Molly Rookwood writes in defense of my own metier, copyediting, and does so persuasively and well. I’ll just single out a passage that made me particularly happy:
Descriptivist vs. Prescriptivist Editing
Good copyeditors use descriptivist editing (editing that is based on the current usage of language) rather than prescriptivist (like Strunk & White).
I don’t know why so many writing programs still assign The Elements of Style. While it was indeed held up for many years as the pinnacle of grammar rules, the book is an entirely prescriptivist endeavor. Strunk and White tell you there are definitive rules of language and you should not deviate from them. They’ll tell you that singular “they” is not allowed and that you should use “he or she” instead.
Editors have long ago moved past the idea that there is one correct set of writing rules. The goal of editing (and writing) is clear communication, and clear communication is dependent on the current use of language. Strictly enforcing the use of “whom” in a fantasy novel is not in service of clear communication. And replacing “they” with “he or she” is doing harm.
The editors I know and work with use the descriptivist method because it allows us to help our writers connect most effectively with their audience. It acknowledges the evolution of language and keeps our field from becoming, as Rubinstein suggested, stodgy and outdated.
Preach it! (There are, of course, hordes of editors who would disagree with her. They are wrong.)
I found her comments that copyediting is NOT based in white supremacism more interesting.
“One big problem with prescriptivist books like The Elements of Style is that they promote the idea that there is a “correct” English—namely, the elitist, formally educated, primarily white Oxford/Cambridge dialect.
“I can see the argument that copyediting has roots in white supremacy if the editor in question follows a strictly prescriptivist method. If an editor rejects the evolution of language (which would be an absurd choice), then yes, they risk upholding a system that does harm.
“There is a horrible history of the English language being used in colonialist and genocidal ways. (“Genocidal” here refers to stripping a people of their culture until that culture no longer exists, rather than the more common definition that refers to murder.) In Canada, Indigenous children were placed in residential schools and forced to speak “correct” English instead of their own languages. Today, children who grow up in minority cultures are often taught that their dialects are “wrong” and that they need to adopt the more official version of the language.
“The system we use to teach writing can be colonialist, genocidal, and based in white supremacy. It is our job as editors to address the harm that has been done and do what we can to rectify that harm.
“Good copyeditors recognize that dialects like AAVE have their own grammar structures and word spellings. In order to be good editors, we must learn to recognize when a writer is intentionally deviating from Oxford/Cambridge English. We must learn the correct way to edit different dialects, or find someone else who is better equipped to work with that writer.”
The problem is, of course, that non-standard English is still stigmatised, which is, it could be argued, white supremacist. The imposition of standard English is not a result of copyediting, it is a byproduct of social attitudes and existing power structures.
English writing with an imposed layer of vernacular speech in order to capture a certain flavour is all well and good. But the idea that standard English should not be imposed on writing is a curious one. If we all really wrote in our different types of English (not just to impart a certain flavour, but actually writing such varieties as they are spoken), then English could easily just split up into a set of separate, not mutually comprehensible languages.
Strunk and White tell you there are definitive rules of language and you should not deviate from them if you want to be hired by the New Yorker circa 1960.
I confess that I would put up with Strunk and White if I could be hired by the New Yorker circa 1960.
That’s just a bogeyman. The New Yorker doesn’t obey Strunk and White, never has. “Comprised of” is perfectly acceptable there, for example.
(Caveat: it has been perfectly acceptable there for a long time, but I haven’t been able to confirm whether it already was in 1960. Still, I suspect there are plenty of S&W-isms that they have never bothered with.)
The “white supremacy” discussion that bathrobe excerpts seems almost self-parodic in its attempt to avoid discussion of social class and language variety as an important class marker/reinforcer among people of the same skin color. There’s actually a pretty big sociolinguistics literature about that, as I recall.
I find the “Oxford/Cambridge” references confusing in the context of dissing Strunk & White, who as best as I can tell were self-confident enough about their own university up by Lake Cayuga not to defer excessively to British usage over a somewhat stylized version of American. (In other words, excessive attention to S&W’s strictures may make your writing stilted but I don’t think it will make it more British-sounding?) But I see that the author is Canadian, so maybe she has colonial-cringe issues that S&W didn’t?
AFAIK White’s role at the New Yorker was as a prolific/valued writer, but not as a deviser, redactor, or enforcer of the house stylebook. I can’t imagine that they had so little institutional self-confidence that they thought the house stylebook should defer to some vulgar bestseller one of their contributors had worked on on the side. How much influence there may have been flowing the other direction (i.e. how much of White’s expansion/embellishment of Strunk’s older guide may have reflected the influence of New Yorker house style on White) is a different question.
Here’s a Strunkism that the New Yorker was already ignoring in 1960: “However” isn’t allowed to begin a sentence when used as a sentence adverb, i.e. meaning “nevertheless”. See extensive discussion at Language Log, e.g. Pullum, Liberman. But I found these in the New Yorker:
That’s all I could find via the (crude and unreliable on date ranges) Google interface. Sentence-initial “However,” did seem to get more common in later decades, but I’m not sure how much of that is due to limitations of Google’s database. Searching from somewhere with an actual subscription would be better.
JWB has a persuasive point about direction of influence.
I too find it persuasive.
UK: everything is assumed to be class-based, US: everything is assumed to be race-based. 😐
Ooh, so she’s probably got both the UK’s and the US’s cringe issues. :-S
Comma placement is a descriptivist job in my experience. You can’t make hard and fast rules for it, except elementary ones like the Oxford comma. Comma placement rules would be like a comprehensive theory of syntax, including a sensitivity to register and style.
English could easily just split up into a set of separate, not mutually comprehensible languages.
fine by me! (it already has: there are plenty of points on various english creole continua that are not comprehensible by most anglophones whose cradle lects are near one or another ‘standard’, and it’s easy to find pairs of non-creole englishes that are at best dubiously mutually comprehensible with each other.)
but something more similar in spirit has in fact happened recently – with not a lot of notice (as far as i’ve seen) – but i think hasn’t developed quite in the ways that people talk about as possibilities.
the first time i was in eastern europe, back in 2002, i stayed with some folks in their early 20s in brno. our host told us that he had absolutely no trouble understanding slovak, having been raised to think of it as another dialect of czechoslovak, his native language. however, he said that his younger sibling, whose conscious life didn’t precede the velvet divorce by very long, had trouble understanding people who spoke what they’d been taught was a closely-related but separate language to their own czech: slovak.
n=1, of course, but this rhymes with how i’ve heard other czechs talk about the two lects since then.
and, to me, that takes us somewhere interesting, that’s outside a lot of the conversations about standardization, language cultivation*, etc. the czech/slovak example pushes more, in my ear, towards “let’s ditch the category of Languages, and talk instead about how the different lects of different speech communities interact, dealing with them descriptively (regional lects, social-group lects, descent-group lects, class-based lects, etc) instead of placing them all in relation to a category that only reflects political legitimacy.”
especially because, after all, neither czech nor slovak nor czechoslovak can possibly be a Language. they’re landlocked.
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* whose (possibly only universal) goal, i believe, should be to promote linguistic diversity and the health of all lects.
“The goal of editing (and writing) is clear communication, …”
No. That’s one goal of editing and writing – the most obvious one. There are others, and they too are important.
“… and clear communication is dependent on the current use of language.”
Only partially dependent on that. Consistent and principled use of the serial comma is perennially an advantage, regardless of current or local fashion.
Prescriptivism versus descriptivism? An oversimplified binary characterisation, of an enormously complex languagescape.
“If an editor rejects the evolution of language (which would be an absurd choice)”
Why, there are many languages like Latin that got frozen. Absurd or not, it is like a tree or a jelly fish or sunrise: they exist:-)
I find this use of “prescriptivist/descriptivist” confusing.
The distinction between norms and rules
– set in stone
– based on abstract reasoning (which a group of users happens to like),
– following observed usage and (illogical) perceptions among a model group of users (including associations with other groups as in “sounds uneducated”)
…is of course important. But norms are prescriptive.
Sorry if my earlier comment was muddled. I had very little time to think carefully about what I wanted to say. I agree with comments by JWB and DM.
rozele: it’s easy to find pairs of non-creole englishes that are at best dubiously mutually comprehensible with each other
I must say that I find this position (“fine by me!”) rather interesting. rozele rebels against standard English by abandoning capital letters. That’s about as far as it goes. The real grip that standard English has on the language is spelling and grammar, and rozele still adheres pretty scrupulously to standard English in that respect.
Standard written English has been fairly successful in uniting various different varieties of English under one umbrella. However, I personally feel uncomfortable when people speak of “standard English”, which generally refers to the rules of the written language. It doesn’t refer to a lot of spoken usage in white native-speaking societies. These native varieties are the enemy in the view of prescriptivists (as DM pointed out, non-adherence to standard written English is a class issue in British English). They are unwilling to countenance any influence from colloquial, demotic, or “non-standard” varieties. Prescriptivists are, in fact, overzealous in protecting this established written variety and jealous of every tiny established usage. They are convinced that any deviation at all will result in a crumbling of the standard language.
I would suggest that advocating a loosening up of standard English is fine if you speak one of the native white varieties of English (which I do), which diverge from it in clearly defined ways (e.g., standard English says you shouldn’t use “ain’t”, shouldn’t use “them” as a demonstrative, should use the correct past participle, etc.) But what if you don’t? What if you speak a creole that doesn’t share those features at all? In such cases, standard English forms a kind of Dachsprache — something like standard Mandarin to speakers of Chinese dialects. If a creole/standard English mixture became established in a particular society or locale, that it is fine, but unless that variety becomes widespread in English-speaking societies it will be of limited influence and importance. For the foreseeable future at least, standard written English, no matter how artificial some might find it to be, will still hold sway in most English-speaking domains.
(Tok Pisin has declared its independence of standard English by adopting its own spelling and grammar — which is fine. But if you want to be heard outside of PNG, you need to write in standard written English. Ok, popular culture in many places has been influenced by Black English, which has influence beyond its American homeland. But its challenge to standard written English is still relatively small.)
Standard written English has both a privileged and a unique position in English. Yes, it was mostly established by white, literate Englishmen and later their colonial offshoots. But it has taken on a life of its own. It’s not just the language of the white überclass; it’s the language of literate English speakers everywhere, including those writing here, not all of whom are either native speakers or upper crust white people. (I don’t find Rookwood’s article “self-parodic”; I find it superficial and completely off the point).
As for the prescriptivists’ fears about the dissolution of the English language, maybe they are right. If people wrote as they spoke, the barriers would come crashing down and the old era when English had a relatively standard written language would be finished. Well, maybe….
(I find my comment still sounds muddled but I’ll leave it as it is for others to comment on.)
@rozele:
Interesting about Czech/Slovak.
On the crude basis of percentage of identifiable cognates in vocabulary, Czech vs Slovak seems almost exactly the same as Toende vs Agolle Kusaal; but as the Toende and Agolle Kusaasi seem to have no doubt but that they all belong to the same ethnic group, as fas as I can make out no local person regards them as different “languages.” (This despite the fact that Burkina Faso Toende speakers, who are much less exposed to the Agolle dialect than their Ghanaian cousins are, apparently don’t understand it at all well.)
To me as an outsider, Toende Kusaal seems distinctly closer to Nabit, its neighbour to the West, than to Agolle Kusaal, its neighbout to the East; but as the Nabdema are regarded as not-Kusaasi both by themselves and by the Kusaasi, nobody locally regards Nabit as a dialect of Kusaal.
(There’s actually a Kusaasi clan called “Nabdema”, using the exact same Kusaal name; they are not Nabdema either. Life is complex …)
In fact, because the Nabdema are part of the Farefare chieftaincy system, if anything, people regard Nabit as a “dialect” of Farefare, which from a strictly linguistic point of view is like calling Catalan a dialect of Spanish. (I mean, it’s not totally off the wall, just … Wrong.)
That a Dachsprache is to some extent functionally useful leads inexorably, it seems to me, to the question of what sorts of texts ought to be written in the standardized Dachsprache and what other sorts of texts ought not be or at least need not be. A not-unrelated point is what sorts of texts ought to prioritize and emphasize some sort of distinctive and individualistic “authorial voice” and what sorts ought to minimize that in favor of a generic/institutional voice. And of course there are lots of different generic/institutional voices out there, not all of which are formal-register or standard-grammar. The one used for low-grade clickbait listicles (I assume there’s a standard genre-convention voice those are conformed to, because the notion that hundreds of writers of this schlock all naturally have the same individual style is too depressing to think about very long) is very different from that used for automobile owners’ manuals, for example.
BTW, the original circa 1919 Strunk-only Elements of Style is in the public domain and freely available online: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37134/pg37134-images.html
It’s much shorter. Some of its peeves may be “period” in that the thing he’s inveighing against has receded/disappeared. But OTOH some of the examples of bad prose he claims attention to his recommendations will prevent are indeed hilariously bad and do sound familiar if you’ve read a fair amount of written-circa-1900 bad prose. At least some of the time he resorts to descriptivist-friendly rationales. E.g., the deprecation of split infinitives says: “There is precedent from the fourteenth century downward for interposing an adverb between to and the infinitive which it governs, but the construction is in disfavor and is avoided by nearly all careful writers.” That’s an empirical claim (which at least implicitly acknowledges the possibility that things that have at present fallen into disfavor may at some future time return to favor), which may even have been approximately true as of 1919?
Or consider this:
“The spelling of English words is not fixed and invariable, nor does it depend on any other authority than general agreement. … At any given moment, however, a relatively small number of words may be spelled in more than one way. Gradually, as a rule, one of these forms comes to be generally preferred, and the less customary form comes to look obsolete and is discarded. From time to time new forms, mostly simplifications, are introduced by innovators, and either win their place or die of neglect.”
@David E.: Well, the Catalans are these last several centuries part of the Castilian chieftaincy system, aren’t they? Although I guess some of them are grumpy about that and wish it weren’t so, which I suppose may not be the case with the Nabdema although I don’t know one way or the other.
I’ve heard the Czech/Slovak example before. This is a result of the political separation of standards. Slovak was previously a variety of a single language. Now it is an independent language. Varieties across the border belong, of course, to Polish, even if they are intelligible to Czech or Slovak speakers. Exposure to the other variety is essential in maintaining the unity of the language. English is very fortunate in having a standard that is generally recognised (with variation) across major polities, particularly the UK and the US.
Mongolian presents another twist on this issue. Mongols in China believe they are speaking the Mongolian language. OTOH, Mongolians in Mongolia regard the Mongolian of Inner Mongolia as weird, dialectal, Chinese-influenced, non-standard, and deviant. It is ignored and generally dismissed as not worthy of attention. Many of its spoken dialects are, indeed, almost incomprehensible to Mongolians. Most Mongolians have little exposure to the Mongolian of China.
However, I know a scholar of Mongolian from Inner Mongolia who argues that the Mongolian of China should be regarded as “Mongolian” as it accepts the Mongolian standard (I forget his exact formulation of this, but essentially he argues that the Mongols of China adhere to standard Mongolian — unlike the Buryats and Kalmyks, for instance, who have set up totally different standards). It is sad that he is forced to make this kind of argument, which is aimed at resisting the linguistic exclusivism of Mongolia. I wonder whether the split between Dutch and Flemish might not have something in common with this….
As far as script is concerned, though, the two might as well be separate languages. Mongolians of Inner Mongolia generally can’t read Cyrillic while Mongolians generally have a hard time reading material in the old script, which is still used in China. In this sense they are in many ways “separate languages”.
““Genocidal” here refers to stripping a people of their culture until that culture no longer exists, rather than the more common definition that refers to murder.”
I think people who say things like this should be taken out and shot. (“Shot” here refers not to filling people with bullets until their lifeless corpses lie motionless on the ground, but to pointing out to them that words have meaning and meaning matters, and to bring them to understand how offensive it is to devalue what those meanings are.)
“Slovak was previously a variety of a single language. Now it is an independent language.”
I’m not sure if the change affected the two languages themselves (as opposed to nomenclature, function and exposure of Czechs to Slovak).
They became two different states.
the mongolian example seems to make my weinreichian point perfectly: it shows “language” to be in no way a linguistic category, but a matter of nation-state authority, whether directly over what’s spoken in the territory it claims or less directly over the populations it defines as its constituency (regardless of where they’re located).
i’m more interested, though, in the perspective that emerges from DE’s examples, because they show the nation-state-centered analysis to be a specific instance (and a quite timebound* instance) of the wide variability in how different lects are understood by their speakers to be related to each other in varying degrees, according to very local social geographies and relationships (that can be related to social categories defined as political, lineage, geographic, class, etc.). but the one thing that is no reliable gauge of those understandings, of course, is linguistic analysis.
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* arguably to either the period since the land/blood/tongue definition of ‘nation’ was proposed in the 19thC or became fully institutionalized in the mid-20thC, or to the period since the 1492 castillian grammar, which first proposed in europe the idea of a ‘codified national modern language’, which colonialism proceeded to export.
Latin might be “frozen” today, but it wasn’t until quite recently. There are a lot of books on Medieval Latin. Whenever people are using languages to actually communicate (and not just studying them as fossils), they are definitely changing them as they go. Right?
@Bloix:
that is literally the geneva convention definition of genocide: the destruction of a group as such. which, as the convention and the entire short history of the term makes clear, can include any number of mechanisms, including mass murder, theft of children, systematic sexual assault, and other forms of cultural destruction. that definition is rooted directly in the concrete history of, and shaped by survivors of, the attempted genocides of armenians, jews, and roma – and to a degree informed as well by the successful and attempted genocides of peoples throughout the americas and in africa.
words have meanings. and that is the meaning of this word.
it is a quite new word, and one that is (so far) inextricably tied to a specific definition within the post-WWII system of international law, and a correspondingly narrow field of use. so it is still possible to say with a great deal of clarity that it has a single, very specific and very explicitly defined, meaning.
attempts to limit the meaning of “genocide” to industrialized mass murder (which usually in practice means, to industrialized mass murder carried out by the german state* between 1939 and 1945) are a form of genocide denialism. such attempts are almost always carried out in service of defending and supporting one or another specific genocidal project. most commonly, of course, those in settler-colonial contexts, especially the zionist project targeting palestinians, or the u.s. and canadian projects targeting indigenous peoples. but recently, it’s also been a popular rhetorical strategy from nostalgic defenders and supporters of the OUN, the Endecja, the LAF, and their ilk, as well as of backers of current genocidal projects targeting the rohinga, mapuche, and others.
genocidal projects, and attempted genocides, are not rare. and as the folks who worked to define the word rigorously knew, trying to limit our understanding of how they work to one or another tactic is a way to avoid taking seriously what it means to work to prevent them. and that’s true even if – as i have never so far seen be the case – it’s done through a good-faith argument rather than as a screen for geocide denialism or advocacy.
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* generally specifically (and often explicitly) excluding its central and eastern european allies in organized parties and armed groups, its willing volunteer supporters in the practice of genocide, its active and passive enablers among its military opponents, etc.
@rozele: You are quite correct that that was what genocide was coined to mean (by Raphael Lemkin), circa 1944;
However, I nonetheless agree more with Bloix in this case. Descriptively, words have lives of their own; they mean what people take them to mean. Genocide has become a fairly common word, but the broad meaning of genocide that encompasses tactics separate from mass liquidation has at the same time become rather marginal.
I can see at least two clear reasons contributing to this, one historical and one linguistic. As you note, the dominance of the Second World War, with its industrialized atrocities, in discussions of genocide (including in Lemkin’s original writing) naturally pushes people to construe the terminology narrowly to apply to that very specific kind of situation. However, there is also the fact that the broader usage does not comport well with what many people feel should be the meaning of a –cide word. Regicide does not mean to deprive someone of their status as a monarch (there are other words for that); it means killing them! There was no regicide of Umberto II, no more than it would be fratricide if my family cut my brother off entirely. This may be an etymological fallacy, but This is the West, sir.
Brett is perhaps conflating what Lemkin originally said and what the treaty ultimately said, which are not the same thing. Neither is definitive. The actual treaty would at first blush (because otherwise Lemkin’s just some activist dude on a street corner with a manifesto) seem rather more important but I think it’s a category error to treat the meaning of a commonly used English word as completely fixed by its technical definition in a statute, treaty, or suchlike legal document, especially when as in this particular instance we know as a historical matter that the technical definition of “genocide” in the relevant treaty was narrowed down from some broader original proposals (like Lemkin’s!) in order to obtain the support of then-powerful nations like Canada and the Soviet Union by carving out stuff that they knew full well they were, or at least might be credibly accused of, doing themselves. (Admittedly, the Canadians et al. were in hindsight sloppy in letting the child-stealing language remain in the final version without carefully thinking through how it could be applied to their boarding-school policies of the time.) Although it of course remains fair game in appropriate contexts to question the agendas of people who use colloquial senses of a word that’s the name of a crime with either a broader or narrower scope than the technical legal-jargon scope.
But even in a beyond-current-treaty-language sense of “cultural genocide”* I don’t think that copy-editors are typically significant operatives in the machinery of such genocide, which makes Ms. Rookwood’s apparent self-congratulation for taking a non-genocidal approach to copy-editing somewhat fatuous. Even if “cultural genocide” were proscribed by treaty, I wonder if it would fall into the same category as legalistic phrases like “constructive fraud” or “statutory rape” that cover situations where the law says A technically counts as an instance of B but at some level knows it is pushing upstream against a folk/common-sense understanding of what is and isn’t “really” B.
*Here’s a recent establishment-do-gooder take on the idea – see note 70 at the end for an example of stuff about language suppression that ultimately got edited out of the treaty and is thus not proscribed by it. https://www.getty.edu/publications/pdfs/CulturalGenocide_Luck.pdf Although it’s not clear to me that that wording if adopted would have covered heavy-handed or illiberal promotion of the prestige-standard version of a “language” over deprecated/marginalized non-prestige dialects of the same “language.” And e.g. France’s lawyers at the Hague would have been ready with arguments that e.g. Occitan was merely a “dialect” not a separate “language” and who’s to say they would lose on that argument?
Anyone who thinks Latin is frozen now has never read my Latin.
There actually is a (kind of) standardisation issue with Kusaal, inasmuch as the written language on the Ghana side is based on the Agolle dialect, but on the Burkina side, on Toende. It seems unlikely that this has much bearing on the position regarding the actual spoken language, though, as few people are accustomed to reading Kusaal at all: “literacy” usually implies literacy in English or French.
AFAIK both dialects are pretty uniform internally. Such systematic variation as I encountered between Agolle informants seemed very minor, and there didn’t seem to be any obvious geographical pattern to it. But I don’t think anyone has ever looked at the issue properly.
Agolle and Toende, on the other hand, are strikingly different, probably because the White Volta border zone between them was thinly populated historically because of river blindness (a relatively minor cause of dialect differentiation in Europe …)
But even in a beyond-current-treaty-language sense of “cultural genocide”* I don’t think that copy-editors are typically significant operatives in the machinery of such genocide, which makes Ms. Rookwood’s apparent self-congratulation for taking a non-genocidal approach to copy-editing somewhat fatuous.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. It is your rhetorical assumption that only those who are actually effecting massive changes in the world so that it is forever changed for the better are entitled to congratulation (self- or other) that is fatuous.
…Soviet Union by carving out stuff that they knew full well they were,
@JWB, a random source:
@drasvi: one of the primary Stalin-friendly outcomes of the negotiations was making sure that a population “group” defined primarily on social-class grounds (e.g. “kulaks”) was simply not the sort of “group” whose intentional obliteration could fall within the treaty definition of “genocide.” Stalin, you may recall, had no particular objection to the mass murder of class-based groups. Class-based groups are of course often the bearers of distinct language varieties and other indicia of a distinct culture.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, JWB. And I don’t think anybody is under the impression that Stalin was a decent guy with deep feelings for humanity.
@JWB, accepted. But we were discussing “cultural genocide” specifically….
I see that you did not refer to cultural genocide in your formulation (“some broader original proposals (like Lemkin’s!)“), so my comment is not an objection.
@LH, I still find JWB’s note important, because they did promote hatred.
I do not feel that class hatred (and accordingly murder of say aristocrates) is better than ethnic or religious hatred. Again, there was no shortage of hatred directed at Bolsheviks or even lower classes, and the Whites spilled blood just as the Reds (and Blacks and Greens….).
Yet I won’t call an ideology that promotes hatred good.
On the other hand, “Communism” as such does not necessary include this. It is entirely possible not to believe in private property and still hate no one. Many Soviet dissidents were Communists (not in terms of party membership, just worldview), and even though I disagree, Soviet intelligentsia compared Communism to Christianity.
especially because, after all, neither czech nor slovak nor czechoslovak can possibly be a Language. they’re landlocked.
Communist Czechoslovakia did have a merchant navy though, based in Hamburg. Not sure if that counts.
Slovak was previously a variety of a single language. Now it is an independent language.
As far as literary standards are concerned, this “previously” may roughly refer to the first half of the 19th century. There was virtually no written Slovak before, and at around 1850 Slovaks gave up the idea of using Czech as their literary standard and created their own one.
Interbellum Czechoslovakia held the official view of one “Czechoslovak” language with two literary variants, but this was rather a political statement meant to conceal the fact that Czechoslovakia was a multi-ethnic state, for which there were various political reasons. In all but name Czech and Slovak were separate languages and after 1945 nobody really claimed otherwise.
that only those who are actually effecting massive changes in the world so that it is forever changed for the better are entitled to congratulation (self- or other)
That sure would put a crimp in my style. If I didn’t roll my own congratulation, I wouldn’t have any.
I don’t know if Lemkin included classes.
@LH, the problem is that if we are interested in preventing genocide, we need a typology. Class hatred also leads to horrible things, including Cambodia.
So we have for example:
– a moral problem. If “genocide” in popular use is the symbol of absolute evil, then what is Cambodia? Should we include it or find a new word for it?
– a technical problem. Should we distinguish between the Holocaust and events in Cambodia when trying to prevent both kinds of situations?
@drasvi: You do find the horrible acts of the Khmer Rouge loosely called “genocide” in popular and even academic discourse. The decades-after-the-fact prosecutions of surviving Khmer Rouge leadership did include some technical “genocide” charges because of atrocities that allegedly targeted specific non-ethnic-Khmer minority groups (ethnic Vietnamese and Cham) but the majority of the KR’s victims were of course of the same ethnic/national group as their killers.
Back in the USSR, Stalin’s treatment of the Crimean Tatars maybe started approaching genocidish territory? Although most of his mass-murders that had a specific ethnic/national angle also had a social-class angle, e.g. the Katyn Forest massacre was not an indiscriminate killing of any/all ethnic Poles that could be rounded up, but a targeted mass killing of Poles of comparatively elite status who would be unusually well-suited to provide a leadership role in resistance to Soviet domination. Similarly, pre-WW2 Stalinist mass killings focused on Belarusians often targeted intelligentsia types as the presumed leaders-in-waiting of any inconvenient nationalist movement. There’s a claim on the internet (historicity not verified by me!) that as of 1934 there were something like 130 Belarusian Ph.D. candidates on the Soviet side of the border, of whom only six or so were still alive five years later.
Is there an equivalent of Godwin’s law for Stalin?
What about Serbocroat? Are Serbian and Croat variants of the same language, or are they separate languages?
In my opinion, from either a moral or a purely practical prespective it makes much more sense to lump the Holocaust together with Khmer Rouge atrocities, than with e.g. 19th and early 20th century French language policies in Brittany or Occitania. “Soyez propres, parlez français” is one thing, mass graves are another and totally different. What made the Holocaust a symbol of absolute evil were the mass scale institutionalised killings, not the consequent disappearance of the Jewish culture. Cultural preservation is important, but murder is murder.
@prase, yes, but again, there is a typological connection.
“Destruction of a people” does seem to include destruction of a people as a unit without physically destroying people. Another argument is that cultural destruction (as a proclaimed goal) can be associated with physical destruction. It matters in terms of prevention. But of course there are many missionaries who actually want to destroy paganism while sincerely believing that they are acting in pagans’ best interests. Same with linguicide. States too can destroy cultures in the name of the state’s “stability” but without slightest intent to destroy people.
We need some framework for navigating this mess. “Genocide” as a concept is a tool, I don’t know if it is adequate or not (and thus I neither support nor object to it – maybe they could invent a better tool?).
For me, Prase’s description is hard to argue with, and perfectly in keeping with my sense of how people outside academia or a few global bureaucracies understand the word genocide.
Without specific prompting, I wouldn’t even consider that “cultural genocide” might mean the killing off of a culture. Instead, it sounds like the mass murder of people associated with a given culture which doesn’t have strong genealogical affinities.
With prompting to think of it that way, I’m immediately triggered by the concept. It’s hard for me to take seriously the idea of a category that includes both mass murder and “other”.
“murder is murder” – yes. and that’s why we needed another word for genocide. because it is not just murder. genocide is about life as a collectivity, not individual lives – the latter can only be eliminated through death; the former can be eliminated in many ways.
the main differences between attempts at cultural destruction and mass murder, when it comes to the preservation of a group as such, are that the first is slower (taking at least a generation or so) and easier both to recruit liberal supporters for and to stifle outrage about (as long as you can do a decent propaganda push attacking the relevant culture as evil/uncivilized/etc.).
that’s hardly news. in the north american context, the state-promoted slogan explaining the point of the attacks on indigenous languages, ritual practices, kinship relations, uses of land, &c was “kill the indian to save the man” – which makes it pretty clear that the genocidaires understood their project as one materially the same as mass murder, when it came to the continued existence of “indians” as collectivities. it’s trivial to find similar statements from perpetrators of other attempted genocides, especially in the decades since the nazis gave the more direct version such bad press.
genocidaires understand this just fine (and say it explicitly, every time).
it’s their polite supporters who still want to be invited to nice liberal parties who pretend not to. and i say again: i’ve never seen this argument made in good faith, only by people who have one or another (past, present, or future) genocide they’re committed to defending or advocating.
Another problem with the idea that “culture” could possibly be the issue is that every late-18th century “culture” and most mid-19th century cultures are gone. The touchstones of rural life in the US, the UK and elsewhere including dialect have almost entirely vanished, usually not by direct evolution, but by rapid disaggregation and disruption at the moment of the move to a city.
There are obviously critical factors that distinguish the experience of the white Anglo farmer or farmkid who moved to an American city, that of the Occitan-speaker who moved to a French city, and that of the African American southerner who moved to a northern city. But pressure to assimilate isn’t really one of them.
I would argue genocide can be defined by the moment at which those with the means of violence decide that assimilation is not a realistic pathway. So “cultural genocide” as some want to define it for me is roughly the opposite of real genocide.
And that doesn’t lead me to limit the number of genocides to one, or to exclude the central and eastern european allies of the Nazis. No one has mentioned Bosnia, Rwanda or holodomor Ukraine in this thread, but they all fall within my definitions. I think a definition of genocide as mass murder directed against racial, cultural or perceived genetic groups where non-combatants are routinely and intentionally targeted is sufficient, and is a definition that most people already share.
a category that includes both mass murder and “other”
This is what is most problematic for me as well. Usually when people try to expand a narrow term denoting some kind of atrocity to cover something less apparently evil, they are usually motivated by good intentions. Along the lines “everyone agrees that mass murder is bad, but not everyone is similarly sensitive to forceful assimilation, so perhaps we should use the same word for both so that people realise that cultural assimilation is bad too”.
But this always goes both ways. “Did the Nazis organise a genocide of Jews? Well, they did, but the French too organised a genocide of Corsicans! So how dare they claim that they are any better?”
(It’s just an example, I don’t really want to pick on the French, they are not that exceptional in this respect.)
>and that’s why we needed another word for genocide. because it is not just murder. genocide is about life as a collectivity, not individual lives – the latter can only be eliminated through death; the former can be eliminated in many ways.
>the main differences between attempts at cultural destruction and mass murder, when it comes to the preservation of a group as such
Genocide has to be both — the destruction of a group through the targeted killing of members.
Cultural destruction is a fine term for what you’re describing.
@Ryan, then I feel differently about the word. When I read “cultural genocide” I understand that what is meant is “destruction of a people by destroying their culture”.
P.S. a response to this comment.
@prase, you could argue that the French were more heavy-handed than most, although I suppose various European nations have taken turns in that regard. What happened in places like North America and Australia at various points in time, where children were (with what degree of nominal parental consent can be debated and no doubt varied) physically separated from their families and home communities for periods of years so that they could be educated by servants of the dominant culture with an eye toward assimilating them into that culture is maybe qualitatively different than what the French did “domestically.” In Corsica you as a child had to go to a Paris-controlled school for X hours a day and would get in trouble if you spoke Corsican at school but then went home to your own family and neighborhood where you could generally get away with speaking Corsican. Obviously in the long run the process by which it became impossible to grow up as a monolingual Corsican-speaker made the odds that the population would generally shift over to being monolingual Francophones much higher, of course.
The separate subtype of “genocide” that is fairly ubiquitous in pre-20th century European history (with at least some spillover into the 20th century …) is the forcible suppression of minority/disfavored religious groups, which sought to eliminate (within the boundaries of a given political entity) the existence of such groups qua groups by getting all of their members to variously (a) convert under duress to the approved religion; (b) be driven into exile; or (c) be dead. It’s a really good thing that there was a post-1945 European consensus (leaving the Communist nations out of it …) that that should never happen again. Whether lumping it in with some of these other things (especially in contexts where (c) was not the first or more prominent tactic used) is the best approach conceptually is a different question. (Obviously there are historically situations where religion and ethnicity strongly correlate and it’s not entirely clear which the authorities are trying to suppress, but there are other historical situations where it seems clearer that members of the favored and disfavored religion are both members of the same ethnicity.)
>When I read “cultural genocide” I understand that what is meant is “destruction of a people by destroying their culture”.
This usage feels dishonest to me. An attempt to harness the instinctive revulsion at murder subliminally to something that when described in concrete terms would not provoke that revulsion. The only reason I can see for such a term to exist is with the intention of eliding the difference between killing and not killing.
@drasvi “ Many Soviet dissidents were Communists (not in terms of party membership, just worldview), and even though I disagree, Soviet intelligentsia compared Communism to Christianity.”
There have been and still are many Christian intentional communities that are living forms of communism, in terms of worldview. (also true for other religions)
Woodie Guthrie wrote lyrics for a song called “Jesus Christ”, put to the melody of a song about Jesse James, that cast Jesus as in opposition with the establishment, with Judas Iscariot as the dirty little coward.
https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Jesus_Christ.htm
Roy Berkeley and Dave Van Ronk produced a takeoff
“ Born in 29 B.C. in a barn in Galilee,
Bathed in his unwed mother’s tears
He preached to the masses to overthrow the classes,
And predated Marx by eighteen hundred years.”
Confusing “Communism” (a particular ideological mode of organized violence that did quite a lot of damage in quite a lot of places from 1917 forward) with “communism” in the sense of “how things might optimally work on an idealistic/religious ‘commune,'” seems an instance of the Etymological Fallacy.
@JWB, in Russia “Communism” was the ideal society that our leaders promiced to build, but which our science fiction writers placed in very distant future.
Also it is an ideology, but… it is like “Islam” when you live in Tunisia (and aren’t a Jew) or “Christianity” when you are raised in a Christian country.
What would the mass killing of monks and the mass destruction of Buddhist temples in Mongolia during the 1930s be classed as? The Communists tried to eliminate monastic Buddhism in various ways before resorting to physical elimination. It was at one with Stalin’s steely determination to physically destroy anyone who resisted his goal of creating a new society, but it involved the attack on an entire country’s culture. (Monks in Mongolia were given to temples from ordinary households; they weren’t a separate class — it would have been difficult given that there was no system for monks to father the next generation of monks. The same, of course, applies to Christianity in Europe.)
the mongolian example seems to make my weinreichian point perfectly: it shows “language” to be in no way a linguistic category, but a matter of nation-state authority, whether directly over what’s spoken in the territory it claims or less directly over the populations it defines as its constituency (regardless of where they’re located).
In this sense, nation-state authorities in more than one country that push the same language are supra-national linguistic hegemons. This supports the idea that white English-speaking countries enforcing standard English are in fact, enforcing an international system of white supremacy.
When you start talking about copyediting’s roots in white supremacy, this is the territory you drift into.
@drasvi, I personally wouldn’t mind another label like “Bolshevism” for the Lenin-et-seq. phenomenon that promised to deliver such-and-such magical future utopia but was clear in both theory and practice that the vanguard-of-the-proletariat Party needed to use illiberal methods during the preparatory period which might take some time to complete … But for better or worse “Communism” became the standard English term for the system of rule recommended by Lenin-et-seq for that supposedly interim period, such that using “Bolshevism” other than in the context of the early time period ending with the full consolidation of power (1922ish?) may seem, in an English-language context, a bit affected or confusing.
>This supports the idea that white English-speaking countries enforcing standard English are in fact, enforcing an international system of white supremacy.
For sake of argument. But this leads to a definition of white supremacy as a system of openness and tolerance of people of all races as long as they speak English with some degree of proximity to that spoken by others in the country. The kind of system that would push forward a Barack Obama and a Rishi Sunak as leaders.
At the same level of moral turpitude as the “class-based cultural genocide” depicted in My Fair Lady.
For me, it’s another category error to lump together “move off the sidewalk and address me as Mr. or we’ll kidnap you and leave your corpse by the side of the road” and “I’ve been asked where my family is from several times by boys trying to hit on me.” Or “my teachers only taught me about Martin Luther King and the debates between DuBois and Booker T. Washington, but never mentioned the kings of West Africa.” (That’s the ideological basis of the new elementary school curriculum in my town.)
I think it’s useful to maintain white supremacy for the former example, not the latter two.
The people who sponsored the idea that “aggressions” like the latter are just as bad or nearly as bad coined a term that inadvertently helped people understand where such mild ignorance and rudeness ranks in the moral hierarchy, “microaggressions”.
I think that’s a good template for thinking about cultural genocide. It could accurately be described as microgenocide.
@Ryan, several different things got mixed up here, in this “white supremacy”. Cultural, social and racial supremacy in particular. But social prejudice too leads to violence, and the word “supremacy” looks absolutely suitable for the ideology described in “The White Man’s Burden” even if the author does not think that black people are biologically inferiour and does not promote anything like slavery.
All right, the terminology is confusing, but I’m not sure the author is to blame here.
And if you are not a racist it does not mean there are not other serious issues with you.
If we all really wrote in our different types of English (not just to impart a certain flavour, but actually writing such varieties as they are spoken), then English could easily just split up into a set of separate, not mutually comprehensible languages.
Consider the headline “KIWI DOLE BLUDGE RORT PROBE”. There’s a written form that I literally had to look up word for word in a dictionary. It’s grammatically headlinese, of course, but headlinese was born in the U.S.
It doesn’t refer to a lot of spoken usage in white native-speaking societies.
That was ambiguous enough to confuse me: that is, there’s a lot of spoken usage that is non-standard, but there’s a lot that’s standard too. Standard English is my native dialect, for example, and I’m not the only one.
I would suggest that advocating a loosening up of standard English is fine if you speak one of the native white varieties of English (which I do), which diverge from it in clearly defined ways (e.g., standard English says you shouldn’t use “ain’t”, shouldn’t use “them” as a demonstrative, should use the correct past participle, etc.)
The comma after “(which I do)” also confuses me. If it doesn’t belong there, I read you as saying that your English diverges from the standard in clearly defined ways. Are those grammatical examples characteristic of your native dialect? If the comma is intentional, then I don’t know what the sentence means at all.
hat if you speak a creole that doesn’t share those features at all? In such cases, standard English forms a kind of Dachsprache
Note that some creoles, like Jamaican, have Standard English as their Dachsprache, but others, like Miskito (which is close to basilectal Jamaican) do not.
attempts to limit the meaning of “genocide” to industrialized mass murder (which usually in practice means, to industrialized mass murder carried out by the german state* between 1939 and 1945) are a form of genocide denialism.
It seems clear that genocide is both a prototypical and a graded category. (Those aren’t the same: sparrows are prototypical birds and ostriches are not, but there is no gradation, because there is no such thing as “more or less a bird”, “somewhat of a bird”, etc. Everything is either a bird or not a bird.) The Holocaust is both the prototype and at the extremum of the gradient.
This is the West, sir.
An interesting article on the misquoted quote.
As far as literary standards are concerned, this “previously” may roughly refer to the first half of the 19th century.
Indeed. What is more, the political separation of Bohemia and Slovakia dates to the year 548, the fall of Samo’s Empire.
“murder is murder” – yes. and that’s why we needed another word for genocide. because it is not just murder. genocide is about life as a collectivity, not individual lives – the latter can only be eliminated through death; the former can be eliminated in many ways.
Indeed, Arendt spelled out the distinctions clearly. Wrongful death is a tort/delict against an individual. Murder is a crime, that is, a wrong against the community perpetrated on the individual. Genocide is a wrong against humanity, or more precisely against the human status, perpetrated on the community.
But the term wrong is not self-defining. The children of a society have their own culture, and all societies have some mechanism whereby children are induced to give up their culture and join the adult culture. Are we to say this is a case of cultural genocide? The children might well think so.
When you start talking about copyediting’s roots in white supremacy, this is the territory you drift into.
Furthermore, there is copy editing in Modern Standard Arabic and Modern Standard Mandarin. Are these also founded in white supremacy?
“Cultural genocide” is by now a commonplace and unambiguous term used in North American Indigenous discourse, by victims and descendants of victims of that practice, alongside plain “genocide”. I wouldn’t nitpick with them about terminology.
India probably now has more completely fluent non-white Anglophones (especially for written-standard purposes) than the U.K. has white Anglophones. Generally not L1 speakers but fluent enough, and inclined to buy into the notion of the importance of written-standard-norm because of having acquired English as an L2 for purposes of social-economic advancement. Take a sufficiently modest bar for fluency and India (w/o even adding in neighboring South Asian countries) has more non-white Anglophones than there are white Anglophones in the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and N.Z. combined (all of which except maybe Ireland have material numbers of non-white Anglophones as well, of course). Are the Anglophones of the metropolises of the subcontinent being bossed around on questions of grammar, spelling, and prose style by white folks from backwaters like Auckland or Saskatoon? And this is to say nothing of the millions of non-white Anglophones in the West Indies and Africa who can generate standard-written-norm English prose even if in speech they can and do code-switch into a local creole.
It would be pointless to deny that “white supremacy” in a variety of senses drove the various historical events and processes that have led to English fluency being common among so many non-white populations in various parts of the globe, but it does not follow from that that the present and future usefulness of English fluency is destined to advantage white over non-white users or even advance any particular civilizational agenda. If it does, the problem is not so much the supremacy of Saskatoon over Bangalore, but all those goshdarn Flemings and Swedes and whatnot that can’t confine themselves to writing in their own perfectly suitable small-market white-people languages and are thus trying to cut ahead of the Trinidadians and Pakistanis and what not by writing in English.
The term ethnocide has been coined for “killing the Indian to save the man” and the like. It doesn’t get used much, though…
…well, not in the last 65.5 million years. Go back beyond that and get an enormous headache.
The comma means that all native varieties of English diverge from the standard in such ways. I doubt it was intentional.
However:
This absolutely needs a second comma. Consider:
but others, like Miskito do not.
See?
Consider the headline “KIWI DOLE BLUDGE RORT PROBE”.
Makes perfect sense to me, don’t need no dictionary.
Presumably a headline from a Aus newspaper. (‘bludge’, ‘rort’ are more Aus than NZ) There’s a nasty sub-culture in Aus thinks that New Zealanders (‘Kiwis’) are tantamount to whinging Poms, and only come to Aus to ‘bludge off’ (freeload/sponge off) the over-generous Aus unemployment pay.
This is based on one (one!) criminal who was born in NZ, but had lived in Aus since age 5. Admittedly he had been fiddling the system (‘rorting’) and dealing drugs. It’s hardly as if there’s no Aussies do that.
a) Aus unemployment pay (‘dole’ — but that’s a long-standing English word) is not available to non-Aus citizens. In fact there’s discrimination making it harder for Kiwis to get Aus state benefits than those from any other country. (Whereas NZ unemployment pay is available to anybody with a work permit, including Aussies.)
b) Aus ‘dole’ is not generous, is subject to all sorts of intrusive means testing and officially-sanctioned reasons for delay.
c) When the lockdowns were announced in Aus, there were hordes of Kiwis forced to flee back across the Tasman, because they knew they wouldn’t get income support. (Whereas NZ gave payouts to all employers to support their employees, no requirements for citizenship/visa status. Visas were extended without question.)
I did not know (and could not guess the meaning of from context) “rort,” so I am now pleased to be better-informed. The internet tells me it is back-formed from the adjective “rorty,” but then the etymological trail apparently goes cold (attested late 19th century in UK, origin unknown but maybe costermongers’ slang?).
I am also delighted to find a comment (August 4, 2008) on an old Language Log thread in which the commenter replies to a prior commenter who had introduced a variant of that headline by saying:
You cite the Australian tabloid headline:
“KIWI DOLE RORT BLUDGE PROBE”
But, to this Australian, that sounds incorrect. Are you sure it was not:
“KIWI DOLE BLUDGE RORT PROBE”
So there are apparently rules as to how these nouns can and can’t be strung together to result in cromulent output …
In a U.S. supermarket you can often buy yourself a half-gallon of DOLE STRAWBERRY KIWI JUICE, in which some of the lexemes from that headline are serving different roles with different meanings.
I would suggest that advocating a loosening up of standard English is fine if you speak one of the native white varieties of English (which I do), which diverge from it in clearly defined ways (e.g., standard English says you shouldn’t use “ain’t”, shouldn’t use “them” as a demonstrative, should use the correct past participle, etc.)
Thanks DM.
Parenthetical “which I do” means “I speak one of the native white varieties of English”.
“native white varieties of English, which diverge from it in clearly defined ways” means exactly that. It’s non-restrictive, hence the comma. It is saying that “native white varieties of English” diverge in clearly defined ways from “standard English”.
However, it was imprecisely formulated. There are indeed people who speak the “native white variety of English” known as standard English, without a hint of nonstandard usage. However, there is also a very large group of people whose colloquial speech contains non-standard usages, such as the use of “ain’t”, the use of “them” as a demonstrative, the use of incorrect past participles, etc. Some of these are considered more “egregious” than others.
At any rate, my point was that prescriptivists reserve their ire for native speakers who don’t speak or write standard English. Advocating less prescriptivism implies (in my opinion, at least), that non-standard uses should be tolerated to varying degrees. Infelicitous usages in non-native speakers’ English are (in my opinion) not so much the target of prescriptivist critiques; they are simply regarded as errors made by non-native speakers and corrected.
I will have to think further about what I said; I could be barking up the wrong tree. My feeling is that, contra the thrust of the article, “prescriptivism” might actually contribute to discrimination between native white speakers who retain features of non-standard usage, and non-white speakers. Loosening up on prescriptivism favours the white native speaker over the non-white native speaker, which indeed smacks of “white hegemony”. But I could be totally wrong.
@JWB quoting ‘Peter’ on another thread, 2008 Are you sure it was not: …
I agree with Peter’s intuitions, although my Strine ear is not reliable. His correction is as @JC quotes above.
Searching for that phrase, Google tells me “It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search”, and indeed can’t find the whole phrase in a headline except from these hallowed halls. The judged-wrong version has only one hit (that to the Hattery 2008), which reinforces my intuition.
cromulent output: ‘Dole bludger’ is a fixed phrase. ‘Dole rort(er)’ isn’t. But sensu strictu if you’ve already said “DOLE BLUDGE”, the “RORT” is superfluous. This must be some particularly egregious dodginess.
DOLE STRAWBERRY KIWI JUICE
Dole is “One of the world’s largest producer of fruits and vegetables, Dole Asia Holdings Pte …” import bananas from Ecuador to both Aus and NZ.
oh, yeah pineapples too: they’re always too green/never sweet and juicy in NZ. Presumably imported that way so they survive the journey. (You know that fruit picked deliberately under-ripe for export is then put in methane ovens upon arrival, to force-ripen? They do that with avocados, too. Never works properly: you get piebald fruit that’s still hard in one part whilst going mushy in another.)
‘KIWI’ = Kiwi fruit, Chinese Gooseberry commercially bred by NZ growers. Exported to the world, so that usage shouldn’t be unfamiliar. Juice from Dole-brand strawberries with juice from anonymous-brand Kiwifruit? Or Dole-brand juice from strawberry+kiwifruit? Either way I suspect loads of added sugar. (Confirmed: 40g added _per serving_!) Doesn’t tempt me.
I would like to point out a nonstandard usage in AntC’s response above:
“don’t need no dictionary”
This use of nonstandard English is totally outrageous coming from a native speaker and should be condemned in no uncertain terms. Of course, he can always say that he was just being facetious, but that particular out is nicely available to the privileged white native speaker. (Get my point?)
Of course, I am not at all upset by AntC’s usage there, and I also understand “KIWI DOLE BLUDGE RORT PROBE” without recourse to a dictionary.
they’re always too green/never sweet and juicy in NZ. Presumably imported that way so they survive the journey.
Custard apples are unknown in Mongolia because they simply don’t travel well to such a distant destination. Avocados are available, but they’re small and often brown or overripe.
Fruits are ripened with ethylene, not methane. No oven.
Presumably a headline from a Aus newspaper.
Yes. My point is that it is wholly unintelligible to Americans, who don’t call unemployment payments the dole (although American dictionaries do define the sense, and per COCA it shows up in right-wing publications), use kiwi primarily in reference to the bird or the fruit, and don’t use the words bludge or rort at all. (We do have probe ‘investigation’, primarily in headlines.) This is an extreme case of a written form which is already intelligible only in certain anglophone countries. Other examples we’ve discussed are “Please uplift your messages outwith the store” (Scottish English) and “Johnny went to the bathroom in his pants” (North American English); the last is perhaps the worst case, because it has a completely different sense outside North America.
@AntC: I had assumed the distinction that made the use of both BLUDGE and RORT non-redundant was that bludging involved sponging off the money of others (in this case the taxpayers) in a way thought less than praiseworthy or Not the Done Thing but not necessarily technically fraudulent or illegal (versus just taking cynical advantage of an imperfectly-designed system that incentivizes that sort of disreputable behavior) whereas rorting added the explicit element of actually cheating/scamming the system that was not a necessary element of bludging-as-such. But neither of these lexemes are present in my Northern Hemisphere idiolect, so maybe my guesswork is flawed.
Depending on the intonation, even in NAm “Johnny went to the bathroom in his pants” could mean “Johnny went to the lavatory, and he was wearing pants at the time” or “Johnny went to a lavatory which was installed within his pants”, as well as “Johnny peed while having his pants on.” I wonder how the phrase in each of these intonations would be understood in, say, BrE.
@John C.: I think plenty of Americans know the set non-AmEng phrase “on the dole,” from exposure to British writings and song lyrics and what have you. It’s like knowing a “lorry” is a truck, or what “taking the king’s shilling” means, or something like that. But recognizing that sense of the single word “dole” without the “on the” and when instead adjacent to something mysterious like “bludge” may be more of a challenge.
Fruits are ripened with ethylene, not methane. No oven.
Thanks @Y, I stand corrected. I did a systems implementation at a veggie/fruit wholesalers — who had the import licence for Dole bananas and pineapples. I should have paid more attention to the gas they named; they definitely said ‘oven’ — not in the sense of burning the gas/heating the produce, but in putting the produce in a sealed space with a carefully-monitored gaseous environment, that had to have fresh air blasted through it before anybody could go in and move the produce on to retailers.
Yeah, the ‘oven’ was probably facetious.
I’m glad somebody picked up my double-negative above. I was being only half-facetious. In one of my lives I lived in Leeds, which has a large Caribbean-origin population. So that usage was standard for then-me. (It was also a great way to annoy my Dad, who was the worst sort of lower-middle-class socially-aware prescriptivist.)
“I can’t get no saa-tis-fac-tion.”
Ripening bananas release both ethylene and heat, both of which help many other fruits to themselves ripen. It is (or at least was, when my mother worked on stuff related to fruit production, back in the 1980s) common for wholesalers to close their other fruit in an insulated box with some bananas, to take advantage of this phenomenon. Those boxes were probably what was meant by “ovens.”
@JWB, I remembered that in my school jargon “communism” meant: “everyone can take those cookies without asking permission”. Usually it was proclaimed by a party that brought cookies to a party, and the ironical reference was to the utopian communism (or primitive communism among hunters and gatherers), not to the actual Soviet situation.
Different from Wiktionary “A state of affairs perceived as oppressive, overly arbitrary, or totalitarian”.
It was only when I went to West Africa that I discovered that what are sold as “bananas” in Europe are in fact seriously unripe bananas – presumably because they can’t be conveniently transported and sold at the stage when they are actually edible by people who don’t think that all the best food should be tasteless.
This notion that copyediting is some form of colonialist imposition is not merely ludicrous, it’s actively harmful, and should be greeted with loud jeers and vigorous hostile polemic.
It has the implication that a concern for accuracy, lucidity, consistency and correctness is some sort of Western thing, foreign to Lesser Breeds. It’s right up there with the idea that logic itself is some sort of white western male invention*, and the fact that a number of well-meaning activists have internalised this fundamentally racist and sexist view themselves is all the more lamentable.
Any acquaintance at all with cultures other than ours immediately reveals the epic falseness of this idea. (Many activists, alas, understand their “own” cultures only through an actual colonialist lens, and think that they can arrive at a better understanding of their culture in its pristine purity only by subtracting whatever they have decided is “Western.”)
* I do not mean “formal logic”, which as far as Europe goes, seems to have indeed been largely invented out of his own head by that clever man Aristotle, who probably was male. (I suspect that modern Americans would classify him as “Hispanic”, though, for police-records purposes.)
@de
Logic as a tool–clearly not imposition
Logic as a mindset or way of dismissing intuition or imposing priorities which have no basis in “logic”–historically and primarily imposition but now co-opted by activists to discredit, shame, browbeat, etc., any opposition to their views, whether from within their own ranks or from the odd white Western male who sticks his (their?) head above the parapet…
I think the second is not really logic, but rather leveraging the good name of “logic” for browbeating purposes. You might call it “logicism”, on the analogy of the difference between Science and Scientism.
(I’ve just decided that my forthcoming once-and-for-all definitive takedown of the idea that cultures are only properly understood by expunging everything imagined to be “Western” will be entitled The Poverty of Exoticism.)
“It has the implication that a concern for accuracy, lucidity, consistency and correctness is some sort of Western thing, foreign to Lesser Breeds.”
@DE, alas, some things believed to be virtues here are not believed to be virtues there. Russians drink, Islam accepts polygamy.
I agree that we have a problem. I disagree in that I am unaware of any reasonable solution to it. I have a plenty of female algebraic geometers around, but they are distinctively female (and differnet and unique) and I need to appreciate this fact somehow.
Most Russian female science fiction that I read is quite reflexive (‘she thought that he thought that…’) and I have no idea if I should take it as a female way of looking at the world or as something analagous to stormtroopers shooting at insectoids (an element of genre fiction). I can convert this into “most male since firction that I read is…” too, of course – and I also don’t care if this femininity is inborn or acquired.
Compare Tutuola. Obviously some people thought that he is discrediting African literature. Here I know the solution: just stop blaming people and getting angry about everything. Sadly this attitude too can be cultural in some ways: Russian men generally care less about the public opinion of their beloved selves than men from some other cultures or even Russian women.
There were centuries of Greek antecedents to Aristotelean formal logic, particularly in the area of mathematics: Thales, Pythagoras, maybe Xenophanes.
I agree that we have a problem. I disagree in that I am unaware of any reasonable solution to it.
Agreed.
Here I know the solution: just stop blaming people and getting angry about everything.
Hear, hear!
And once more we’ve forgotten that by “lesser breeds” Kipling meant Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, and other non-British imperialists.
I’m quite sure DE hasn’t “forgotten that.” He’s using the phrase the way it is generally used today; to insist on Kipling’s context is as pedantic as to insist that “beg the question” can only be used in the sense of petitio principii. (Which a tiresome number of people do, to be sure.)
the year 548, the fall of Samo’s Empire
Over a century too early. Do you mean the fall of the Avar Empire?
And I insist on not needlessly insulting Kipling, dead as the Avars though he is. As for “beg the question,” I avoid the phrase in any sense.
even in NAm “Johnny went to the bathroom in his pants” could mean “Johnny went to the lavatory, and he was wearing pants at the time” or “Johnny went to a lavatory which was installed within his pants”
Sure. except that the first interpretation is fatuous and the second is preposterous, and so violate Gricean maxims of their very own. They also don’t resolve the issues around pants or the fact that in the NAm interpretation Johnny is probably a wee fella as opposed to being pissed (in the non-NAm sense).
insist that “beg the question” can only be used in the sense of petitio principii
A rule more honored in the breach than in the observance, in fact.
“lesser breeds” Kipling meant Frenchmen
But as we know, the French aren’t big on facts.
> the year 548, the fall of Samo’s Empire
Over a century too early.
Misplaced fingers on the keyboard: it should have been 658. Anyway, a long time ago.
the French aren’t big on facts.
Thanks for giving me a chance to reread that brilliant Gopnik passage. Poor Mark responds with a remark that chimes with his Germanic surname: “Gopnik ignores one crucial asymmetry — the French don’t actually have theory checkers, as far as I know.” I’m not sure whether that’s to be filed under “pedantry” or “humor, lack of.”
Could Gopnik really have never considered that the fact checker was checking up on him?
There are two parts to fact-checking. You verify what was said (ie, check up on the interviewer) and compare that to known facts (check up on the interviewee).
There’s really no other point in the call to the interviewee than to check up on Gopnik. They’re not hoping to get the subject to admit she made something up. They’re making sure she said what Gopnik claimed she did.
I didn’t recognise the reference so I’m grateful to Rodger C.
There’s really no other point in the call to the interviewee than to check up on Gopnik.
Well, it isn’t just Gopnik, it’s everyone in the editorial process who had an opportunity to change the content intentionally or unintentionally. Gopnik initially thinks of fact-checking this way: “making sure that we haven’t made a mistake in facts” (emphasis added). It’s only as a result of this incident that he sees it as his own organization checking up on him personally.
An interesting point is that when the post was written in 2004, third-party general-purpose fact-checking organizations didn’t yet exist. (I say “general-purpose” because groups like Consumers Union, who fact-check manufacturers’ claims about their products, have been around since the 1930s.) The words pajamahadeen and blogosphere also gave me a jolt of nostalgia.
I wonder if by “lesser breeds without the Law” Kipling didn’t primarily mean Russians.
Good point. But it’s still primarily checking on Gopnik. The writer gets a final read. Gopnik himself is the primary person intended to catch anything changed without his say-so. Fact-checkers are focused on the recondite steps.
“An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless.”
That’s George Orwell, in an essay first published in 1942. What evidence other than his own self-confidence lay behind the “refers almost certainly” is not stated. Orwell FWIW had used the phrase “P/pansy L/left” on prior occasions and was apparently fond of it, although as early as 1946 some writer in Partisan Review could deprecate it as a “not very urbane[]” phrase.
To clarify my point: I suppose that most people aware of the phrase “lesser breeds” are aware (or are they?) that Kipling originated it, and therefore the common interpretation, regardless of “usage,” is a factual mistake about Kipling.
They’re also unknown over here, though (I had to look them up in Wikipedia).
I suppose that most people aware of the phrase “lesser breeds” are aware (or are they?) that Kipling originated it, and therefore the common interpretation, regardless of “usage,” is a factual mistake about Kipling.
You suppose wrong. Most people aware of the phrase “lesser breeds” acquire it by itself, the way they acquire most of their bits of language and culture, devoid of historical context. They may know the whole phrase “lesser breeds without the law”; some of them may associate it with Kipling; but very few know the original context. If you don’t believe me, go out and do your own survey. If you enjoy patting yourself on the back because you know the Whole Story, be my guest, but in decrying popular misuse you are simply pissing in the wind. (I would say “telling the tide not to come in,” but then you’d explain to me that that’s not what Canute meant.)
Well, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230105522_9
Joseph, C.A.B. (2010). In the Face of Even Lesser Breeds: Reading Nayantara Sahgal with Indian Christians. In: Dimitrova, D. (eds) Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia.
Here the author is criticising Lesser Breeds, a book by Nayantara Sahgal with an epigraph from Kipling. I think both Nayantara Sahgal and Clara Joseph apply it to Indians.
By taking this loaded title, in the context of colonialism and a globalization that many suspect is only the other side of imperialism, the novel instantly shares several of the assumptions about Christianity and colonialism that are often held….
…..Kipling’s poem, modeled on the Anglican recessional hymn, is a tribute to Queen Victoria, on her diamond jubilee. In the novel this poem, thus, becomes a metonym for colonialism that is Christianity and Christianity that is colonialism. The notoriety of the phrase worsens as those of the non-Christian–non-West are rated not only on the basis of their appearance but also of their very soul: lesser breeds without the capital “Law.” In a novel that strives at decolonization and nationalization, what is defended is this non-Christian–non-West, Kipling’s “lesser breeds.”
(I’m not confident, but ‘Kipling’s “lesser breeds.”‘ seems to mean that this is what Kipling meant).
A contemporaneous response to the Kipling poem (in the form of an 1898 letter to the editor of the New York Times) says “It is not clear to whom the terms employed in verse four apply. It is adopting the Hebrew idea very emphatically to represent other peoples as ‘gentiles,’ and others still as ‘lesser breeds.'”
Both the letter-writer and Kipling seem a bit muddled by treating those “without the Law” and “Gentiles” as separate categories when from a traditional “Hebrew” perspective those are just different ways of talking about the exact same category. The traditional daily prayer enjoined in the Talmud (“Blessed are you Hashem, our God, King of the world, for not making me a gentile,” to use the translation I googled up in one bilingual version of the relevant passage) has, I believe come to be felt as embarrassing-to-impolitic in some circles in recent decades and reworded by those sufficiently non-Orthodox to do so.*
The irony of Kipling’s poem is that it is overtly a warning against becoming hubristic about the Total Awesomeness of the British Empire as of the time of writing, but merely by alluding to that Total Awesomeness it perhaps stirs up some of that hubris (or the corresponding envy, for the non-Briton) it warns against. The “Hebrew” parallel, which I’m pretty sure many many many rabbis have worked up into sermons, is that the proper response to being The Chosen People(tm) should be a sense of obligation and responsibility rather than of self-congratulation.
*The rabbis whose teachings were memorialized in the Talmud did not live in vacuum-sealed isolation from the wider Greco-Roman etc. world of the time, and I think some have seen an echo of the statement that would have likely been current at the time (dubiously and variously attributed to Socrates, to Thales, and/or perhaps other Famous Dead Folks) that one should give thanks to the gods for, inter alia, having been born a Greek rather than a barbarian.
@brett
https://forward.com/opinion/182947/should-men-thank-god-they-were-not-born-women/
The verse in question is clearly meant to make men aware of their obligations and responsibility. Why don’t the women get that?
Not touched on yet: Does “without the Law” mean “deprived of the Law” or “outside the Law”? Or is this a distinction without a difference?
Also, what’s “the Anglican recessional hymn”?
What would the mass killing of monks and the mass destruction of Buddhist temples in Mongolia during the 1930s be classed as?
Oh, no, the Mongolians happily and voluntarily abandoned Buddhism wholesale once the Soviets told them the Truth! Owen Lattimore told me that in 1972!
I am very familiar with Kipling’s poem (and have long maintained that he is greatly underrated as a poet, on account of his politics being so … Kipling.)
However, I wasn’t actually thinking of the poem at all. So everybody has won, and all must have prizes.
This heated discussion about artificially hotted-up topics reminds me of a fusion reactor. At the end, it is clear that more energy has been put in than extracted.
I wonder where that surplus heat ended up. Probably dumped in the environment, killing birds and bees. At the very least it should be turned to some practical use, such as frying eggs. In that way only chicken sentiment would be affronted.
@PlasticPaddy: Those specific prayers are so far from my own personal experience of (Reform) Judaism that I have never really put much thought into either justifying or avoiding them. I follow a liturgy from which most of the differences between the sexes were scrubbed long ago, and I have very little concern about the authenticity or orthodoxy of my practices. I do have some personal ruminations about the nature of the Law and the Hebrews’ position as the chosen people, but even those are more an intellectual exercise than anything else.
@brett
I suppose that what I was getting at is that certain texts (e.g., in the New Testament, Matthew 10:34) use language that requires a non-literal interpretation, because the literal interpretation is felt to be inconsistent with central messages or truths propagated within other texts. So the message of an Elect (for me the OT could be plausibly read to say even that the Jews have been selected to achieve enlightenment via suffering and earthly trials) is interpreted by practitioners like you as an inspiration to follow central religious teachings and observe certain practices. Similarly I would suppose that the message of holy war in Islam is interpreted by practitioners as concerned with a cleansing of the self and not with intolerance or violence directed against others. However certain texts, like a prayer thanking God for making one male, are probably better just dropped from practice.
@Rodger C.: there are at least two different phrasings in NT Greek that have sometimes been Englished as “without [the] [L/l]aw”: ἀνόμως (e.g. Romans 2:12) and χωρὶς νόμου (e.g. Romans 7:9). Some have argued that they mean substantively different things in Greek (maybe “lawless” versus “exempt from the law”?), but I’m not sure everyone agrees on that.
Kipling had a good ear for Biblical or Biblical-style English, but was not necessarily very personally pious or theologically well-educated, so it may be hazardous to assume his echoes of Biblical language should be understood to come along with a whole pile of prior exegetical baggage versus just being something he thought sounded good.
“….he claimed never to have met an Englishman who hated Islam and its peoples although he knew Englishmen who hated other faiths. ‘Where there are Muslims,’ he quoted from an Urdu saying, ‘there is a comprehensive civilisation’. ”
About Kipling. I wonder what it was in Urdu….
I see that some modern commenters cite David Gilmour [the wrong but honourable baronet] ‘s book:
WHAT!?
The man quotes verses 12 and 14 and skips
13(For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.
15Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
I mean, all right, “act as they please” is a correct definition …..
he claimed never to have met an Englishman who hated Islam and its peoples although he knew Englishmen who hated other faiths
The imperial Brits, at least in Africa, were quite pro-Islamic, at least in some respects. [Deleted irrelevant rant about that vile man Lugard.] They often favoured Muslims over “pagans” or polytheists, and indeed over Christian missionaries (there was often no love lost at all between the missionaries and the colonial authorities.) Mind you, a fair bit of this was probably sheer Realpolitik.
Enoch Powell apparently knew quite a bit of Urdu, incidentally.
Adam Jones, the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, considers sanctions against Iraq genocide.
I am aware of the discussion (and of the idea that the war was a way to stop it:)), and I am not writing this about Iraq.
What I mean is: this is no joke. Imagine a country is hit by famine, like North Korea in 90s, like Yemen, or like Iran 1917-19 (the do blame us, see) and Holodomor and of course Ireland.
And imagine economic sanctions are imposed on this country (hardships as a form of political pressure. So likely it is Korea), the hardships obviously contribute into the famine and you’re supporting them. Are you personally organising genocide? Perhaps you did not think that there would be a famine. But do you think sanctions were a mistake and must be immediately lifted?
Oops.
Enoch Powell apparently knew quite a bit of Urdu …
Yes, and several other languages beyond Latin/Greek — under the influence of A.E. Housman, including Welsh.
A very clever man, very wrong in very clever ways. Whereas his supporters didn’t understand the half of his cleverness: they were just ordinary wrong.
Aha, apparently someone traced the history of this strange interpretation in Gilmour and dedicated a chapter/essay to it (The thesis I want to advance in this essay is pretty trivial: the success of a literary artefact’s contribution to the formation of (collective) identities depends on the extent to which it manages to elude reading by commanding thoughtless assent. If it weren’t so trivial, we might call it the propaganda paradox; as it is, we should perhaps just call it the propaganda principle. The reason why I nonetheless propose to advance this principle yet again….)
Ortwin de Graef, Epistle to the Europeans (On Not Reading Kipling), in: Re-Thinking Europe, Brill, €32.65
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/194928
He’s impressive:
As he says, Paul’s entire point there is that the gentiles do not do as they please; “a law unto themselves” means not “they do whatever they like” but “they may not have the Jewish Law, but they can still tell right from wrong”: he’s arguing specifically that whether you are Jewish or not, you are in trouble just the same, because you can’t maintain in good conscience that you didn’t know you were doing anything wrong.
There’s also no reason at all to think that Paul means “rulers” particularly: the whole argument is in the context of the first major intra-Christian doctrinal dispute, viz “can we evangelise non-Jews, and if so, do they have to become Jews first?” He’s talking not about imperial oppressors, but about potential evangelisees. Evangelising emperors was not on his horizon.
Kipling (whatever you think of his politics) was not stupid, and what I’ve just said is humdrum Sunday-school stuff that must have been entirely familiar to him (and indeed, to most of his original readership.) Accordingly, it seems to me to be extremely unlikely that he is deliberately referencing Romans at all in his poem.
@DE, yes, I mean the interpretation is very weird. As for the Sunday school, I would expect Gilmour to see that too…Yes, I don’t think he is alluding to Paul’s message (and “the Law” is a thing for Kipling anyway, as Gilmour notes it also appears as “the law of the jungle”).
If he does, that would mean that he is speaking about the colonised people, but “boasting” – and honestly even “lesser breeds” (it’s still Kipling, his view of colonisation seems different) – don’t seem to combine well with this reading.
P.S.
“the Law” is a thing for Kipling anyway
Of course people “without the Law” are Biblical, I don’t mean here that they aren’t.
When I said that technically “as they please” is accurate I meant that they “who do by nature the things contained in the law”, and “having not the law, are a law unto themselves” possibly so “please”. As for sinners, they too do as they please.
—
I am not sure if Paul means that the sinners are also a law unto themsleves and can tell right from wrong:)
In Harpers an essay by Christian Wiman, “The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God?” seems to me to tune in and out, but I mention it for a lack of copyediting.
[begin quote]
Einstein was familiar with field theory and spent much of his later life futilely trying to “unify” the existing theory with the Standard Model, neither of which can account for gravity.7
Still, I find this (perhaps misattributed) quote by him helpful:
“It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in the space between the charges and the particles that is essential for the description of physical phenomena.”
{end quote]
The attribution is easily obtained.
A. Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (1938) 258-259.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/12/the-tune-of-things-christian-wiman-consciousness-god/
https://archive.org/details/evolutionofphysi033254mbp/page/n277/mode/2up?q=%22space+between%22
Is Consciousness God?
No.
Next question, please!
No.
Next question, please!
Yeah, we hardly need to occupy the time of eminent Kusaalists to answer that. Just ask any passing Atheist. Betteridge’s Law applies.
The article is garbage. AI-generated? (Because of its ‘shopping list’ style of disconnected thoughts and unsupportable claims.)
Is ‘Christian Wiman’ a real name? Or is it cover for a collective: Christian Wimmin? [as Private Eye would put it]
Wiman is a real last name in any case. Also Wiemann, Wiegmann and Wiechmann…
I was going to say “And Wigman,” but then I saw that she was originally a Wiegmann.
I’m going to guess that Wigman’s Hardware in Mobile, Alabama is historically connected with (whether or not currently owned by) someone named Wigman who is/was distinct from the Wigman that hat had in mind. Could have been a German-American fellow w/ ancestors named Wiegmann, I suppose.
[begin quote]
Einstein was familiar with field theory and spent much of his later life futilely trying to “unify” the existing theory with the Standard Model, neither of which can account for gravity.7 [end quote]
In Einstein’s time, physicists were nowhere near what’s now called the Standard Model. Also, what are the quotation marks around “unify” doing?
I belatedly looked at that paragraph of the article and would like to rephrase my comment more simply. In regard to physics, Wiman has no idea of what he’s talking about. I couldn’t face looking at the rest of the article.
@Jerry Friedman: That sentence really sounds like something a LLM, as opposed to an uninformed human, would come up with.
The biology is bollocks too.
But I suspect we’re dealing with an author who would regard any criticism of their views based on their incongruence with scientific knowledge as merely being part of the problem.
There is a good bit of stuff by real philosophers (as opposed to dabbling neuroscientists) about consciousness (including panpsychism, which seems to be what is being vaguely alluded to.) I imagine that Wiman would regard all that as murdering to dissect* as well.
And with friends like this, religion really doesn’t need any enemies.
* From
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45557/the-tables-turned
a poem which perfectly encapsulates why (like Byron) I can’t abide Wordsworth. “Hullo clouds! Hullo sky!”
Blake does this theme much better:
https://www.poetry.com/poem/39126/mock-on,-mock-on,-voltaire,-rousseau
It has been said that the difference between zoologists and botanists is that botanists actually like animals.
That’s only true of the neozoologists, though. We paleozoologists escape that whole issue because death is on our side.
Don’t you lecture me, Wordsworth. It’s cold outside.
The paradox of a descriptivist approach to language as a tool to facilitate communication or ‘connecting’ is that descriptivism encourages a higher rate of linguistic and stylistic innovation and as innovations proliferate communication ends up becoming harder, not easier. Doesn’t experience show that people with different styles of writing and speaking don’t tolerate each other that well? Mocking other people’s accents is itself a form of linguistic prescriptivism and probably the most common and the pettiest. But this pettiness reveals something important about human nature, something that we might want to try to understand and accept instead of fighting.
Enforcing a uniform grammar and style may come across as an asshole’s errand to people with rebellious spirits. I imagine it’s spirits of that sort who coined the term ‘grammar nazi’. And it’s definitely true that sometimes the norms (e.g. ‘he or she’ instead of they) are poorly thought out. But on the whole strict norms are actually beneficial to communication because they foster empathy among those who share them.
But on the whole strict norms are actually beneficial to communication because they foster empathy among those who share them.
Citation needed, as the wikifolk say.
descriptivism encourages a higher rate of linguistic and stylistic innovation
No it doesn’t. It describes. Hence the name.
The causal relationship is the exact opposite: those who possess the virtue of empathy are better able to communicate across differences.
Conversely:
Very few* racist bastards are much good at foreign languages. Those who complain about incomprehensible dialects of their own language are generally bigots with an axe to grind. The views of such people on linguistic matters are of little to no interest.
* There are exceptions. Meinhof (as I may have mentioned from time to time) was an Actual Fucking Nazi. Some people are better at compartmentalising than others.
@LH
You would agree I think that prescriptivism is more than a practice, it’s also a mentality based on certain notions and attitudes. The same is true about descriptivism. It’s not simply the practice of describing actual usage, it’s also the mentality of affirming actual usage as in when a teen says: ‘I say ‘like’ all the time, my friends say it too, therefore it’s correct, shut up old man’.
When a whole culture has this mentality that all linguistic and stylistic innovations are good or at least acceptable then the rate of innovation increases because nobody is taught to respect and revere linguistic authorities i.e. the language elite, those who in less rebellious times might be called grammarians or rhetoricians.
Why does the language style of a Times piece from 1925 read so different (and better) to 2025 although no major linguistic evolution has taken place? It’s because the writers of those eras where brought up on rigorous prescriptivism.
@cj
Surely there is a range of approaches to descriptivism, from “recognise all usages by native speakers as equally acceptable” to “some usages, although not incorrect, are deprecated and best avoided in all or specific registers or contexts”, i.e., maybe LH would subscribe more to the second approach than the first.
The same is true about descriptivism. It’s not simply the practice of describing actual usage, it’s also the mentality of affirming actual usage as in when a teen says: ‘I say ‘like’ all the time, my friends say it too, therefore it’s correct, shut up old man’.
No it’s not, that’s all in your head.
It’s like trying to describe atheism based on what a believer thinks: “Atheists hate the very idea of a supreme being! They perform sacrifices to Nothingness! They secretly want to kill all believers!!” No, they just don’t believe in any god. Similarly, descriptivists are simply not prescriptivists: they do not think certain forms of language are “correct” just because some Sacred Book (Strunkwhite, Larousse, the English textbook you had as a kid) says so.
@LH
A better analogy would be to compare descriptivism with secularism, not atheism per se which is a more far-off version of secularism, especially in its more militant iterations.
A secular mentality sees no particular religious creed as inherently better, all are more or less okay and people can decide for themselves which one they will follow, if any. That’s the usual run-of-the-mill secular mentality. Only secular outliers such as militant atheists insist that all religions are bad and that none should be followed.
Similarly, a descriptive mentality normally takes a laissez-faire approach to language: you can say it how you like it just as long as others understand you. Only a few militant oddballs see any sort of prescriptivism or standardization as an evil in itself.
Theoretically speaking you are right. Descriptivism has in theory no real broader effect on how people speak and write just as secularism has in theory no real broader effect on how people deal with the issue of religion. It’s all in Jaeger’s head. But as usual, theory fails when it comes in contact with reality. Secularism has in practice led to a very real and very significant decline of religion among the societies it has spread in and this decline can be measured by sociologists using ordinary empirical and statistical tools. So secularism is not simply a neutral force but a practically anti-religious one, even though it’s neutral in theory.
militant atheists insist that all religions are bad and that none should be followed
Then that makes me a non-militant atheist. I don’t much care whether other people follow religions of their choosing, so long as they don’t try to coerce others.
Secularism has in practice led to a very real and very significant decline of religion among the societies it has spread in and this decline can be measured by sociologists using ordinary empirical and statistical tools. So secularism is not simply a neutral force but a practically anti-religious one, even though it’s neutral in theory.
The rise of secularism means precisely that fewer people subscribe to religious beliefs. It doesn’t follow at all that one causes the other. They are different names for the same thing.
What is secularism other than a label for the decline of religion?
Very few people indeed are even aware of any secularist ideology (apart maybe from a historical example or two), let alone consciously follow one.
Estne de gustibus disputandum?
a very real and very significant decline of religion
What might have caused that is the very actions of some claiming religious justification for their behaviour. Or rather, those actions coming to light where they previously took place under the veil of institutional secrecy.
Or are you blaming the ‘force’ of Secularism for exposing abuses and hypocrisy? Just as you are blaming Descriptivism for, errm, describing.
What I note about Prescriptivists (thinking of my father, and my English teacher) is in unguarded moments they break their own rules and talk just like everybody else (of their age). Over at LLog they’ve plenty of examples from White’s published prose of violating StrunkWhite.
That’s a factor in leaving organized religion, of course (secularism, laïcité); but I don’t think it makes a lot of people conclude there’s no god at all (atheism) or that there’s no point in trying to answer that question (Apathetic Agnosticism) or that the question is silly in the first place (ignosticism).
I actually agree with AntC that what one might Marxistly call the Internal Contradictions of various organised religions have been much more significant in causing their decline than any intellectual polemic from proponents of “secularism.”
But much more significantly, the decline is intimately bound up with the far-reaching social changes consequent on the industrial revolution. There have always been scandals within organised religions, always been gross hypocrisies and betrayals of basic principles by religious leaders: they didn’t lead to widespread complete abandonment of organised religion until modern times. So such betrayals can’t be a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon.
“Secularism” as an intellectual movement is no more likely to cause a given individual to abandon their faith than the works of (say) C S Lewis are likely to convert a convinced atheist. In our own day, Dawkins et al produce works which function not as evangelism for atheism but as apologetics: like Christian apologetics, they provide intellectual reassurance for the small minority of people who want to have rational arguments in support of their beliefs.*
Almost nobody actually adopts their beliefs (or lack of them) on the basis of pure intellectual ratiocination, though quite a few people like to imagine that they have done so. More self-aware people will notice how much their beliefs are really the product of their life experiences and social interactions. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate their beliefs: but it’s always better to be clear about these things.
There have been high-profile cases of intellectuals reluctantly abandoning their traditional faith in the light of their own developing understanding of science (Darwin himself comes to mind.) I suspect that the dynamic was often more complex than the individuals themselves may have always realised; most believers have plenty of personal reasons, not always acknowledged, to feel that their faith is at least sometimes irksome.** But be that as it may, I don’t think that such journeys were at all typical of society in general, or that parallel struggles can explain widespread abandonment of traditional religion.
* I’m not dissing apologetics, of either kind: I belong to the small minority myself.
** If your beliefs never lead you to do anything you’d really rather not, they’re not so much “beliefs” as a form of light entertainment.
@David L.: The rise of secularism means precisely that fewer people subscribe to religious beliefs. It doesn’t follow at all that one causes the other. They are different names for the same thing.
@David M.: What is secularism other than a label for the decline of religion?
AHD says,
That’s my understanding too. And secularism in sense 2 can give rise to a decline of religion in the next generation, as for instance public schools are required to teach science.
David E.: I agree that most people aren’t very logical about their beliefs regarding religion and that scandals in organized religion can lead to a decline in belief in God. I think for a significant number of people, the organized religion that they belonged to was the only thing keeping them believing in God, or the only thing causing them to try to make their children believe in God.
But I suspect that science did have a lot to do with the decline in belief in God in many places, since it provided the answer to a question that previously had no satisfactory answer: How did the diversity of rocks and terrains, the diversity of species, the complicated processes of life, and such come to be if there was no Creator? Even if people didn’t understand the scientific answers well, many were and are convinced that those answers are satisfactory. I don’t see what the Industrial Revolution as such might have had to do with it.
The Argument from Design is very weak, and I very much doubt that any significant number of people have ever really been led to even Deism by it (indeed, the Argument from Design only seems plausible to people who actually believe in a Creator God already.*) So I also doubt that demolishing the Argument from Design was a significant cause for many people abandoning traditional religions, though it may often have played a role as an excuse or as a makeshift “explanation” for what really had deeper social causes. Organised religions were (as it were) pre-weakened by quite other trends.
I think one candidate is the individualism which arises from the Enlightenment project, coupled with certain strands of sola fide Protestantism. That readily leads to an interpretation of religion as a matter of individual personal opinion and interpretation. If there is no such thing as society**, organised religion has become something quite different (and more fragile) than what it was before: a sort of club of like-minded people.
Then the social changes ushered in by the industrial revolution uprooted whole communities and atomised society. This caused major disruptions in all kinds of traditional patterns of behaviour.
* It just isn’t the case that people believed in God(s) in the olden days just because they had an inadequate grasp of physics. This is a just-so story put about by the less, um, intellectual kinds of atheist polemicist (it often goes with … interesting … ideas about “primitive peoples”, based on thought experiments rather than evidence and a comforting certainty that primitive people are/were all basically rather stupid.)
If people thought God(s) sent rain, that was not because they were trying to solve the question of why it rains. It wasn’t an early, now discredited, scientific hypothesis. They believed in God(s) a priori. In that context, well, yes, perhaps a God sent rain (among many other activities and attributes.) But he/she/it was not the explanation of rain.
** Yes, I know. But you know what I mean, nevertheless.
a sort of club of like-minded people.
I must thank DE in earlier threads[**] for pointing out that for many, regularly going to church is (or at least was before the rise of Evangelism) to act out personal membership of the club. So didn’t say much about beliefs. Industrial revolution … urbanisation … end of “society” … means people don’t get to church so much, so drop out of organised religion, so don’t get regularly reminded of those beliefs they’re supposed to adhere to, so eventually the beliefs wither away unnourished. And if folks don’t actively go looking for a rationale, they end up with a vague sense of ‘there must be _something_’ — which is a response I get all the time.
[**] Particularly the bit about people not even listening to their own words when reciting the Credo or Lord’s Prayer.
I think one candidate is the individualism which arises from the Enlightenment project, …
Yeah. And Evangelism can also be explained as a form of individualism: I have had a particular revelatory experience/been born again/am enlightened, even.
I had assumed (wrongly) that someone’s reason for joining/staying active in a particular sect was from some form of personal revelation. I’ve never experienced something I could describe in those terms, so dropped out of all forms of such ‘club’s. It was only later by rationalising that I came to explicit Atheism.
It was the founding of America, surely, that can be thanked (or blamed) for that. (‘State’ Religions still have formal recognition in most of the rest of the English-speaking democracies.) Then I find it bizarre that as most of the ‘Old World’ has become more secular, U.S. democracy/public life is now dominated by Evangelicals.
It’s not a natural state of affairs. To a great extent it reflects a deliberate (and in its own terms, highly successful) Reagan-era Republican strategy of tapping into support from the most bigoted wing of Evangelicalism as it then was, and exacerbating its cultural paranoia.
https://www.salon.com/2014/05/18/the_evangelical_presidency_reagans_dangerous_love_affair_with_the_christian_right/
Much of this at the time was aimed at Jimmy Carter, an actual Christian and a decent man (whatever views one might hold of his performance as President.)
I am always puzzled by the leap some make when they have a spiritual experience, from non-believers straight to accepting the exact full dogma of whichever faith happens to be around: some intelligent entity must have created the universe — therefore one accepts baptism, or avoiding eating milk and meat together, etc. There must be a name for this.
(Add reference to the best religion joke ever.)
In the somewhat more restricted field of conversions to Christianity, I have often noted that converts generally come to hold that the doctrines of the first Christians they then encounter are wholly definitive. This is perhaps analogous with Konrad Lorenz’ ducklings.
[I sort-of exemplify this myself, though I was in fact greatly influenced by two people with widely divergent views in the critical duckling period, I eventually gravitated to the views closest to those I was brought up in, and had repudiated as an atheist teenager. Pure coincidence.]
I think the name for it is really just cognitive conservation of effort. I mean, it’s discombobulating enough being converted, without sweating the small stuff afterwards. (“How many gods? OK …”)
accepting the exact full dogma of whichever faith happens to be around
Hmm I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. I suspect there would be violent schisms amongst all these new Evangelicals (as there are amongst the fractured Left) if it weren’t that they’re united against what they perceive as threats to ‘the American Way of Life’: wokeism, DEI, beardos, non-whites (not that they say that out loud in public). cultural paranoia is exactly right.
What American ‘Family Values’ would countenance Trump’s behaviour?
I wasn’t thinking about U.S evangelical born-agains or anyone else in particular. It’s a general phenomenon that’s been around forever.
I am always puzzled…
Serious answers to this conundrum were already (pre)provided (people rarely convert/deconvert for intellectual reasons, it’s all about community). But it’s an excuse to link to this wonderful comedic bit.
The idea is indeed the other way around: that the Argument from Design kept lots of people in the religions they already had.
Dawkins: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
Not as much as the French Revolution.
(And while the US was founded without an established religion at the federal level, many states kept state religions for much longer.)
The idea is indeed the other way around: that the Argument from Design kept lots of people in the religions they already had.
That also strikes me as unlikely. If you already believe in a Creator God, the Argument from Design is really pretty trivial. It doesn’t add anything. I think intellectual exercises like this were of little concern to most actual believers: the well-publicised debates on things of this kind were really a sort of epiphenomenon.
Having said that, debates of that kind probably did contribute to the narrative that people only believe in God because they are ignorant (wilfully or otherwise), so it’s not intellectually respectable to be a believer, and people who claim to be rational are hypocritical or delusional if they say they believe in God.
This works perfectly well as a rhetorical strategy regardless of whether anybody actually believes in God because of the Argument from Design. (I’ve never met anyone who did.)
It’s rather like saying to an atheist: you disbelieve in God because you believe in the theory of evolution (the more brain-dead type of US “evangelical” does indeed say such things, of course.) I would hope and expect that any self-respecting atheist would reply that they had much better reasons for disbelieving in God than that.
Apologetics is its own thing. The more cerebral kind of Christian has sometimes got themselves tied in intellectual knots from mistaking the defensive work of maintaining that Christianity is not illogical or immoral for the actual positive intellectual accompaniments of belief.
C S Lewis has a remark somewhere which is apropos: he says that his faith often felt at its weakest when he had just finished engaging in a bout of apologetics, because that created the illusion for a while that the apologetic arguments he’d been propounding were actually the basis of his own belief: so the truth of his belief seemed to depend on the rigour (or not) of his own all-too-fallible arguments.
Rachael Bedard has a piece in today’s NY Times that addresses such issues in the context of anti-vax:
This is what comes of deliberately stoking cultural paranoia for political gain.
This kind of pathology is largely absent in the UK (may God grant that it remain so.) The nearest I’ve come to this is Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transfusions on behalf of their children; or, as I should say, attempting to do so: they do not have any such right in UK law.
There’s confusion about my use of the term secularism so I’d better explain myself.
Secularism is best understood as an umbrella term for various philosophies that appeared in the era after the Middle Ages (Neuzeit in German, the English term ‘modern era’ is somewhat vague chronologically) featuring a cosmological, epistemological and ethical framework based on considerations and concepts that deliberately exclude theology and metaphysics and focus solely on the secular i.e the sensuous and worldly domains of the human experience, such as human history or nature in the raw sense.
Note that ‘theological’ doesn’t have to mean Christian. Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism are pre-Christian traditions that derive their core tenets from ideas that are essentially theological, not secular. Christianity inherited a long philosophical tradition that was itself steeped in theology, it didn’t create this tradition from scratch. For this reason, the Christian religion is more than just another cult with its own peculiar myths and taboos. It also has a coherent theological system that developed in its dialogue with and assimilation of ancient philosophical discourse, a background that other non-Western religious traditions lack.
The reason why theological disputes are so common and so important in the history of Christianity cannot be understood if we don’t grasp the fundamental fact that Christianity is at its core the most philosophical of religions. Precisely because of this peculiarity of Christianity any attempt to combat it also had to be deeply and intensely philosophical itself in order to have any chance of success. Neo-Platonism tried and failed to defeat Christianity. But centuries later, a tradition developed that would finally succeed. This rival anti-metaphysical, anti-theological philosophical tradition, developed in a Western context to fight a Western religion is called secularism. It features countless diverse thinkers, among them Spinoza or Nietzsche.
If we trace the history of the neuzeitliche Metaphysikkritik (the criticism of metaphysics in the modern era) we’ll see that secularism had precursors in the Late Middle Ages when the unprecedented tragedy of the Black Death led the thinkers of the period i.e. the Christian theologians, to question a central tenet of their religion: the benevolence of God. The theological debates in the aftermath of the Black Death, coupled with new socio-political trends, blossomed into a new secular worldview that reached its climax in the 19th century, the first time that anti-metaphysical and anti-religious thought came to unquestionably dominate the intellectual and philosophical landscape. Nevertheless, the originality of the various anti-metaphysical philosophical ideas expressed in the 19th century has been overestimated. All of them had a long history spanning centuries prior.
In our time, secularism is showing clear signs of decline. Although it continues to be the dominant cultural paradigm governing all areas of the human experience, it has lost much of the prestige and self-assurance it had in the late 19th century.
Though the article was linked, it’s important to emphasize the part in which anti-vaxxers told the father that his child died not by measles but was mistreated for pneumonia in hospital.
If it was indeed measles–which I can’t say–then, as a father of a daughter, it is hard for me to imagine a lie more publicly obscurantist and personally, humanly more cruel.
@sg
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pneumonia-mortality-by-age
Something like 3 deaths per 100000 pop by pneumonia, age 5-14.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-from-measles-by-age
6700 deaths per 100000 pop by measles, age 5-14.
Although statistics might suggest the cause was more likely measles, go with your gut and sue the hospital!
There have been several major epidemics of measles in West Africa. It is particularly often fatal to children with Vitamin A deficiency, which affected, to some extent, the majority of children where I was working.
A feature which I particularly remember is that many survivors were left blind.
Anti-Vaxxers are guilty of a crime against humanity. There are no excuses to be made for them based on their own deliberately cultivated indifference to fact: that is merely part of the their crime. They are just sincerely evil.
Bugger this talk of the imagined “autonomy” of their dupes. They are “autonomous” in the same sense as the victims of pyramid sales scams are “autonomous.”
I’ll try to make serious contributions to the secularism topic in the next few days. For now, take a look at this picture. 🙂
@DE: Yes, the Argument from Design is logically weak, especially as an attempt to prove the existence of an Abrahamic-style Supreme Being, but it’s a big part of God’s answer to Job. And didn’t you and I just agree that people’s views on these matters are often not very logical? I don’t think your attitude and mine toward people at different times in history are very different.
* It just isn’t the case that people believed in God(s) in the olden days just because they had an inadequate grasp of physics. This is a just-so story put about by the less, um, intellectual kinds of atheist polemicist (it often goes with … interesting … ideas about “primitive peoples”, based on thought experiments rather than evidence and a comforting certainty that primitive people are/were all basically rather stupid.)
If people thought God(s) sent rain, that was not because they were trying to solve the question of why it rains. It wasn’t an early, now discredited, scientific hypothesis. They believed in God(s) a priori. In that context, well, yes, perhaps a God sent rain (among many other activities and attributes.) But he/she/it was not the explanation of rain.
What’s your evidence for “a priori”? In the mythology from a few cultures that I know a little about, there’s a Creator or some personifications of natural phenomena such as thunder or both. I’m not suggesting that people were trying to solve the question of why it rains, much less that they were doing so by framing scientific hypotheses before science was invented. I’m suggesting that based on that slight acquaintance with mythology that from the start, some myths explained things. And when, say in Christian Europe, people suggested that there was no God, people at any intellectual level almost up to Kant might think about Genesis 1 and 2 and the beginning of Psalm 19 and stuff, and say, OK, where did all this come from? Until the work of Lyell and Darwin and others suggested that such questions could be answered.
On the Industrial Revolution, conquests and diasporas and disasters had caused great disruptions that did not decrease religion. I think the other things you identify were involved, and I’d add that it may have started to sink in that religious tolerance and secular science had pragmatic benefits.
To be fair, Lyell tried to abolish the question more than answer it: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” is what he could see in the rocks.
but it’s a big part of God’s answer to Job
Surely not? Job has at no point doubted the existence of God, who is in any case at that point actually talking to him.
God is appealing to the wonders of creation to make a point about his nature (essentially, “stronger and wiser than you can even imagine”) not his existence.
Personally, I am far from taken with arguments from the nature of creation to the (benign) character of God, but that definitely is a Biblical trope (Paul alludes to it, as a truism needing no real discussion, in Romans, for example.) But nowhere in the Bible is there an argument for the existence of God: that’s simply taken as read throughout.
What Job has been disputing is the justice of God (as several “comforters” quite reasonably point out, also implying that to do this is blasphemy.)
The shock twist at the end is that God declares that it is Job who has spoken rightly about him, and the Comforters (much of whose discourse could be straight out of the psalms, and is completely orthodox throughout) need to ask for Job’s forgiveness and intercession.
What’s your evidence for “a priori”? In the mythology from a few cultures that I know a little about, there’s a Creator or some personifications of natural phenomena such as thunder or both.
The Kusaasi, who are typical at least of their cultural area (generalising about “African culture” is a mug’s game) say that Win “God” created the universe. (This is regarded as an obvious platitude rather than some kind of credo.) But he has nothing really to do with its daily workings at all. Proverb:
Win nyɛ ka sin.
“God sees and is silent.”
The Kusaasi have a perfectly well developed sense of cause and effect: there’s a Kusaal proverb in mockery of someone who doesn’t:
Pʋ nyɛ saa kʋʋbɔ, ka nyɛ saa niib.
“Didn’t see the clouds gathering, did see the rain.”
The characteristic Kusaasi “religious” activity is consulting professional soothsayers, who cast lots to get guidance in decisionmaking for their clients.
The supernatural entities that actually matter in everyday life are local wina “genii” that are not thought of in anthropomorphic terms. Relationships with them are basically transactional (a major role of soothsayers is to find out what wina actually want.) If you blithely ignore all this, basically you can expect misfortunes, very much as you would if you ignore proper relationships with human beings.
The idea that any of these entities explain natural phenomena is not present. It’s just not what the system is for.
There’s no “mythology” in the sense that we use the term.
My impression is that Kusaasi “religion” is at least as typical in terms of the total range of human experience as any of the major “world” religions. In fact, the major world religions are, once you start thinking about it, highly atypical: being a major world religion at all entails a whole lot of weird and unusual attributes, practically by definition.
As far away as Rwanda, though, there is* a quite similar deistic Creator who created the world, stepped back, hasn’t done anything since, and in principle has the power to help you but isn’t going to because he** doesn’t know about you and isn’t there. Important in any other than a historical sense are lesser deities/spirits.
* From what little I’ve read. The people from there I’ve actually met are very, very Catholic – though at the extreme upbeat end of Catholicism: On est là pour représenter l’amour de Dieu.
** Possibly an unwarranted assumption, given a language that doesn’t distinguish m/f.
Possibly an unwarranted assumption, given a language that doesn’t distinguish m/f.
It’s more radical than that …
Swahili Mungu “God” actually belongs to a typically non-human gender (the core meaning of which is “trees and other extended things.”)
Kusaal Win likewise does not belong to either of the “genders”* that most human-reference nouns do, but to the default non-human gender. Kusaal does have some human-reference nouns in that “gender”, but most of them seem to have been reassigned from the core “human” gender for phonological reasons (specifically, that they have stems ending in a long vowel, which doesn’t play nice with the human-sg ending -a.) Doesn’t apply to Win.
Win(n)a’am, favoured by Christians as the word for “God”, which is probably actually a loanword from Mooré, belongs to the “liquids and abstract nouns” gender. Literally, it’s something like “Spiritual Kingship.”
* Scare quotes because Kusaal doesn’t preserve noun-class-based grammatical agreement; however, the morphology of individual nouns is unchanged from the time when this still was a Bantu-style multiple-gender system.
In re the gender of God:
In many Oti-Volta languages, “God” and “sun” are exact homophones. I think this has come about by sheer phonological-historical accident (in Kusaal, per contra, the words differ in tone, vowel quality and noun-class membership) but even if this is the case, it still seems to have given rise to the idea that the wina of human beings (nearest analogue to our “soul”) return to the sun at death.
I think this is parallel to the similarly widespread idea in that area that the gall bladder is the seat of common-sense and reason in general: again, the words are definitely quite distinct in some Oti-Volta languages, and where they are no longer distinct, this is usually as the expected outcome of known historical sound changes.
So: Edward-Benjamin Sapir-Whorf, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
Anti-Vaxxers are guilty of a crime against humanity.
These are the same people who talk of ‘protecting’ the unborn child. Rather than “succor” that dude — presuming measles was the proximate cause of his daughter’s death — I’d be throwing him in jail, to prevent him having any more kids to murder.
Of course this would be counter-productive amongst that ‘community’, only stoke the cultural paranoia.
… in the olden days just because they had an inadequate grasp of physics.
Is it that anti-vaxxers have an inadequate grasp of epidemiology? Is ‘herd immunity’ too abstruse as a concept? Is it too hard to understand that a virus might cause the death of a few, cause some to be very ill but recover, perhaps with some getting serious relapses, yet many throw it off after a week or so? Does this stretch the idea of ’cause’ too much?
And yet despite millions receiving the vaccine with no side-effects (except not suffering measles), these same people are convinced MMR ’causes’ Autism.
Rachael Bedard has a piece in today’s NY Times that addresses such issues in the context of anti-vax
Thank you @Hat for drawing attention. I’m finding Bedard’s attitude really quite disturbing, for a Physician.
I can understand that professionally, Bedard is empathetic with the bereaved. I also feel some facts should be pointed out:
Not only has the father been bereaved (he seems to have been the main mover in refusing vaccination), but also the mother and several siblings — who are still unvaccinated. Isn’t Bedard’s obligation as a Physician to get them vaccinated? Isn’t her obligation as a carer to be equally empathetic to all who’ve been bereaved?
The father ” had granted the [anti-vax] organization access to his daughter’s medical records.” Does the mother not get a say in that? The mother’s voice seems to be entirely missing in all the coverage. (I’d well understand if the mother didn’t want any more attention to exacerbate the trauma; but Bedard seems to have written the mother out of the piece entirely.)
Dr. Kory is a nutjob whose “certifications were to be revoked [2023] for spreading medical misinformation” [wikip] Then was he even entitled to be looking at patient records? Does he have enough expertise on measles or pneumonia to be able to make a diagnosis, let alone pronounce cause of death?
Also attending this conference was the medical fraudster Andrew Wakefield, struck off 2010. Isn’t Bedard’s obligation as a writer on medical topics to say these people and their opinions are dangerous and to be ignored?
Isn’t Bedard’s obligation here to get the kids removed from the father’s ‘care’?
She goes on about empathising with peoples’ suffering. Isn’t her obligation ‘first, do no (more) harm’?
It’s worth mentioning that Wakefield was indeed struck off for unequivocal academic fraud, not for his opinions on autism and vaccinations. The GMC report of their reasoning (which I have read) is admirably dispassionate and keeps rigorously to the fraud issue.
Dr Bedard is operating in a toxic and paranoid political environment where doing the right thing is not even possible, and would probably put her in personal danger if she tried, but I agree that she seems to be in danger of rationalising her powerlessness as empathy for the deluded father who actually caused the problem, and is (all too understandably) systematically denying this devastatiing fact, with the help of the fraudsters ultimately responsible for the tragedy (who have every personal interest of their own in maintaining the lie.)
I thought Dr Bedard’s piece in the Times was very illuminating. Yes, she’s a doctor, but what power does she have (legally or ethically?) to “get the kids removed from the father’s care?” Wouldn’t she have to be licensed in Texas, at the very minimum?
Her essay is very clear about who Wakefield and Kory are. She is not expressing sympathy for the anti-vaxxers but trying to understand where they are coming from.
Isn’t Bedard’s obligation as a writer on medical topics to say these people and their opinions are dangerous and to be ignored?
She does say that, pretty clearly, IMO.
I’m reminded somewhat of the discussions we’ve had here of Dawkins vs believers. Fans of Dawkins think that telling religious people that they are stupid and misguided is going to change their minds. Most people here don’t agree. Does anyone think that telling antivaxxers they are stupid and misguided is going to do any good?
Yes, she’s a doctor, but what power does she have (legally or ethically?) to “get the kids removed from the father’s care?”
Exactly. You’re expecting way too much of her; in her situation she’s doing the best she can. And you have to be reading it with maximum paranoia to think she’s in any way sympathetic with “these people and their opinions.”
@DE: [Job] God is appealing to the wonders of creation to make a point about his nature (essentially, “stronger and wiser than you can even imagine”) not his existence.
Yes, but the picture of God as the wonderful designer is there, so Before Science it was available to followers of Abrahamic religions if people questioned the existence of God. Likewise (you knew I was going to get to this) Psalm 104 (103).
It just isn’t the case that people believed in God(s) in the olden days just because they had an inadequate grasp of physics.
When I responded to that, I should have noted that it’s irrelevant to what I said previously about the decline of belief in religion starting in Europe and its colonies and former colonies with widespread European-style education. Regardless of what originally caused belief in gods and specifically the Abrahamic god, “How did all this get to be like this?” was a persuasive argument for most people. It got a lot less persuasive when geology and biology (maybe more important here than physics*) showed promise of being able to answer large parts of that question.
Turning to other traditions…
Apparently traditional Kusaasi beliefs (which I should have remembered more about from what you’d written here already) are consistent with my attempt at a generalization: “In the mythology [sic] from a few cultures that I know a little about, there’s a Creator or some personifications of natural phenomena such as thunder or both.”
Do you have any idea what answer I might get if I told a… Kusaasi person (what’s the singular?) that I see no reason to believe that there was a Creator? Maybe “Look around”?
The Kusaasi have a perfectly well developed sense of cause and effect: there’s a Kusaal proverb in mockery of someone who doesn’t:
Pʋ nyɛ saa kʋʋbɔ, ka nyɛ saa niib.
“Didn’t see the clouds gathering, did see the rain.”
And until Abrahamic religions or maybe science showed up, they didn’t consider why sometimes there were clouds gathering and sometimes there weren’t?
*That is, more important to the history of thought about religion. In an absolute sense, physics is obviously the most important science, of course.
Kusaasi person (what’s the singular?)
“Kusaasi”, in English, though the word is borrowed from (the Mampruli version of) the plural Kʋsaas (singular, Kʋsaa.)
That’s the usual pattern for local ethnonyms in the local English, though it’s not absolute: some people use “Busangas” for the Bisa, for example, which is from the Mooré exonym Bʋsãanga (plural, Bʋsãanse.)
It’s just occurred to me that bʋsãanga means “strange goat” in Mooré. As I say, exonym …
(The Kusaal equivalent, Bʋsaŋ, I am glad to say, does not show this unfortunate homophony …)
Do you have any idea what answer I might get if I told a… Kusaasi person (what’s the singular?) that I see no reason to believe that there was a Creator?
Ventriloquising (probably wrongly):
Ɛhɛɛn, ba pʋn yɛlim ye Nasaarnam ɛɛnti pian’ad ala, ban dɔl nɛ ba mɛŋ malima la zug.
“Aha! People have told me before, that Europeans habitually say that, because they have their own customs.”
In reality, of course, it would depend on who you asked. Someone who could speak English (or French) might well give you a rather different answer. Atheists are not thick on the ground in Ghana, though, so it’s not an issue people are likely to have much of a handle on.
The usual Kusaal word for “Bisa person” is actually Barig, plural Baris (and the Bisa language is Bat.) This comes from “Bareka”, the self-designation of one of the major Bisa subgroups, but in Kusaal it’s used for all Bisa. Same principle as “allemand” and “Graecus.”
And yet despite millions receiving the vaccine with no side-effects (except not suffering measles), these same people are convinced MMR ’causes’ Autism.
I have a neighbour whose legs swelled up horrendously after the covid vaccine. They are still swollen to some extent. I believe in vaccines, but cases like this challenge my convictions.
Thanks @Bathrobe, yes that appears to be a thing. Warning: graphic images. I can’t find more recent/follow-up papers on incidence or on possible predisposing factors. (There’s also reported cases of glandular swelling (adenopathy) — which is an expected possible effect, but persisting more than the expected few days.)
Nobody I know of has suffered that sort of swelling following vaccination — including those with generally poor health. Anecdata.
It’s complicated, see my remark above about understanding epidemiology. More research needed. I wish a mature, risk-aware conversation was possible.
As far as I understand it, the research remains sound that there’s no correlation between MMR and Autism. The risks to children from contracting measles remain severe.
The idea of God as a ‘designer’ is actually quite a recent idea that appeared in the misguided attempt by some protestant sects to ‘disprove’ evolution. No theologian ever claimed that God formed humans, animals, the skies or whatever quasi with his own hands as if he were a potter or stone cutter. Even in antiquity the biblical creation story wasn’t taken literally by theologians. So biblical literalism too is a surprisingly recent ideological development. The notion that God ‘created’ in traditional theological terms simply means that the existence of the universe depends ontologically (not in the strict causal sense of an object’s manufacture by an artisan) on the existence of something absolutely transcendental and ineffable. This idea, the basis of all metaphysics, is unfalsifiable. No matter how much our knowledge of the mechanics of the universe progresses, it cannot be disproven experimentally because it cannot be tested. The ineffable by definition cannot be put to the test and it can’t be forced to reveal itself. If anything, developments in cosmology over the last few decades have made the public’s urge to engage in wild metaphysical speculations stronger, not weaker.
Traditionally, atheists tended to argue against the existence of God using philosophical ideas such as by evoking the age-old question of the problem of evil: ‘If God exists why is there such an extreme level of disharmony and immorality in the world?’ The habit of using biology to argue against God’s existence (or rather against the biblical creation story) is extremely recent.
There are plenty of people that like their steaks or pork chops well-done i.e. hard as a sole, among them Donald Trump, a man not quite famous for his refined tastes. But virtually all professional cooks on the planet take well-done steaks to be something barbaric and abominable. And while all cooks in the world would heartily agree that there are many legitimate ways in which people’s tastes may differ, they would also agree that there are some hard limits to what can plausibly count as good taste. Just as there is no universe in which Trump’s preferred way of speaking (which is childishly colloquial) counts as decent rhetoric, there is no universe in which his preferred way of enjoying steaks counts as decent dining.
No theologian perhaps, but the second creation story does go there: Gen 2:7, KJV copypasta – “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
But they don’t agree on where those limits are!
Steaks, BTW, are a rather desperate attempt to escape from the consequences of a category error. Beef, you see, must be boiled, just as pork must be fried. Frying beef, as in a steak, is just wrong, and the best you can hope for is a tradeoff between the different downsides of frying it and having it raw.
Frying beef, as in a steak,
I thought the mode of cooking steaks is grilling? Probably barbecuing? (I agree with the distaste at them being well-done.)
The shmoo tastes like chicken when fried, like pork when roasted, and like steak when broiled. That tells you something.
I thought the mode of cooking steaks is grilling?
Not to an Austrian. See this thread.
—Keith Laumer, “Courier”. The Retief stories were favorites of my youth, not necessarily recommended for those over 25. I believe broiling is known in some countries as “grilling”.
Steaks are OK, especially really tender ones with mushrooms and garlic, but I do like stews (is that what you mean by “boiled”, DM?) a bit better. I usually bake pork, often marinated, but I currently have some whole hominy in my refrigerator and will soon make posole (=MexSp “pozole”, but the New Mexico version is much simpler). And I wouldn’t want to go through a winter without pork pot-roasted with sauerkraut.
One of the points in which I discover I agree with al-Ghazali is in his
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/occasionalism/
(which he didn’t initiate in the Islamic tradition, but drew from al-Ash’ari.) It’s a kind of anti-Deism. It also renders the whole question of a historical Creation somewhat moot, although al-Ghazali himself believed in it as a revealed truth (as opposed to something deducible on philosophical grounds.) Interestingly, he (probably) does not in fact deny physical causality, but the idea that the connection between cause and effect is necessary (as opposed to contingent.)
You could (but probably should not) force the traditional Kusaasi worldview into this framework, if you don’t mind a bit a major cross-cultural comparison of apples to oranges.
Win, the usual “pagan” word for the Creator, is the “same word” as win, the “spiritual individuality” of a place or an animal or a person (where it is the nearest thing to our “soul.”) So you might argue the Win the Creator is just the win of creation – of everything. (Ideas like this usually get called “animism”, but I avoid the A-Word on purpose in this context, because in practice is seems to be used to lump together all kinds of really rather different cultures’ worldviews in order to make them into a “religion” in the sense we are accustomed to.) The statement that Win created the universe would then be a kind of metaphor (or even a Christian or Muslim misinterpretation.)
“Aha! People have told me before, that Europeans habitually say that, because they have their own customs.”
Thank you. I’d have to insist that I came to Ghana for an argument.
A typical Kusaasi person would (I am pretty sure) find it difficult to see what there was to argue about, having the sound Wittgensteinian view that the difference in views in question simply reflected a different “form of life” (or Lebensform as it is called in Kusaal.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_life
[It’s also very bad form to contradict a guest. It took me a while to realise that just because nobody said I was wrong about something, that didn’t actually mean they thought I was right.]
Do you call it that when it happens in a pan, too? The steaks I’ve been seeing lately arrived sizzling in a pan. No added oil or anything, though, so “frying” is certainly not the best choice of word.
Broiling and grilling are “dry” cooking, where the dripping juices are collected below, or in the case of charcoal grilling, flavor the smoke.
the idea that the connection between cause and effect is necessary (as opposed to contingent.)
Al-Ghazali seems to want to both have his cake and eat it:
So if something happens in accordance with cause and effect, all is well/causation confirmed. And if it doesn’t, Lo! Miracle! God is Great!
I’m sure Philosophers have a Latin term for this style of sophistry — it just won’t come to mind at the moment (petitio principii?). An ‘explanation’ that merely restates the observations, explaining nothing.
I know such an “explanation” as an “Anne Elk theory.”
I’m pretty sure “This is my theory, > cough, cough <” is lifted straight from Bluebottle/Goon Show. Only that was funny [Sellers’ timing].
the connection between cause and effect
There is a point (if Einstein is to be believed) whereof even a full-throated chain-of-causation Atheist must remain silent. At a singularity (a black hole, or the scrunched-up universe just before the ‘big bang’) all information is lost (in a technical/idiosyncratic sense of ‘information’), meaning none can observe why or how the big bang banged, or what ’caused’ it to form galaxies/stars/planets in some particular arrangement.
This is distinct from the ‘God does not play dice’ variety of Quantum theory Uncertainty.
(Those two I was rehearsing with the god-botherers who tried to back me into conceding there was a first cause.)
The steaks I’ve been seeing lately arrived sizzling in a pan. No added oil or anything,
Have they been cooked like that? Or cooked over a grill, then put in the pan to stay hot? Dry-heat in a pan I think I’d call ‘searing’.
As @Y points out, steaks are supposed to self-sizzle from marbling or from an outside layer of fat.
Al-Ghazali seems to want to both have his cake and eat it
Not at all. His position is that causation in the case of miracles and non-miracles is the same: God is the sole true cause (in some sense) in both cases. The position he is opposing is that the mechanism of the universe ticks along as a kind of Deistic clockwork almost always, but God occasionally resets the time on special occasions to make a point. (This is pretty much the usual view among yer average Christians in the pew, at least, those who ever give the matter any thought at all.)
His further views relate to precisely how the cause and effect relationships we undoubtedly do observe in the world should be interpreted if you take the position that God is the only true causal agent: are they essentially illusory, or can we interpret them as having at least some kind of independent reality?
Certainly his views are unlikely to appeal to an atheist, who does not accept the foundational premise, but they are by no means logically inconsistent. And he sees (as most people do not) that the very concept of causation is problematic in ways that need deeper examination.
In many ways he exemplifies Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy leaves everything the same: he’s not disagreeing with Avicenna about what happens, but how to understand what happens. His objections to Avicenna’s views is that he thinks they are incompatible with revealed religion, and have in practice led to deviations from proper Islamic practice, but his argumentation is deliberately conducted within the same Aristotelean framework, because he means to show not just that Avicenna’s views on some (not all) matters are unIslamic, but that they are internally inconsistent. (Hence his snappy title.)
In other words, he does not think the job can be done by (effectively) saying: “Hey: your thoughts are unIslamic! Stop thinking them!”
Al-Ghazali was by no means opposed to scientific enquiry, and specifically objected to misuse of religion to oppose it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers#Cosmology_and_astronomy
I don’t think he’d have had much patience with US Creationists (quite apart from them being, well, infidels, he would have held their characteristic modes of discourse in justified contempt.)
@de
Not having read the philosophical writings alluded to, can’t things have both a proximate and an ultimate cause (or even a whole series of proximate and ultimate causes), so that while the ultimate cause is God, for most explanatory or pragmatic purposes related to a given effect (apart from miraculous ones) it is necessary to identify some other cause?
or even a whole series of proximate and ultimate causes
Sure. Al-Ghazali basically collapses this causal chain in his philosophical position, but in a way that doesn’t make it pointless to investigate the (apparent) cause and effect relationships we observe in the world. Because God is rational, even if he is the immediate cause of all events, it is rational to expect to discover recurrent regularities in the relationships between events, and legitimate to study them.
In terms of how a Muslim or Christian or Jewish scientist should actually go about their scientific business, all these views are probably equivalent, though they may well result in rather different notions of what said scientists suppose themselves to be up to.
The WP article on the Incoherence of the Philosophers ends
which is something I have seen asserted; but, interestingly, the reference is to: “Myth 4. That Medieval Islamic Culture was Inhospitable to Science” in Ronald L. Numbers (ed.): Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion, Harvard University Press, 2009.” I think one can fairly deduce from the title that the reference does not in fact support this proposition …
I recall once reading a treatise which made out that modern scientific endeavour was all the result of Protestantism, because Protestants rejected the Thomist Aristotelianism which (supposedly) made investigation of causal relationships in a scientific manner inconceivable …
Favourably predisposed though I be to treatises bigging up my own theological position as the source of all Progress, I was … unconvinced …
(I think you could make a better case for the causal [ehemm!] relationship being the other way round: with Protestantism being the religious manifestation of the somewhat mythological Renaissance notion that Truth was to be found in going back to the Original Writings of the Ancients, bypassing the confusions of the newly-invented Middle Ages …)
So if something happens in accordance with cause and effect, all is well/causation confirmed. And if it doesn’t, Lo! Miracle! God is Great!
I’m sure Philosophers have a Latin term for this style of sophistry — it just won’t come to mind at the moment (petitio principii?). An ‘explanation’ that merely restates the observations, explaining nothing.
Unfalsifiable? Underdetermined (as a sort of metonymy)?
Which is not to say that I understand what he was doing, including what he intended, sufficiently to call it a sophistry.
They do because good taste basically boils down to hard science. There’s many ways to argue the point. For example, there is no rational reason for disagreeing that mutatis mutandis a pizza baked on steel is better than one baked on stone. Steel’s higher thermal conductivity and heat capacity per volume allow it to dump a lot more heat into the pizza crust very quickly.
There is no rational reason to disagree that cascatelli are better than spaghetti. The former outdo the latter in all three elements that define pasta goodness: forkability (how easy is it to get the pasta on the fork in the desired amount and keep it there?), sauceability (how well does the pasta take on and retain sauce?) and toothsinkability (how easily can it be prepared al dente, which essentially means ‘toothsinkable’?)
There is also no rational reason to disagree that underseasoned or overseasoned food (the latter practice is called ⲏⲇⲩⲥⲙⲁⲧⲟⲗⲏⲣⲓⲁ in the fragments of Archestratus) is rather bad.
If there’s one cuisine in the world where both underseasoning and improper or excessive seasoning are most consistently avoided it’s Mexican cuisine. It’s one of the reasons why I strongly suspect Mexican cuisine would be voted in as the best in the world if we devised a contest between the world’s culinary traditions. But my personal favorite cuisine is the cuisine of Veneto, Adriatic Croatia and the Greek islands, three regions united through a coherent culinary continuum. If there’s one cuisine that encapsulates the ideal of Epicurean pleasure it’s the cuisine of Veneto. Mexican cuisine captures the ideal of Cyrenaic pleasure.
Boiling is the most fuel-efficient cooking method so obviously it’s the most traditional but there’s no objective gastronomical reason why beef must auf jeden Fall be boiled. The best method depends on the cut. The general rule is that for cuts with high marbling and minimal connecting tissue (e.g. ribeye) you should opt for dry cooking methods while for cuts from hard-working collagen-laden muscles it’s wiser to choose wet methods. A shank for example shines best when it’s braised.
If there’s a single best method for cooking meat (if we define best as the most precise, least risky way to achieve ideal doneness), it’s arguably sous vide.
By frying I suppose you mean pan-searing (Anbraten). The term frying (as opposed to stir-frying) is nowadays only applied to methods using copious amounts of vegetable oil. Maybe this general usage spilled over from the ubiquity of Pommes in the post-war period as vegetable oil became more widely available and American convenience food took over.
I recall once reading a treatise which made out that modern scientific endeavour was all the result of Protestantism, because Protestants …
… unconvinced …
That’d be Robert K Merton. You can find other claims to the effect it was Catholicism — I think chiefly on the grounds everyone was Catholic once upon a time. So it all depends when and where you think the Scientific Revolution started. Arab culture is to be thanked for preserving the Greek Scientific classics (“Original writings of the Ancients” [**]) over the centuries Europe wasn’t. OTOH I get the feeling that was chiefly pre-Islamic culture.
the very concept of causation is problematic in ways that need deeper examination.
Very true. I just think that introducing God at some point in the chain means you now have two problems.
[**] I think you shouldn’t be so dismissive. The achievements of Greek Mathematics/Geometry are formidable. Amongst them measuring the circumference of the earth astonishingly accurately [Eratosthenes ~200 BCE]. By 1492 no-one had bettered it. Furthermore no-one thought to apply the Greeks’ scientific methods enough to repeat the experiment. Rather, mis-read those Original writings as if they held mystical power and set off into the wild blue yonder expecting to find Asia within a few weeks.
OTOH I get the feeling that was chiefly pre-Islamic culture
Well, no: the translation of Greek philosophical works into Arabic happened after the Muslim expansion into originally-Roman territories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-Arabic_translation_movement
I think your impression may have arisen from the apparently widespread idea that Arab science was doing quite nicely until it was killed off specifically by Ash’arite occasionalism (and especially because of al-Ghazali himself.) I suspect that this taps into a number of comforting Whig-view-of-history notions in the self-image of the West, and ignores a rather large number of historical reasons which might account for why the Muslim world didn’t participate in the Western European seventeenth-century scientific revolution.
Many of the scholars associated with the translation work were Mu’tazilites; their specific doctrines subsequently fell into disfavour because of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihna
but to try to make the “decline of Arab science” attributable to the Sunni reaction to this (which I’ve seen done) just doesn’t work historically, and misrepresents what the actual issues were between the Mu’tazilites and other Muslims.
The other comforting myth is that the mediaeval Arabs were mere transmitters of the inspired Greek classics and themselves contributed nothing of importance to philosophy or science. This theory does not survive contact with the data; to be fair, it began, at least, partly from the same mindset that led Renaissance scholars to see themselves as rediscoverers of Ancient Wisdom when in fact they were major innovators, doing things the ancient Greeks and Romans had never thought of; moreover, they saw the whole mediaeval period, in Europe too, as an era of intellectual stasis, and saw discontinuity where there was continuity.
@AntC: There was another classical estimate of the size of the Earth after Eratosthenes, and it was too small by about forty percent. Columbus’s famous disagreement with the scholars at Salamanca may have been about which measurement was more accurate. With the smaller one, the idea of sailing west to Asia was not so absurd, although Columbus probably underestimated the width of the Atlantic. When he crossed the Atlantic, that was a much longer journey out of sight of land than ships of the era normally undertook. That the Pacific could be so much vaster yet was a nasty shock for Magellan’s crews a few decades later.
There was another classical estimate of the size of the Earth after Eratosthenes, and it was too small by about forty percent.
Eratosthenes original works are lost; as are Posidonius’s. What came down was Cleomedes simplified description of the method, and a result in stadia. The trouble is stadion meant different lengths to different people. (Similar confusion with Roman ‘mile’ vs Nautical Mile vs Statute Mile.) There were also estimates during the ‘Islamic Golden Age’, interpretation again plagued by not knowing how to convert their units.
Columbus went with Ptolemy’s smaller, old-fashioned definition of stadion. Plus a ‘map’ from Toscanelli that was just fabulation. I think calling that an ‘estimate’ is being generous.
My point was that if you’re setting off needing provisions/fresh water to be outside sight of land for weeks, the (modern) scientific method would work hard to understand how far/how many weeks, not just take a number from centuries back. You’d re-run the method, with observations, to check the calculation.
Columbus thought the Atlantic went all the way to Asia. (I don’t know about “absurd”: even his estimate was much longer out of sight of land than anybody had previously survived.)
I’m not sure I can agree with @DE’s claims of European continuity of knowledge: the info that the Vikings had reached a large land mass at the end of the Atlantic was lost.
Maybe not completely; after all, the settlement in Greenland had only died out a few decades earlier. But there’s no evidence that Columbus knew about that, even though speculating about this isn’t hard.
Many (unlike Columbus!) expected a more balanced arrangement of land & sea. Parts of Gulliver’s travels are still set on an America-sized continent in the middle of the Pacific.
What these terms mean is precisely where individual (and cultural) tastes differ the most!