Tag Archives: Authority

Will Someone Give that Man a Drumstick!

16 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by in General

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“I want a drum stick”

The old man hunched over the counter at the Kaintuck Chicken Massacre with his eyes glued on the roasted chicken. I couldn’t quite hear the young man behind the counter just yet, but I could see the old man pointing at the piece he wanted.

“I want a drum stick”

This time I could hear the young teenager responding; “Do you want a 3-piece or a 5, piece. The meal comes with…”

“I want a drum stick!”

The old guy knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted a drum stick. A decade or two earlier, this old fella might have adapted his order to the menu, but now the details were clearly nonsense to him. He was pointing right at the piece he wanted. Why wasn’t that enough? The kid, for his part, wasn’t authorized to act on the desire for a single drum stick. The buttons on the cash register didn’t include that option. He needed to translate the order into something else, something that fit the categories he was allowed to provide. In a few years, the young man might have had the confidence to attempt an explanation, but the old man wasn’t listening anyway. So the poor kid just kept repeating himself.

The old man, of course did the same;

“I want a drum stick.

Somewhere in the back, I imagined, there must be a manager, someone endowed with sufficient authority to just give the old man a drumstick, perhaps resolving the technical problem by putting it on the house. Maybe, maybe not. A manager might well have insisted on the usual categories just as the kid had. In any event, there was no manager up near the cash registers. So, the kid just kept repeating the official options.

And the old man just kept repeating himself.

…to absolutely no avail!

Decades later, I can still hear the old guy’s words as I took my own order out the door.

“I want a drumstick!”

Underdogs All the Way Up!

13 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Alaska, Native American Themes, Politics

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Sled dogs waiting patiently

So, I am enjoying the Alaska Native Studies conference in Fairbanks last weekend, and one of the many things that keeps catching my attention is a persistent use of outside authority for a kind of whipping boy. I hear about how ‘the media’ portrays Alaska natives and minorities i general. I hear complaints about The Federal Government, academia, and ‘the system’ in general. Different people have thought these phrases through to different degrees, so the quality of the references vary from the completely vacuous posture to reasonably well defined concerns.

Meh, nothing particularly new under the sun (unless it’s a rather Northy start for the Iditarod which began right in front of the Hotel I was staying at this year, …a couple hours after I flew out. …dammit!) I haven’t attended many academic conferences in the last decade or so, but this is hardly new to me. I just have to cast my mind back a bit to remember how often I used to hear this theme in the old days of my grad work.

…or I could just remember the last time I visited more conservative friends and family down South. They too like to complain about the Federal Government. They too like to complain about academia. (Oh yes they do!) And they too can sometimes be heard to talk disparagingly of something called ‘the system.’

I am keenly aware of the fact that these groups often argue for radically different political goals, but I am rather struck by the fact that they do so using remarkably similar narratives. Each seems rather consistently to present themselves as countering the effects of some overarching authority that resides somewhere out there, so to speak. But this is hardly unusual. In America, at least, most people seem to frame their politics in populist terms. That includes the most well-funded of incumbent political candidates and their supporters. It also includes people arguing for the clear and forceful exercise of political authority just as it includes those arguing against such authority, and it includes all manner of politics falling somewhere in between. It isn’t just that we can’t always tell who is exercising authority and who is objecting to it. What strikes me about this is the fact that the common preference lies on the down-side of the equation. It seems as though everyone wants to be the underdog, and you could take a lantern about in the day looking for someone who will happily cop to playing the man to all his low-brow critics.

In the culture wars lefties typically presented themselves as countering long-term abuse of authority by privileged parties; their right wing opponents bash PC politics and the liberal establishment that tells them what to do and what to say. Evangelical Christians complain of persecution in schools and other government institutions even as secularists fight against believer-bias in those same institutions. And how many religions count oppression somewhere in their founding narratives? (Probably as many as appear in each others’ oppression narratives, I should think.) Climate scientists struggle against well-funded corporations to counter the effects of powers both political and mechanical even as climate skeptics buck the authority of a plot to spread government authority. Some folks will burn a flag to protest the authority of government. Others will wave it to flaunt their patriotism in the face of ‘elitists’ who don’t like it. Even Hollywood actors sneer at the culture of Hollywood, and the educational reformers who crash upon the curriculum in waves of paperwork and conference panels always seem to see themselves as flying in the face of some institutional conventions. Retention and Persistence specialists complain about professor-sages who just want to pronounce wisdom to their students from a lectern and those same professors complain of reformers using administrative leverage to force dubious changes and undermine academic freedom. Advocates of gay marriage often appeal to personal freedom even as its opponents appeal to personal freedom to disregard such marriages.

Indie this and Indie that! (Just cross-apply this theme to movies, music, fashion designers, writers, and Hell, most likely fish-tank designers at this point. I wonder if guppies complain of pretentious betas while zebra fish moan about the abuse of authority of neon tetras.)

…okay, the fish tank bit was probably a bit of a stretch, but hey I’m trying to buck a system here!

Some of these narratives are more authentic than others, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that all these agendas are really of equal value, but I am interested in the way so many different political views (some of them diametrically opposed) seem to vie for the moral low-ground. It really is fascinating to see just how ubiquitous the underdog status seems to be in contemporary political rhetoric. Sure, those with political power will exercise it, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who frames a political agenda in terms of a straight forward claim to authority and an equally straight forward intention to use it. Even those with tremendous power seem to present their exercise of that authority to some other regime at power.

When at last we meet the Man so to speak, he usually tells us that he is new to the job and only there to finally undue the damage done by the real Man, the guy with all the power who is only just out of office (and probably lurking somewhere nearby). That other man, the real man, is the real bastard. He has power even when he doesn’t, and it’s his abuse of that power that necessitates the use of power by real people in charge of real institutions.

…who always seem to be underdogs despite themselves.

I sometimes wonder at this vacuum into which all authority seems to escape. Is it purely a function of rhetoric? To listen to folks, the real power always seems to lie somewhere else. And yet it must really exist or all this rhetoric is hot air. And of course we do encounter power and authority in our daily lives, but its presence is almost always akin to a force of nature. It is a fact with which we must contend even if we cannot find a cogent case for it. And when one looks for that case, so often we find only a case against some other use of power.

Could it be that all this obligatory underdogging be a product of cognitive bias? Is it easier to see authority in others and damned hard to feel the power of authority when it’s in your own hands? There is often (perhaps always) a little bluff in the exercise of authority, a little sense that its successful use depends on the willingness of others to accept it.

I once TAed for a professor who liked to mock his own authority. The students were not reassured by his self-deprecating humor. He might have hoped to communicate that he didn’t take himself too seriously, but what his students heard was that he didn’t take his position seriously, and most particularly, that he didn’t take seriously the responsibilities of that position and the limitations of his authority. This was underdog failure at its finest and most cringe-worthy.

And I suppose this is what bothers me the most about it all. I can’t help but see in the collective impact of all this underdogging something a bit like the students saw in that professor a marked inability to grapple with the authority that people actually do have and very clearly will use. We can’t all be under-doggier than the next guy. Or if we can, then perhaps it says something rather sad and ironic about the value of low-brow politics. For one reason or another, it is often more effective to position oneself as the underdog than the authority.

And if you can get by with wielding authority while pretending to be that underdog?

Well, ain’t that just the cat’s pajamas!

 

Damn the Semiotics! All Hail the Lexicographer-Judge (If Only We Could Find Him)

05 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by in Religion

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Consulting Lexi-Kitties

I am continually amazed at the faith some conservative Christians place in the authoritative pronouncements of a single ancient book. No, not that one. I am talking about the dictionary.

…pardon me, ‘thuh dictionary’.

I have long since lost track of the number of times someone has told me what this or that word means according to ‘thuh dictionary’. It could be any word, but frankly, the most common ones to land me in front of the court of lexicography are ‘homophobia’ and ‘atheism’. Significantly, I don’t think many of the people who launch into this sort of dictionary-whinging gambit have even looked up the words they hold court over. If you ask them which dictionary, they will often tell you ‘Websters’, as if that meant a damned thing!

Dictionary-Whinging (Sorta verb-like, but more gerundy) Pronounce the g like a j, dammit. It means being a jerk, but a certain kind of jerk. …a jerk with or over a dictionary.

Sometimes folks will invoke the power of ‘Merriam-Webster‘. This at least is a real entity, a branch of Encyclopaedia Britannica, so that will at least tell us something about the source, but it doesn’t do much to pin down the book in question. As to the name ‘Webster’s’? That is in the public domain. Anybody can publish a Webster’s Dictionary. You, me, the homeless guy down the street could write out a couple definitions and call it a “Webster’s Dictionary” Hell I could translate my cats noises and call it a Webster’s Dictionary.

In fact, let’s do that!

WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY OF ARCTIC CATISMS

Compilerized and Authoritated by Daniel S. Dammit

July or maybe December, 2013.

Editorial Staff: Fido, Junkmail, and Auto-Kitty

Mrrour: Pet. (e.g. ‘Pet me please!’)

Me’a’our: Pet, used with a sense of urgency (e.g. ‘pet me now dammit!’)

Mmmmmeuurrrrrr: Pet, used in a polite way (e.g. “If you have a moment, could you please pet me, …and perhaps change teh literbox. …no hurry.”)

Meow: Ironic Usage. It means; “I don’t actually sound like this human. You are imagining things.”

Meeeh!: Head-Butt (e.g. I’m lonely, human. Please head-butt me this very instant.”)

There. That’s my Webster’s Dictionary. Suck it Lexi-Judges! You have to use that now when you interpret cat. I has spoken.

(Aside over. We now bring you back to your regularly scheduled, cat-free, post.)

The bottom line is that a significant portion of people citing the authority of ‘Webster’s’ are simply bluffing. They haven’t looked anything up, much less thought about it. I guess they figure the meaning of the words in question is so obvious to anyone but the idiot they are talking to (which if often me) that there is no real need to consult the authority of the imaginary lexical-judge; it goes without saying that this good Justice will back their own understanding. I guess the spirit-filled just know what thuh dictionary would say.

It seems to me that some people look upon a dictionary as a judge of sorts, or maybe a legislature, both if they get their way, but most of these folks are happy to admit that ‘thuh dictionary’ is not an executioner. No, that is a role they hope to play themselves.

One thing I find quite amusing about all of this feigned dictionary-deference is that it always works best with the really bad dictionaries. You see a good dictionary will include a number of entries spelling out a variety of different uses of a given term, but the ideal dictionary for the the lexical authoritarian contains just one reference for every word. So, on the off chance that he actually bothers to look anything up, our dictionary-whinging fellow is not going to want to bother with anything resembling choice. He wants a single entry, and (Webster’s willing) he will present that single entry as clear and convincing proof that the word in question has just that one proper meaning. …thus effectively turning the weaknesses of an incomplete dictionary into a virtue. For these purposes Dictionary.com will serve the vocabulary fascists much better than the Oxford English Dictionary. Webster’s Third New International would be right out, …at least it would be if such folks knew enough about dictionaries to realize what that infamous source of lexical permissiveness contains.

Which brings me to a second point of amusement about the art of dictionary-whinging. Its practitioners seldom (perhaps never) understand how dictionaries are actually made. They haven’t studied lexicography, and they haven’t even read the methodology section of any given dictionary. Most, probably don’t even know that such a section exists; it fits in those automatically skipped pages at the beginning of the book they aren’t actually reading anyway. These folks certainly haven’t read Samuel Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary of the English language or any other thoughtful discussion of the topic. If they did, the first thing they would find is that lexicographers generally don’t work the way they think they do, and they don’t intend their dictionaries to be used the way they think they do.

Now let me give you a minute to parse all the ‘they’s of the last sentence. Wait a minute! I sense a new volume of Webster’s coming. Here it is:

WEBSTER’S NEW NOT-SO-COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY OF DANOLOGICAL THEM-ITUDE

Compiled on a Lark, 2013

They: Them.

They2: Those people.

They3: Them other guys.

They4: They (like I sad …dammit!)

They5: I obviously don’t get laid often enough.

Anyway, my point is that with the possible exception of early editions of the American Heritage Dictionary, lexicographers are not legislating and they are not adjudicating language. They are informing us about common usage. In short, their approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive. This is exactly NOT the approach that those seeking to use dictionaries authoritatively would wish it to be.

To put it another way the judge in this instances refuses to do his job as the dictionary-whinging bastards of this world would have him do it. What dictionary-makers consistently seek to do is provide us with a responsible account of the way language is actually spoken and the meanings of words that people speaking a given language actually use. What the dictionary-whinging types consistently want is an authoritative pronouncement delivered from on-high about just what meanings we SHOULD be attaching to any given word. They want the dictionary to tell us how to use language.

That really should be end-game folks. When the judge doesn’t adjudicate; it oughtta be case-dismissed, but that is almost never the case. Pretty much every one hitting me over the head with an imaginary Websters will just go right on doing it after they have just been shown that their weapon of choice is not really meant to be used that way.

Dunning and Kruger should demand that such folks return their effect with interest.

My rant began with a reference to religious folks though, didn’t it? Okay, it did. To be fair, this is a post I dropped several months ago and just picked back up. The sticking point was just that. Do I really want to talk about the general misuse of imaginary lexical authority? Or do I want to explore the specific role of such  practices in the thinking of pious people. Tonight, my solution is this. I will make just one point about the religious variation, and that is this:

It is sort of fitting to find that people who wish to approach life as though it must be lived according to a specific set of directives from on-high would replicate that model in their approach to language. This is the prescriptive life well lived. They find an ought-to in every decision and an essential meaning in every word, all hard-wired right into the universe itself. Actual language use then becomes a set of cases fitting clearly into categories of right and wrong, just as anything else one might do in a world defined by an ultimate Legislator. The deus ex machina that some folks look for in a dictionary is thus pretty much the same one they commonly proclaim outright in their other book-weapon of choice.

So much for the arbitrary nature of the sign!