Parts of Speech

We wuz robbed of a whole world of culture when they reformed language teaching

This is one of those scales-fall-from-my-eyes moments. Looking back, I think I must have known that something was wrong with how we were taught languages -- although in my case, a great deal was right with it, too -- but I really never would have put it all together if Prof. Anthony Esolen hadn't pointed it out. He writes:

Sometime in the 1970's, the aim of teaching languages changed pretty noticeably, and therefore also the range and the kinds of languages taught. In my small Catholic high school, we had full curricula in French, Spanish, German, and Latin, and the school allowed you to take Latin instead of History, if you were taking another language besides. The goal -- which was, shall we say, never entirely settled -- was to get you to be able to Read Good Things in the other language. But eventually, that goal would be abandoned, for the sake of a fluency in conversation which you were really never going to attain without being immersed in the language somewhere for many months. The practical result was this: In 1960, you might study Spanish to read Don Quixote. In 1980, you studied Spanish to ask where the bathrooms were in Tijuana. In 1960, you might study German to sing the great Lieder that Schumann or someone set to music. In 1980, you studied German to order ein Glas Bier in Heidelberg. In 2000, you didn't study German at all. In 1960, you might study Latin to read Cicero. In 1980, you might study Latin to gain 60 or so points on your verbal SAT; because obviously you couldn't order Falernian wine in Mediolanum. In 2000, you didn't study Latin at all.

 

I began to notice very early in my teaching career (1985) that students could have four years of a language in high school and still not know the first thing about grammar. It meant that after all that time, they could sputter out a few stock phrases, but they could not read a newspaper, and forget about reading a real novel. If it can't be imagined as being said at a restaurant or a train station or a booth at a flea market, forget it.

 

Strange, though, that they were spending four years apparently studying A LANGUAGE -- apparently -- but never studying LANGUAGE, how it works, what it does, how we pronounce things, how we hear things, how it helps us organize things, how it is almost necessary for us even to have any kind of thought. They were expected to learn a language at age 15 in the same way they might have learned it at age 2, when the circumstances were completely different, both outside them and inside them. And the conversational technique shoved aside every other way, every other inroad, every other necessarily artificial but still illuminating tool for understanding.

 

English phrases from falconry: Hoodwinked, haggard, fed up, bated, booze, under my thumb, wrapped around my finger ...

"How Falconry Changed Language" -- BBC

    My falcon now is sharp and passing empty;
     And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
     For then she never looks upon her lure.
     Another way I have to man my haggard,
     To make her come and know her keeper’s call ...

"The Taming of the Shrew"

Sfyria -- Greece's whistled language has lasted 2500 years

"Greece's disappearing whistled language". BBC Travel. BBC.com. 

Also at: "Greece's disappearing whistled language". BBC Travel. BBC.com. (via Wayback archive)

 

 

 

 

 

 

They say "PHILOTIMO" can't be translated ...

... but it can be approached by:

• “Doing the right thing”
• “Loving and honouring God and your society”
• "Striving for perfection”
• “Stepping out from your comfort zone to help someone in need”

Philotimo comes from the Ancient Greek word philotimia (φιλοτιμία) ... the first attested written reference dates to the dawn of the Greek classical period (6th and 7th Centuries BC) in the writings of lyric poet Pindar. For Pindar and other early writers, the word meant love of honour or distinction, or ambition, but often in a negative way. In mythology, for example, Achilles' philotimo was wounded when King Agamemnon took away Queen Briseis, his prize for bravery on the battlefield.

It was only after the consolidation of democracy in classical Athens around the 4th and 5th Centuries BC, when competition was replaced by co-operation, that the word gained a more positive connotation. At that time, “a man with philotimo signified someone who loves to receive the praises of his city, but first serves the community.” 

...

“While the West was experiencing Enlightenment and developing modern states that tied together individuals under the rule of law and an abstract sense of responsibility, the subjugated and inward-looking Greeks were bound by pride, localism and interpersonal relationships,” Vertoudakis said. “Instead of developing the kind of institutional consciousness seen in Western Europe, Greek communities were imbued with philotimo, which was triggered not by law and logic but intense emotion and some degree of intimacy.”

... locals not only grabbed kitchen knives or unsophisticated weapons to go out and fight the enemy, but also trudged through the towering, rugged mountains and steep gorges of Crete to find the best hideouts for the British and Australian soldiers. Neither the fact that they were half-starved due to the Nazi-induced Great Famine nor the death penalty for sheltering soldiers fazed them; their sense of duty, honour and courage took precedence.

Almost 76 years later, locals on the islands of Lesbos, Chios and Kos, places renowned for their beauty and touristic prowess – yet all in years of deep recession – have been jumping in boats to rescue refugees reaching the Eastern Aegean shores in droves. Some have even been witnessed plunging in icy waters as the rickety boats approach the islands.

“Why are you congratulating me, my children?” asked 86-year-old Emilia Kamvisi when journalists asked her why she and her friends, 90-year-old Efstratia Mavrapidou and 86-year-old Maritsa Mavrapidou – who were later nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize – go to the coast of Lesbos every day to help weary female refugees and their children. “What special am I doing? Wouldn’t you do the same?” she continued.

Also nominated was 41-year-old fisherman, Stratis Valiamos, who often takes his tiny wooden boat into the Aegean to rescue people off his own accord. “I’m out fishing, I can see people shouting for help. What can I do? Pretend I can’t see? Pretend I can’t hear? That’s the right thing to do”. ...

"The Greek Word that Can't be Translated" -- BBC

Silbo Gomero -- the long-distance whistled Spanish of La Gomera in the Canaries

"A whistled register of Spanish used by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands to communicate over a distance of up to three miles, across the deep ravines and narrow valleys that radiate through the island." -- Wikipedia

Listen (turning on captioning helps).

 

 

 

Why did I never think of using the noun "standby" in a literal sense?

 

 

 

Haidt Explains Why "Hate Speech" Now Means "Speech People Hate".

The definition of a "hate" group has been in constant flux, no, expansion, for so long now that it's easy to forget that it was stable for generations. I always thought that the standard use of it for Nazis and other organized racists was unimaginative, and risked underestimating how dangerous they actually were, but at least everyone knew what it meant. American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell used it to describe his group's product as least as far back as the early 1960s, when he founded Hatenanny Records. In a 1991 college newspaper column titled "Bad Words to be Purged from the Language," I wrote,

"Hate speech, groups etc. As angry as they make us, Doug H. [prominent campus racial slurster] and friends are still expressing opinions, not hate. They probably have feelings of superiority, entitlement, self-pity, fear, envy, and contempt, but I doubt that many racists are possessed by hate or anything else unknown to the rest of us. The ones I know espouse sociological theories that were dominant until the 1940s, and think their own experiences empirically support them. They don't even dislike minorities, as long as they stay in their familiar and inferior "place."

With more space or forethought, I would have added that they often aren't expressing anything, they're just looking for words that will hurt, humiliate and enrage whoever they're using them against, or they're just trying to fit in with others, or show them that they can think of something powerful to say, and so on.

But this was still a "sidelines" kind of comment -- it wasn't about anything that was threatening me, or people I respectfully disagreed with, or any core values. It was just at that stage where you sense something "off" about someone who says it it, something that bespeaks some unknown, idiosyncratic, quirk in how they process the world, that might suddenly turn vicious under pressure if you had to trust or rely on them.

But now, Lord, ain't we got fun! At some point in the gay marriage movement, which itself had been outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion until the early 90s, someone decided to label its opponents as "hate" advocates. Never mind that those opponents included Senators Clinton and Obama, at least officially. And now that the monopoly on "hate" victim status is broken open, everybody wants a piece of it.

In 2012, Randall Parker broke this ongoing process down in "On Labeling Opponents Of Multiculturalism As Hateful", citing and building on Jonathan Haidt's study showing why "The right gets the left better than the left gets the right":

That the Obama Administration would label a video that lampoons a religion as hate demonstrates why I so distrust Barack Obama. The primary use of the term "hate" is to label someone as outside of civilized discourse and deserving of pariah status. But lets get to root causes. Why use the term "hate" for this purpose? The role of hate looms so large in the elite liberal mind in large part because liberals lack the ability to understand non-liberal minds. The left has elevated their own psychological blindness and misunderstanding into a campaign of marginalization where they label their opponents as hate groups. This blindness of liberal minds to half the moral considerations used by conservative minds creates a condition very much like the Dunning-Kruger Effect where someone lacks the ability to detect the extent of their own misunderstanding, ignorance, and incompetence. ... This is the part that scares me. Will multi-culturalism and the desire to placate ethnicities at home and abroad cause an even larger reduction in freedom of speech than it already has? Speech codes in workplaces are already left-liberal. I'm expecting them to become more strictly enforced and for that enforcement to extend beyond the workplace.

The reason for this, as revealed in Haidt's study and vividly described by John Faithful Hamer:

Jonathan Haidt has found that when you give conservatives a questionnaire and ask them to answer it like a liberal, they’re able to do so with ease. When you ask them to answer like a libertarian, they’re able to do that too. Libertarians aren’t nearly as adept as conservatives, but they’re still fairly good at imagining how a conservative or a liberal might answer the questionnaire. Alas, the real outliers are the liberals.

In numerous studies, with respectable sample sizes, Haidt has demonstrated that liberals simply don’t have a clue. When you ask them to answer the questionnaire like a conservative, they answer it like a fascist. When you ask them to answer it like a libertarian, they answer it like a sociopath. The liberal conception of what makes the average conservative or libertarian tick is, Haidt concludes, way off.

Are liberals less imaginative than conservatives and libertarians? I highly doubt it. The virtues and vices are, it seems, to be found everywhere to varying degrees. Why, then, do liberals do so terribly on this “ideological Turing test”? And why do conservatives do so well? Haidt maintains that conservatives do well because they base their moral thinking on all six of the moral foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, Liberty, Care & Fairness). Liberals do poorly because they base their moral thinking on only two of them (Care & Fairness).

Haidt’s explanation is fascinating. But it’s got way too many moving parts and a fatal flaw: namely, it implicitly presumes that liberals are somehow spectacularly deficient in imagination. I find it hard to believe that any sizable group of human beings could be spectacularly deficient in any virtue (or vice). That’s why I’ve come up with a simpler explanation for Haidt’s robust findings: liberals suck at this test because shutting down certain parts of your imagination has become central to what it means to be liberal.

Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents. Trying to sympathize with, say, a Trump supporter, has come to constitute a kind of thought-crime for many liberals (and almost all progressives). So it’s not that liberals have less imagination than conservatives or libertarians; it’s that they’ve set up mental firewalls that actively prevent them from even going there. Just as Odysseus’s men stopped up their ears with wax so they wouldn’t be tempted by the seductive song of the Sirens, many liberals have, it seems, set up taboo boundaries which more or less ensure that they’ll never have to empathize with a conservative or a libertarian. This is decidedly unwise, as it often leads to group polarization.

...

Just as the violent suppression of the labor movement pushed a lot of good people into the communist camp in the twentieth century, I fear that the outrageous attacks on nonconformists like Jordan Peterson may radicalize a lot of middle-of-the-road moderates in the twenty-first century. As Malcolm Gladwell makes clear in David and Goliath (2014), when you crack down on terrorism by demonizing an entire community, you invariably end up strengthening support for the terrorists; and when you crack down on the civil rights movement in a draconian fashion, you invariably end up strengthening support for the civil rights movement. What’s happening on the left at the moment is striking similar. Demonize everyone who seems to disagree with you and you’ll invariably end up strengthening support for those who actually disagree with you.

Telling people off on Twitter and preaching to the choir on Facebook can be fun. But it’s a dangerous kind of fun. Because you get intellectually lazy. Because you start speaking in a specialized jargon that no one outside of your safe space can understand. Because you develop a contempt for everyone outside of your élite group of cool kids that frequently leads you to dehumanize those who disagree with you. Live in your little bubble long enough, and you’ll become downright delusional, like the emperor in that Hans Christian Andersen tale.

-- John Faithful Hamer, "In Praise of Listening", also published in Hamer, Social Media Land, 2020

More:

• "Why Won’t They Listen?" by William Saletan, NY Times, March 23, 2012
• "Hateful speech on hate groups" by Dana Milbank, Washington Post, August 16, 2012

BSA scout gives excellent communication advice as troop improvises unique pandemic food drive

My sons' Scouts BSA troop has suddenly become a food drive. (Though the scouts are also still doing a lot of work on various merit badges and rank requirements.) It started with the Gomez family, two of whose sons have led the troop as Senior Patrol Leader. They are close enough to parts of our community that they can verify the needs and resources of the families receiving aid. Both the recipients and the troop know and trust them. The troop as a whole has organized to support the supply side of the Gomezes' operation, while adult scouters and troop alumni help with delivery. 

The classic cautionary tale about charitable work is Dickens's "Mrs. Jellyby" in Bleak House, who works tirelessly to raise awareness and support ill-fated highbrow missionary projects in the most obscure parts of Africa, thinking she's saving people whose needs and wishes she actually knows nothing about, while completely neglecting her own children.

The opposite of Jellybying is often depicted by another English novelist, whose compassion, skill and sales rival Dickens's, Sir Terry Pratchett. As he puts it, "Do the work that's in front of you." 

That's what this is. It does something that existing institutions don't have the capacity for right now. It provides not only shelf-stable staples, but fresh food that we buy and deliver on the same day. Instead of taking whatever food people donate, it buys in bulk so that donors' contributions do more good, handling is efficient, recipients get a planned and balanced basket, and, importantly, they feel like they are treated equally with each other, and with dignity.

Current Boys' Senior Patrol Leader Mattie Nguyen, a high school junior, asked the scouts to participate by spreading the word, and gave them communication advice that it takes most of us decades to learn. I frankly assumed the Scoutmaster wrote this, but I asked Mattie's mom and she assured me that he wrote it all himself. 

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Dear Scouts/Parents of Troop 167:

 If you attended the troop meeting held May 20^th, you are likely aware of the service project that Troop 167 is performing to help families within our community put food on the table. An extension of an effort initiated to help families in our own troop, the scale of this project has grown enormously. Each week we are purchasing bulk quantities of food and preparing staple packages that are delivered to over 100 families. A more detailed description of this can be found in the attached files. A crucial service for at-risk families in Arlington, the continuation of this project is imperative: and it cannot be sustained without sufficient funding. Each box of food requires $25 or more to produce, and each week we distribute to at least 100 families. The cost of providing this service reflects the immense need we are filling.

The potential success of our fundraising effort lies in the hands of T167 Scouts and families.

We are relying on you; the scouts and parents of T167, to raise the funds we need to continue our pledge to service. A volunteer effort, we have no overhead. While helpful in eliminating fees and bureaucratic obstacles, this also means that we are fully dependent on the proactive actions taken by the members of this troop. This is your call to action.

 This is how you can help:

Spread the word. The most helpful thing that Scouts and parents can do is spread the word. As previously mentioned, we have no outside resources managing advertisement. You are our media outlets. In a world now communicating almost solely across the internet, emails are one of the easiest and most effective ways to advertise our fundraising effort. A simple message outlining who we are, what we are doing, and why we need funding can be copied and pasted to reach dozens of people. Additionally, people are witnessing the effects of this virus firsthand, making goodwill in easy access. For this reason, we are asking each scout to reach out to at least 5 people. If each scout does this, we will establish the lines of communication with the community necessary to move our service project forward. Attached to this email are documents providing the intricacies of our effort you may wish to include in your note, as well as a model message/note found below that can be used as a template or guide. Here are some things to keep in mind when creating your messages:

• Who are you writing to? If your recipient is a family member or friend, don’t hold back from personalizing your message. The more closely you know somebody, the more important it is to sound like yourself. A candid and genuine letter will be better received by people you are close with than a robotic and scripted note.  Even if it is to your neighbors or people you may not know as well, show your personality in your writing. Keeping this in mind, still be sure to maintain a professional and appropriately formal approach. Remember; you are asking them for money at a time when people in all walks of life are facing their own challenges.
• How are you writing to them? Are you writing to your recipients over email? Text? Mail? By phone? Understanding the method of communication you are using is key to crafting an effective and appropriate message.
• What are you asking? Every communication has a purpose. The core purpose of the messages we are asking you to create/distribute is the following: Ask people for monetary donations and direct them to our donation page. Provide clear ways for people to donate by providing links or URLs to our donation page like this, and giving them instruction if you believe they may struggle to understand the platform. Offer your aid! The other parts of your message are also extremely important but keep this core purpose in mind. ...
• Communicate safety! How much people know about what we are doing is reliant on what you tell them. Make sure they know that scouts are out of harms way, and that everything we do is in full compliance with the safety restrictions in place. One way that this is ensured is in what you are doing right now- maintaining an essential role in this operation from the safety of your own home!
• Ask your recipient to spread the word too! The whole point of our asking you to send these messages is to raise awareness about our fundraising. Why stop at one point of communication? If you have grandparents you know how awfully well chainmail works, so consider asking the person to whom you are writing to to spread the word as well! As always, make sure you are being polite and considerate. 
• Ask for help! Between younger Scouts, older Scouts, parents, and troop leaders, there is wide range of communicative experience and skill in our troop. If you are ever unsure of what you are writing, who you should write to, or if your message is good, don’t hesitate to ask for help! Your parents are the closest resource you have -- so run your message by them before sending it out. Ask anybody, and they’ll say a second pair of eyes is key to ensuring good writing. As always, the leadership in your troop is also available to you! Reach out to your patrol leader, troop leaders, or even fellow scouts if you have any questions or concerns. No question is a bad question.   

 -------------------------------------  

Model Message/Letter

“Dear Friends, Neighbors and Family [customize]

 The COVID-19 pandemic is making it difficult or impossible for vulnerable families in our community to consistently put healthy food on their tables to feed themselves and their children. We at Scout Troop 167 (having pledged to help other people at all times) are stepping in to help by feeding up to 100 local food-insecure families in great need each week – and we need your help!

As detailed below, we shop at wholesale stores to get the best prices possible and assemble food boxes each week for distribution. We are organized and have the manpower – what we need is continuing funds.  It costs about $2500 a week at our current level of aid.

 Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at tinyurl.com/t167fooddrive. No amount is too small, and your generosity is greatly appreciated.

 Thank you.

 [xxxxxxxx personalized by the scout sending it out]”

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...

 We thank you for your help in ensuring the success of our Troop’s vital service project. Together, we are helping our community stay healthy and safe in a period unprecedented in our lifetimes. We encourage you to please read the attached documents formulated over the past few weeks, detailing the story behind what we are doing, why we are doing it, how we are staying safe, and the logistics of such a large operation. ...

 Sincerely,

Mattie Nguyen (on behalf of the Patrol Leaders’ Council and Leadership of Troop 167).

Links:

• Troop 167 Pandemic Food Drive: Helping Arlington Families in Need
• Donations web page
• Main Troop 167 web page
• Mount Olivet United Methodist Church

Words only the media uses, and sometimes even they don't understand them: Vex, blaze, slay, imbroglio & many more

It's a feature, not a bug. Sometime you do it to use the shortest word possible in a headline, other times for variety, but as Gene Weingarten points out, also to "cover" yourself, or out of dull and stilted habit and a disregard for readers and their real-life experience, forgetting that your work is not an end in itself but serves a purpose in everyday life.

Although some of the terms he says only journalists use have come back into more normal use because they're used in the media so much, or maybe that's just in places like Washington, where I live, or professions like mine. But others definitely haven't: "blaze" (for a house fire), vex, slay ...

Gene fingers journos in language imbroglio

Washington Post Magazine

And there's even a version on Youtube!

“Translate” Shakespeare? Yes! Extremely carefully.

Modern English is a big language, sprawling over roughly 500 years of literature, and many different structures, dialects and styles, including some that brought back even older forms, the gothic thees and thous, the license poetic to rearrange where go the nouns, verbs and adjectives, the words resurrected or repurposed because they sounded more medieval and Germanic; it welcomes and absorbs words from every language, every trade, every sport;  it very well contradicts itself; it contains multitudes.  

And we need to keep that big language alive and predominant, to have people of average education able to converse with Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Milton, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Jefferson, Gibbon, Austen, Byron, the artificially archaic language of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, the Hebraic rhythms and devices of Whitman’s free verse. It isn’t hard; it comes naturally so long as students still read them and worship still includes the classic wording. But if that stops, we’ll lose access to those incomparable classics: they’ll first start to sound difficult, and then like a foreign language.

But the new effort to “translate” 39 Shakespeare plays is being done for all the right reasons; preserving the old whenever it has value, but finding replacements when it’s so decrepit that it serves no purpose but confuses and deadens the lines. And finding a way for the replacements to do the most important things that Shakespeare’s language did originally. In the hope that an audience that isn’t straining so hard to follow the language will react more immediately and fully to the words, the acting and the action, more like the original audiences did. So far, it seems to be succeeding better than anyone hoped. As productions begin, sometimes the audiences and actors haven't been able to tell that anything is new, or have mistaken Shakespeare's words for contemporary updates.

We need to keep using historic words, historic literature, historic places and historic items as long as possible; but they best connect us to history when we actually use them, and interact with them, instead of putting them in glass cases and treating them  as curiosities, trivia, and markers of leisured elitism.

How Play on! came to be: The backstory of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation project