I was distressed to see that a long-time favorite blogger was thinking of giving it up in favor of a personal website; he mentioned Michael’s Notebook as an ideal to emulate, citing the page How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create? So I took a look and quickly backed away. Nothing against Michael, I’m glad what he’s doing works for him, but it’s the polar opposite of what I’m about, with its overemphasis on the vital importance of “thinking well” and contempt for purportedly lesser beings: “Far better to have one brilliant, knowledgeable person respond strongly and in depth to a piece than to have a hundred thousand respond shallowly.” Ranking people by “brilliance” vs. “shallowness” is morally equivalent to ranking them by skin color, religion, nationality, or anything else; once you accept the principle that some lives are worth more than others, you’re on a bad road. And of course people who rank by brilliance always seem to put themselves near the top of the rankings.
Me, I accept as an axiom that all lives are equally valuable and that there is no such thing as “intelligence” as a single, measurable quantity — different people are intelligent in different ways. I find the idea of wanting to interact with only “brilliant” people both laughable and repugnant. I love blogging because it gives me the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of other people with a wide variety of spheres of knowledge and experience; the more I blog, the more I realize the limitations of my own knowledge and appreciate the truth of Isaac Newton’s famous quote about being like a boy playing on the seashore “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” I intend to keep blogging until the keyboard falls from my cold, stiff fingers, because it keeps me learning and keeps me humble. And I am deeply grateful to all of you who read and respond and chat among yourselves and keep this jalopy on the road.
I recently ran across a comment by Alex Case that ended:
[…] can I just say that this is the first blog I’ve ever come across that’s being going continuously since 2002. Congratulations!
That was in 2008! I certainly wouldn’t have bet money that the blog would still be going in 2022, but I’m glad it is. Thanks again, and forgive the above rant; I figure after all these years I’ve earned the right to shake my cane and grumble a bit.
bravo, congratulations, auguri & thanks
万歳!
it keeps me learning and keeps me humble
This is my MO as well. Moving up the learning curve encourages humility in those behind you, while you gaze meekly at those ahead of you. Humility for all !
万歳!
Auch die japanische Lesung Banzai ist außerhalb Asiens bekannt geworden.
Congratulations, and as for your blog’s future, well, as a proto-Romance speaker would have put it, *VIVAT KENTU ANNOS DE ISTU DIE!”.
(I doubt any of the regular commentators or His Divine Hatness need a translation, but for normal human beings (as opposed to us glottophiliacs -yes, I just made up that word, feel free to spread it far and wide), who make up a majority of the intended readership after all, well, here it is: “May it live a hundred years from this day”.)
Thank you, hat, for not changing a winning formula.
Yes thank you for not changing your formula: I can’t think of another forum that’s kept going 20 years, let alone kept to the same ‘atmosphere’.
May you shake your cane and grumble a bit for the next 20 years.
Gefeliciteerd, Hat!
Felicitaciones Hat, y todos los que contribuyen o han contribuido!
I´m a sometimes faithful follower … and although I´m not a connoisseur of linguistic technicalities, I do love languages and find most of languagehat content fascinating and alluring.
Cheers!
Here’s to keeping our jalopies (literal and metaphorical) on the road! Thank you for all your reading and writing, Languagehat, I learn a lot from you and your blog.
Ad multos annos!
You’d better not quit, is all I can say! It would be a lot lonelier without you, and after all these years I’ve come to count on your presence and the ongoing conversation here. Congratulations on 20 years, and a big thank you (from this “personal blogger” who also thinks all lives are equally valuable.)
Congrats and many happy returns! Always a pleasure to learn from you and your readers.
You’ve created something very special here. And your persistence is especially worthy of celebration after all these years, when so many erstwhile bloggers have retired or moved to other, more au courant (but generally more superficial) platforms.
Happy Languagehattiversary!
Takk!
furthermore Huzzah, молодец так держать, many happy returns…
הוראַ! הוראַ!
ביז אַ הונדערט צװאַנציק!
What they said!
Reading a conversation here is humbling. There are so many who know so much more than I ever will. And it’s enlightening and uplifting because all share their knowledge and opinions freely and congenially.
Thanks for creating and maintaing this comfortable sharing space.
Congratulations on 20 years!
This is the kind of brilliant insight that raises you above the common blogger
Thank you, and bravo for your rant! Like the fictional detective Harry Bosch says, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” Or as Confucius supposedly said: 有教無類 Keep on choogling!
Thanks again. No one else could have done what you are doing.You know how people have been listening to the same great DJ at the same radio station for decades? That’s how it feels. I am glad to have been reading this blog and sometimes commenting here for much of this time.
There’s a fair bit of references to the hattery popping up in searches at G. Books and G. Scholar. One article acknowledges a proper translation of a Latin phrase, discussed on the third anniversary post. Reading it, it’s clear that you have been doing the right thing, right from the beginning.
can I just say that this is the first blog I’ve ever come across that’s being going continuously since 2002
For me it was the second, I believe, or at least the second I can think of offhand; LLeo’s blog apparently started in 2000, though it has nowhere near the activity of yours. Irregular Webcomic also started in 2002 but of course that’s not quite a blog. Language Log didn’t start until 2003.
(Since then I’ve also discovered Tom 7’s blog, another low-activity 2000 start. There were probably others I couldn’t remember.)
Of course some websites (like the UBEA…) had been continuously running since the 1990s. Oldest still-active project I know of is Burime, est. 1995. Again, there are probably older ones I couldn’t recall at the moment.
Zorionak & χρόνια πολλά!
Your approach to knowledge and to human interaction is exactly what makes this a special place I’ve been coming back to for almost half that time, and I wish I’d found it earlier. Thank you for having made so many of my days a little richer. And my thanks also extend to your whole commentariat – although a party is only as good as its host.
Onnea ja iloa montakymmentä kiloa!
I’ve not been actively around for a third of the time I think, but then — by now even just following JC’s comments index regularly brings up little treats from the archives seemingly endlessly.
This may be an appropriate good point to mention I’ve mentally coined for the blog plus its commentariat the collective term hatio; rhymes with my grandparents’ pronunciation of radio with /t/. “Hmm, wonder what’s on the hatio currently?” And, with impressive consistency, there usually is something indeed. (Works a bit less well in English alas.)
Crawdad Tom’s somewhat free paraphrase of Confucius led me to the interesting (imho) discovery that spelling variations in the present participle of the verb “to choogle” may provide a good way to test the capacities of google translate:
E.g. (using Welsh/Ukranian/Galician as sample target languAges):
Keep on chooglin = Daliwch ar chooglin or Продовжуйте чугліне or Sigue chooglin
Keep on chooglin’ = Daliwch ati chooglin’ or Продовжуйте чути or Sigue escollendo
Keep on choogling = Daliwch ati i choogling or Продовжуйте чукати or Sigue chooglando
Congratulations! May there be many more years.
One article acknowledges a proper translation of a Latin phrase, discussed on the third anniversary post.
OK, this I want to see, and I haven’t been able to find it. URL?
Never mind, here it is:
I have not blogged in vain!
Ha, and I just turned up this in Google Books, from Matthieu Boyd, “HEL and the K-12 Curriculum: The Common Core State Standards,” n. 7, in Teaching the History of the English Language (Modern Language Association of America, 2019), ed. Chris C. Palmer and Colette Moore: “I usually assign Wallace with a comment by the linguist Stephen Dodson (languagehat).” I’m willing to accept the dubious description “linguist” if it helps further such a worthy cause.
Ha, and I just turned up this in Google Books, from Matthieu Boyd
Previously on LH – with more context, quite helpfully as the link you give doesn’t show any preview to me (even on Tor).
Herzlichen Glückwunsch und weiter so!
Previously on LH
Sigh. Well, I got to experience the pleasure twice!
Thanks, Hat, for being.
My visits skim like stones on water, which means I get several postings to wallow in each time..
Van harte gefeliciteerd en nog vele jaren! (NL)
Never change a winning concept. IMHO the Recent Comments list is a very useful idea.
Even after let’s say seven years I might have a noteworthy addition to the comments. In blogs without Recent Comments my addition will be lost forever in the white noise of history.
Thanks and keep on going strong!
Qapla’.
Gràtülierung!
Thanks to you, hat, and the community of language-knowers you’ve gathered here. A daily balm for my ignorance.
Cheers!
Felicitările mele, și la mulți ani! Still the first blog I read most days.
Here’s to 20 more of the ‘hat!
@J.W. Brewer: Ha! I didn’t mean “keep on choogling” as a translation; that was encouragement to Hat to keep up the good work. I just missed out a period after the quotation. Confucius: Whoever shows up, help them learn.
Hearty huzzahs, Hat!
Congratulations, Hat! I see I’ve been around here since 2004 at least. Tempus fugit!
Fugit quidem!
Congratulations!
However, when you say “I accept as an axiom that … there is no such thing as “intelligence” as a single, measurable quantity — different people are intelligent in different ways” you’re elevating a testable claim to the status of an axiom. That claim has been tested in every possible way, and found to be false. There is a single factor, and it’s measurable very well by the standards of social science. You may of course disagree with the science behind intelligence, but surely testable claims cannot stand as axioms.
Whether all lives are equally valuable is a different question. Operationally, who knows? Morally, it is arguable. Pragmatically, in the sense that acting as if it were so leads to a better society, yes indeed.
That claim has been tested in every possible way, and found to be false.
That’s absurd on the face of it — how can you type “in every possible way” with a straight face? What you mean is that certain researchers have thought of certain ways to test it and have confirmed what they already believed. I remind you that a century ago scientists were equally sure of the racial differences that had “been tested in every possible way.” An axiom is “a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments,” and that’s what I mean by it. I cock a snook at social science and its “tests.”
That claim has been tested in every possible way, and found to be false
https://web.archive.org/web/20161020130433/http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html
The hattery certainly seems to attract a diverse and interesting range of personalities with different sorts of expertises and interests, but I daresay it does not seem a particularly balanced statistical cross-section of the human species when it comes to “intelligence,” whatever that might be, but is heavily overweighted with the subset of the species that does better than average (including those that do several standard deviations better than average) at book-larnin’ and the sort of standardized tests said to correlate with the g-factor by those who believe that to be a thing.
The problem in many of these discussions IMHO is at least implicitly treating “intelligence” (treated at least for convenience’s sake as a quality than can be measured quantitively along a single dimension) as if it were some sort of praiseworthy moral accomplishment. To be proud of being very “intelligent” (or, if you like, possessing strength in a whole bunch of different cognitive abilities that are conceptually distinct but nonetheless quite often statistically correlated) is like being proud of being very tall, imho. It’s a consequence of some combination of your genes and your childhood environment, not anything you accomplished on your own.
The problem in many of these discussions IMHO is at least implicitly treating “intelligence” (treated at least for convenience’s sake as a quality than can be measured quantitively along a single dimension) as if it were some sort of praiseworthy moral accomplishment.
I don’t treat it that way. The whole point of taking as an axiom that we’re all intelligent in our different ways is to remove it entirely from the discussion. Morality, now — that’s a quality people differ violently in.
“We’re all tall in our different ways.” Regardless of how fuzzy or ill-defined it is, and whether or not it’s best conceptualized as a single quality or a bundle of imperfectly-correlated related qualities, if “intelligent” is not in some sense a scalar adjective, it’s meaningless. In general (I can think of some potential exceptions), adjectives that cannot be used to draw contrasts (A is X but B is not, or A is Xer than B …) are meaningless. If you want to remove it from the discussion, surely it is better to assert that “intelligence” is an incoherent or vacuous concept rather than claim that, properly understood, it is universally distributed with perfect equality.
καλὴν γενέθλιον ἡμέραν ὦ γλωσσόκορυ! Or on safer ground (since no one seems to know how the ancient Greeks said happy birthday), χρόνια πολλὰ καὶ νὰ τὰ ἑκατοστήσῃς!
if “intelligent” is not in some sense a scalar adjective, it’s meaningless
adjectives that cannot be used to draw contrasts (A is X but B is not, or A is Xer than B …) are meaningless
These are not the same thing. Any proposition can be negated, but plenty of perfectly meaningful adjectives are not gradable. “Perfect”, “dead” …
Even limiting the discussion to gradable adjectives, this is plainly not the case.
For example, it’s perfectly possible to say “we are all beautiful in our different ways.” This may be false, but it is neither meaningless nor incoherent. Nor does the possibility of saying this, meaningfully, at all entail the consequence that “beauty” is itself “an incoherent or vacuous concept.”
The argument is less perfect than you think. In fact it’s deader than a doornail.
It is arrant prescriptivism to think that “perfect” and “dead” are always non-gradable, but in any event they can be still used contrastively in my “A is X but B is not” type of construction. Re “All beautiful in our different ways,” I guess the question is whether that’s best paraphrased as “none of us are devoid of beauty if considered from the right angle” (and/or some sort of “true beauty is inward/spiritual” notion) or “none of us is any more beautiful than anyone else.” These are different claims. The first is fine. I’m not sure if the second is meaningless or incoherent but it is vacuous or, rather, if true, would suggest that “beautiful” is not a particularly useful word.*
And of course the first seems fine in part because many/most of us (in 21st-century Anglophone societies) have been socialized into believing that questions of aesthetics are inherently subjective and there’s no accounting for taste etc., which is not necessarily the socialization we would have received at certain other times or in certain other places.
*Even a theological statement like “none of us is [materially] more or less sinful than anyone else” is only meaningful because the “us” is understood to have a restrictive scope that excludes certain sinless-and-supernatural persons. “All men are mortal” is meaningful to the extent that there’s something (or Someone) out there that’s immortal or at least non-mortal.
It is arrant prescriptivism to think that “perfect” and “dead” are always non-gradable
That issue is deader than a doornail.
She’s so perfect she’s insufferable.
“All men are mortal” is meaningful to the extent that there’s something (or Someone) out there that’s immortal or at least non-mortal
In Stargate, Apophis is a non-capitalized someone who is non-mortal. He is an incubus who inhabits mortals. Provided he can grab a ride on a new mortal, the old one can die for all he cares.
many/most of us (in 21st-century Anglophone societies) have been socialized into believing that questions of aesthetics are inherently subjective and there’s no accounting for taste etc.
My view is that it’s easy to account for taste. It’s just that few people want to see their audit.
If you want to remove it from the discussion, surely it is better to assert that “intelligence” is an incoherent or vacuous concept rather than claim that, properly understood, it is universally distributed with perfect equality.
Fine with me, I’m not picky.
@Stu Clayton: Apophis seems to genuinely believe that he is a god though, however deluded that viewpoint might be. Some of the Goa’uld seem more self aware than others.
If you want to remove it from the discussion, surely it is better to assert that “intelligence” is an incoherent or vacuous concept rather than claim that, properly understood, it is universally distributed with perfect equality.
Incoherence and fatuousness are already universally distributed, in quantities so nearly equal that even their mother couldn’t tell the difference.
That’s true in the sense that over 100 genes with some influence on height have been discovered, plus nutrition during growth and whether you sat or kneeled.
As I keep complaining, Western culture keeps paying lip-service to this notion and then turning around and treating beauty as either objective or at least the matter of a broad consensus.
Well spoken, lh, and many congratulations from my tiny corner of the UK for a blog that has been so stimulating for so long!
David M. makes the useful point that just because adult height is a paradigm example of a trait that can be quantified pretty uncontroversially and 1-dimensionally doesn’t necessarily mean that adult height is monocausal. Even if you split causation into “nature” and “nurture” neither of those is itself necessarily a single factor. That said, adult height is (in wealthier countries) an interesting example of a trait where the nature/nurture ratio has shifted over time because in recent centuries certain societies (first in North America, then in Europe) eventually got to the point where even the poorest kids mostly got sufficient nutrition in childhood to get above the threshold beyond which incrementally better nutrition no longer has an impact on adult height. (At least according to the late Robert Fogel.)
Being nothing if not self-centered, I decided to do a search for “Bloix” and “Languagehat.” And what a cornucopia of interesting, enlightening, amusing, instructive, and occasionally infuriating conversations I recovered! Your blog enriches my life. Thanks for it.
Gratulerer herfra også.
You’d better not quit, is all I can say!
No indeed. Or if you must, do it in one of these ways:
—Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston
Annual summaries:
0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14</a, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
John, how did you first become a hatter? When I started coming here, quite a while ago, you were already established.
I came here from Language Log, but I don’t remember just when.
During the 20th century. Over here, my generation is still taller than my parents’ was – admittedly that was the immediate post-war generation, so that probably doesn’t apply to the US.
Congratulations and thank you for continuing! I completely get why so many other bloggers I once followed chose to give it up; usually because blogging got in the way of other projects that felt more pressing. But sometimes the blog can become the project.
I sometimes come to it a bit late, but I never miss a Languagehat blogpost. They are continuously excellent.
Outstanding. Many, many more years, please.
Your blog has always seemed to me like the one where a hundred thousand brilliant, knowledgeable people respond. A model. I always learn, at Languagehat, up to the limits of my capacity for learning.
I don’t have a firm terminus ad quem for my not-yet-presence, but there is no doubt I was here on November 21, 2005.
JC, how did you first find out and get in the LH cult?