"Boy, she doesn't have a very melodic voice!"
"It's a man. It's George M. Cohan."
I also noted that he largely recites the song, rather like Maurice Chevalier used to get away with: For little girls grow bigger every day!
Men are allowed to get away with that more often than women. In his case, he was talented musically, just didn't have a good voice. Vaudeville teaches you how to get around that.
We discussed spelling reform at pub night last night.
You really want to come to our pub night. We also talked about Gettysburg and Fred made his joke about the cunning linguist for the sixth time. He just can't contain himself.
You may have known that cniht was pronounced k'neecht, the ch as in Scots Gaelic loch. Knight. No longer a good spelling, but here we are.
In terms of English spelling many of you already knew that scribes who wrote in Latin or French applied conventions from their own language to English and printers from the continent did not always have good command of English, leading to the use of gh for that raspy throat sound more common in German (hoch) or Scots Gaelic (as above) or adding an h to c or s to represent an English sound that hadn't a letter. ch, sh.
The Great Vowel Shift occurred just before the growth of printing and the conventions of that became messy, because the vowels moved around in the mouth and what was considered a long vowel and short vowel changed with it. This gave us all oo, ai, and all manner of ei and ie. U wasn't even it's own vowel until then, but quickly became four sounds: super, mute, put, putt. That brought in all the ou, au, ui, eu confusions.
There were attempts at standardisation in the 1500s, but they were largely ignored. Printers did what they wanted and things calmed down a bit without intervention. But regional variations persisted and people were stubborn about it. Imagine that.
There is an influence on change that is largely overlooked. King Charles tried to keep a lid on things in the 1630s by not calling any Parliament for over a decade, but with the Scots and the French and the damn Puritans, military money was needed. The Star Chamber dramatically censored printing in 1637 because there was a lot of information that they did not want in circulation, especially about the troubles with the above. During the religious quarrels leading up to the English Civil War in the 1640s, the nobility had a longer and longer list of complaints, Charles had an increasing need for money, and secrecy. Good luck with that. But to do this he needed Parliament, which increasingly opposed him. Even his allies in the nobility had had it. He called a Parliament but it didn't do what he wanted, so he disbanded it after three weeks - the Short Parliament. The Scots attacked and decided to settle in in the north, hovering around and looking like they might head to London. Now Charles really needed money to pay them off, so he called another Parliament and this one - the Long Parliament - lasted two decades. One of the first things it did was execute his major counselors.
Yes, I know we haven't gotten to any spelling yet. We are just about to. The Long Parliament disbanded the Star Chamber, and all its acts became null. Printers poured into London and put out pamphlets, broadsides, and what might roughly be called newspapers. They provided up-to-date reports of battles, sometimes in only a day. This speed was previously unheard of. Prior to this time, such reports were printed with justified margins , which looked elegant and nifty. But to justify margins printers added in letters, so that three words in a line might have an -e at the end, no longer pronounced but recognised, or a doubled consonant as in magicall or grass. This slowed down spelling standardisation quite a bit.
But with speed now of the essence readers cared less about elegance and printers just spelled things the way they thought they should. Even better, they spoke English rather than Dutch or French as their first language.This only fixed about 10% of the problem, but it was something.
It's a good sport, especially live. It did not televise well until about twenty years ago, which hampered its professional growth, and there still is the problem of low scoring. A three-minute highlights film is about all you need even for a World Cup game. I understand why people who have taken to the sport like to watch the whole thing, start to finish, but the same can be said of golf and tennis, which most people find unwatchable. If you know something in depth, you see more than others and it is more interesting to you. I have never watched a videogame competition, but young people who have played that particular game and gotten good at it will see things I don't and recognise the excellence of some moves.
There has long been a quiet political undertone to soccer, and not-so-quiet as well. Soccer has been a mixed sport, played by immigrants and prep schools, making it a liberal natural. Sssshhh. But the World Cup has gotten problematic for liberals now. This is a background item that is causing collisions in progressive brains.
They liked soccer because Americans weren't good at it and had to eat crow. Especially, it was European (!) and Latin American(!) Swoon. Now it is even African and Middle-Eastern which should further stick it to The Man, but it's too late. The American women's team has long been dominant, which was hard enough to swallow, but at least was anti-sexist. Now the men's team has been pretty good throughout the 21st C and there is a lot of hand-wringing over whether a good liberal should root for them or not.
I will mention again that NPR missed a trick by not adopting World Cup coverage as far back as the 70s. It's a fun alt-history to imagine how that would have played out. It would have changed NPR's audience a bit, and that would have influenced it. They would then be involved in sports broadcasting, a different world. (It could conceivably have expanded to rugby, with less coverage but still some every year.) They would then have to deal with the interests of immigrants as they really are, not as they imagined them.
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Or Baumol Effect. I had never heard of it until today. Because all prices are relative, if the price of something goes down...No, I am not going to dare explain it. I am reading a paper by Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution and keep thinking I understand it, but the next page reveals that I probably don't. I really thought I had it when I grasped that when productivity improves in one facet of building a house, the wages go up even in areas that have not improved, because they are now the bottleneck that prevents the houses from being finished. But I think I am oversimplifying, as I am told it applies more strongly to services than to manufactured goods.
It was recommended to me as explaining a great deal about economics, as it is a principle that works across countries, across industries, and across time. It is independent of regulation, though regulation keeps trying to correct it.
So have at it, with my blessing. I'm going to try something else.
Image v. Reality at Fake Nous.
My usual audience will wonder Why are we going over this ground again? It's a fair cop. This will look like many other discussions we have seen here and at our small corner of the internet.
First, it's a great name for site. I was determined to link to something from the main page; the host is a philosophy professor with significant libertarian leanings. He doesn't pull punches.
I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals. They fill the academic world and the elite cultural circles of our society. As a group, they seem to me incredibly deceived and self-deceived people—much more self-deceived than right-wing intellectuals (of whom there are far fewer). Their worldview revolves around self-serving lies, and much of their self-image is practically the opposite of reality.
Second, many of the themes I have tried to tie into the Dueling Intellectuals debate over the years are in this article. Echoes of the various tribes will show up.
That is the first element of progressive self-deception: they style themselves warriors against prejudice, but they are the biggest force stoking prejudice in our society. They think that their prejudice is different because the group they’re attacking is actually bad. They don’t see their stereotypes as stereotypes but just as the truth. That, of course, is what all bigots think.
Many leftists seem to live in an alternate reality in which our society—including the most left-wing-dominated of institutions—is filled with neo-Nazis bent on hurting women and minorities at every turn. In the academic world, you can hear people talking about how biased the academic world is against women, in the very same meeting that everyone present agrees to give women preference over men in hiring, and no one notices the dissonance. Constantly talking about how the other side has all the power, while being constantly directly confronted with their own side’s power.
Third, some new insights I had not thought of, or not articulated as clearly
This sort of echo chamber tends to make people overconfident, to make them ignore problems with their worldview and even take increasingly extreme and implausible positions. Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, are probably more self-aware because they keep hearing criticisms from left-wing intellectuals. (But this is not true of the right-wing masses, who ignore the left-wing intellectuals.)
I have a friend who worked long amongst liberals who had tiring and irritating prejudices. But she took a new job that involved a lot of work with bluer-collar guys who had different false beliefs, about contrails and power lines. There was a general cynicism that everything was not what it seemed and was either a sham or a shady plot by the worst of the powerful. CS Lewis noted much the same nearly a hundred years ago. It was not merely different prejudices, but a different kind of prejudice.
I keep forgetting this bit of NH trivia. George Cleveland, a grandson of Grover Cleveland is still alive, up in Tamworth. We used to vacation up there, and bsking's family is quite familiar with the area. Her father Mike, also a commenter here, lived in the next town over when younger and they have a lake cabin up there. It is in the borderland where the Lakes Region leaves off and the White Mountains pick up.
George is my age, but I've never met him and don't know that we have friends in common.
I noticed today in an older book, The Memoirs of Count Witte, that he uses the word "practically" to mean in every practical sense: "I was practically the head of the Odessa Railroad." We would interpret that now to mean "I was almost the head of the Odessa Railroad." It's one of the fun things about reading older works, sensing the changes.
Two years ago from Cremieux Recueil Food Probably isn't Making People Smarter or Dumber
It is thorough. You can almost hear him thinking "Someone is going to bring up this objection right away. Let me nip that in the bud." I understand that, and my overlong essays of ten and fifteen years ago illustrate it. He casts far afield to head critics off at the pass (metaphor alert: where he can nip them in the bud) with a long discussion on the Flynn Effect, the observation that IQ's have been rising across multiple populations for over a century*. The first guess that people have on this is nutrition, because that has been shown to be true in terms of height, and nutrition has varied within cultures and among cultures because of war and famine, creating rather dramatic natural experiments. It was not a crackpot theory. However, when looked at more closely it hasn't held up.
We have noted that 20-point Dutch gain on a Raven’s-type test registered by military samples tested in 1952, 1962, 1972, and 1982. Did the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1982 really have a better diet than the 18-year-olds of 1972? The former outscored the latter by fully 8 IQ points. It is interesting that the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1962 did have a known nutritional handicap. They were either in the womb or born during the great Dutch famine of 1944—when German troops monopolized food and brought sections of the population to near starvation. Yet, they do not show up even as a blip in the pattern of Dutch IQ gains. It is as if the famine had never occurred.
Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no.
Micronutrient supplements in Nepal and Indonesia; exposure to lead; even Ramadan
Among the White British students, the month of pregnancy Ramadan took place in wasn’t related to test scores, and among Caribbeans, the same thing was true. But, for Muslims, scores were lower if their mother was pregnant during Ramadan, and maybe lowest at two to three months in. (But even that is only one point difference.)
*And has now stopped, puzzlingly.
We went to see Come From Away at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith. That theater has some uncomfortable seats, but the production was good enough that the cast quickly overcame that and I no longer noticed. The script is about the 38 planes diverted on 9-11 to Newfoundland, Canada and stuck there for 3+ days, with the locals unexpectedly on the hook for taking care of them. If a production comes by, you will enjoy it.
Joe Cocker's movements are described as energetic and idiosyncratic. They always looked like some sort of neurological damage to me. It's a real contrast to Leon Russell, who looks as if it's not actually very interesting to be playing at a rock festival. But I loved Cocker's voice.
No.
Oh, like you wanted some evidence or something? If you must. In fact, they show slightly more racial tolerance.
This particular post on Substack by Dr. T is good enough that I reprint it in full. In my comment there I noted that when I worked with Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome patients in the 90's, the former were always clear that they are female and the latter that they are male. They are a large percentage of the folks that trans advocates like to call intersex and imply that they are ambiguously gendered, but they do not in fact undermine the binary. Dr. T assured me that this is still the case.
Having accused my argument of being reductionist, simplistic and outdated, the SubStacker I quoted in my previous note went on to accuse my argument of an even worse transgression.
“[Your argument] also willfully ignores the existence of intersex individuals, whose biological reality defies your rigid binary, as well as the progress made in countries like India, where legal recognition of identity is increasingly based on lived reality rather than just chromosomes…”
I did not “wilfully” ignore “the existence of intersex individuals”. My note did not mention disorders of sex development (abbreviated as DSDs) because the existence of congenital biological conditions (present at birth) in which the development of chromosomal, gonadal and/or anatomical sex is atypical do not challenge the binary (female/male) and immutable (unchangeable from birth until death) nature of biological sex in the human species.
In common with most biological scientists and health care professionals who treat people with DSDs, I do not use the obsolete term ‘intersex’ for a number of reasons.
First, the term ‘intersex’ is stigmatizing because it implies that ‘intersex’ is a person’s identity (as in, “she is intersex”). In contrast, the term ‘DSD’ refers to an often debilitating biomedical condition that a person has from birth and throughout their life, not who a person is. The use of DSD in place of intersex seeks to put the person first, as we do when we say that a person has a disability, rather than saying that the person is disabled.
Second, calling people who have DSDs, “intersex”, is both scientifically indefensible and an insult to the humanity of these people. The people who used to be called “intersex freaks of nature”are not located somewhere on a sex continuum between a woman (a female person) and a man (a male person). Nor do these people have a sex that is other than female or male. The claim that DSDs create a variety of sexes, other than female or male, usually ranging from three to six other sexes, but even extending to a multitude of other sexes, is scientific sophistry serving the transgender political agenda.
Third, the social and biomedical challenges faced by people with DSDs have been weaponised by transgenderists in their war on the material reality of biological sex. By including the letter ‘I for intersex’ in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, transgenderists claim that people with DSDs have ‘a queer gender identity’. This has done a great disservice to people with DSDs and their families who are focused on ending the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs and who do not want to serve as clown fish in scientifically ludicrous attempts to disprove that sex is binary and immutable in the human species.
The main source of the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs is the mistaken belief that all people with DSDs are sexually ambiguous, meaning that, at birth, they can not be classed as either female or male and so need to be arbitrarily assigned a sex by their birth attendants.
DSDs encompass over 60 different congenital biological conditions and are relatively common, affecting approximately 2% of live births, but the vast majority of these live births are unambiguously sexed either female or male in terms of their chromosomal, gonadal and anatomical sex, even though one or more of these determinants of sex are atypical to some extent. Less than 0.018% of live births are affected by a rare DSD that either causes a mismatch between chromosomal (male) sex and anatomical (female) sex or results in anatomical (mainly genital) sex that is so malformed that it is not classifiable as exclusively female or male, but is never both.
The former type of DSD involves disorders of testicular development or disorders affecting the synthesis of testosterone produced by the testes. In the absence of the masculinising effects of testosterone, a foetus will follow the female developmental pathway in utero.
