Tag Archives: Language

From San Antonio, Texas to Beulah Colorada.

01 Tuesday Nov 2022

Posted by in Childhood

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Lake House

I was four years old.

I remember, I was stringing beads at the kitchen table when Mom and Dad came to get me. They told me not to worry about the beads; just leave them there. We got in the car (an old black Volkswagen hatchback) and drove off.

Hours later, I was still thinking about the half-finished string of beads still sitting on the kitchen table back home. I kept wondering when we would get back to I could finish the string. Several more hours later, as great big snowflakes began to smack up against our windshield, I came to realize I probably wasn’t going to get to finish the string of beads after all. We eventually piled into a strange new house and promptly moved right in before going to bed. Mom said she packed the beads after all, but she wasn’t sure where they were. The next day, my older brother and sister took me out to play in the snow of our great big back yard. We made a snow man, something I’d never seen before, and then my brother took a running charge and tackled it. This small ranch in what seemed like the middle of nowhere was our new home.

I never thought about the beads again.

But I did think a lot about Texas,

Beaulah

Sometime later, I remember sitting around a dinner table eating fondu (it was the seventies, after all). The rest of the family was chatting away with the dinner guests, and their conversation puzzled me. They kept talking about how everyone back home in San Antonio talked in a funny way. I distinctly recall, my sister telling a story about a friend who used the word ‘y’all’ in the conversation, and of course there were the usual comments about how Mom’s speech had already come to match that of everyone else back in Texas. The laughter was all in good fun, but I simply didn’t understand. Almost all of my short life had been spent in San Antonio, Texas, and I hadn’t noticed anyone talking funny.

Anyone!

Eventually, we took a quick trip back to Texas for a couple days. It must have been a good year or so later. Dad sold our small vacation place on LBJ Lake bought a Ford Pick-up before driving home. While there, I remember seeing one of my old playmates. We talked for a few minutes, but something was different. I remember one thing in particular.

He said; “So y’all going back to Colorada?”

And I suddenly realized that he DID talk funny. So did everyone else! How I hadn’t noticed before would remain a mystery to me for quite some time,

***

THAT, is how I first became aware of accents.

Language in Schizopolis

14 Tuesday Sep 2021

Posted by in Movies

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For me, Schizopolis is nearly entirely a personal pleasure. Almost nobody I know has seen it, and still fewer people seem to have liked it. Still it’s my all-time favorite Soderbergh film.

What is it about?

Well, I could tell you, but that’s hardly in keeping with the spirit of the whole thing. Really, Soderbergh says it all quite clearly at the beginning of the film; if you don’t understand it, you must watch the film over and over until you do, and you must pay full price for the ticket at a genuine movie theater. Nothing else will do!

Suffice to say that the movie is well-named.

What I do want to talk about here, for a paragraph or two anyway, is some of the language games Soderbergh plays around with in this film. At first these games appear to be just so much nonsense, part of the chaos at which the name of the film barely hints. In time, though, I can’t help thinking that Soderbergh managed to say something interesting through these games, something about the relationship between the meaning of words and the nature of human human relationships.

What do I mean?

One of my favorite sequences consists of an assignment given to the main character at work. He is to write a speech for a motivational speaker. The instructions for this speech would be a great take-down of the entire genre. What should be red flags in view of basic critical thinking skills turns out to be the very means by which some of these people will make connections to an audience full of vulnerable people. The next time someone asks me why I hate motivational speakers so much I should just link them to this video.

My favorite language games from this movie are those involving romantic connections, or the lack thereof. There are two main story-lines for this theme; one involving a womanizing exterminator, named Elmo Oxygen, and other another involving a couple whose marriage has clearly taken a turn for the worse.

Elmo Oxygen is an id in a jump suit. He does what he wants in people’s houses, and for the most part he does who he wants as well, because all the housewives seem to fall for him. (Really, it’s why they call for him in the first place.) What Elmo doesn’t do is speak in meaningful sentences, not for most of the film anyway. His flirtations always take place in a kind of code. He knows the code. The women know the code. We the audience, don’t even recognize that it is a code for a little while. It just sounds like nonsense, and then we start piecing it together. As I recall “Nose army” means “yes.” (Elmo hears this phrase a lot.) About the time, we can start to follow these conversations the story-line takes us someplace else, someplace just as odd, I can assure you. For a time anyway, the Elmo Oxygen story-line treats us to a delicious jumble of utter nonsense which actually turns out to make perfect sense. What is said in flirtation between Elmo and his lust-interests never really amounts to anything but the flirtation, and if that’s going well, one may as well say ‘nose army” as ‘yes.”

…the same goes, if it’s not.

For their part, the couple spend much of the film speaking in metapragmatic descriptors. Instead of using normal words to communicate; they describe what they are doing in the conversation. Instead of saying ‘hello’, they greet each other with words like “generic greeting.” Instead of saying “I’m sorry,” they say “sincere apology.” Their communication is always meta-communication, and that meta-communication remains disingenuous throughout their first few scenes in the movie. The only exception to this occurs when the husband turns to his daughter and suddenly speaks to her like a normal father would. When he turns back to his wife, he is once again going through the motions, or rather calling out his motions, because the content no longer means anything anyway. He and his wife do this for awhile.

…and then one of them starts speaking a foreign language.

This word-play alone was enough to sell me on the film. It’s an excellent commentary on the nature of romance, or the lack of it. What the Elmo Oxygen story-line and that of the couple have in common is the absence of substance in communication. What’s different is the reason for it. Elmo and his lovely companions don’t really say anything because they don’t have to. Whatever they have between them is working and the words themselves just don’t matter. Of course e could ask whether or not the shallow code that works so well for Elmo might also be devoid of substance because he really isn’t connecting after all, not in any meaningful sense, but he would surely be unimpressed with such vapid nonsense. In fact, the character would probably be off to some new conquest before we could finish asking the question. For their part, the couple no longer have anything to say to one another, and so they call out their moves instead of talking to each other, because these empty moves are the only thing that matters at that stage in their relationship.

Or in their break-up, anyway.

Oh yeah, …spoilers!

Lost in Translation

09 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in Las Vegas

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Recent Korean

A more recent meal

I still remember the first time I ever went into a Korean restaurant. A friend and I had been playing pool down at the Cue Club in Las Vegas for a couple of hours. It was pretty late as we left, but both of us were quite hungry. Seeing Korean restaurants all over the plaza, as we had for years, we decided that it was was well past time to give one a try.

I don’t remember what either of us ordered, but I do remember that we were both pretty unsure of what we’d be getting. Familiar choices were available, but we both decided to avoid going for the Chinese items we’d both had before. We wanted to try Korean food, so that meant launching into unknown parts of the menu. Anyway, we both found something to order, and in time the food came around.

Two main dishes and a whole host of side dishes, plus some rice in a covered bowl and a bowl of soup for each of us.

We could tell that some of the side dishes were Kimchi, but some of them were a complete mystery. We weren’t entirely sure if we should add the rice to the main dishes or visa versa, eat them separate, etc. Were the side dishes really side dishes, or were we supposed to mix them in with the rest? We just didn’t know the drill. We thought about just plowing ahead, but it occurred to us that doing it wrong might mean missing out on the full experience, so we decided to ask.

The waitress didn’t speak English that well, and the question was at least a little odd, but we stumbled through it, and she seemed to understand us. Was there some trick to eating this? How were we supposed to go about this?

She hesitated.

Then she called over a second waitress and spoke to her in Korean.

The second waitress thought carefully and then began to explain something to the first, also in Korean. She went on for a while. …quite awhile! She was actually a little bit animated, and her answer must have taken at least five minutes.

Mike and I looked at each other. Clearly, we were right. There was something we should know, but what was it?

Our first waitress, asked a follow-up question.

The second answered her.

They began going back and forth, still in Korean. The full conversation must have taken at least ten minutes, tough it actually seemed much longer. We had no idea what they were saying to each other.

Mike and I prepared for the long and complex lesson we would surely get when this conversation was over.

Finally, the first waitress turned to us and we both straightened up, ready for the coming lecture.

“It’s just food. eat it!”

***

Needless to say; when a certain Bill Murray film came out, I laughed my ass off at a certain scene.

Utqiagvik By Any Other Denali

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Alaska, Politics

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barriow-signI live in Barrow, Alaska.

Wait a minute. No I don’t.

I live in Utqiagvik, Alaska.

It turns out that the town of Barrow has elected to change its name to Utqiagvik, or at least we have initiated the process for making this change.

Okay. It’ll take a day or three to get used to, and I can certainly understand some of the reasons for opposing it, but on the whole the recent name change of the town where I live is fine by me. It’s a native designation for a primarily native community. I’m not that involved in local politics, but suffice to say that this is a local decision I am happy to live with.

Thinking about it, a little bit, I am reminded of the way people responded to a similar change of names. It was a little over a year ago that President Obama announced the decision to change the name of Mt. McKinley to Denali. I recall immediately realizing that this would have little impact on the lives of Alaskans. To us, that was the name of the mountain, Denali, full stop. My favorite anecdote about that change came from a guy on Twitter who related the story of how he learned Denali was Mt. McKinley when he moved to the lower 48 and people began asking about it. He had lived in central Alaska for a couple years, and nobody that he noticed had ever called it Mt. McKinley. So, he simply hadn’t made the connection until non-Alaskans began talking to him about it. For myself, the only reason I knew it was Mt. McKinley was because one of the many pilots who called attention to Denali as we flew over actually bothered to mention that it was called Mt. McKinley in the lower 48. If I hadn’t heard that, I might not have made the connection myself. To me, it’s Denali. It’s been Denali since I moved up here, and near as I can tell that’s what the mountain is to Alaskans in general. Sure, there are some other native groups with names of their own for the mountain, but to most Alaskans it is Denali. So, that change shouldn’t have been all that controversial.

…or so one might think!

It wasn’t really all that surprising, but it was certainly worthy of an eye-roll to find how many people viewed the move as an instance of political correctness. Obama was, in their view, caving to the social justice warriors of the world and adopting a new term just to placate Alaska Natives. We all knew it was really Mt. McKinley, so the argument seemed to run, at least it should have been, and it was damned silly to find this mountain whose name we already know getting its named changed just to keep some odd group happy. Yawn! Heard that story from lots of folks who’ve never seen Denali, much less talked to Alaskans about it.

I suppose it wouldn’t occur to some folks that the indigenous people in the area might have thought the same thing when the mountain was renamed in honor of one of the nation’s caretaker Presidents. It certainly didn’t occur to some people that the name change might have had overwhelming support throughout the state at large, a marked preference for both native and non-native alike.

There was, as it happens a political angle to this. President Obama was then preparing a visit to Native Alaskan communities even as Shell Oil was preparing to drill in the arctic; the renaming might very well have served to provide a token gesture of good will in advance of a potentially divisive moment of history. But if this is a problem, it was a problem of timing and ulterior motives. As regards the merits of the name change itself? No, that’s not a problem at all. Not here.

So the renaming of Denali  was for me one of those moments when PC-bashing rhetoric revealed its true colors as a form of political correctness in itself, and those complaining about the name change found themselves triggered, so to speak, by a symbolic issue of little genuine significance to themselves.

So, I wondered…

I wondered what certain ‘conservative’ voices might make of this recent name change? It seems an innocent enough question, doesn’t it? Ah, but in this case an ‘innocent question’ is another phrase for ‘damned morbid curiosity.’ That’s the only reason I can think why I would have found myself scanning the comments section at World Net Daily. I know. It’s a bit like scavenging a garbage dump except I can think of legitimate reasons to look through a garbage dump. As to looking at the comments on World Net Daily, I have only the aforementioned excuse, and it’s not a very good one at that.

Like any other miserable person, I am apparently interested in some company, so let me share with you what I found. The article itself was just a stub and a link to a piece from Alaska Dispatch News, but the comments? Oh, the comments!

Let’s see…

Well, don’t get to used to it, before long they’ll be telling us the muslims were there first.

Um, no. But it is fascinating that a perfectly real question about a community that really was here first would be so easily dismissed with a story about one that clearly wasn’t.

How many Inupiak actually lived in “Utqiagvik” prior to its being named Barrow? I would venture even fewer than lived in Iqaluit (which is in Nunavut) prior to its being named Frobisher Bay (which was its name until 1987).

Basically, this was copied from the 1987 Canuck folly of renaming Frobisher Bay as “Iqaluit”.

A bit more detailed than the other folks weighing in on the subject, which is it least interesting. I really can’t tell why the number of Inupiaq who lived here prior to contact is relevant to the current name. Likewise, it isn’t entirely clear why the renaming of Frobisher Bay is a problem. That name change too is not what this individul would like to see, that’s clear enough, but he never does present a clear reason to believe his preferences should weigh more than the preferences of either community. …or that they should weigh anything at all, really.

Oh no… not another passport stamp within our own country !!!

HE IS COMING……………..

Passport? Do we need passports now? I don’t think so. It is interesting though to think that the name of our little town could trigger the second coming? At least I think that’s what the writer is referring to. So, I guess Jesus doesn’t think much of indigenous names. Unless he does. Seriously I suspect the many churches of Utqiagvik are filled with Native people who may have prayed for this very thing, or given prayers of thanks afterwards. I could be wrong of course. Honestly, I don’t know what happens in churches on Sunday, but still. Seriously? He’s coming? Over this!?!

“To [rename Barrow] would acknowledge, honor and be a reclamation of our beautiful language which is moribund.”

Their “beautiful language” is dying is because to embrace that culture is a sure-fire way to wind up spending the rest of your life performing the Inupiaq equivalent of burger flipping. The young just aren’t interested and are leaving for better, easier lives, hence the moribund language.

Okay, this is an interesting narrative. To say that it affirms a kind of cultural imperialism would be putting it mildly, but it’s an oddly caricatured version of the local job market. Simply put, the North Slope of Alaska does not seem to be lacking for jobs, and in particular it does not seem to be lacking for jobs in which speaking Inupiaq would be anything less than a plus. Speaking Inupiaq alone could be an issue, but English + Inupiaq? That’s a damned pay raise right there! If people are leaving that’s not it. If the language is floundering, that’s not why.

A barrow by any other name….

Hm…

Dog gone it !! I missed Indigenous People’s Day again.

So somebody doesn’t give a fuck about indigenous people? Well fuck his fucks anyway.

Re: BARROW, ALASKA, CHANGES ITS NAME … TO ‘UTQIAGVIK’
‘It reclaims our beautiful Inupiaq language’
———————-
If memory serves me the people of Alaska recently voted to call Mount McKinley by its original Native-American name.

More than half the US states have Native-American names and there is a reason for that. Native Americans may have fought each other, as well as Europeans, but the Europeans admired Indian bravery and kept most of the Indian names of places for that reason.

Interesting. I don’t think warrior heritage is really the issue in either of these cases, but this does strike me as a reasonable effort to understand what’s going on. It’s nice to see that reasonable happens from time to time, even in odd places.

Well, if I ever have to go to Barrow/Utqiagvik I’ll have to visit the travel agency to book a flight. They’ll never understand what the hell I’m saying over the phone.

Okay.

Unpronounceable Utqiagvik is so…so…PC!

Always amusing to see someone who has ideas about what other people should be calling themselves complain about their political correctness. And seriously, it’s really not that hard to pronounce. I mean, the ‘g’s around here are not like English ‘g’s but no-one has been executed for mispronouncing a ‘g’ in at least 5 years. Say it like it looks and no-one is going to bug you about it.

Now, knowing we are meant to have a republic, this is one of the few democracy style political decisions I can live with. Doesn’t bother me one bit to have a community decide on a name change…even if I have no hope of pronouncing it in this lifetime.

Nice to see a conservative voice in the comments at WND for a change.

WHAT-I-VIK!???

Utki… Oh that was a rhetorical question, wasn’t it?

I guess we can call it The City Formerly Known as Barrow.

…or we can call it Utqiagvik.

We could have its name as ‘UTQIAGVIK’, but since this name seems to be unpronounceable or sounds and looks almost random to most people, I think nearly everyone will continue to call the town “Barrow”. Thanks, though.

Reply 1: It looks like a name some negro might give to their child.

Reply 1a: …could be an Icelandic volcano name

On the first comment here, I find the authorial ‘we’ interesting. If ‘nearly everyone’ is nearly everyone that lives elsewhere, then I suspect nearly everyone here won’t much give a damn. If nearly everyone were here, then well I suspect the vote would have been different.

On the first reply to that comment, I’m guessing this is one of those folks mystified by the way some people keep calling him ‘racist’, but I’m sure I would have no idea why that would be the case.

On the second reply to that particulatr comment, I suppose it could, and that would be cool.

I went on a one night trip to Barrow um Utqiagvik back in 1993. Alcohol was prohibited but there was a speakeasy just a snowball throw away from the law enforcement building. I went on a school bus tour and the driver narrated. It was great. There was an italian restaurant that had excellent food. It was an expensive trip but worth it.

Right on!

Disgusting! We brought these people civilization, yet they still want to celebrate their savage ways

Reply 1:  Maybe they didn’t want to be brought into anything! Maybe they just wanted too be left *** alone.

Reply 2: Barrow had Eskimos. They were peaceful until corrupted by alcohol. The noble savages lived in the south and they too became corrupted after being turned on to petrol and alcohol too. The white man did it.

Reply 2a: All the white man did was give them God, civilization, and stopped them from warring among themselves over sparse resources.

Reply2a1: The black man and woman are the start of humanity.

Reply2a2: One more IDIOT that does not know their history the white man sold alcohol to the Indians in the lower 48 and in Alaska also….

Reply 2a3: When before that, they had only Peyote and Mescaline. Fine hallucinogens indeed. Good Grief.

Reply 2a4: I know the white man introduced them to alcohol. The point is that the indian moral character was so weak that their way of life collapsed because of it, so big government has to give them land and take care of them like orphan children

It’s always nice to see bigotry drop the white robes and show its face in the light of day, or at least the internet equivalent. That would certainly cover the first comment. What’s fascinating to me though about this exchange is the use of peyote and mescaline to undermine respect for Inupiat. Those plants are not found in the arctic, so this person is clearly treating the indigenous people of the Americas as one homogeneous group. That he also doesn’t seem to understand much about native use of these hallucinogens is of course par for the course. The mere presence of drugs in the Americas is, for him, sufficient cause to comment on the moral character of all of them.

…and we’re back to naked bigotry, bigotry that’s still going strong at the end of the thread.

Also find it fascinating that such folks could consider themselves conservative. There is simply nothing in conservatism that should contribute to such naked bigotry. And still…

Why don’t they just piut up a blank sign, since the enlightened indigenous people of Alaska had no writen language….or an alphabet for that matter?

I normally make it a point not to use people’s spelling and grammar against them, but I can’t help feeling amused at the difficulties this fellow has writing about the inferiority of those without a written language. I also find it fascinating to see someone hold the lack of a written language against any population. Suffice to say that Inupiaq is written now (hence the ability to write the name, Utqiagvik), and there isn’t much reason to hold it against Inupiat that they learned writing from someone else. …just like most of the peoples of Europe did at one point or another.

How about “Freezeyourassoff”?

Point taken.

been to Barrow, it’s a dump

Reply 1 – So is Detroit

Reply 2 – But it was fun for me. I visit the hood while there but the hooligans were safe. I ate fried chicken at the supermarket and while there checked out the prices of food items. Triple in cost! The beach I went to was cold but nice. It was fun for the one night I stayed.

Your face is a dump!

From now on people will say “so, you’re from Unpronounceable, Alaska”

Reply – Or, gesundheit.

Touché and thank you.

More PCBS

Pure projection.

Weird.

Reply 1 : How do you pronounce this new name!!????

Reply 1a: I guess the Alaska Dispatch News never expected to get national coverage of this story. Either that, or it never occurred to the writer and editor that few people outside of the area would have the first clue how to pronounce the new name.

Reply 1b: oot-GHAR-vik

Reply 1b1: Thank you!

Reply 1c: Utqiagvik… pronounced just as how it looks.

Reply 1c1: It looks pretty messed up.

Reply 1c2: The same forward and backward … at least when I say it.

Reply 1c3: Haha, Okay! That makes my day. I can chuckle all day now.

Us Americans are so darn monolinguistic.

Fantastic.

Reply 1c4: “Us Americans are so darn monolinguistic.”

I’ll bet the Romans were too when they were the dominant world power. And very likely whoever comes after us will be as well.

It’s ridiculous to suggest that people should learn a second language “just because” or that not doing so makes one small-minded. It’s about as intelligent as mocking someone because they can’t play more than one musical instrument.

But no doubt it makes you feel somehow more enlightened to make such comments.

And there it is, the right wing reaction to another name change occurring in Alaska. Its an interesting mix of outright racism and the usual complaints about short-sighted thinking associated with political correctness. Some of these folks have very specific objections, and those very specific objections often seem to turn on value judgements the authors take as obvious. In the end, it does appear that respect for native communities simply isn’t very high on the priorities of a good portion of these critics. At least a couple of these guys would appear to object to that value in itself. Others clearly think other things should come first. But what strikes me most about the whole thing is the ease with which this crowd picks apart a local issue in terms of national priorities and ideological assumptions.

I keep coming back to the one person who voiced the notion that the preferences of a local community ought to control the choice of its own name. All other issues aside, I can’t help thinking that’s the winning argument in this case. It strikes me as the sort of argument I would expect a conservative to make on the subject, and this one more reason why the right wing stance in America’s culture wars always seems so disingenuous to me. For all the fretting and fuming over left wing excess in these conflicts, it is as often as not the right wing that seeks to impose national agenda to the issue at hand.

…and proceeds to tell us it is someone else that is politically correct.

Argumentation and its Narrative Payoff

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Philosophy

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ARnold ConanIt’s been a long time since I read Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, but I was recently thinking the internet has surely added a lot of good material for some of its central themes. The the notion of argumentation as warfare comes to mind. In that book, they advanced the notion that a lot of the metaphors people use for argumentation are those associated with warfare and violence in general. This is certainly born out by a number of things you can see on the net.

To see what people say about argumentation on the internet, it would seem that the world of debate is tremendously violent. Everywhere one looks, one finds destruction in the wake of a rhetorical flourish. Case in point? “Pres Obama Brilliantly Destroys a Loaded FOXNews Question” in this clip. Go Bama! But wait a minute? Is that an accomplishment? How do you destroy a question anyway? Loaded or unloaded, do you bash them? Crush them? Hit them with a mega-devestating incinerator photon torpedawhomper Bomb? Not to worry, cause our man Obama gets some here. He totally destroys Trump in this speech. In this video a “60 Minutes Host Destroys Barack Obama On Syria.” “Dawkins destroys Muslim Morality” in this video. But don’t look now! “Rupert Sheldrake Destroys Dawkins Dillusion in Banned TED-x Talk.” …er (sic). Apparently the author of this book is content to merely “refute” him. (Merciful soul!) Bill Nye destroyed Ken Ham. Ken Ham took the Science guy down with him. …totally destroyed. Sam Harris kicks ass here. Ben Carson “demolishes liberalism entirely in this clip from The View.   Hillary Clinton destroys things too! Oh no, Rand Paul destroyed her! He destroyed Donald Trump too! But wait a minute! Donald Trump destroyed Paul. Mutual destruction, just what I like to see in the GOP.

But wait!

Hold the phone.

In this video Cenk Uygur “destroys, degrades, demolishes, desecrates Antonin Scalia.”

Destruction, degradation, demolition, AND  desecration? That’s it. Uyguyr wins the prize. he can just drop the mic now. He totally wins the violence as war meme for the day. Apparently the man is a veritable engine of rhetorical terror. Behold his verbal prowess and tremble!

***

Okay, so I know how to belabor a point, right? Well, I’m just getting started really, so please bear with me. The point here is NOT that argumentation is really a form of warfare, but rather that many of the ideas we attach to argumentation are derived from the world of violence. The metaphors we use when talking about argumentation are, as Lakoff and Johnson pointed out, borrowed from the world of war. We could use other metaphors, and sometimes we do, but when we approach this subject for some reason or another violence just keeps pushing its way to the front of our tropic tool-kit. And really, what else would we expect Violence to do? He’s a pushy bastard. That’s why we call him Violence.

What has me thinking about this today isn’t really the metaphors, per se; it’s the stories used in this case to convey them. Each of the links above provides a little mini narrative describing some argument as though it were a decisive victory in battle. Reading the links in question, we can practically hear the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan echoing in the background.

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Is this what every arguing argutizer really has in mind all along, an effort to achieve a victory so complete he can hear the lamentations of the women mourning his poor vanquished victim?

Perhaps.

But of course we want other things too. We want to show that we are smart. We want others to see our point, perhaps even to accept some truth that we regard as important. Sometimes we may want to learn ourselves, perhaps fleshing out our ideas in the effort to present them to others. We might even hope to learn more from another party by pushing them a little, getting them out of their comfort zone in the hopes that what they then tell us will be a little more worth listening to than what they say when the world feels like a warm moist hug.

Sometimes an argument leaves us with a narrative about conquest and destruction. That’s fair to say. But sometimes it leaves us with narratives about personal transformation, mural respect, learning, realization, …and, oh the fluffy! It burns!!! I’m really uncomfortable pleading the merits of such wholesome and earnest values, but honestly, they too play a large role in the construction of argumentation. Often these values are the more serious reasons for engaging in argumentation. Officially they are the reason we produce arguments in the classroom, for example, though someone might be excused for thinking the real reasons may at times be closer to those of argumentation as warfare. (I’m reminded of references to the ‘silverbacks’ in scholarly halls, people who contribute great thoughts to be sure, but also folks who are prone to pounding their chests and roaring at others whenever they feel the need.) One often feels a certain tension between these motivations, at least I do.

Increasingly I am inclined to think of the tension between different rhetorical styles in terms of the narratives folks hope to tell about the arguments in question. Whether successful or not, at some point an argument passes into discursive history. It then rests in the background of subsequent discourse, taking on the form of the texts, ideas, quotes, and general resources others may use to communicate. They may recount an argument (or perhaps resurrect it in dead horse form just for the purpose of kicketation). As often as not, arguments make their appearance in later discourse in the form of stories like those referenced above. We talk about how Chomsky blew Skinner away on the nature of language (or perhaps he didn’t). We speak of the conflict (‘shedding more heat than light’ as one of my professors put it) between Masrahl Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Sometimes we simply say that one theory replaced another or that a given approach has become the standard in the field. Whatever else happens in such commentary, it transforms the point of an argument into a moment in a narrative. In many cases, I’ll warrant, this is hoped-for pay-off in producing an argument, that it will pass into the positive themes of a story. Maybe that story will be about how Bob kicked Joey’s ass on a random topic, or maybe it will be a story about how this or that idea came to be the dominant approach to a given subject.

Dominant? I’m back in the language of violence again. er, …perhaps the received wisdom in a given field? Anyway…

My point is that much of what people do in the course of pursuing an argument can be thought of as an effort, not simply to prove the truth of a claim as logicians might tell us, but to lay the groundwork for any number of stories one would hope to see told at some later time. Why do I think this is important? Not so much because it helps us understand the production of any particular argument, and certainly not because it helps us grasp the nature of academic argumentation (or any argumentation conforming to the normative ideals of my logic texts). What strikes me as important about this is that it helps to understand conflict with argumentative styles falling outside those norms. It helps precisely because it denies the centrality of those norms and reminds us that the effort to provide an objective case for the truth of a claim is just one of the many reasons someone might field an argument. He could also do so because he wants to hear the lamentations of your women.

I’m still belaboring the point, aren’t I? Thus far, it feels like I am painting too much in broad strokes, but wait! Oh! There’s another good metaphor for argumentation. Painting!!! Wouldn’t rhetoric be that much more colorful and that much less painful if we could construe arguments in terms of visual media? To make it work though, it needs to be generative. We need to be able to spell out the details of argumentation in painterly terms. Perhaps we could a prepare the canvas in reference to issues of context or outline a theory. Hey! We do ‘outline’ theories. We also sketch out the details of a position, make too fine a point of some things, and even speak of prevarication as erasure. Argumentation as art works. …but apparently not as often as warfare.

Artsy asides notwithstanding, what has me up at this undogly hour is the prospect of looking at the transition from an argument to a narrative in more detail. What happens when a genre defined in terms of premises and conclusions passes into the form of a genre defined by characters, plots, and events? What happens when relevance and logical support is transformed into dramatic tension? Are there regular patterns? If so, can they help us understand some of the details happening on either end of that transition?

There is plenty of interesting material out there. Election year political debates are a great example of this. Candidates do not approach these debates as an academic might. They are not trying to prove a point so much as provide an audience with a reason to vote in a certain way. The candidate with the most compelling argument for a given policy may not be the one who impresses voters the most. A large part of what determines this will be the way the arguments play in subsequent speech. A candidate, for example, who handles the details of a legal issue thoroughly may find himself resonating far less effectively than one who fielded a better sound bite in the same debate.

Obvious example is obvious.

Less obvious material? Internet trolls could perhaps provide us with a fair number of examples, but I think pure trolling is just the tip of the ice-berg. That kid who was too busy laughing at your avatar pic to care that your argument was sound will probably be as proud to tell the story of the encounter as you are, perhaps more so. Likewise the old fart who, hey that’s me! (Nevermind that example, we’re moving on…) If I’m ever tempted to use the phrase ‘social justice warrior’ in contempt it’s when I meet someone who seems more intent on claiming moral high ground over certain issues than addressing any number of objective concerns. You could absolutely prove a point to such a person and the only story they will tell about you is that you proved yourself to be a bad person for doing it. But of course one also encounters plenty of people happy to sneer and smirk at the the discomfort of others, especially anyone stupid enough to give a damn about the underprivileged. To let such a person know that you care about any given issue is little other than to tell them how to hurt you. They too will tell a tale about any argument you have with them. Your own tears (real or imagined) will figure prominently in the stories they hope to tell about you.

Such games aren’t limited to the net, of course, but the anonymity of online discussion seems to bring it all out so much more. It’s part of a general pattern of behavior one sees in public disagreements, especially those involving people from very different walks of life. All too often both parties in an argument will come away thinking they have won. In each case, what they actually come away with is a story that relates their victory. It would be easy to think this is because people simply don’t see their own errors, to think that only one of the stories about a given argument would be authentic, but that’s not usually the case. As often as not, the difference occurs because each side had a different sense of the win-loss conditions to begin with.

Yes, the notion of ‘winning’ an argument is already a problem.

The problem isn’t always that other speaking styles compete with those we might think of as more sound argumentative practice. Sometimes the alternative approaches are genuinely interesting in themselves. For example, sometimes an argument is encased in a legendary narrative, which of course makes possible a kind of indirection or an argument by allusion. One may simply refer to the story as a means of suggesting an argument about real world matters. My favorite example of this remains the separation of men and women in Navajo lore, though I suppose one can also see it in conventions of scriptural quotation among Christians (where it almost always takes on the quality of an authority argument). In each of these cases, the significance of an argument appears to be filtered through the significance of a set narrative that defines and shapes its meaning in ways you couldn’t get from a direct analysis of the argument itself. That argument appears as a brief moment in a stream of storytelling, and for some at least its possible significance will always be tied to that very narrative.

When I used to post on Christian Forums, I recall a number of instances in which the arguments of atheists were described in terms of malevolent supernatural power. Realizing I was among the demons described in these narratives, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of anger and irritation. I also found it fascinating. These were people who measured arguments in terms of spiritual warfare. They measured such arguments in terms of powers not premises and faith instead of relevance. This is argumentation as war, to be sure, but in this case, it’s a war between demons and angels. Where I might havedescribed an argument on that forum in terms of proof and evidence, to the practitioners of spiritual warfare those same arguments became stories of a struggle with evil. In the abstract, that isn’t really too surprising, but I must say that it was odd to see just how that general theme played out in the details.

The Storify app would seem to be relevant to my thoughts at the moment? …Still not gonna use it!

Comedy strikes me as a particularly perplexing example of this problem. Stand-up comics produce arguments all the time, but of course their primary job is still to make people laugh. Often we laugh because the argument seems to make a good point in a clever and interesting way. At other times we may laugh because the argument is clearly absurd or irrelevant. The shear audacity of an obvious fallacy can be damned humorous if one isn’t expected to take it seriously. In such performances, our priorities shift and we may approve arguments which might otherwise seem foolish or genuinely asinine.

My tendency in such cases has always been to assume the comic doesn’t really mean it, but as I get older (and as some of my favorite comics do the same) I find at times these jokes are meant more seriously than I might have hoped. Victoria Jackson would be one particularly morbid example of this problem. What might have been a funny act, at least to some, appears less an less to be an act at all. Honestly, I think the same of Ted Nugent. I know he’s not a comic, but in his old television appearances I can’t help thinking his tone was tongue in cheek, that he at least realized he was taking some liberties with reason. I don’t see that when he speaks anymore. I see the same reckless leaps of lack-logic in Nugent’s speech, but he no longer seems to be in on his own joke. Its as if his reasoning has become so committed to the service of a personal narrative that it couldn’t matter anymore when he is wrong, not even enough for a wink.

How did I get onto Nugent?

Nevermind that!

My point is that in comedy argumentation and jokes are bound up together in interesting ways. Which takes priority over which just isn’t always that clear. Sometimes the strength of an argument carries the joke itself, and sometimes it’s the lack of that strength that makes us laugh. So, which is it in any given case? That’s not easy to tell. The guy laughing beside you may be thinking ‘that is so true’ even as you are busting a gut because it’s completely ridiculous. In either event, we are less likely to evaluate the work of a comedian in terms of the cogency of his reasoning or the truth of his assumptions than the cleverness of his words, his timing, projection, etc. With some clear exceptions, we can see this in the stories people tell about the work of comics.

On the other hand, the work of a good comic does bring us back to the argument as war metaphor. If an act is done right, we might well say of the comic that he killed it! I wonder if stand-up comics ever want to crush their audiences, to see those who came to a show driven before them, and to hear the lamentations of their women?

I’ve probably overdone that line, haven’t I?

Yes, I have.

 

 

 

 

An Uncommon Refutation

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Uncommonday

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26morg.184Philosophy buffs will already know about Sidney Morgenbesser, (September 22, 1921 – August 1, 2004). A Professor at Columbia University, Morgenbesser’s sharp wit has produced more than a few great stories. He is particularly known for a single moment of shear brilliance that outstrips the value of many published volumes. J.L. Austin, a prominent philosopher of language, had been giving a lecture, so the story begins. Austin claimed that two negatives could make a positive in many languages, but nowhere did two positives make a negative.

…to which Morgenbesser’s replied; “yeah-yeah!”

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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046

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!

Apropos of Nothing, The Worst Lecture Ever to be Inflicted on My Delicate Ears

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Education

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I’m lucky.

I have very few classroom horror stories from my college days. Of course I remember a lot of petty behavior, some arguable decisions, and I witnessed at least one case of genuine abuse to a classmate, …okay two. But it was pretty rare that I personally felt any significant discomfort as a result of anything the teachers did in the classroom.

My statistics textbook took a Hell of a beating, but that’s a different issue. I liked that teacher. I just hated statistics.

But there was one really awful lecture that I remember in detail. Lucky you, dear reader, because I am going to share the misery.

It was my last semester in college and I was finishing up the credits for a second major, linguistics. In those days, the linguistics program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas was interdisciplinary. So, I had taken plenty of classes in linguistic anthropology, sociolingistics, psycholinguistics, logic, philosophy of language, etc. …all really great stuff! I enjoyed every minute of it. But that did leave one really huge gap in the knowledge that a guy graduating with a degree in linguistics ought to have. I hadn’t yet taken a full course in grammar. I didn’t even need it to graduate, at least according to the degree requirements, but that didn’t sit right with me. How could I graduate with a degree in this subject without the benefit of a full course in grammar? I’d heard good things about the lady who taught grammar in the English Department, and so I signed up and prepared to get down and dirty in the realm of syntax.

I knew something was wrong when I found a middle-aged man standing at the head of the classroom on the first day. I do remember his name, but let’s just call him Mr. H. Mr. H. passed out index cards and asked all of us to fill in some personal information while he explained that the usual instructor was on sabbatical that semester. He would be teaching the grammar classes.

Okay.

For the next few minutes everything seemed pretty standard. No red flags went up as Mr. H. reviewed the syllabus, and I felt pretty confident I was going to learn a lot in his class. I grew even more pleased when he explained that he would sometimes venture outside the narrow bounds of grammar to discuss other aspects of language use.

It was as though he had promised to have strippers pass candy out during class.

I couldn’t wait for some of those discussions. Luckily I didn’t have to, as Mr. H. proudly announced his first slightly-off-topic lecture for the semester. He wanted to talk about euphemisms.

I was a happy guy.

He began by telling the story of his first job, working in a mom&pop grocery store somewhere in Texas. Mr. H. talked about the time some yankee had come in and asked for some jalapenos, (pronouncing the ‘j’ about like you would ‘jam’). His reply, as Mr. H. explained it was; “Sir I believe the Spanish call them jalapenos (pronouncing the ‘j’ like the ‘h’ in ham).” He then proceeded to explain that this was a terrible thing to do and that no-one should ever make fun of the way anyone else speaks, ever.

I wasn’t entirely sure that he had described an act of mockery, but that was a detail I could easily overlook. On the main point,  the man was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned. I was really glad I had signed up for the class.

And that’s when things took a bad turn.

Within just a couple minutes of announcing this principle that one shouldn’t make fun of other people’s speech, Mr. H. began to tell us all about the decline of the English language as a result of recent trends. Mr. H. was quite concerned that folks had begun to water the English language down with a variety of euphemisms. It was a terrible situation as our great medium of communication had been harmed a great deal by this trend.

Mr. H. had quite a few examples, but the first one that I can remember was the term ‘African-American’. Mind you, this was 1990 and the battles over political correctness were picking up steam fast. This topic had not yet run its full course in the public sphere; it hadn’t yet bored everyone to tears. My classmates sat on the edge of their seats while Mr. H. proceeded to explain that he had nothing but love for all God’s people, but he didn’t believe in calling people by the wrong word. You had to call people what they were, not what they weren’t. I sat back just a little disappointed and waited for Mr. H. to explain that ‘black’ was the proper name for the people in question.

Instead he proceeded to tell the class that ‘negro’ was what ‘they’ were and that was what folks ought to call them. I sat back up. He had at least surprised me. I had to give him that, but did I hear the man right?

Had I heard correctly? Was he actually skipping right past the common usage I expected of conservatives and moderates to rescue a sordid vocabulary choice out of a distant era?  I listened on as Mr. H. insisted that he meant no disrespect by this term and that it had no insulting implications. ‘Negro” was the right word and nothing else would do. Those using the term ‘African-American’ were engaged in a full-scale assault on the English language, and she suffered terribly at their abusive treatment.

The rest of the class ate this message up. I mean they loved it! For my own part, I dropped right out of that choir he was preaching to.

My concern wasn’t entirely with the politics at hand. I was never fully on board with the PC approach to vocabulary, and I could think of reasonable concerns about a lot of the verbal practices at hand. But Mr. H. wasn’t producing reasonable arguments. In fact, he was demonstrating a level naïveté that I didn’t expect from someone who was about to teach a class in descriptive linguistics. Objections were crowding their way into my thoughts in such numbers I feared my mind might burst if I listened anymore.

– Mr. H’s assertion that there was a right word for this or any other topic and that anything else was poor use stood out like a sore thumb. By ‘sore thumb’, I mean a completely unsupported premise. Worse than that; this assumption flew in the face of pretty much everything lexicographers had to say about the subject. Words had multiple meanings, and topics could be referred to in a variety of different ways. Languages changes! You could argue pros and cons of different word choices, but Mr. H. just insisted there was a right word and the public wasn’t using it anymore. This was a bit like discovering your geography teacher was a flat earther.

– ‘Negro’? Seriously, ‘Negro’?

– Details aside, declensionist narratives about the state of a given language are tired and damned lame. Untold prophets have warned about the decline of English, each with a different sin on their minds, and each cherry-picking the evidence with all the shame of a child stealing fruit from a neighbors tree. In this case, there was the additional absurdity that Mr. H. wanted us to feel for the abuse of the English language even as he minimized concerns about the abuse of actual people. This was personification with an agenda, and that agenda had little room for concerns about folks who really could feel the effects of abuse.

– I really couldn’t square the entire theme of the lecture with the lesson Mr. H. had drawn from his first example. Were we not making fun of the way some folks talked? I suppose he was suggesting that advocates of politically correct speech were making fun of others, but he had gone well past correcting that and right into the realm of mocking their own vocabulary preferences.

– A bit depends on the presentation, but the notion that words like ‘African American’ are euphemisms contains at least one really ugly implication. If a euphemism is a word that makes something ugly sound better than it is, and that did seem to be the way Mr. H. defined it, then what did that say about his thoughts about the people this term was applied to? Was he not suggesting that the right word really did convey something bad. He denied this of course, but that really seemed to be the station to which his particular train of thought had been headed.

All of these thoughts and others crowded into my head and screamed for me to let them out. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this crap from a guy who studied language for a living.

I looked around and I saw over 20 students falling in love with this man.

It’s okay, I thought. I’m here for the lessons on grammar. This doesn’t have to matter. Who knows. Maybe, Mr. H. will respond well to challenging opinions. Should I say something now and see how he responds? But where to start? I thought about whether or not to field an objection as I just sat there and took in the horror show.

The straw that broke this camels back came when Mr. H. took up the use of the term ‘gay’.

Yep. He was against it.

Mr. H. told us that he would never use that word. He went on to explain that he would never condemn a man for being what God made him, but he believed in calling people what they really were. I thought surely that he was going to tell us the proper term was ‘homosexuals’.

But no.

What these people were, Mr. H. informed us was ‘faggots’.

No other word would do.

And Mr. H.’s fan club fell over themselves to show their appreciation for this point. It was quite the surreal experience for me, watching my classmates nod and stare lovingly at this performance. I thought surely I would soon be sick.

At this point, I felt like Mr. H. had enough rope. If I couldn’t hang him with it, I should at least be able to reign in the message a bit. And anyway, I really needed to see how he would respond to disagreement. So, up went my hand. Mr. H. called on me. And I proceeded to ask him if he didn’t think it more appropriate to consider ‘faggot’ a dysphemism (in retrospect, I should have just said ‘insult’). I went on to ask if he didn’t think the English language was growing new insults at about the same pace that it was growing euphemisms, or if he had specific reasons for thinking the one trend was outpacing the other. I think I managed to keep a respectful tone, but I definitely expressed my disagreement.

And the class grew silent.

The man literally scowled at me. In falling tones, Mr. H. asked me for my name. He then proceeded to dig the pile of index cards from the beginning of class out of his shirt pocket and slowly flip through the until he found mine. He then studied my card for a minute or two, all of this in utter silence. No-one said anything.

With a heavy sigh, Mr. H. finally placed the cards back in his pocket and looked back at me. “What I am trying to say is…” He then proceeded to restate his general thesis that English had been watered down through excessive euphemisms. He did this without responding to any of my points at all. It was amazing. There was no reference to anything I had just said, no answers whatsoever to my questions. No counterarguments. Nothing!

Mr. H. then asked me if that message was okay with me.

After a brief pause, I said ‘yes’.

By ‘yes’ I meant that I would be graduating without the benefit of a full course in grammar.