Parts of Speech

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"

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

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!

#Munchausen By Proxy needs a new name, just as vivid, but as serious and ghastly as it is; focused on the abuse, not the "disease".

You may have read about Christopher, a Dallas-area 8-year-old who has been, without exaggeration, sadistically tortured his whole life, completely robbed of a normal life, in an extreme case of "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy." 

Christopher’s mother treated him as if he was deathly ill from his birth until she was arrested last week: feeding tubes, oxygen tubes, heart tubes, hospice, do-not-resuscitate orders, wheelchairs, 13 surgeries, hundreds of hospital visits. She tried to subject him to a lung transplant. But actually, he was always completely healthy, except for life-threatening blood infections from the tubes. His father took her to family court to stop it, but the court responded by cutting off the father's visitation for the past five years.

Munchausen is a dashing and lighthearted name for a horrible, sadistic form of lifelong child abuse; they really should give it a name as serious and awful as it is. It has many vague and forgettable official names, none of which are remotely as ghastly as they ought to be.

The actual and fictional Baron von Munchausen  was a romantic, satirical figure who told unbelieveable but enthralling tales of adventure and derring-do. Regular Munchausen Syndrome is pathetic, it annoys and exploits others but it generally screws up the life of the person with the Syndrome far more than it does other people's. Naming it after a silly character in old movies is the least that the rest of us  can do to add a little bit of humor and culture, to slightly leaven the misery and aggravation it imposes on us.  It also makes it identifiable and memorable, which greatly increases lay people's (and doctors') likelihood of recognizing it.

But Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy is nothing to joke about. There's nothing cute about it. And the real victims of it are not those who have it, but their innocent children. We need to find a name that's recognizable, memorable, vivid and visceral, but serious.

Finally, the other big problem with this "Syndrome" is that it's a name for whatever mental disorder the perpetrator may be suffering, but the pattern of behavior, the abuse that the children suffer and can even die from, is even more socially real and important than whatever in the perpetrator's heads may be making them do it. It's as if we had a term for "Feline Proximity Induced Restless Leg Syndrome" but no word for "Cat-Kicking." "Itchy Trigger Finger Syndrome" but no word for "Mass Shooting". Kleptomania but not Theft.

And when faced with people who chronically make up diseases, is diagnosing them with a disease really the best way to deal with them?

I have no opinion on whether or how the psychologists should classify this as an official mental disorder, but let's start talking first about the abuse of the children, and only secondarily about the abusers' psychological "Syndrome."

As Confucius said, "First, the rectification of names."

Celts gave us our odd "helping verb" sentence structure, & other fun insights

This isn't your typical "History of English" article. It's by John McWhorter, who has a great audio course on linguistics.

English is not normal:

No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language

 

"Mondegreens" remind us that sounds aren't exactly the same as words, and may betray them

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.