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 It acknowledges the evolution of language and keeps our field from becoming, as Rubinstein suggested, stodgy and outdated.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:)