Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Voice of Saruman”, The Two Towers, 1954.
April 18, 2013
QotD: J.R.R. Tolkien on the power of oratory
April 8, 2013
Words as weapons, words as tools
The agreed meaning of words is critical to communication. Redefinition of meaning can be a useful political tool to shift an argument or to delegitimize an opponent:
A huge quotient of the seemingly endless cultural and ideological wars hinges on how terms are defined. Those who claim authority to declare what words mean are able to shape public thinking like a sculptor molds clay. Although facts — which are what news organizations are supposed to peddle — seem immutable, words are forever in flux. Both “liberal” and “progressive” now mean almost the opposite of what they did a century ago. Such semantic squabbling also leads to absurdities such as how the phrase “colored person” was deemed hateful and replaced with the far more sensitive “person of color.” Terms such as “racist” are almost never applied to nonwhites, and if you dare tell a militant feminist that she’s “sexist,” she may scratch out your eyeballs. And don’t even dare to ask for a quantifiable and consistent definition of “Semite” lest you be deemed “anti-Semitic.”
What’s worse, many of these politically charged terms never seem to achieve stasis. Over the past generation there’s been a ballooning expansion of terms such as “racism,” “sexism,” “white supremacy,” and, the granddaddy (sorry — Earth Mother) that supposedly spawns them all, “hatred.” Yet if you dare to ask anyone for a concrete definition of such terms, they’ll consider you automatically guilty of all the cultural sins these derogatory terms are intended to describe. As US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously explained, although “obscenity” may not be readily defined, you’re supposed to know it when you see it.
And if you persist in claiming that neither do you know it or see it, these words will be used as hammers to pound you into submission. In the sort of foam-flecked hyperbolic insanity that seems to suggest a culture either ready to implode or finally yield to ideological totalitarianism, you will be accused of ranting, slamming, bashing, and scaremongering merely for asking questions — even if you ask them in a timid and sincere voice without a wisp of malice.
March 19, 2013
QotD: “It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts”
Free speech was alive and well at the University of Toronto last night, but in that moment I’d have welcomed its death with open arms.
It was clear that both the professor’s detractors and supporters were, overwhelmingly, nuts. And Dr. Fiamengo herself, was, standing at that podium, a buoy of relative reason in a sea of everything but. “Any movement can attract hysterical detraction and unsavoury allies,” she would tell me over the phone the next morning. “That is the risk one runs.” She’s right. Take this little Facebook diatribe from an active member of A Voice for Men, one of the men’s rights groups who support her.
There has never been a great female composer. Throughout history there has been plenty of privileged woman, who have had access to pianos, and violins, yet somehow we are expected to believe that men have somehow stopped them for being composers? Woman have the big lovely eyes, big tits, but mean [I think he meant “men”] are far more beautiful, they are more beautiful where it counts. In their wonderful creative souls.
Unfortunately, though, the other side is no more intelligent. They just use bigger words.
Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific – only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.
Slogans don’t make scholarship and being self-righteous does not make you right.
Emma Teitel, “Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover”, Maclean’s, 2013-03-11
March 8, 2013
Jack Layton biopic provokes outrage … because there isn’t a French version
I’ll let Paul Wells explain this one:
So let me get this straight. The (English-language) CBC makes a film about a Toronto MP with a Toronto wife who wants to be Toronto mayor…
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 8, 2013
….and listens to Parachute Club and hangs out with Steven Page and sat on Toronto Council and spends election night in Toronto…
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 8, 2013
…and it’s a problem that it was in English?
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 8, 2013
Of course, if Rad-Can wants to make a movie about Layton that gives short shrift to the 2/3 of NDP voters outside Quebec, that’s OK too.
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 8, 2013
February 19, 2013
Orwell updated: how politicians lie in “plain speech”
Ed Smith shows how Orwell’s warning about politicians lying is now out of date because they’ve mastered the art of using “plain language” in aid of untruth:
Orwell season has led me back to his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”, first published in 1946. It is written with enviable clarity. But is it true? Orwell argues that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words.”
I suspect the opposite is now true. When politicians or corporate front men have to bridge a gap between what they are saying and what they know to be true, their preferred technique is to convey authenticity by speaking with misleading simplicity. The ubiquitous injunction “Let’s be clear”, followed by a list of five bogus bullet-points, is a much more common refuge than the Latinate diction and Byzantine sentence structure that Orwell deplored.
We live in a self-consciously plain-spoken political era. But Orwell’s advice, ironically, has not elevated the substance of debate; it has merely helped the political class to avoid the subject more skilfully. The art of spin is not (quite) supplanting truth with lies. It aspires to replace awkward complexities with catchy simplicity. Successful spin does not leave the effect of skilful persuasiveness; it creates the impression of unavoidable common sense. Hence the artifice becomes invisible — just as a truly charming person is considered nice rather than “charming”.
February 6, 2013
English accents, circa 1483
I’m afraid the coverage of the discovery and identification of the remains of Richard III have done bad things to the newspapers. We’re starting to see articles like this posted:
King Richard III was ‘a brummie’
King Richard III would have spoken with a Birmingham accent, according to a language expert.Dr Philip Shaw, from the University of Leicester’s School of English, used two letters penned by the last king of the Plantagenet line more than 500 years ago to try to piece together what the monarch would have sounded like.
He studied the king’s use of grammar and spelling in postscripts on the letters.
The university has now released a recording of Dr Shaw mimicking King Richard reading extracts from those letters.
Despite being the patriarch of the House of York, the king’s accent “could probably associate more or less with the West Midlands” than from Yorkshire or the North of England, said Dr Shaw.
Wow. This must have been a long, painstaking effort to pin down the linguistic “tics” that help indicate a person’s natural speaking habits. What were the key elements that indicated Good King Richard was a “Brummie”?
“… there is also at least one spelling he employs that may suggest a West Midlands accent.”
That’s it? One spelling variation that “suggests” he would pronounce that one word in a similar manner to the modern Birmingham style? Gah!
December 7, 2012
US student vocabulary tests show disappointing results
At the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero reports on recent tests of vocabulary that show US students are not as well-informed as expected:
U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation’s reading education.
Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.
The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn’t know that “permeates” means to “spread all the way through,” and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn’t know that “puzzled” means confused — words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.
Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of “created,” “spread” and “underestimate.” At eighth grade, most students knew “grimace,” “icons” and “edible.”
The new vocabulary test was embedded in the biennial national reading exam, known as the NAEP. Last year’s scores were in line with those posted in 2009, the first time vocabulary scores were broken out, but the latest results are the first to be made public. Experts noted that the results mirror the performance on the national reading test, which has yielded fairly static scores for a decade.
December 5, 2012
Finland’s excellent education system can’t be exported
Finland frequently comes in at or near the top of the rankings for quality of education, and some countries are tempted to replicate the Finnish model to improve their own domestic school systems. Unfortunately, as Eero Iloniemi points out, the model is actually more cultural than educational:
One such similarity is orthography. Both languages are written almost exactly as they are pronounced. Therefore, a child who can spell one word will be able to spell every word, even when they hear it for the first time. An eight-year-old Finn will have no trouble identifying every letter when he hears the word ‘kertakäyttösyömäpuikkoteollisuus’. So while native English speakers practise spelling well into their teens, Finnish and Korean kids are busy brushing up on other subjects.
Another thing Finland and Korea share is a fairly homogeneous culture. Ethnic minority groups are small and immigration to both countries is conspicuously low. As Horst Entof and Nicole Miniou of Darmstadt University of Technology noted in their 2004 study, PISA results are higher in countries which have strict and/or highly selective immigration policies than they are in countries with more liberal immigration policies. The name of the study says it all: PISA Results: What a Difference Immigration Law Makes.
This point is underlined by the fact that Finland performs significantly better in PISA studies than neighbouring Sweden. Why? Sweden has an immigrant population that is 10 times bigger. When these socially and economically similar countries are compared, omitting first and second generation immigrant children from sample groups, the results become almost identical.
Update: Oh, and it’s also a myth that the Finns pay their teachers at the same level they pay their doctors.
November 28, 2012
Is English really a Scandinavian language?
ESR on some recent linguistic speculation:
Here’s the most interesting adventure in linguistics I’ve run across in a while. Two professors in Norway assert that English is a Scandinavian language, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one. More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; rather, our language is more closely related to the dialect of Old Norse spoken in the Danelaw (the Viking-occupied part of England) after about 865.
[. . .]
Previously on this blog my commenters and I have kicked around the idea that English is best understood as the result of a double creolization process — that it evolved from a contact pidgin formed between Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw Norse. The creole from that contact then collided, a century later, with Norman French. Wham, bam, a second contact pidgin forms; English is the creole descended from the language of (as the SF writer H. Beam Piper famously put it) “Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids”.
This is not so different from the professors’ account, actually. They win if the first creole, the barmaids’ milk language, was SVO with largely Norse grammar and some Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The conventional history of English would have the girls speaking an SOV/V2 language with largely Anglo-Saxon grammar and some Norse vocabulary.
November 26, 2012
WW1 slang that became part of everyday English
Jasper Copping lists a surprising number of words that entered the civilian language thanks to the linguistic creativity of soldiers in the trenches during the First World War:
If you’re feeling washed out, fed up or downright lousy, World War One is to blame.
New research has shown how the conflict meant that hundreds of words and phrases came into common parlance thanks to the trenches.
Among the list of everyday terms found to have originated or spread from the conflict are cushy, snapshot, bloke, wash out, conk out, blind spot, binge drink and pushing up daisies.
The research has been conducted by Peter Doyle, a military historian, and Julian Walker, an etymologist, who have analysed thousands of documents from the period — including letters from the front, trench newspapers, diaries, books and official military records — to trace how language changed during the four years of the war.
They found that the war brought military slang into the mainstream, imported French and even German words to English and saw words from local dialects become part of national conversation.
It was a “world” war, so the linguistic additions came from further afield than Belgium or France:
Several Hindi terms, picked up from Indian Army soldiers and already circulating in the regular, professional army, were also disseminated widely.
One of those most used at the front was “cushy” — from khush (‘pleasure’).
Soldiers would describe cushy, or comfortable billets, as well as cushy trenches, in quiet sectors.
The most well known term derived from Hindi though was “Blighty”, from bilati, meaning “foreign”, which, when applied by Indians to Britons, came to be perceived by Indian Army servicemen as the term “British”.
Words even entered the lexicon from the trenches opposite. “Strafe” became an English word, from the German “to punish”, via a prominent slogan used by the enemy: “Gott Strafe England”, while prisoners of war returned with term “erzatz”, literally “replacement”, but used in English to mean “cheap substitute” and spelled ersatz.
November 14, 2012
OED plumps for “omnishambles” over “mummy-porn”
Anna Leach explains just how exciting life can be when you’re working on the Oxford University Press staff:
The UK’s new word of 2012 is “omnishambles”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s compilers.
Selected from a list of several new words added to the gold-standard dictionary this year, omnishambles was chosen by lexicographers at Oxford University Press because it best reflects the mood of the past 12 months. It was first used by the character Malcolm Tucker in series three of the BBC satire The Thick of It and subsequently repeated by the Coalition government’s political opponents.
[. . .]
The OED now defines it as:
A situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterised by a string of blunders and miscalculations.
Other contenders were “mummy porn” (a description of the genre inspired by smack’n’tickle ebook bonkbuster 50 Shades of Grey), “green-on-blue” (to describe attacks by Afghan police or troops on NATO servicemen), the verb “medal” (from the Olympics), “eurogeddon” (from Eurozone crisis) and the acronym “YOLO” (contraction of the trite phrase “You Only Live Once”, mostly used as a justification after someone does something stupid on the internet).
November 8, 2012
Bless their hearts
I used to work for a company that had offices in Tallahassee, Florida. Over several years, both on the phone and during on-site visits, I think I heard at least half of these phrases used in earnest.
H/T to Radley Balko for the link.
October 23, 2012
Bilingualism and multiculturalism, “the Siamese twins of Canadian social policy”
In Maclean’s, Heather Scoffield wonders if the twin keystones of “official” Canadian identity (as defined by the Liberal party in 1969) are actually in opposition to one another:
Have the two forces that have defined Canadian culture for the past 40 years — multiculturalism and bilingualism — turned on each other?
The final release of 2011 census data this week will offer Canadians some insight into the answer.
On Wednesday, Statistics Canada will publish language data showing how many people speak English, how many speak French, and how many speak a myriad of other languages — a consequence of increasingly diverse immigration.
In the last census, in 2006, the number of people who called French their mother tongue was almost — but not quite — on par with the number of people who identify other languages as their first.
If the trend lines continue, as the experts expect they will, they could cross come Wednesday. Measured in terms of percentage of the total population in Canada, French is expected to continue its long, slow decline as a mother tongue and “other” languages will continue their ascent, with the number of allophones — those with a mother tongue other than Canada’s two official languages — surpassing their francophone counterparts.
So have we reached the point where the twin forces unleashed during the 1970s are now competing forces, with multiculturalism drowning out bilingualism?
October 22, 2012
Want to learn a new language? How about proto-Elamite?
If you have the ability to decode the world’s oldest undeciphered texts, you can be our first proto-Elamite scholar:
“I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough,” says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.
Dr Dahl’s secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before.
In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.
This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.
It’s being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.
And the Oxford team think that they could be on the brink of understanding this last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world.
September 6, 2012
Esperanto: the easiest way to introduce a second language to children
I got interested in learning Esperanto in my early 20’s … and even though I never needed to speak the language in ordinary life, it was a very positive experience and I would recommend it to anyone as an easy way to limber up the brain for other learning tasks. It’s easy to learn, and success in learning helps to make the next learning experience a bit easier and more enjoyable.
