People Who Mostly Agree With You

The trollish and MSM accusation about the blogosphere is that each area develops an echo chamber, an intellectual cul-de-sac, which becomes impervious to new information and ideas. I don't find that. I find that the sites I frequent have commenters who are people I mostly agree with. That is quite different, because all across the spectrum of ideas, it is often not those who refute you, but those who partly agree with you, who are most likely to change your mind.

Reflections On the Second Commandment

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

This has nothing to do with swearing, dammit. (I just threw that last in for effect.) Bad language is hardly ever mentioned in the rest of the Bible, so why would people think that God would make it #2 on the Big Chart and then forget about it? Even making promises with oaths -- the other swearing -- gets very little play, Old Testament or New.

False prophecy, now, that subject comes up a lot, with many variations played on the Carillon of Scripture (that metaphor didn't work out as well as I'd hoped). And that, my friends, is what is referred to as taking the Lord's name in vain is here. It means no forging God's signature under your own ideas. It means being very cautious and considered about making any claims that what you teach is The Gospel, or The Authentic Gospel.

Teaching is of course not only allowed, but encouraged. Check up on the penalties for false teaching before you start blathering, however. Liberal Christians rightly criticize conservatives for stepping way over the line in making claims about what God does and doesn't want in law and politics. Then they do the same thing themselves -- and worse, because they will often get together and put a denominational stamp on it. They just claim to speak for God in more elegant terms -- which is what God really wants, right?

Anyway, everyone just cut it out, y' hear me?

No Bode, None of the Time

On behalf of the State of New Hampshire, but with no authorization from anyone, I would like to apologize to the country, and ultimately the world, that Bode Miller is still a twerp at 28 years old.

If you win a gold medal, you become a smart person who is considered knowledgeable about human relations, drug policy, and politics. Also, your arrogance gets redefined as honesty. Silver medal, people still think you might know something. If you finish out of the medal standings, you are a stupid person who knows nothing about anything, not even your sport specialty, regardless of your other qualifications.

Shut up and ski.

Parallel Hatreds

The comments of Ed Driscoll of The Press as Victorian Gentlemen, with all the condescension and we-know-better-than-you that implies end with his suggestion that the MSM hates the blogosphere because of its availability to the masses. The internet is messy and unpredictable -- that is, democratic.

I recall going into Walmart a few years ago and thinking "There's a lot of ethnic folks here. Huh." I thought immediately after, "I wonder if that's what the people who hate Walmart are really objecting to. There are poor people here, immigrants, odd-looking people." I have observed the tone of discourse about Walmart since then, and it has confirmed my initial suspicion. The Walmart opposers like immigrants and poor people in the abstract, but they don't like to see them in groups larger than three outside their assigned neighborhoods.

For additional evidence, observe the tone used for the entertainments and other places favored by the poor -- the type of sporting events, churches, and restaurants they choose. It is the tone the settled and successful used about the poor and immigrants a hundred years ago. Exactly the tone used when the lower classes started going to college on the basis of merit. Exactly the tone that Europe, and one-third of the American Colonies, used when representative democracy was proposed as the rule of governance.

Democracy is a bitch, aint it?

Ben In Torino Update

In the Moguls competition (Women's 2/11, Men's 2/15), when they finish their run and look up at the scoreboard to see how well they did? That's where Ben comes in. He and another guy zoom themselves and the camera in on the athlete. If the skiers keep their goggles on, he thinks he'll be visible in the reflection.

He has already screwed up one rehearsal for the flower giving ceremony at the foot of the run, but thinks it should go fine now. Hope so.

All Are Welcome

Ah the early days of blogging! There is much less of this now.  People were giddy with the possibility of getting to communicate WITH THE WHOLE WORLD, I suppose.  Originally published February 2006. (Oh, a note on February. The first "r" had dropped out by the beginning of the 1800s, as it also had in library. But literacy was increasing, so people looked at the word and said "Darn it, it's got that "r" in it, it should be pronounced." And so we put it back in, rather pointlessly, and is now a mark of being a really smart and precise person.  The same thing happen to the first "c" in arctic and the "t" in often. I pronounce the useless letter, the affectation in the first three of those, but say "offen." (Because the rest of you are wrong, dammit.) Part of the difficulty was that early publishers and correctors of grammar put letter back into words where no one had pronounced them in decades, even centuries, in order to show their Latin roots, because they reasoned people should know this if they are to be fully educated. I use "reasoned" in a loose, almost facetious sense there.

So.  Debt. Doubt. Ridiculous. Thank God we didn't go back and try to put those in the pronunciations.)

*********

How many blog commenters does it take to change a lightbulb?

One to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been
changed.

Fourteen to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how
the light bulb could have been changed differently.

Seven to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.

Seven more to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing
light bulbs.

Five to flame the spell checkers.

Three to correct spelling/grammar flames.

Six to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ...

Another six to condemn those six as stupid.

Fifteen to claim experience in the lighting industry and give the
correct spelling.

Nineteen to post that this group is not about light bulbs and to please
take this discussion to a lightbulb (or light bulb) forum.

Eleven to defend the posting to the group saying that we all use light
bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant to this group.

Thirty six to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior,
where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best
for this technique and what brands are faulty.

Seven to post URLs where one can see examples of different light bulbs.

Four to post that the URLs were posted incorrectly and then post the
corrected URL.

Three to post about links they found from the URLs that are relevant to
this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group.

Thirteen to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety
including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too"

Five to post to the group that they will no longer post because they
cannot handle the light bulb controversy.

Four to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"

Thirteen to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting
questions about light bulbs."

Three to tell a funny story about their cat and a light bulb.

AND

One group lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now with
something unrelated they found at snopes.com and start it all over again!


I have fit EIGHT of the above categories at one time or another.

Underground DSM-IV: Sex Offenders

I have no research data on this, but I have been at this long enough that I consider it more than anecdotal. Once again, when reading a sex offender’s history today, I noticed that he had observed his mother having sex with someone other than her husband. This shows up remarkably often in this population. One might expect that as a general rule, a woman with poor sexual boundaries and notions of privacy might bring up a son more likely to offend. But I wonder if the specific act is charged enough to be pathogenic, even as a single occurrence.

If anyone knows of research on this, please pass it along. I haven’t been able to discover any. I am also interested in anyone’s rambling thoughts on the matter.

Additional: Interesting blogging on a sex offender today over at Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred.

Parenthood

Being a parent means learning to watch your heart run around outside your body.

Pray for the parents of our soldiers in Iraq.

Libertarians, One-Worlders, Co-Religionists, and Americans.

Do we have a right to have a culture? The anthropological answer is that every group has a culture. Every group decides how the young are to be educated, how goods are to be distributed, how rules will be enforced. If we encounter a cluster of Amazonian tribes, we expect them to have distinctive ways of doing things: our sons must marry someone from the same language group, but a different clan; we may keep all birds we kill, but must share fish. The hidden complexities of such arrangements are the province of the anthropologist.

Does this tribe have the right to forbid gay marriage?

Now go back to the title, and just run through the questions within questions this raises. Where is this decision located? Are there rights of humanity which supercede group rules? Who owns the group identity? Is it part of American culture to leave culture up to the individual? Please know in advance that nearly every theoretical premise will lead you somewhere you don’t want to go. Discuss. Do not attempt to write on more than one side of the paper at a time. (Quick, what’s that from?)

The Actual Influence of Black English -- Part One

Introductory linguistics texts and History of English Courses usually cover this in a paragraph or two before moving on to discussions of how African-American Vernacular is not a substandard English, but a dialect, and all the other political statements academics feel should be inculcated into adolescents, who would otherwise have only the narrow views of their bigoted culture to fall back on. Then linguists get distracted into talking about black slang, Gullah dialect, literacy, and other topics which are important in themselves, but don’t tell us too much about the influence of African-Americans on our everyday language.

That paragraph usually gives a word list of terms that we get from African-Americans, like jazz, or yam, or banjo. This always struck me as a terribly condescending, everybody-gets-a-ribbon way to proceed. Did you know that several important words come from Turkish?!

The actual influence of black speakers is deeper and more profound. We have many small words in English that get enormous use, such as run, get, set, and go. Go up. Go over. Go for. Get through a crisis. Get under your skin. Get down tonight. Run up. Run out. Set up. Set out. We use dozens of idiomatic, nuanced versions of these words. Many of them have histories long before slaves were brought to America, but their use was not so extensive as it is today.

When wave after wave of people come in and learn your language as a second language, basic words tend to take on multiple uses. New speakers draw from what they already know to communicate. If you have the idea of run already in memory, then you are going to pick up the ideas of run out of water, run out on your wife more easily than emptied, or abandoned.

The French, Dutch, and Spanish all came early to America, but didn’t tend to learn English. Jews, Germans, Armenians, and Cambodians came in their own times and reinforced this pattern of multiple-use basic words. But it was the enormous number of Africans learning English as adults which originally gave American this idiomatic twist.

Anticipating objections: Yes, British English also uses these forms. It’s a long discussion, and I still stand by the above

Needed In The Middle East

I got compliments for this off-the-cuff idea posting on other sites, so I thought I'd bring it home.

What the Middle East needs is an Urban Legends site like snopes.com, written in Arabic.

Hukt on Fonix

There are elements missing from the layman's whole language/phonics discussion which are present in the more rigorous scientific discussion. I would like to add several of those simpler elements in, free of jargon, simply to elevate the level of discussion -- on both sides.

Everyone claims their method works better. Their arguments, however, tend to revolve around why each method should work better. Because good readers move quickly to whole language, why not skip the phonics step altogether? Or contrarily, If you can read phonics you can decode almost anything without assistance. Additionally, there is the sense that phonics is the old-fashioned way, whole language is the newer, advanced way, each side drawing some adherence on that basis alone.

In languages more consistently phonetic, such as German, there is no question. Teaching phonics is so obviously superior in such situations that whole language is not even considered. At the other extreme, there is no sense in teaching phonics in China, as the writing is pictographic. Spanish and French are phonetic enough that phonics is superior.

English lies farther out. It is essentially phonetic, but so littered with exceptions that phonics is not an infallible key to decoding. As with irregular verbs that we have to "just learn" because there is no rule, there are irregular spellings which we have to "just learn" to pronounce.

The scientific evidence is mixed, but tends to favor phonics. That is more a statement about the English Language than it is about the teaching method. If English were more phonetic, phonics would look even better. If English were less phonetic, phonics would be less useful. The reason that we have a controversy at all is because English is predominantly, but not entirely, phonetic. There are readers who learn almost entirely by the whole language method, but when you break down what they are doing, they are reverse-engineering their own phonics methods when they encounter an unfamiliar word, usually making inspired guesses on the basis of the first and last letters and the word length. Less often, something very unusual about a word will make it stand out, such as the two z's in "pizza," which children often pick up on their own once they start reading, moving back and forth between the context cues, repetition, simplified phonics, and bright neon, reminders to take in the whole word.

Self-Mockery, Adulthood, Confidence: Nations

Inspired by a post on a similar topic over at Dr. Sanity.

The joke runs that In Heaven…
All the Comedians are English,
All the Cooks are French,
All the Lovers are Italian,
All the Mechanics are German,
And All the Service is Swiss.

In Hell…
All the Comedians are German
All the Cooks are English
All the Lovers are Swiss
All the Mechanics are Italian
And all the Service is French

Europeans find this funny when they tell it to each other. Everyone knows these are stereotypes and exaggerations. There are some good English cooks. There are some bad German mechanics. The cost of getting to poke fun at someone else is to endure a mild insult oneself. It is an honor to be mentioned at all. Luxembourg and Portugal don’t figure in the equation, for example. It seems a little less funny to them when an outsider tells it, but they can still appreciate the humor.

I told the joke to a Romanian and asked if a similar joke could be constructed with Romania, Hungary, Poland, etc in it. He didn’t think so. He couldn’t put his finger on humorous stereotypes – all of them still had bite and meanness in them. He allowed that Romanians could tell jokes about themselves somewhat, but nationality jokes were still mainly elevations of Romanians at the expense of others. Only recently, he thought, were double-edged jokes told by others beginning to be accepted.

This would seem to be a step forward. It takes a certain largeness of character to laugh at oneself, both as an individual and as a nation. The inability of radical Muslims to endure even a mild insult bespeaks a brittleness and touchiness common to children.

When Chris and John-Adrian came to America at 16 and 14, they had less defensiveness and brittleness about them than I had feared, but more than I as father would hope for. It was quite natural on their part, of course, coming from abuse, rejection, and the insecurity of institutional living. But we started a campaign early to acclimate them to affectionate teasing. My two older sons had an exquisitely fine sense of how and when to push the envelope with their new brothers. John-Adrian’s small group Bible study also sensed the need to banter him up to bring him into full fellowship. They are both well up on the bell curve of giving and taking affectionate abuse now – as I would expect for a Wyman male.

Self-Mockery, Adulthood, Confidence: Changes in American Comedy

When I was growing up, white people making jokes about black people was considered in poor taste, rather like kicking someone when they were down. Only in carefully controlled situations where some affection and equality were assumed were such jokes allowed, and it was usually considered better if the black person led in this. For blacks to make jokes about whites was a little dicey, but more acceptable. Only people with a fine-tuned social sense could make it work consistently.

Bill Cosby came in, and the focus of his humor was how much his childhood experiences were like everyone else’s, especially those who had grown up poor or in cities. The universality was the key, rather like the Jewish comedians earlier poking fun at their mothers, who turned out to be much like everyone’s mothers (only more so).

Cosby gradually inserted gender and racial material over time. I doubt it was so much intentional as it was a comedian’s sense of what the market would bear – how far you could push an audience and still be funny. That he was able to push the envelope illustrated that we were all growing up.

Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy came up and made fun of both black people and white people more – and it worked. No matter how many they offended, they always were able to delight a larger percentage, forcing the offended to smile anyway. It is good for us to pretend to be more great-hearted than we are. For one thing, you learn that it doesn’t kill you; secondly, you find that people like you better.

Rednecks make fun of themselves. Female comedians increasingly make fun of women instead of men. I recently read a female travel writer who wrote “My Inner Princess wanted to scream.” That joke could not have been told twenty years ago. It wouldn’t have been funny.

There has been a lot of complaining about men being the butt of jokes on television for forty years. It persists because most men don’t mind all that much. We’ve been doing this for years and are more comfortable in our own skin. When men find general insults unfunny, it is usually because the attack was clumsy – merely insulting, with little grace. Remember Cyrano, for example. The rising group often takes pleasure in the mere ability to get away with the insult.

That confidence may come from having been the power group for so long. The recent increase in men complaining about how they are portrayed may reflect a recognition that the field is leveling.

The Expansion of Language

In public expression, we try to adhere as closely to Written Standard English as we comfortably can, as a cultural marker that we have been taught to care about standards, or traditions, or literature. How we write and speak declares something about who we are and what we value.

This has been changing under our feet for decades, and has been accelerating on the internet. Not only are forms changing, such as the increasing use of phrase-abbreviations such as IMHO, BTW, LOL, and WTF, but switching between Standard and Colloquial is increasingly valued in communication.

Hispanics who grow up in America switch back and forth between English and Spanish. Linguists call it code-switching. It is a declaration of relative comfort with both languages, and the rules of when to switch are not arbitrary. Black writers switch back and forth between Written Standard and African-American Vernacular, to make the statement that they have command of both and move in both worlds. In less dramatic fashion, writers like Dave Barry code-switch between colloquial and standard for comic effect. The use of sentence fragments is increasing in standard written discourse.

I should deplore this, but I like it. How someone who never splits an infinitve and will have to have the Princeton/Oxford comma pulled from my cold, dead fingers can countenance such solecism may seem impossible. But I still like it. So there.

Bullies To Buddies

When I received the flyer that announced this speaker for Grand Rounds at my hospital, I expected this to be a PC nightmare. I googled over, hoping to find good examples of PC idiocy to deplore and complain about.

But this guy Israel Kaplan makes sense. He gets it that zero-tolerance increases anger and violence. He gets it that aggression is natural and must be channelled, not pathological to be eliminated. I agree with 90% of what he writes.

His observations about oversensitivity to words and insults, and how to perpetuate victimhood, are particularly relevant in view of the violence around the Danish cartoons.

Transylvania Roundup

I browsed around to see what is happening in Transylvania and that which borders it: the rest of Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, and Slovakia. Technically, I should include Serbia as well, but I never have a clear sense what any of the news stories mean there.

Romania and Ukraine have gotten together a joint venture to drill for oil in the Black Sea. You will note that this agreement was attempted by previous left-leaning governments of both countries without accord. The center-right coalitions, if they are to survive in this part of the world, must be able to make such deals and keep corruption to a minimum.

Corruption has been the major drag on the Romanian economy since the Revolution of 89. I spoke with a Romanian who had moved to Australia when young and become successful there. He was returning to try and start a transportation business in Timisoara, but was discouraged. He didn't balk at the $100,000 in bribes he had to pay, but that ponying up produced no guarrantees. He called this Middle-Eastern rather than European corruption, and thought it did not bode well for Romania's future.

On positive economic notes, there is this intriguing tourist attraction, and confidence of better times ahead in Mihail Kogalniceanu. This latter was in the news as the suspect "black site" in Romania where the US was secretly sending prisoners. I hope we have several such sites there, though I would guess that Maramures is more likely than near the Black Sea. You could hide anything in Maramures. Forever.

There are elections happening in Hungary in April. The center-right FIDESZ party is currently leading in the polls, (background here), and the 50th Anniversary of the 1956 Uprising is still making waves.

Hungarian newspapers reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons, and the Saudis don't like it.

Slovakia is showing more sense than the Democrats about social security, and Ukraine hopes to join NATO.

But the best news is that the Romanians may get this free-market idea down after all. Dacia Logans, coming to a parking lot nowhere near you.

Winter Olympics in Torino

Ben left this morning to work as a camera assistant filming the 2006 Olympics, a very cool gig worked out by Asbury College. I am thrilled, I am envious.

The word "terrorist" is never far from my thoughts. Please pray for all of them over there.

Update: We called the bank and found out that he used his ATM an hour ago, though we don't know where. You would think with the Olympics in ntown, internet access would be everywhere, but rereading the packet they sent him, it's not expected to be available until the events actually start. He is likely an hour out of Turin/Torino, up in the Alps for the Freestyle events.

Bryson Disappoints

I always look forward to a Bill Bryson book I haven't yet read. I have
learned not to read two of the travel books back-to-back, as his intention
to tell you how ridiculous everything is, and how stupid most people are,
gets a touch tiring in large doses. Bryson is a great deplorer of things.
Still, he turns the humorous death-ray back on himself as well, which
lightens the burden. I consider the ability to make fun of oneself one of
the surest signs of a healthy personality. And his writing craft is good
-- even complicated material is an easy read.

Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States is not what it claims to be. It is not a book about American English. It is a book of anecdotes in American History, some of which
touch on language. Plus, lists of a dozen or so words every ten pages which have some oddity about them. There's not a whole lotta language goin' on, heah.

An anecdotal history of America, with more than an average amount of
information about language, could theoretically be a good Bryson book.
Somehow, even granting him a mulligan for the false advertising doesn't
bring him to par. The anecdotes are not quite of the Everything You Know
Is Wrong school, but there's too much of that. It's been done, and done
often. There is usually a barely-hidden agenda in such books -- religious
or anti-religious, conservative or anti-conservative, European or
anti-European -- and Bryson mercifully keeps this at a minimum. But the
gotcha aspect remains.

Keeping Perspective

I generally support the president in the GWOT, but The Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill asks a reasonable question -- though perhaps with more irritation than I would -- about the WMD going to Syria: Isn't it more George Bush's fault than his critics? Sure, it was the Iraq critics who kept insisting slow down, make sure, don't be a cowboy, and it's easy in retrospect to complain that he was more right than they were. But George W. Bush is the president.

Let's use the ridiculous advantage of hindsight for a moment. If we were
sure that there were WMD, and that they were being moved to Syria (and
elsewhere, presumably), what would have been the proper course? Immediate
action. No UN, no placating Tony Blair, no polite nods to the critics to lessen their slavering. The outcry would have been enormous at the time, but we would have intercepted at least some of the shipments. And we would be safer now.

Hindsight tends to obscure practicalities. If we had intervened immediately and been wrong, that would be worse than what we now have. If we had intervened immediately and just looked wrong, by not successfully
intercepting shipments, that would also be worse than what we have now. How likely would we have been able to put resources in place quickly enough to have a reasonable chance of success? Would such an intervention create too much instability in Iraq? I grant all those complicating factors. But I don't think they would make intervention impossible.

I'm a sympathetic outsider, willing to be told that more immediate action was considered and rejected for entirely practical considerations. But I am also willing to ask if political considerations, granting the critics too much voice, prevented the administration from doing the right thing. You're the president. Mollifying your critics is not the overriding consideration. Do the right thing.