking of philosophers discussing important issues, Jeremy Chong gives a near-formal deductive argument for the conclusion that soy milk is indeed milk. I would have argued on the same basis but in a very different way, focusing more on philosophy of language but really for the same reasons and based on the same intuitions.

Volokh: A 15-year-old girl is up for child pornography charges for taking pictures of herself and sending them to people through the internet. Get a load of what they're charging her with.

Also at Volokh, Jacob Levy, from my alma mater Brown, mentions two things of note in one post. First is his reference to Buddy Cianci, former mayor of Providence who was convicted of a felony and then later re-elected mayor for multiple terms while still not serving any terms. It's as if he's a cartoon character. What Jacob says about him is precious. Then he goes on to tell a great story of the new attorney general of RI calling Marvel Comics to get Stan Lee's permission to use a quote from the first appearance of Spiderman.

Yet again at Volokh: Anyone up for a vampire slaying? This one wasn't posted on April Fool's Day. At least the guy was already dead.

Last but not least, you have to see the latest two comments on my post from January about the racist Condoleeza Rice poster that had been circulating at the time. It would be ideal if you go and look at the family pictures on my old blog site first to appreciate the full humor of what these two guys (assuming they're two people -- I haven't checked the IPs yet) think they can get away with saying. Update: Sam weighs in. I like the MTV comment. It's too bad I didn't catch that. It's insulting enough to assume that I don't know my wife. To assume that I watch MTV may even be worse.

I've got a couple more, including another from Volokh, but I'll hold off on them in the hopes that I might be able to say a little more about them.

I've often wondered where this expression came from. My affinity for things that make sense found this phrase revolting from the first time I heard it. I can think of some ways to try to make sense of them, but all of them end up seeming implausible, confused, or both.

It could mean what it literally says. Some difference is being calculated. The first might be 13-10 and the second 4-1. They're the same difference, since they're both 3. Is there some difference in common every time this phrase gets used? I doubt it. The difference people are referring to is the difference between the two things being compared, not some difference within each of the two things being compared.

So that leaves us trying to make sense of how the difference between A and B, which is not much of a difference, is then the same difference. The same as what? As itself? That's trivial. There is a difference between A and B, or there wouldn't need to be someone saying that they're somehow the same. Yet what's this difference the same as? If it's saying that they're the same and also not the same, then that might make some sense of this, but they would have to be the same in one sense and not the same in another sense for this to have any meaning at all and avoid contradiction. I don't think most utterers of 'same difference' are thinking on this level of things being the same in one sense and different in another.