... or, in this case, bad speaking.
The following sentence appeared in a June 16, 2009, piece by the Associated Press fashion writer Samantha Critchell:
Noting her "meteoric rise as a fashion icon," CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg said [Michelle] Obama had "a unique look that balances the duality of her lives" in her roles as trusted adviser to her husband, President Barack Obama, and busy mother to their two daughters.
The CFDA is the Council of Fashion Designers of America, an organization that has apparently so exhausted itself in designing fashion that it has no energy left to speak clearly.
In the sixteen words attributed to her, Diane von Furstenberg commits four verbal fouls. First, "meteoric rise" is a cliché, i.e., an overused expression used as a crutch by the mentally inert. Second, it is a stupid cliché, as meteors do not rise but fall (a meteoric trait pointed out so often that to proceed in ignorance of it is to flaunt one's disconnectedness from intelligent writing or speech). Third, she refers to Michelle Obama's "lives" as if the First Lady were a cat. The remote possibility that reincarnation may be true aside, one life is all any of us have. Fourth, von Furstenberg refers to the "duality of [Obama's] lives," as if each of her lives has two parts. (If to go forth and multiply is to obey a divine command, is going forth and subdividing a sin?)
Somehow, von Furstenberg managed to use unique--one of our most abused words--correctly. She didn't modify it with a very or a most the way most people would who are as verbally challenged as she is. Maybe she was feeling run down.
The conclusion: clothing fashions are determined by idiots.
Who'd've thunk it?
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Overlooking the Obvious: Real-Life Examples of Bad Writing, No. 1
The lead sentence of a recent CBS-news headline read as follows: "For the second day in a row a newborn girl has been born on New York City's mass transit system."
It contains three writing errors (a rather impressive achievement when you realize that the sentence contains only twenty words).
First, there should be a comma after "row," as a comma usually follows a series of introductory prepositional phrases.
Second, there should be a hyphen between "mass" and "transit," as a hyphen usually joins one or more words used to form one adjective.
Third, the word "newborn" is superfluous. What other kind of girl who has just been born is there?
It contains three writing errors (a rather impressive achievement when you realize that the sentence contains only twenty words).
First, there should be a comma after "row," as a comma usually follows a series of introductory prepositional phrases.
Second, there should be a hyphen between "mass" and "transit," as a hyphen usually joins one or more words used to form one adjective.
Third, the word "newborn" is superfluous. What other kind of girl who has just been born is there?
Friday, June 12, 2009
Euphemisms (A Work in [Very Slow] Progress)
euphemism: an agreeable or inoffensive expression substituted for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant
This entry's governing syllogism:
1. A word is the shape taken by a thought to make that thought intelligible to more than one person.
2. A euphemism is a distorted word.
3. Those who use euphemisms do not think straight.
C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength was published in 1945. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. Both take place in societies in which "common sense" has become so diluted by euphemisms that the citizens cannot see what's happening right under their noses: namely, that they're being dehumanized in the name of humanity.
Our society is becoming more like the ones envisioned by Lewis and Orwell everyday. Indeed, most if not all of our most heated political, social, and religious debates have become so befogged with verbal imprecision that many people no longer even know what the debates are about (although they think they do) let alone qualify as responsible participants in a serious discussion.
The following may someday be a reasonably complete list of the contemporary euphemisms most to blame for the swamp-like consistency of our common socio-political ground:
abortion
It's hard to remember, but this term once referred to any process that had been stopped before it reached fruition. Now, like the term make love, it is used exclusively to refer to human reproduction (or the lack thereof). What makes it a euphemism is that it stops short of saying what is being aborted. And for good reason: Whether one considers the developing life to be human (a "baby") or sub-human (a "fetus"), it's certainly life, and therefore the ending of it is, at least in some sense, an act of killing. One sometimes still hears proponents of legalized euthanasia (another euphemism) using the term mercy killing, yet one never hears proponents of legal abortion arguing for the right of a woman to kill the fetus growing within her. By the standard set by such linguistic tergiversation, we might justwell refer to the killing of anyone as an "abortion" (in that any killing is the stopping of a process--a thirty-two-year-old murder victim could be said to have been aborted in the ninety-sixth trimester.) Not surprisingly, "pro-choice," the euphemism most preferred by legal-abortion advocates, is equally incomplete, as it fails to clarify what "choice" the advocate favors. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll takes the absurdity even further, referring to "pro-life" performers (e.g., Pat Boone) not as "pro-life" (which they obviously are) but as "anti-choice," as if those who consider Roe v. Wade to be unconstitutional oppose any selecting among options. What term, then, should be used to refer to what happens when the life growing in a human womb is ended? Well, selecting a bon mot is seldom easy, but "prenatal killing" would be a step (if only a "baby step," so to speak) in the right direction.
adult
As a noun, this word still suggests a mature, full-grown human being, one who has successfully put away childish things. As an adjective, however, it has come to mean "pornographic" (as in "adult magazines" or "adult content"). As pornography is the deliberate arousal of any audience's sexual desire for the purposes of making money, there is nothing "grown-up" about its creation or its consumption. (I was going to saying that there is nothing mature about its creation or its consumption, but mature has also become a euphemistic synonym for "pornographic.") No one is so easily titillated as the immature.
developmentally disabled
This nine-syllable term has become the euphemism of choice among those who care for the mentally retarded. "Retarded," they say, has become a negative and-or outdated term. It is difficult to see how a term that means "slow" (retarded) is more "negative" than a term that means "incapable of" (disabled)--or, for that matter, how "developmentally" is less pejorative than "mentally." Frankly, I would rather be mentally slow than incapable of any development whatsoever. The fact is that any term used to label something that we regard as deficient will take on negative connotations; so changing the terminology without changing the nature of the thing to which the terminology refers solves nothing.
tolerance
This entry's governing syllogism:
1. A word is the shape taken by a thought to make that thought intelligible to more than one person.
2. A euphemism is a distorted word.
3. Those who use euphemisms do not think straight.
C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength was published in 1945. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. Both take place in societies in which "common sense" has become so diluted by euphemisms that the citizens cannot see what's happening right under their noses: namely, that they're being dehumanized in the name of humanity.
Our society is becoming more like the ones envisioned by Lewis and Orwell everyday. Indeed, most if not all of our most heated political, social, and religious debates have become so befogged with verbal imprecision that many people no longer even know what the debates are about (although they think they do) let alone qualify as responsible participants in a serious discussion.
The following may someday be a reasonably complete list of the contemporary euphemisms most to blame for the swamp-like consistency of our common socio-political ground:
abortion
It's hard to remember, but this term once referred to any process that had been stopped before it reached fruition. Now, like the term make love, it is used exclusively to refer to human reproduction (or the lack thereof). What makes it a euphemism is that it stops short of saying what is being aborted. And for good reason: Whether one considers the developing life to be human (a "baby") or sub-human (a "fetus"), it's certainly life, and therefore the ending of it is, at least in some sense, an act of killing. One sometimes still hears proponents of legalized euthanasia (another euphemism) using the term mercy killing, yet one never hears proponents of legal abortion arguing for the right of a woman to kill the fetus growing within her. By the standard set by such linguistic tergiversation, we might justwell refer to the killing of anyone as an "abortion" (in that any killing is the stopping of a process--a thirty-two-year-old murder victim could be said to have been aborted in the ninety-sixth trimester.) Not surprisingly, "pro-choice," the euphemism most preferred by legal-abortion advocates, is equally incomplete, as it fails to clarify what "choice" the advocate favors. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll takes the absurdity even further, referring to "pro-life" performers (e.g., Pat Boone) not as "pro-life" (which they obviously are) but as "anti-choice," as if those who consider Roe v. Wade to be unconstitutional oppose any selecting among options. What term, then, should be used to refer to what happens when the life growing in a human womb is ended? Well, selecting a bon mot is seldom easy, but "prenatal killing" would be a step (if only a "baby step," so to speak) in the right direction.
adult
As a noun, this word still suggests a mature, full-grown human being, one who has successfully put away childish things. As an adjective, however, it has come to mean "pornographic" (as in "adult magazines" or "adult content"). As pornography is the deliberate arousal of any audience's sexual desire for the purposes of making money, there is nothing "grown-up" about its creation or its consumption. (I was going to saying that there is nothing mature about its creation or its consumption, but mature has also become a euphemistic synonym for "pornographic.") No one is so easily titillated as the immature.
developmentally disabled
This nine-syllable term has become the euphemism of choice among those who care for the mentally retarded. "Retarded," they say, has become a negative and-or outdated term. It is difficult to see how a term that means "slow" (retarded) is more "negative" than a term that means "incapable of" (disabled)--or, for that matter, how "developmentally" is less pejorative than "mentally." Frankly, I would rather be mentally slow than incapable of any development whatsoever. The fact is that any term used to label something that we regard as deficient will take on negative connotations; so changing the terminology without changing the nature of the thing to which the terminology refers solves nothing.
tolerance
Friday, June 5, 2009
Overlooking the Obvious: Ivan Illich
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html
Click the link above and you will find yourself face to face with an online-text version of Deschooling Society, a book every bit as brilliant and relevant to our twenty-first-century educational quagmire as Barzun's Teacher in America.
The author of Deschooling Society was Ivan Illich (1926-2002), a man whom Wikipedia descibes as a "philosopher, social critic, and defrocked Roman Catholic priest." (If Illich's Wikipedia entry is to be trusted, he apparently defrocked himself, "resign[ing] from the active priesthood in the late 1960s [having attained the rank of monsigneur]....") Born in Vienna, he studied at the University of Florence and the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, served as an assistant parish priest in New York City, and as the vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico.
It was as the founder of the Interculteral Documentation Center (commonly referred to as CIDOC, an anagram based on its Spanish name), however, that he began forging in earnest the ideas about teaching and learning for which he would be best remembered. These ideas came to fruition in Deschooling Society (1971) and Tools for Conviviality (1973), works that established his reputation as a first-rate controversialist and that made him a much in-demand lecturer the world over. (He also served as a professor at Penn State University.)
There are, not surprisingly, elements of Deschooling Society that now seem dated, but they are outweighed by the elements that not only remain relevant (such as Illich's thesis, that "[u]niversal education through schooling is not feasible") but also predict the future. (His description of the "educational webs" that he envisioned as the best alternative to schools seems to anticipate the existence of the Internet.)
In this post--to which I will be adding, for months if not years, as time allows--I will examine the degree to which an understanding of the ideas in Deschooling Society can inspire those of us who would rescue teaching from professional "educators" and, in so doing, make possible the kind of learning that is a never-ending pleasure.
Click the link above and you will find yourself face to face with an online-text version of Deschooling Society, a book every bit as brilliant and relevant to our twenty-first-century educational quagmire as Barzun's Teacher in America.
The author of Deschooling Society was Ivan Illich (1926-2002), a man whom Wikipedia descibes as a "philosopher, social critic, and defrocked Roman Catholic priest." (If Illich's Wikipedia entry is to be trusted, he apparently defrocked himself, "resign[ing] from the active priesthood in the late 1960s [having attained the rank of monsigneur]....") Born in Vienna, he studied at the University of Florence and the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, served as an assistant parish priest in New York City, and as the vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico.
It was as the founder of the Interculteral Documentation Center (commonly referred to as CIDOC, an anagram based on its Spanish name), however, that he began forging in earnest the ideas about teaching and learning for which he would be best remembered. These ideas came to fruition in Deschooling Society (1971) and Tools for Conviviality (1973), works that established his reputation as a first-rate controversialist and that made him a much in-demand lecturer the world over. (He also served as a professor at Penn State University.)
There are, not surprisingly, elements of Deschooling Society that now seem dated, but they are outweighed by the elements that not only remain relevant (such as Illich's thesis, that "[u]niversal education through schooling is not feasible") but also predict the future. (His description of the "educational webs" that he envisioned as the best alternative to schools seems to anticipate the existence of the Internet.)
In this post--to which I will be adding, for months if not years, as time allows--I will examine the degree to which an understanding of the ideas in Deschooling Society can inspire those of us who would rescue teaching from professional "educators" and, in so doing, make possible the kind of learning that is a never-ending pleasure.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Overlooking the Obvious: The First Amendment
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Thus reads the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is often used to justify the banning of religious activity on public-school campuses. The recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, in which the phrase "under God" occurs, has been called "unconstitutional" insofar as it requires, or at least encourages, students to pledge allegiance to something "under God" and therefore qualifies as an "establishment of religion." By similar reasoning, valedictorians have been forbidden to thank the "Lord Jesus Christ" in their graduation speeches and students forbidden to assemble peacably for Bible study on school grounds.
Such prohibitions are obvious nonsense, as in none of the aforementioned examples has Congress made a law requiring the offending action or activity. Were Congress to mandate the recitation of the Pledge, the thanking of God in graduation speeches, or the accommodation of on-campus Bible study, opponents of public religion (usually abetted by the American Civil Liberties Union) would have a legal leg on which to stand. But Congress has never made such a law. Therefore a school may permit whatever it wants in the way of public piety without violating the Constitution.
It may also, of course, forbid whatever it wants along these lines as well, but to do so in the name of the Constitution constitutes blatant sophistry.
What is one to make of a society in which schools demonstrate such indifference to the plain meaning of one of the most important documents in the history of their country?
Quite a bit, I'm afraid, and none of it good: first, that the administrators of such schools are apparently not very intelligent; second, that they therefore probably don't do a very good job of hiring qualified teachers or of knowing whether anything resembling good teaching takes place in their classrooms; third, that the "education" of the students in these classrooms amounts to little more than twelve years of this trickle-down stupidity; fourth, that these poorly taught students graduate and start voting, thus determining the fate of their nation.
There are, of course, many other consequences of First Amendment ignorance, not least of which is that the "free exercise of religion," which the First Amendment is plainly meant to protect, goes completely by the boards. Public schools, so the specious argument goes, receive funds from the federal government and are therefore an arm of the federal government--the same government that must not permit public religious practice (lest it "establish religion") and that, by disseminating funds to an ever-growing percentage of the private sector (e.g., its recent takeover of failing banks and automobile companies), reduces the area in which one may practice his religion to a very small piece of turf indeed. And to stray from that turf is practically to become an enemy of the State.
Whether one approves or disapproves of religion, it is only the religion-establishing acts of Congress that the First Amendment prohibits. In his book Catholicism and American Freedom (Harper & Brothers, 1952), the late James M. O'Neill argued that, because the First Amendment affected Congress only, an individual state was free to establish a religion if it wanted to. Utah and Louisiana, for instance, could declare Mormonism and Roman Catholicism respectively to be their official state religions while leaving the First Amendment inviolate.
O'Neill was not a right-wing zealot but, according to a blurb on the back of his book, a "widely recognized authority on the subject of the separation of church and state in America."
He was also, according to that same blurb, a "long-time leader in the American Civil Liberties Union." What a difference half a decade makes....
Thus reads the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is often used to justify the banning of religious activity on public-school campuses. The recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, in which the phrase "under God" occurs, has been called "unconstitutional" insofar as it requires, or at least encourages, students to pledge allegiance to something "under God" and therefore qualifies as an "establishment of religion." By similar reasoning, valedictorians have been forbidden to thank the "Lord Jesus Christ" in their graduation speeches and students forbidden to assemble peacably for Bible study on school grounds.
Such prohibitions are obvious nonsense, as in none of the aforementioned examples has Congress made a law requiring the offending action or activity. Were Congress to mandate the recitation of the Pledge, the thanking of God in graduation speeches, or the accommodation of on-campus Bible study, opponents of public religion (usually abetted by the American Civil Liberties Union) would have a legal leg on which to stand. But Congress has never made such a law. Therefore a school may permit whatever it wants in the way of public piety without violating the Constitution.
It may also, of course, forbid whatever it wants along these lines as well, but to do so in the name of the Constitution constitutes blatant sophistry.
What is one to make of a society in which schools demonstrate such indifference to the plain meaning of one of the most important documents in the history of their country?
Quite a bit, I'm afraid, and none of it good: first, that the administrators of such schools are apparently not very intelligent; second, that they therefore probably don't do a very good job of hiring qualified teachers or of knowing whether anything resembling good teaching takes place in their classrooms; third, that the "education" of the students in these classrooms amounts to little more than twelve years of this trickle-down stupidity; fourth, that these poorly taught students graduate and start voting, thus determining the fate of their nation.
There are, of course, many other consequences of First Amendment ignorance, not least of which is that the "free exercise of religion," which the First Amendment is plainly meant to protect, goes completely by the boards. Public schools, so the specious argument goes, receive funds from the federal government and are therefore an arm of the federal government--the same government that must not permit public religious practice (lest it "establish religion") and that, by disseminating funds to an ever-growing percentage of the private sector (e.g., its recent takeover of failing banks and automobile companies), reduces the area in which one may practice his religion to a very small piece of turf indeed. And to stray from that turf is practically to become an enemy of the State.
Whether one approves or disapproves of religion, it is only the religion-establishing acts of Congress that the First Amendment prohibits. In his book Catholicism and American Freedom (Harper & Brothers, 1952), the late James M. O'Neill argued that, because the First Amendment affected Congress only, an individual state was free to establish a religion if it wanted to. Utah and Louisiana, for instance, could declare Mormonism and Roman Catholicism respectively to be their official state religions while leaving the First Amendment inviolate.
O'Neill was not a right-wing zealot but, according to a blurb on the back of his book, a "widely recognized authority on the subject of the separation of church and state in America."
He was also, according to that same blurb, a "long-time leader in the American Civil Liberties Union." What a difference half a decade makes....
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