A Need for Rhetoric

Usually people dislike the idea of rhetoric, equating it with empty communications. But it is actually the study of how to frame and understand arguments. A Scientific American article suggests that people fall prey to "reasoning errors" in the media, which explains why, for example, that nearly half of Americans in 2003 falsely thought that there was solid evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda:

News shows often have an implicit bias that may motivate the portrayal of facts and opinions in misleading ways, even if the information presented is largely accurate. Nevertheless, by becoming familiar with how spokespeople can create false impressions, media consumers can learn to ignore certain claims and thereby avoid getting duped. We have detected two general types of fallacies—one of them well known and the other newly identified—that have permeated discussion of the Iraq War and that are generally ubiquitous in political debates and other discourse.

I think it is again time for schools to teach formal rhetoric. Why not let people learn what a bandwagon or straw man tactic is?

Banned Words

I find it interesting how institutions carve out odd niches for themselves. Lake Superior State University in Michigan has an annual rite of banning words, even though there is no particular reason that it should be the decider of what might well be cast out from our common linguistic life. Apparently the school takes nominations from the public at large. So we have the general populace of the world - whose collective wisdom has included the ascendancy of McDonalds and the Spice Girls - deciding on the tastefulness of language. Oh, my.

Some of the suggested excisions certainly had me applauding. For years I've hated the term "wordsmithing," often used by a certain type of pompous individual who simultaneously won't use something as plain as writing, but casts an attitude that the activity is nothing more than cleaning up and rearranging what the person set down as a first draft. Perfect storm, too, should be gone, as all manners of situations become one.

On using author as a verb, there was a funny quote: "In one of former TV commentator Edwin Newman's books, he wonders if it would be correct to say that someone 'paintered' a picture?"

But banning waterboarding? It seems to me that if the word seems overused, what should go is the practice, not the language. And using Black Friday as a retailing term? It's been around for years - the problem is that now people pay attention to it, particularly when the people are reporters who are forced to create some kind of news on a holiday weekend.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

The word is out - literally. Merriam-Webster had its annual world of the year contest, the winner apparently the result of popular consensus. The winner: w00t, an expression of joy with likely origins in the gaming community. It supposedly stands for "we owned the other team." The mix of numbers and letters is deliberate, not a typo, and belongs to the hacker lexicon called l33t - leet, or elite, speak.

Blogging in Middle English

In the throws of some research for my WriterBiz blog, which is about the freelance writing business, I came across Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. If you've ever made an attempt at reading Canterberry Tales in the original Middle English - which is actually a highly enjoyable activity when you start letting the sounds of northern England splash a bit into Scotland and realize that it's almost like being fluent in a foreign language, except taking a lot less work - you'll enjoy an entire blog written in that manner.

The Evolution of Language

Two papers in the journal Nature this week examine the evolution of language. One measured the frequency at which verbs become more regular (use a simple -ed ending for past tense) over time at a rate inversely proportionate to the square root of their usage frequency. The site Science Codex has an article on the paper with interviews with some of the involved researchers.

The other paper looks at why some words use similar word forms across the entire Indo-European language family while others appear as unrelated forms. According to a press release from Nature:

Mark Pagel and colleagues used a statistical modelling technique to analyse four Indo-European languages: English, Spanish, Russian and Greek, and compared this to a database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 languages. They found that across all 200 meanings, commonly used words, such as numbers, evolve much more slowly, suggesting that the frequency with which specific words are used affects their rate of replacement over thousands of years.

Again, and with some appeal to common sense, the conclusion is that frequent use cements the form more thoroughly through the act of repetition.

The New Censorship - the Information Age Meets Orwell

I came across this World Editors Forum blog entry on Paul Moreira's book Les Nouvelles Censures (The New Censorship, I think) indirectly and finally tracked it down. It's worth a read and some thought. Here's the center of the issue:

Moreira’s thesis is based on this paradox: in a society seemingly – and really – more and more transparent, the forms of censorship and control of information are becoming increasingly subtle and mechanical. In an age in which raw censorship isn’t possible anymore (at least in most true democracies), more and more resources are being put into controlling not what the people hear and see, but how they think and react to it.

According to Moreira, the journey between (controversial) news material and its actual delivery to the public now typically transits through a “communication filter” – a public relations firm, spokesman, or communication consultants. These filters, commonly known in the US as spin doctors, proceed to a play game of chess with journalists and news media.

It's not altogether a new observation - the book and documentary Toxic Sludge Is Good For You looks at the influence of PR on so-called news.

But look beyond the "spinning" of the news and you'll see that various interested parties are actually trying to redefine language - decidedly 1984 in flavor. When you control language, you control thought, and if you have enough success, it becomes virtually impossible for someone to oppose you, because you've made it virtually impossible for that person to even conceive of something different. In an age where catsup was supposed to be a vegetable (in the 1980s), the vice president isn't part of the executive branch of government (the current administration), and political parties hire consultants to try and use language to create impressions at contrast with reality, this is no longer a theoretical consideration.

Crimes and Non-Punishment

I heard a snippet of a speech George Bush gave about the Scooter (what an embarrassing nickname to cleave to) Libby sentence. The reason he gave for commuting the sentence was because the 30 month period was "too harsh." But is commutation an all or nothing process? Couldn't the president have cut it back to what he thought was not harsh, especially as I suspect the Libby defense fund will probably pay the $250,000 fine and that although he can't practice law (until Bush presumably pardons him on leaving office), he could certainly work as a lobbyist or in some other managerial position where the premium is on government connections? The process of redefining language that Orwell mentioned in 1984 is, and was even then, a daily practice. Blink and you can forget that someone is trying to hoodwink you.

Foreign Names Amusement at NPR

I was listening to NPR this morning when Susan Stamberg did a piece on summer reading. One of the people she interviewed suggested a John Burdett detective novel with protagonist Sonchai Jitpleecheep, which pretty much sounds the way it's spelled. Ms. Stamberg made not one but two jokes based on sneezing - acting as though the interview subject had sneezed when he mentioned the character by name and then referring to the detective as Mr. Gesundheit. What a condescending attempt at humor for someone whose family, like virtually everyone else in this country, originally came from somewhere else, and whose name it its original version might, as is true of so many others, might have been similarly difficult for an "American" to pronounce. I suspect her name might also sound - let's generously say unusual - to someone from Thailand. Hopefully people there have better manners than to mock that with which they are unfamiliar.

When Is A Billion Not A Billion

In a discussion on a writers' board, there was what I thought would be a brief discussion about what to call 5,400,000,000. Five point four billion, right?

As it turns out, not necessarily. and the explanation is not only fascinating, but it explains something about the BBC - more on that in a moment. First we must return to the 15th and 16th centuries, during which French mathematicians developed the terms billion and trillion - which meant 10¹² and 10¹⁸ respectively.

But for some reason, a century later, some scientists in Italy and France started using billion to mean 10⁹, or a 1 followed by nine zeros. That created what eventually come to be called the long and short scales. In the former system, there was a name every time you added an additional six zeros - or multipled by a million - and in the latter, the new names started with every three additional zeros, or multiplication by a thousand.

The world was now split, with many countries, including Britain using the long form, and some using the short. By the 18th century, the short use appears in the British colonies in North American, although back in England the citizens still used the long scale. By the early 19th century, the U.S. officially converted to the short scale and taught it in schools, as did most people in France. Britain remained unmoved.

By the 20th century, things got really screwy. The French now officially proclaimed the long scale to be the one to use, and by 1994, the Italians also embraced the long scale. Note that these were the very two countries that had started all the confusion in the first place. In 1974, the United Kingdom had official statistics switch to the short scale. I'm sure it had something to do with the French moving back to the long scale. And you thought geopolitics was confusing.

As for the BBC, there is still some use of the long scale, which is why news presenters will still often say "thousand million" rather than billion. How quaint - though I'm not sure which side is.

Web Site Review: Wordsmith.org

This is a must stop for word junkies. Jeffrey Henning, a friend and creator of tools for creating your own language (and a spot worth going to in its own right), pointed me to the fun that is the A.Word.A.Day mailing list a good dozen years ago. The Wordsmith.org site lets you join the mailing list and offers a chat service, anagram server, and a project to donate books to libraries around the world. It's worth a stop.