New Word Alert. Reports are that Sarah Palin did not know the countries that made up North America (Canada, US and Mexico) and did not know that Africa was a continent but thought, instead, that it was a country.
Yet on the campaign trail, she repeated assertions without explanation.
All that to say that we have a new word alert:
ex-palin, verb, 1. dogmatically making a claim for which there is neither supporting logic or data; 2. to repeat an assertion rather than actually clarify.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
06 November 2008
18 October 2008
Cog Sigh
Jordan has been posting some fascinating stuff on cognitive science - easy to digest and intriguing. Her recent posts include explanation about why dogs in Russia say "gruff gruff," how even bonobos communicate with just eye contact, and a definition of deixis.
In particular, the video at this post
What YouTube Means About You
is fascinating (I know - I know! It's an hour long! But fascinating to anyone who cares about what is actually going on in the on-line community and, by extension, the global community.)
Jordan's Cog Sigh Blog
(Oh yeah. Jordan is my daughter. That doesn't make her blog any less interesting, though.)
In particular, the video at this post
What YouTube Means About You
is fascinating (I know - I know! It's an hour long! But fascinating to anyone who cares about what is actually going on in the on-line community and, by extension, the global community.)
Jordan's Cog Sigh Blog
(Oh yeah. Jordan is my daughter. That doesn't make her blog any less interesting, though.)
20 March 2007
Orwellian Blogging
This from Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language," May, 1945.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. 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 and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
--------------------
This may well be the mission of blogging: cut past the obscurity of language and media to reality as we live it.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. 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 and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
--------------------
This may well be the mission of blogging: cut past the obscurity of language and media to reality as we live it.
01 February 2007
Superbowl Cities Compared
The folks from America's heartland may find themselves feeling out of place in Miami this weekend. If you live in Indianapolis, you are almost 3X as likely to run into someone with a BA as you are to run into someone who is bilingual. When in Miami, though, those numbers more than reverse: you are 4X more likely to run into someone who is bilingual than you are someone with a BA. The difference lies less in rates of education (27% vs. 20%) than in the percentage who are bilingual (79% vs. 10%).I think that the term is cultural shock. The talk of those who watched the game back home on TV will be about Peyton Manning's performance. The talk of those who went to the game will be about how they felt as though they were in another country.
And the fans from Chicago? I suspect that they'll come home talking about the weather.
[Graph from swivel.com, http://swivel.com/graphs/show/5409843 ]
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