Tag: language

Has “belie” changed meanings?

I came across this comment in a history of movie popcorn (by way of The Dish):

Movie vendors, however, preferred yellow corn, which expanded more when it popped (creating more volume for less product) and had a yellowish tint that belied a coating of butter.

Now, it’s unusual for people to use words to mean their exact opposite, and I have a vague idea that I’ve seen this usage before — belie meaning not “contradict” or “conceal”, but more something like “dishonestly suggest”. If this is a trend in the word, it’s a fascinating slippage, because this inversion of the meaning — from concealing something true to proclaiming something that is false — is a bit of a double negation. In both cases, the subject is dishonest. In the usual sense of belie the object belied is true. In this new meaning — or maybe it’s just a thinko — the thing belied is false.

Interestingly, among the meanings included in the OED are single negations of what I consider the central meaning: Straightforwardly claiming (or demonstrating) something to be false, as in this 1893 citation from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society:

The postulate of free will and moral responsibility assumed by the classical school is belied by physio-psychology.

Cool nerds

An interesting article by Carl Wilson (apparently the start of a month-long series) in Slate looks at the word “cool” in its past and current incarnations. It’s a lot more readable and to the point than jazz critic Ted Gioia’s fundamentally trivial book The Birth and Death of the Cool, but I found myself hung up on his comment

 You’d be unlikely to use other decades-old slang—groovy or rad or fly—to endorse any current cultural object, at least with a straight face, but somehow cool remains evergreen.

As it happens, I was just recently having a conversation about the word nerd. I have a very clear memory that when the ’50s nostalgia wave broke in the mid-1970s (so I was about 8 years old), I encountered the word in TV programs like Happy Days as an antiquated idiom. I had never heard anyone use the word, and I associated it with my parents’ childhoods. When I was a student the prevailing word for someone too bookish to be cool (such as myself) was weenie. As late as 1993, according to an OED citation, Scientific American felt the need to explain

 ‘Nerd’..is movie shorthand for scientists, engineers and assorted technical types who play chess, perhaps, or the violin.

And I remember encountering the word again in the self-righteous name of the Society of Nerds and Geeks (SONG), an undergraduate club that popped up at Harvard about 1989 (when I was a graduate student in mathematics). This was a self-conscious attempt to co-opt these words, which at the time were exclusively terms of abuse, along the lines of the way what was formerly the sexual invert community, or whatever, renamed itself gay, and later queer. Harvard mathematics graduate student Leonid Fridman, who advised the club, published an op-ed on Jan 11, 1990 in the NY Times arguing that the popular disdain for the brainy and bookish would put the US at a disadvantage in competing with its economic and military competitors. (Remember, this was still the Cold War.) The article concluded with this plea:

Until the words “nerd” and “geek” become terms of approbation and not derision, we do not stand a chance.

This dream has come to fulfilment more than could have been imagined in the linguistic sense, but my impression is that there has been little change in the effective social status of academically-inclined American youth. Fridman’s NY Times op-ed is mysteriously unfindable in the Times online archive, so I have copied the text below: Continue reading “Cool nerds”

Is “open for business” fit for purpose?

One peculiarity of British political culture that I find most striking, coming to it from the outside, is the occasional coining of technocratically flavoured verbal taunts, and the incessant efforts to shoehorn as many of the old chestnuts as possible into whatever attack is currently being made.

Witness the reaction of energy companies to Ed Miliband’s proposal to freeze energy prices for 20 months (which, on the merits, sounds like a pretty awful idea, managing to be offensive both to oil tycoons and environmentalists):

The companies have reacted with fury to his plans, saying he is risking power blackouts and sending a message that Britain is not open for business.

(More quotes used the same slogan to attack proposals to fund the reduction in business energy rates by raising corporate income tax.) The phrase gets associated with Margaret Thatcher, though it’s been used intensively both by the current government, and by Tony Blair, who has been well paid to travel around the world attesting to other countries being “open for business”: Palestine, Sierra Leone, Thailand.

Problems with the subjunctive [for German grammar enthusiasts]

I’ve noticed that web publishing has generally degraded proofreading standards. Still, it’s shocking to see Der Spiegel, a bastion of the German language, making two errors in conjugating the subjunctive in a report on the negotiations over the new governing coalition in Germany:

Was wäre ihre Alternative? Eine Koalition mit den Acht-Prozent-Grünen, bei der die Zahl der Ministerposten für die Union zwar größer, die inhaltlichen Kompromisse aber weitgehender ausfielen würden? Die Union wurde sich in einer solchen Konstellation Unsicherheit mit einkaufen.

I’m genuinely appalled. But no more than I am by the SPD maneuvering itself into this position by continuing to boycott Die Linke. They’re like those proverbial Japanese soldiers still hidden away on an island thinking the war is still going on. Except the SPD is the last one still fighting the Cold War. Or the war for the purity of the socialist cause.

Ambiguous Yids: The problem with speech bans

David Cameron has gotten himself onto the front page of the commuter newspaper Metro by commenting on the bizarre controversy over the use of the word “Yids” in English football.

Tottenham fans often chant the word, referring to themselves as “Yiddos” or “the Yid Army”. Some say it is a defensive gesture, to deflect abuse from opposition fans.
But the FA, backed by Jewish leaders, say it has no place in football and want it stopped.

The prime minister’s solomonic opinion is that the use of the word should be prosecuted only when it is used as an insult, not when people are applying it to themselves. The article quotes one Jewish supporter of a different team who says the word should be banned: “Yid is a race-hate word. It was daubed across the East End by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.” And a Jewish Tottenham supporter who says “This is part of our identity. As a Jewish person, I always find it empowering. We have turned this word into a positive.”

(I recall that when I lived in the Netherlands in the 1990s there was a similar controversy around the AFC Ajax football team in Amsterdam, that had the nickname de Joden, and whose rivals would taunt the fans with antisemitic chants like “Hamas, Hamas, de joden aan het gas” (“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas”). According to this Wikipedia article, supporters of Ajax would sometimes wave Star of David flags, and at one point Hava Nagila could be downloaded as a ringtone from the club’s official website.)

Maybe Cameron should have gone the extra step, to realise that trying to come up with a sensible set of criteria for banning speech based on its content is a fool’s errand. There’s no way to deal with all the shades of meaning, when one person hurls an insult, the victim appropriates the insult as a badge of honour (as has happened with gay, queer, Black, Quaker, and impressionist), and someone else comments on the verbiage ironically.

Is bleating shrill?

Having taken on the controversial question of the significance of ascribing shrillness (shrillity? shrillth?) to ones opponents, I feel obliged to wade in on the pressing issue of “bleating”.

The occasion is an open letter by a group of British education experts, pointing out the well-established fact that the UK obsession with getting children learning arithmetic and reading at ever earlier ages — formal schooling starts at age 3 1/2 — is counterproductive, and that children would be better off with age-appropriate education. The education ministry has responded with an extraordinarily unprofessional (shrill, or perhaps “spittle-flecked” would be the vernacular description) ejaculation of mostly generic insults, including the charge that

We need a system that aims to prepare pupils to solve hard problems in calculus or be a poet or engineer – a system freed from the grip of those who bleat bogus pop-psychology about ‘self image’, which is an excuse for not teaching poor children how to add up.

I can’t fault the alliteration of “those who bleat bogus pop-psychology”, but what does it mean? It sounds like an insult, but I’m not sure what is insulting about it. Presumably it’s supposed to make you think of a flock of sheep, dumbly repeating some meaningless sounds. And, bleating is sort of a shrill sound, so maybe it also is meant to have effeminate overtones.

The term “pop-psychology” is interesting in this context. Given that the letter is signed by professors and senior lecturers in psychology and education, I have to assume that, right or wrong, what they’re talking about is real psychology, not “pop”.  So it’s interesting that the bureaucrats felt that they couldn’t take on the reputation of academic psychology directly, but only by insinuating that it is all just self-help pablum. (And is “bogus” a modifier of pop-psychology — to say, this isn’t even the top-drawer pop — or a redundant intensifier, as when one refers to “disingenuous government propaganda”?) Continue reading “Is bleating shrill?”

Is “shrill” gender-coded?

The Dish recently quoted a correspondent who, on his or her way to making a point about Chinese tourists wrote

This all has a cogent economic explanation. Paul Krugman, before his current role as shrill liberal attack dog, used to explain…

I found this comment irritating, for reasons that were not immediately clear to me. I have enormous respect for Paul Krugman, both in his earlier incarnation as a populariser of economic theory — particularly trade theory, but also macroeconomics — and as a blogger and twice-weekly columnist who occasionally veers away from economic issues. I think he has a healthy appreciation for his own intellectual strengths, but that he mostly stops short of egotistic attachment to his pet theories, whether defending past statements or being overly sure of his predictions. But I can’t say that there is no basis for someone to think that his tone is overly aggressive, that his political analysis is weak, that even his economic analysis may be distorted by political wishful thinking or antagonism. Those aren’t my opinions, but they’re widely held, and don’t seem to me outrageous.

But what is the role of shrill in that sentence? It’s not a word I hear often, but maybe it’s common in some circles. What does it mean? It’s clearly a free-floating insult, which somehow suggests derangement due to becoming overly emotional, and as such merely replicates “attack dog”. And yet “shrill” seems more contemptuous. What does it mean? Imagine replacing it by strident. It has the same signification with regard to the strength of advocacy, but the contempt is gone. So, is the contempt associated with high-pitched speech? Is this something like bitch, or the dialectical equivalent of “he throws like a girl”? Or is it taking the place of the free-form homosexual slurs that used to be ubiquitous, but are now no longer permitted?

Certibus paribus

I was just reading a theoretical biology paper that included the phrase “certibus paribus”. (I won’t say which paper, because I’m not aiming to embarrass the authors.)

Now, I like unusual words, particularly if they’re Latin. Ceteris paribus is sufficiently close to common usage in some branches of science, including mathematics, or was into living memory, that I could imagine using it in print. Maybe I even have. But it’s sufficiently rare that I can’t imagine using it without looking up both the spelling and the meaning. So, while I can see how mistaken word usage can slip into ones everyday language, and then spill out into print, I can’t quite picture how an error like this happens.

Suspicious is as suspicious does

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This is an official government vehicle.

On the list of all-time great tautologies (though not quite as pithy as “It ain’t over til it’s over”) comes the comment of UK immigration minister Mark Harper, defending the government’s new policy of stopping foreign-looking people to check their immigration papers:

“‘They are not allowed to do it based on someone’s physical appearance. If, someone, when seeing an immigration officer, behaved in a very suspicious way, that might give us reasonable suspicion to question them,” Harper said. “It’s about how they behave, not what they look like. It’s not about their appearance or their race or their ethnicity.”

That sounds pretty clear: If they behave in a “very suspicious way” there must be a reasonable suspicion. Otherwise their way wouldn’t be very suspicious, would it?

One of the first things the new government did when it came into power was to cancel the previous government’s plan to introduce ID cards, because of fears that, well, people could be stopped on the street and asked to show them. The cards were dismissed as “expensive, intrusive“. I’m glad I’m a real foreigner. I have a card to show when I see an immigration officer and can’t resist behaving in a very suspicious way. British citizens who behave suspiciously (after seeing an immigration officer) have no recourse, and may find themselves waiting months to see an immigration judge.

Well, the US has had some success deporting unruly citizens to Mexico. Maybe that’s what Obama adviser Jim Messina has crossed the ocean to advise the Tories about.

What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about

It seems that everyone’s favourite hip formula for a title is “What we talk about when we talk about X”. It certainly caught my attention that there were two books by prominent fiction writers with titles of this form, Haruki Marukami’s memoir What I Talk about when I Talk About Running, and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. I take these to be derived from Raymond Carver’s celebrated story What we Talk about When We Talk about Love, though I can’t be sure the phrase didn’t exist in some form before.

But it’s definitely taken on a life of its own. I was inspired to write this post by an article in The Atlantic titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Privacy. A recent book on the future of books included a chapter titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata (which is somewhat ironic, because what we talk about has changed radically in the past few months, as metadata have gone from being a niche concern of bibliographers to a main topic in the discussion of domestic espionage). A quick Google Book search turns up books from the last few years: What We Talk About When We Talk About God, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop, as well as WWTAWWTA  Vision, Emotion, Error, Revolution, and Ralph Sampson.

So, why the swelling concern with talking about what we talk about when we talk about things? Obviously, it’s a great phrase, conveying both intense focus and ironic detachment. It promises to lift the lid on the “real story”, to get behind all the “talk”, while still sounding itself kind of chatty. To move to talking about what we talk about, you must have already mastered all the things people talk about on the relevant topic. Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about”