Parts of Speech

#Confucius's "Rectification of names" is about clear, honest language, not ministerial hierarchy.

 Tsze-lu said, "The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?"

The Master replied, "What is necessary is to rectify names." "So! indeed!" said Tsze-lu. "You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?"

The Master said, "How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.

"If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

"When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.

"Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

Analects, Ch. 13

This passage strikes many Westerners, in this degraded and confused age, as a call for clear, unvarnished, precise and non-"evolving"  language, especially about law and public policy. It has always struck me that way.

But all over the internet you will read that it's not about that, it's about defining, honoring and observing officials' status, titles and powers according to a fixed hierarchy. That sounds to me like a freshman B-minus term paper answer -- how can 1,000 cribbed exam answers, by undergrads who didn't do the reading, all be wrong? Some people think of Confucius as a crabbed, fussy reactionary prig obsessed with status, titles and ceremony, and therefore, whatever he says must be about that? 

I don't think so. Simply reading the entire passage above, instead of taking the three words "rectification of names" and slapping them onto our stereotype of Confucius, should make that interpretation impossible. And while he talks of "a superior man" he clearly describes that superiority as a matter of behavior and wisdom, and a proportionate humility, not birth or status.

 But it's good to see an actual Chinese Philosophy professor, who knows the language, take the same view. Manyul Im, a Philosophy Professor at Fairfield University, writes:

Confucius famously says in Analects 13.3 that the first thing to do in conducting state affairs is to “rectify names” — or “correct terms.” Otherwise, he says, “speech will not follow” (yan bu shun 言不順), with the result that “affairs will not be accomplished” (shi bu cheng 事不成), with the result that “rites and music will not flourish,” with the final result that “punishments and rewards will not be appropriate.”

You could ask a lot of questions here as to what this all means. The one I’ll ask is whether this has anything to do with Analects 12.11–as a lot of people seem to think–where Confucius is asked about governing and he says, very tersely, “jun jun, chen chen, fu fu, zi zi” (君君臣臣父父子子). The way most people seem to render this is some version of “A lord should lord, a minister should minister, a father should father, and a son should son,” where the verbal occurrence is usually embellished (plausibly, I think) with “should act like a proper______.” There are a couple of things that bother me about this, however:

1. I don’t see how 12.11, so construed, is about “names” or “terms” (ming). It seems ostensibly about lords, ministers, fathers, and sons on the one hand and on the other about roles or actions–not about the terms or titles for such people or such roles (or actions). To be about names or terms, at least one of the instances of each pair, the noun or verb–assuming that is how we should construe the grammar–would have to be a mention as opposed to a use. But, how are we to read 12.11 then?
2. Suppose a lord does not act like a proper lord, a minister like a proper minister, and so forth. Why would that threaten to undermine correct or effective speech, as 13.3 states? I could almost see how improper use of the terms–for example, calling someone a lord who is not actually a lord–could undermine correct usage, if the practice caught on or was enforced. But the fact that someone who isin fact, legitimately, a lord isn’t living up to the name or title, doesn’t have an effect on the correct usage of the name or title; correct usage is necessary to make that judgment in the first place. And, if he isn’t legitimately a lord, then his not living up to the title is just to be expected and doesn’t pose a problem. So, 12.11 can’t really be about making sure people live up to their (properly) applied titles if it is to be relevant to 13.3.

From "Rectification of Names (zhengming, 正名)" on Manyul Im’s Chinese Philosophy Blog

I couldn't say it better, or with any authority. But I can add this: In 13 Confucius is talking about what to do first, when reforming a state's government. And he makes a very general statement that language should be "in accordance with the truth of things" so that "affairs" are "carried on to success". He emphasizes how universal and general this effect and necessity is, so why should we interpret it as only being about ministers' titles?

In Portland, media's bureaucratic style smokescreens who killed who

Press deploys its worst bureaucratese against Portland's anti-Muslim killer and its Constitution-burning mayor

Our default victimhood jargon on sex & violence disempowers victims, ignores responsibility

"X% of women were raped." "Battered women". "The accuser". The passive voice leads us to ignore  responsibilities, actions, transgressions.  But it is the politically correct way to talk about sex and violence. (Ah, there's another one, this "violence" that just somehow happens, that we talk about as if it were more real than the people who do it and the people they do it to.)  It is politically correct because (1) officialdom wants people passive. If individuals take action on their own solutions, it considers them part of the problem, or worse. And (2) starting in the 1970s,  everyone has wanted to identify as a victim of something, a rare flower with its own peculiar rights, sensitivities and vulnerabilities. Which the rest of us not only must accommodate, but must confess ignorance about, unquestioningly submitting our "awareness" to "raising".

Guess what?  When the rubber hits the road, most people don't actually sympathise with, or at least don't respect, people claiming special victimhood. Or "rights." Even fewer trust or respect the kind of people who claim and fetishize empathy and identification with all kinds of rare and exotic victims, minorities, disabilities, deviancies, animals, etc. Think of Mrs. Jellyby. (If you can't, better read Bleak House.) This has been a problem ever since the days of the abolitionists. I used to lament that people were just mean and callous. But actually it makes more sense than that. People feel that they have real lives and real work to do and don't have the capacity for full-time compassion, and to be honest, they might add, they don't really have enough information or leisure to decide whether a minority group that they don't interact with often, or one they never heard of in some distant land, is really as deserving and equal and wonderful as the Mrs. Jellybys assure us. And when someone is claiming "rights", many take it as a sign of weakness and weirdness. I've seen all this up close, from studying 19th-Century abolitionists, Northern Democrats and Irish immigrants, to volunteering with the ACLU in the 80s, to decades of working with fathers and mothers threatened with losing child custody -- the most doomed and lost of them can't stop talking about their "rights."

So when the question is an examination of whether this small group with odd coloring, beliefs, preferences, etc. is deserving of some special kind of "rights", or whether "we" should choose to be "permissive" or "tolerant" and "give" them rights, then they're probably going to lose, or gain only grudging and unpopular "tolerance" without respect or legitimacy.

But that is completely turned around when the question is instead posed in terms of rules governing people in general: Things people "shalt not" do to other people. Things the government simply isn't allowed to do. Compare these different ways of describing the same US Supreme Court cases:

• "Does some troublesome Jewish guy have a Jew-hat right to wear a funny Jewish hat when Air Force cockpit safety regulations prohibit hats generally?"
• "Does an Indian have a right to take illegal hallucinogenic mushrooms in a so-called religious ritual that you've never heard of?"
• "Can the government make laws interfering with people's real, longstanding religious traditions that don't harm anyone?"
• "Is a corporation a person with  'free speech' rights to intervene in a presidential election?"
• "Is the government allowed to regulate speech about presidential elections?"

The other great problem with victimhood language is that it puts what trial lawyers call "the focus of judgment", i.e. the microscope, on the vic, not the perp. And when we're under that microscope, most of us don't look very good. Officialdom at all levels, including us good-hearted individuals in the "helping professions", talks about the millions of "battered women", not the millions of "battering men" and "battering women".  Jackson Katz, Ph.D., a filmmaker, cultural theorist, and educator who might be called a "Men's Responsibility Activist", brought that message to the sanctum sanctorum of political correctness, Middlebury College, in a lecture incorporating self-styled "cunning linguist" Julia Penelope's insights into sentence structures about violence. More at:

"The Language of Gender Violence" by Robert Keren in Middlebury Magazine. Via international family law attorney Nancy Zalusky Berg.

 

Adds great new phrases to English: "Rhetorical botox", "A stultifying sub-dialect of pseudo-professionalism"

"SPARE ME THE FASHIONESE" by LUKE LEITCH on The Economists's 1843magazine.com

... A stultifying sub-dialect of pseudo-professionalism has also sprouted, in which the acquisition and possession of fashion is made to sound like a full-time job. If you get rid of old clothes to make way for some new ones, you are “editing your wardrobe” (much in the same way, I suppose, as binning furred cheese and liquefying tomatoes is “editing your fridge”). Choose what to wear of an evening and you’re “curating” your outfit. These days, anyone who manages to stumble out of his front door without being entirely naked can claim to be a stylist.