We Should Live - Ben Bateman

‘Theft‘, ‘larceny‘ and ‘steal‘ all refer generically to wrongfully taking someone else’s property. The differences between those words are very subtle. I would say that ‘theft’ suggests that the actor steals regularly as a thief, while ’steal’ suggests that stealth may have been involved, and ‘larceny’ is most common in statutes and legal proceedings.

‘Burglary’ and ‘robbery’ are much more specific: A burglary is entering a building, especially a home, with intent to steal, while a robbery is theft by the use or threat of violence.

Finally, ‘embezzlement‘ and the more obscure ‘defalcation‘ are both thefts by someone entrusted with the stolen property.

My six-year-old son’s entertainment habits have turned back to Veggietales recently.  In case you don’t have young children, Veggietales are a series of computer-animated Christian-themed videos for children in which all the characters are fruits or vegetables.  Some of the stories are straight from the Bible, a few are original, and several are re-workings of famous movies, such as The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones.

The trouble is that my son hadn’t seen any of those movies, so much of the humor was lost on him.  I tried to explain to him that the original movie was very different from the Veggietales, but the general story and characters were the same.  And this left me short for vocabulary: Are they satires, parodies, or farces?  So I did some research.
A satire makes fun of people, either specific individuals or groups, by revealing their vices and follies.

A parody is makes fun of an author or literary work.  This best fits the Veggietales.

A farce is something silly.  The historical root is from Old French “to stuff”, and the first use of ‘farce’ was as an ad-libbed humor skit inserted into religious plays.  Modern usage emphasizes a light, silly show that relies on situational comedy.

There’s still a word that I can’t find: The Veggietales Bible stories keep the original stories and characters intact, because the goal is that the children learn the stories and their morals.  But modern children aren’t likely to understand Old-Testament politics and wars, so the Veggietales re-casts the stories in terms that modern children can understand: Goliath is a big pickle with boxing gloves, the defenders of Jericho dump slushies on their attackers, and Joseph’s troubles with his brothers take place in the American West.

Is there a word in English to describe this sort of modernized-but-faithful retelling of a story?

Venom is a poisonous liquid secreted by snakes and other animals.

Venin is the protein in the venom that is actually toxic, especially with snake venom. Many sources ignore this distinction and call ‘venin’ a synonym for ‘venom’. ‘Venin’ by itself is exceedingly rare, and it’s difficult to research on the internet because it’s also the French word for ‘venom’.

Antivenin is a medicine for snakebite. It’s produced by injecting animals with non-lethal doses of one or more venins, waiting for the animal to produce antibodies against it, and then extracting those antibodies from the animal’s blood.

I would guess (based on this and this) that the medicine’s name refers specifically to ‘venin’ and not ‘venom’ because the people who actually make antivenin need the distinction. When you make antivenin, you don’t just inject raw venom into the animal. You process it and isolate the proteins for which you want antibodies. And the resulting medicine doesn’t just treat bites from a specific snake. The same venin can appear in the venom of various species of snakes, e.g. cottonmouths, copperheads, and rattlesnakes are all closely related. So it makes more sense to write and think in terms of the venins that the medicine will actually treat, rather than the animal’s venom that was distilled into those venins.

‘Antivenom’ is arguably not a word at all; it’s a common corruption of ‘antivenin’. Many writers consider it a synonym of ‘antivenin’, because most people don’t know what venin is and wouldn’t care about the distinction even if they did.

If you want to be a language snob with few friends, then use ‘antivenin’ and make fun of people who use ‘antivenom’. If you want to be understood and are willing to risk being mocked by language snobs, then use ‘antivenom’. As a compromise, you could write something like “antivenin (aka antivenom).”

Warning: This one is kinda grisly, so you might want to skip it.

Today this phrase usually refers to insanity or extreme nervousness, with emphasis on an inability to function.  But its history is considerably uglier.  It’s British army slang from World War I, where advances in medicine meant that doctors could save the lives of wounded soldiers to a far greater extent than ever before.  This meant that the army had to transport significant numbers of the wounded back to Britain to recuperate.

There were many different types of wounded.  Some were purely psychological (called shell shock at the time), some were blinded or had respiratory problems from the poisonous gases used on the battlefield, and some were amputees.  Quadruple amputees—those who had lost the use of all four limbs—were particularly difficult to transport.  And so they were carried back to Britain in baskets.  Hence they were “basket cases”.

I think I’ll avoid this phrase from now on.

My six-year-old son wanted to know the difference between a slogan and a motto, and this prompted some etymological research:

‘Slogan’ comes from Gaelic ’sluagh-gairn’, meaning a battle cry used by Scottish Highlanders or Irish.  So a slogan is designed to inspire momentary passion, but it doesn’t need to be particularly profound.  American examples would be “Remember the Alamo,” “Remember the Maine,” “Never again” (referring to the Holocaust), or the more modern “Let’s roll” (referring to terrorism).  They are or were laden heavily with emotion, but they don’t actually carry much meaning in themselves.  You have to know the story behind them.

‘Motto’ comes from a Latin word for muttering or grunting.  One source indicates that it referred to the words written on a heraldric design, and that’s consistent with the broader consensus that a motto in current usage is a guiding principle, goal, or ideal.

I’ve been wondering how this word could have two such different meanings: The more common is the picture on skin; the less common is a drumbeat used as a military signal.

In this case, the two meanings come from completely different origins.  The picture on the skin comes from Polynesian tatau, possibly an onomatopoeia for “tap tap,” i.e. the tapping of the tattooing instrument on the skin.  This sense first entered the language in the writings of the explorer Captain James Cook in 1769.

The drumbeat sense of ‘tattoo’ comes from the Dutch phrase ‘tap toe,’ meaning “taps shut.”  This 17th century phrase referred to the signal that police gave telling the local bars that it was time for them to shut their taps, or stop serving drinks for the night.  This merged with the same “tap tap” onomatopoeia that the Polynesians had observed, and thus broadened to include military signals generally, especially those that involve 1) a drum (”tap tap”) or 2) retiring for the night (”taps shut”).

Some words drift so far from their roots that their meanings nearly invert. ‘Socialism’ is one of the more spectacular examples.

‘Socialism’ is obviously related to ‘social’ and ‘society’, with the Latin root going toward friendly, genial, allied, associated, united, and living together. And you probably could have guessed that on your own, without looking it up. ‘Social’ and ‘society’ still hold meanings very close to their roots, with ‘social’ having a much warmer connotation than ‘society’. But ‘socialism’ is nearly the opposite.

Let’s not bog down in the multitude of meanings that ‘socialism’ can have. Most of the modern definitions come from Marx and especially Engels, who wrote about it at some length. But they didn’t invent the term; it dates back to the early 19^th century, from Claude Henri de Rouvroy or Robert Owen. I often think of modern liberalism as if it started with Marx and Engels, but reading about those two men shows that those two were only intensifying the ideas left in the wreckage of the French Revolution.

And that point of history helps us see that the historical essence of socialism was not about property transfers, but rather about transforming society itself, that is, changing the way that people relate to each other. That’s where ‘socialism’ originally came from, and it made sense in that context. As this page http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0843146.html summarizes it, “Saint-Simon called for the reorganization of society by scientists and industrialists on the basis of a scientific division of labor that would result in automatic and spontaneous social harmony.” (more…)

We have here three types of angry speech.  Let’s distinguish them.

Jeremiad is Biblical.  The Old Testament’s Book of Lamentations is also known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah, as Jeremiah is traditionally considered its author.  This book describes his anguish at the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 587BC by the army of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.  He focuses his anger on the Hebrews, who have obviously brought this suffering down on themselves and their city with their sinful ways.  So the emphasis with ‘jeremiad’ is on anger laced with sorrow and blame.

Harangue is German in origin. A ‘hring’ was a ring or public square set aside for public gatherings and orations.  Now the word refers to the speech rather than the ring itself, and the modern implication is of an angry speech.  So the emphasis here is anger expressed in public.

Tirade is French for a shot or volley, and before that from an Italian verb for drawing back and shooting.  So the connotation of ‘tirade’ is almost military.  The speech is not merely angry; it’s designed to hurt others.

Hotair.com links to a BBC show in which a reporter went undercover into British mosques and filmed various speakers. It’s tempting for Westerners to imagine that most of Islam is a reasonable, peaceful religion, and that the Muslims who strap bombs to their children are just fringe lunatics.

For Americans with liberal or anti-Christian inclinations, it’s difficult for them to resist projecting their view of Christianity onto Islam. In this view, most Christians are perfectly normal and acceptable as long as they don’t take their religion too seriously, and then there are the kooks out there on the fringe who get just a bit too excited about the whole God thing. This view usually lumps together the Mormons, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Catholics who actually believe themselves bound by what the Pope says, along with any smaller Christian groups that worship too energetically or take the Bible too literally.

I think that’s a ridiculous caricature of American Christianity, but let’s leave that topic for another day. It’s much more important right now to understand how poorly that cartoon fits with modern Islam. If a Christian suggests that a schoolchild should be free to pray in class, then the ACLU screams theocracy even though it knows that the charge is absurd. But the Muslims really do want theocracy, and they say so quite plainly when they think that only other Muslims are listening.

It may turn out that one of the most serious casualties of the Left’s war on religion is the destruction of religious words in our language, and our consequent inability to think and talk clearly about religion. ‘Theocracy’ is a perfect example. The word once had a definite meaning, and there are many Islamic governments that fit it perfectly. But the Left has abused that poor word for so long that it’s just a political buzzword now, the sort of thing you expect to hear from the Left if President Bush were to ask Americans to pray for our troops’ safety. So now we have no word left to use when faced with real theocracies, or with British Muslims who talk seriously among themselves about imposing them.

The BBC show is on YouTube cut into three parts: 1, 2, and 3. It’s vital to understand that the Muslim clerics in these videos aren’t on the fringe of Islam. Several segments come from the largest mosque in London, which has received substantial support from the British government. These men are seriously preaching thoughts nearly inexpressible in America: the complete subjugation of women, the death penalty for homosexuality or for leaving Islam, the democratic destruction of democracy, and the religious imperative to kill unbelievers—especially Jews.

The good news is that the situation in Britain is now dire enough that even the BBC has taken notice. The bad news is that the response by the BBC and the British government will almost certainly be more of the same multi-culti liberal mush that has brought them so far down the path to destruction. But at least we Americans can watch, and learn.

Update (1-18-07): Here is a National Review editor reviewing a book titled American Fascists — The Christian Right and The War on America.  And that’s not an ironic title; the author is completely sincere in his belief that America will soon become a fascist theocracy.  A sample: “A group of religious utopians, with the sympathy and support of tens of millions of Americans, are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism.”

It’s unsurprising that someone would write such a book.  This is a big country.  It’s disappointing that a major publisher like Simon & Schuster would print it, and discouraging that it would reach an Amazon sales rank of 584.  But this is what should really make you sick: The author, Chris Hedges, worked for 15 years at the New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize.  It’s an excellent demonstration of how deeply the old-school media outlets hate Middle America.

These three sound similar and all refer to some type of motion, so they’re easy to confuse.

Careen indicates a tilting or swaying motion. It comes from a Latin word for the underside of a ship. The original meaning of ‘careen’ was to turn a ship on its side, so that the underside was exposed. Now it can refer to any kind of leaning or tilting. So to describe a car as careening would suggest that two of the wheels literally left the ground, so that the underside was exposed.

Career as a verb emphasizes speed. No one seems to know why, or even to have any good theories. My best wild guess is that it sounds like variants of the Latin word for running, such as ‘correr’ (to run) in Spanish.

Carom indicates that the moving object is bouncing off of something. The root comes a Spanish word for the red ball in billiards, which in turn came from the name of an orange fruit native to southern India. So when using this word, think of a pool table and sudden changes of direction.

English speakers often assume that a firestorm must be like a rainstorm, only with fire.  But the correct meaning is more complicated.  A firestorm, properly understood, is a powerful wind that springs up around a huge fire.  The heat from the fire creates an enormous column of hot air rushing upwards into the sky.  As that air moves upwards, some other air must move in to take its place, and much of that air comes from near the ground.  So if you stand near a large enough fire, then you will feel a wind sucking you in towards the fire.  That wind is the firestorm.

Some firestorms may occur naturally, but the only ones I’ve read about occur in war.  My favorite is the September 1812 fire that began in Moscow shortly after Napoleon captured it.  Although that fire’s origin is unclear, I suspect that the Russians set it themselves to deny the invaders comfortable lodging.  In any case, the whole city was made of wood.  It burned most spectacularly.

My guess for the largest firestorm to date would be the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, which may have killed more people in a single attack than either of the atomic bombs.  Favorable winds that night helped destroy 31 square miles of the city, which was made mostly of wood and paper.

It’s nice to know what a real firestorm is, but you’ll rarely find opportunities to use its proper historical meaning in casual conversation.  As with ‘decimate’, the popular meaning is more vivid than the historical one.  You’re welcome to choose either as far as I’m concerned—but understand the choice that you’re making.

It’s hard to find a good word with which to describe works of prose, especially on the internet. Every word I think of feels wrong. So I’m determined to scour the language for a solution, or at least an understanding of the problem.

Article. When referring to text, an article is traditionally an independent portion of a larger document. Legal documents are often divided into articles, as are newspapers and magazines. This is a great word to use when referring to prose that appears as part of a larger work, because it can refer either to the words themselves, or to actual paper on which they appear. But this word grows weaker the farther it moves from its connection to the larger publication. Can a page on a web site properly be called an article, that is, a portion of the larger publication that is the web site itself? I use it frequently, but only because the alternatives are so much worse.

Column. The historical root here is to a pillar, with the extention to prose coming in newspapers where the writing appears in narrow vertical spaces. Prose that actually appears in that format can properly be called a column. But it’s a stretch to extend it to anything else.

Post. This apparently refers back to cylindrical pieces of wood stuck into the ground. These wooden posts had two uses that gave rise to two distinct extended metaphors.

First, you can tie a horse to a post, which gives rise to a post office or a military post. For centuries, both the mail and the military moved mostly on horseback.

Second, you can nail a piece of paper to a post, and thereby make the information written on the paper available for public inspection. From this I think we get the modern notion of a post on a web site. And the metaphor fits pretty well. In an internet blog or forum, a post is some public prose, usually with some time sensitivity. But take away that time sensitivity, or the text’s public availability, and it’s arguably no longer a post.

Paper. This word is probably the blandest available to refer to prose. A paper is made of—paper! It’s ground-up wood pulp pressed into sheets. There might be some ink on the paper, and that ink might be arranged into words that convey some interesting ideas or information. But the word itself tells us nearly nothing, except that paper will be involved.

And we can’t even be sure of that! One of its common uses is “to present a scholarly paper,” where there’s a lecture and no actual paper is presented to anyone. College students also write papers, which for the moment still involve compressed wood pulp. But it won’t last.

Manuscript. ‘Manu’ means hand, and ’script’ means writing. As an adjective, ‘manuscript’ still refers to someone gripping a stylus and spreading ink onto paper.

As a noun, this word probably referred to a handwritten document that an author would present to a printer, who would then convert the handwritten words into some type of printing plates. The word wandered far from its origin sixty or more years ago, when many authors learned to type on manual typewriters and the “manuscript” that they presented to the printer was not in fact handwritten. Today the document that an author sends to the printer may never have existed as ink on paper. Yet we call it a manuscript, because we have no better word.

Essay. The original Latin ‘exagiuim’ was to test an object’s weight. That ancient meaning is still present in our modern verb ‘assay’, which is mostly limited to geology. From there the French developed ‘essai’, meaning to try or attempt. From there we get ‘essay’ referring to prose, meaning a short text on a single subject presenting the author’s personal view. This is a good word to use when it fits, because it connects directly to the words themselves without getting tangled up in the details of printing technology.

Document. The Latin root is ‘docere’, meaning to show or teach. So a document was originally any physical object that provided proof or evidence. It was often a paper with writing on it, but could also be a wax seal or a drawing. Today it can also be a sound recording, video recording, or photograph. If my memories from law school are accurate, ‘document’ is a term of art in the law of evidence.

This word is poised to stay with us for a long time, because we now have ‘document’ as a general term for computer files designed to present text.

Thesis. This word would be so much fun if it weren’t wrapped up with the specific document that a student writes in earning his master’s degree. The history goes back to a greek verb for to place or set. A thesis in any writing is therefore the idea that you put down and then defend or support. By extension, the whole document can be the thesis. This word could be a fun alternative to ‘essay’ if it weren’t so tied up with academia. I wish they’d give it back.

Dissertation. The Latin here is ‘dissertare’, meaning to debate or argue. This would be another fun word because it refers directly to the words rather than the physical document. But the academicians have snatched this one, too, and bound it up with the PhD.

Composition. The root Old French verb ‘composer’ meant to put together or arrange. Most of our meanings for this word are consistent with that idea. A work of art, especially music, is the bringing together or artistic components to form a whole. Maybe the literary meaning came from the broader artistic meaning. This is a relatively obscure word to use in connection with prose, and it carries a definite odor of the schoolroom. But it could be very effective in suggesting that the prose in question is artistic in nature and involves the bringing together of disparate ideas.

Piece. I sometimes resort to this word in referring to someone’s prose, but I don’t like it. It’s much like ‘article’: It literally refers to a part of some larger thing, though in actual use it’s often unclear which larger thing it’s a piece of. To me, it sounds a little like newspaper slang. ‘Article’ has a bit more dignity, though it isn’t really any clearer.
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In conclusion, this is a weak area of our language, and a careful writer must select from among various poor options. Maybe the better approach is to avoid words that emphasize the written-ness of the ideas, and instead use verbs that normally apply to speech: say, explain, announce, reveal, ask, hypothesize, accuse, report, wonder, claim, etc.

Many writers don’t distinguish this word from ‘end’. But I see ‘terminate’ as being much more limited. It implies a term, that is, a period of time set in advance during which something should exist or occur, and at the end of that time it ceases to exist or occur.

Thus a president has a term of office, or a mortgage debt has a term at the end of which the debt should be fully paid. Pregnancies have terms, and medical jargon refers to babies born at 40 weeks as ‘full term’, while those born earlier are ‘pre-term’, or ‘preemies’. College students take mid-term exams. All of these are periods of time set in advance, and we expect that something should stop happening or cease to exist at the end of that set time.

Speaking of the ‘term’ of someone’s life extends this core meaning slightly. It implies that fate or some deity has decreed the day on which each person will die. It has been a common idea in most times and places, though it’s not popular in the West today.

From that metaphorical meaning of ‘term’, we have extended the meaning further to ‘terminate’ as a euphemism for ‘kill’ or ‘assassinate’. This use suggests a fate-oriented worldview: The victim’s life was preordained to end at that time, and the murderer was merely the tool that Fate used to accomplish its ends. It’s an extended metaphor that can still be consistent with the core meaning if you use it right.

But beyond that point, modern uses for ‘terminate’ become silly. The worst in my view is to call an abortion the ‘termination’ of a pregnancy: Pregnancies have well-defined terms of 40 weeks. An abortion by definition occurs at some time other than the end of the natural term.

Runner-up for worst use of ‘terminate’ is with employment. This might have made sense decades ago when workers could reasonably expect to stay with one company for their entire working lives. That would create a natural term of employment, which could then be terminated. But today few workers or employers have any idea how long they will stay together, so the idea of a term of employment is usually nonsense, and therefore terminating employment should also be nonsense. With most “terminations” of employment, no term has ended.

(The exception would be for an employee working under a contract. If the contract has a set term, such as the year-to-year employment contracts that I understand are common in academia, then it would make sense to say that the contract and resulting employment relationship terminated at the end of their stated term.)

A final problem with ‘terminate’ for ending someone’s employment is that the common syntax often makes the employee the verb’s object: “He has been terminated.” This is exceptionally clumsy usage, because it suggests the older meaning of termination as death. It leaves the question: Has the employee been killed, or merely fired? An attempt at euphemism ironically becomes far more threatening than a more direct word.

Abortion and employment are not the only areas where we hear ‘terminate’ used on something that doesn’t have a term. I will confess to having drafted contracts in which certain conditions (such as breach) led to termination of the contract before its stated term. In hindsight, some other verb would have worked better. But I’m not alone in my poor usage. Google points out that ‘terminate’ is very common in computer programming, where it describes the end of programs or processes that don’t have natural chronological terms. And beyond that it pops up in all sorts of circumstances to describe something that stops occurring or existing regardless of whether it has a natural term.

Bonus Word of the Day: Execute. Lawyers like to use this word to refer to signing legal documents. That usage is consistent with the word’s historical meaning of putting a command or plan into effect. The trouble is that the word is closely associated with the execution of court orders that certain convicted criminals be killed. That following or execution of a court order has become so closely associated with killing someone that many people have no idea that the word could mean anything else.

So here I give way to modernity. It may be etymologically accurate to ask someone to execute his last will and testament. But why add the stink of death to an already morbid conversation? I just ask them to sign.

A radio ad today described something as having “infinite dynamics”. So on the one-in-a-million chance that the ad’s copy writer reads this blog, let’s review some parts of speech:

‘Infinite‘ is an adjective literally meaning “without limit”. As an adjective, it can only describe a noun. Something described as infinite should have some unlimited quality, such as duration, size, scope, number, etc. The noun in context should immediately suggest the sense in which it is infinite.

Few things outside of math and science are truly infinite. Outside of those fields you can use this adjective as a mild hyperbole: You can claim to have infinite patience or infinite regard for someone.

Some people use this word to describe something that doesn’t go forever, but the limits of which are indeterminate. And example would be the non-ironic use of “infinite joy”. While that use is consistent with the etymology, other words will almost always work better there. More on that later.

‘Infinity‘ is very common in math and science, but outside of those areas it’s even rarer in its proper use than ‘infinite’. It’s a noun. It describes the concept or state of boundlessness, which is an awfully abstract idea for ordinary discourse. It also appears in the mildly fanciful phrase “An infinity of . . .” to denote an infinite quantity or number of something.

‘Infinitely‘ is this set’s unwanted stepchild. It’s usually the word that people want in a non-technical setting, but they avoid. My theory is that they learn this word in math and science classes, and there they almost never this form.

The joy of ‘infinitely’ is that it’s an adverb, which means that it’s the only word among these three that can properly describe an adjective. And in ordinary use, an adjective is usually what you want to describe as extending forever or being limitless, e.g., infinitely tall, infinitely long, infinitely powerful, and what should be the most common: infinitely many.

Even when you could use one of the other forms, you’re usually better off with ‘infinitely’, because it’s more precise. If you describe a noun as infinite, then you must ensure that your reader will understand which aspect of that noun you’re talking about. If the radio ad tells you that something has “infinite dynamics”, you’re left wondering which property of the dynamics is the infinite one. Are the dynamics infinite in strength? Infinite in duration? Infinite in complexity? From the ad’s context, I suspect that it meant that the dynamics were infinite in number. But I’m still not sure. Maybe they just thought that ‘infinite’ sounded cool.

So be careful with these words; they’re easy to misuse. They also usually carry an antiseptic feel, in part because of the mathematical connotations, and in part because they don’t correspond to any definite images or sounds. We have many similar words that are much more vivid, such as: boundless, unlimited, bottomless, incalculable, immeasurable, inexhaustible, unfathomable, and innumerable. Those words usually come closer to what you’re really trying to say, which is that the number or extent of what you’re describing is so big that it can’t conveniently be measured or counted. There are many grains of sand on the beach, and no one is likely to bother counting them—but there aren’t really infinitely many of them.

I must apologize, dear readers, for the short and infrequent posts in the past few weeks. A massive writing project is eating my very soul. But it should be done in two weeks—at least, that’s what I told my editor—and then I’ll return to form.

But I can’t resist pointing to this: an Associated Press report on more rioting and burning of cars in the Paris suburbs. It’s old news by now, and no one should be surprised that it hasn’t stopped yet. What’s fascinating is how badly the article had to be written to conform with political pressure on language.

“Youths torched a dozen cars and hurled stones at police . . . ”

“. . . bands of young people hurled gasoline bombs at public buildings and took to the streets with baseball bats.”

“One of the young men briefly detained Tuesday night for throwing stones at police was also involved in the incident that sparked last year’s riots.”

“About 15 young people hurled projectiles at police in Clichy-sous-Bois . . .”

“Many of those who rioted then were of immigrant origin . . .”

One of the basic rules of storytelling—and of journalism in particular—is to anticipate and answer the questions that your reader will naturally ask. It’s expressed in the cliche: “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?”, which is unsurprisingly the title of a book on journalism. The point of the cliche is not merely to categorize the different questions that a reader might ask, but also to put them in order of importance. Note that the first is: Who?

But the AP writer, Pierre-Yves Roger, doesn’t answer the question. I doubt that this is unintentional. He knows that we want the answer; he just won’t give it to us. If we knew who these rioters were, then we might arrive at non-PC conclusions. So he tries to keep us in the dark as much as possible, for our own good.

Let’s piece together the informational crumbs that the AP writer considered us capable of handling responsibly:

• The rioters were young. This is very informative. If the writer hadn’t given some indication of the age of the people who were throwing gasoline bombs and wielding baseball bats, then we might have imagined that the people involved were pensioners in their sixties and seventies. But that extra-informative adjective really clears things up.
• One of the rioters was a man. Here again, the reader was in grave danger of imagining that this might have been an all-female group of rioters. But don’t worry! The AP hires professional writers whose job is to keep you well-informed.
• Many of those who rioted were of immigrant origin. This suggests that some of the rioters were not ethnically French. It doesn’t give any real idea of how many. Twenty percent? Ninety percent? The AP does not deign to tell us. It also neglects to mention which immigrant origins these rioters came from. Were they immigrant Scots? Germans? Spaniards? Russians? Chinese? The AP writer knows, but he’s not telling.

In conclusion:

First, If organizations like the AP are your sole source of news, then you know very little about what’s going on in the world, and you’re using your news-gathering time inefficiently. If you learn to use the blogosphere for news, then you can get the real story in about a fifth the time:

“France is surrounded by lawless suburbs inhabited almost exclusively by the descendants of unassimilated Moroccan and Algerian immigrants. The young men suffer nearly 50% unemployment due to racial discrimination and economic stagnation born of high taxes and suffocating economic regulation. And they don’t need to work, because the French government offers extensive welfare benefits.

“But living as wards of the state with nothing to do all day makes them unhappy, and it discourages them further from considering themselves Frenchmen. So they have constructed within these suburbs their own version of an Islamic society. They don’t know much about Islam, nor do they really want to—though they like the part about treating women like slaves. They’re mostly just unhappy, as young men always are if they aren’t challenged. So they burn cars, throw rocks, swing baseball bats, and desperately try to be taken seriously. And they should be taken seriously, because eventually they will organize to the point of changing French society, or even threatening the French government itself. But the French government and its voters are too deep in the opium dreams of comprehensive socialism to seriously consider opening France ethnically or economically.”

Is that so hard?

Second, in your own writing always choose the specific word over the general one. Your goal in writing is to convey information, whether about events in the world or the contents of your own mind. Specific words convey more information than generalities. They waste less of the reader’s time. A writer like Mr. Roger insults his readers by using generalities when he obviously knows enough to use more specific words.

Thomas Sowell is outraged that the District Attorney in the Duke rape case has postponed trial until the spring of 2007. This indicates that the DA doesn’t have any proof, but doesn’t want the embarrassment of dropping the case. So the plan is wait to drop the case until the public has forgotten about it, which Sowell calls “cooling out the mark.”

What an interesting phrase! Google led me to this 1952 article by social scientist Erving Goffman. He starts with the perspective of professional con artists. In their jargon, “cooling the mark” out refers to techniques designed to prevent the mark, or victim, from calling the police or otherwise making his loss public. The cooler (the con man assigned to this task) can use various approaches: He can emphasize the embarrassment involved, he can emphasize the hopelessness of trying to recover the lost money, he can encourage the mark to see the con as a learning experience, and so forth.

From there, Goffman moves to a much broader view of how people deal with their losses, which Goffman sees as primarily a problem of helping people reconcile their internally held identities with inconsistent facts. He sees the same basic dynamics in handling an angry customer, in rejecting a suitor, or in firing an employee.

I majored in psychology, but somehow never heard of Goffman. He must have been out of favor at the time. But he is one of the best analysts and observers of human nature that I’ve read, and a pretty good writer. It’s a long article, but I recommend it.

A basic principle of good writing is to convey as much meaning as possible in as few words as possible. A corollary is to prefer precise words over general words, as precise words convey more meaning per word.

So I grit my teeth and choke back caustic comments when I see ‘that’ used to describe a person, as in: “Dr. Jones is the scientist that discovered Compound X.” Substituting ‘who’ will nearly always improve the sentence: “Dr. Jones is the scientist who discovered Compound X.”

You could argue that the shift from the person-specific ‘who’ to the more general ‘that’ is part of a broader philosophical and linguistic trend (discussed here) away from the idea that humanity is special. But more likely the problem is much simpler: If you use ‘who’ then you may ask yourself if you should have used ‘whom’ instead, and few English speakers today can answer that question with confidence. But if you use ‘that’, then the whole subject/object distinction is no longer a problem.

In describing people, ‘that’ is the easier word, but ‘who’ is the more elegant word, if you know how to use it. More on ‘who’ versus ‘whom’ later.

My wife and I are netflixing our way through the Columbo TV shows. Columbo is a lieutenant in the LAPD, and hearing that word ‘lieutenant’ over and over got me to wondering how our language could have absorbed such a monstrously difficult word to spell.

‘Lieutenant‘ is easy to spell, once you get the etymology. It literally means “place holder.” Both are French, of course. ‘Lieu’ is the same word that we use in “in lieu of.” ‘Tenant’ we have directly in English; the tenant is the person who possesses or holds the land, as opposed to the landlord, who owns it but doesn’t have possession. Put ‘lieu’ and ‘tenant’ together, and you have ‘place holder’. I assumed that the place he holds is a metaphorical station within the army or police force, or perhaps a literal place within an army’s marching formation. But two of my sources say that the metaphor is that a lieutenant is someone who can take the place of a higher-ranking officer, such as a captain. No one seems to know why the British pronounce it as lef-tenant.

‘Captain‘ comes from the Latin root for head, just like decapitate, per capita, etc. This is probably mostly a physical metaphor: The captain marches at the front of his group of men. It’s tempting to say that he also gives commands to his men as the head commands the body, but I don’t think that they knew that much anatomy back when the word acquired its meaning.

‘Major‘ just means big or superior. There’s no big mystery on how it acquired its military meaning.

‘Colonel‘ is possibly even harder to spell than ‘lieutenant’. The history helps a little: Soldiers generally travel in columns. The Latin word for ‘column’ is ‘columna’, but in Italian it’s ‘colonna’, and in the diminutive ‘colonello’. The commander of a little column, or colonello, was a colonel. No one seems to know how the pronunciation became the same as ‘kernel’.

‘General‘ is straightforward: A general is in general command of the army, that is, his authority is not limited to any particular sub-group.

‘Officer‘ is another that’s obvious once you hear it. An officer is someone who holds an office, and an office is any post or job that carries specific duties. Corporations have officers, as do police departments and armies. The title by itself doesn’t mean much without further information. An officer holds an office, but which one?

Finally, ‘commissioner‘ has always perplexed me. A ‘commission’ is a grant of authority or power, usually corresponding with a duty or obligation. A police commissioner has been granted the authority to command the police force along with an obligation to prevent crime and catch criminals. Military officers receive commissions granting them authority over certain men; in this setting the term also refers to an actual piece of paper, such as this one. And Christianity has The Great Commission, which is a similar authority/obligation combination:

“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Mt. 28:18-20 ASV).

Here’s what bugs me: Why does ‘commissioner’ end with ‘-er’? Why isn’t it ‘commissionee’?

In law, we use these suffixes all the time: The grantor gives away title to the land; the grantee receives title. A trustor gives away trust property; a trustee receives it. The lessor gives possession of the property; the lessee receives possession. A bailor gives away temporary possession or personal property; the bailee receives temporary possession.
Maybe the problem is that ordinary English speakers rarely see the ‘-ee’ suffix that corresponds to ‘-or’ and ‘-er’. So when faced with someone who has received a commission, they reach for the only suffix they know, and call him a commissioner.

Insults tend to grow over time. My theory is that each word starts with a specific meaning, then expands to a general expression of hatred. And then we drop the word, because it has become too broad to be useful.

‘Bigot‘ is probably going to fade soon, because people today use it so indiscriminately. Its proper meaning involves intolerance, originally either religious or regional. But it’s so misued today—even used as an expression of intolerance rather than a condemnation of it—that I suggest staying away from it.

‘Chauvinist‘ was once like ‘bigot’. First it had a specific meaning: It referred to extreme political loyalty. It came from Nicholas Chauvin, a French soldier known for his fanatic loyalty to Napoleon. (Sources disagree on whether he was real or a character in a play.) The feminists latched onto this word in the fifties or sixties as part of the once-effective insult ‘male chauvinist pig’, which never made any sense. But now ‘chauvinist’ is burned out. Nobody uses it today, which is fine because most of the people who think that they know what it means are wrong.

‘Hack‘ hasn’t spread out too far yet. As an insulting noun it’s mostly limited to writers, though I don’t know why. It started as ‘Hackney’, which was a pastoral village near London. It then became associated with the horses raised in the nearby pastureland, and perhaps got a boost from ‘haquenee’, a French word for an ambling nag. ‘Hack’ then referred to horses, especially broken-down nags. And these low-quality horses were apparently the type that you could rent, so ‘hack’ came to refer to a horse for hire, and then to a horse and carriage for hire, and then apparently to the carriage itself apart from the horse. I base that last conclusion on a line from the song “Soliloquy” from the obscure Rogers and Hammerstein 1945 musical Carousel:

He can ferry a boat on a river
Or peddle a pack on his back
Or work up and down
The streets of a town
With a whip and a horse and a hack.

The common misuse for ‘hack’ is to denigrate the quality of a writer’s writing, or by extension the quality of anyone’s work. The better use, consisten with etymology, is to question someone’s loyalty. A hack is like a mercenary, but without the military connotation. He does whatever he’s hired to do. I think the word fits better in politics than in writing. Today there’s little shame if any in a writer writing whatever someone pays him to write, but we still believe that politicians and pundits should not be “for hire”.

Xrlq has an excellent post on the common rhetorical maneuver of declaring the other side’s argument to be a logical fallacy. This maneuver is just a cheap shot at the other fellow’s emotions designed to shut down debate. And it’s quite effective at that, because the attack is so concise, and formulating the correct response requires a lot of thought and explanation. Now Xrlq has done the thinking and written out the explanation, so the rest of us can benefit from his effort.

Xrlq points out two problems with criticizing an argument as a logical fallacy. The minor point is that it trades unfairly on the different meanings of the word ‘fallacy’. In ordinary usage, it refers to an untrue statement. But in this rhetorical maneuver the speaker is relying on the word’s technical definition within formal logic, which is very different. Even if the listeners understand that the speaker is using ‘fallacy’ in this technical sense, it still has a negative emotional association. The speaker usually understands this, and slip the word in as often as possible which attacking the argument.

Emotional impact aside, the deeper problem with declaring an argument to be a logical fallacy is that it assumes that people can and should think in terms of formal logic. But that’s impossible, as Xrlq explains at some length. The world of formal deductive logic is extremely limited. It’s designed to generate proofs that guarantee the truth of the conclusion, given the truth of the premises. But the real world doesn’t work that way. In the real world, we deal far more with inference and probabilities.

For example, militant gays and their supporters hate the argument that same-sex marriage will lead to the decriminalization and legitimization of other minority sexual practices, such as polygamy. Their favorite attack on that argument is to call it a logical fallacy called the slippery slope.

First, this argument is that it implies a basis in formal logic that doesn’t exist. Within the world of formal symbolic logic, I know of only three true fallacies: denying the antecedent, affirming the consequent, and the fallacy of the undistributed middle. If you look at those three, you’ll get a clear idea of what it means in the formal-logic sense to call something a fallacy. As for the other techniques that are commonly called logical fallacies, such as those listed here, you won’t find them in any books on formal logic. What most people call logical fallacies are really just rhetorical techniques that can easily be abused.

The second problem is that the logical-fallacy attack demands deduction and an extremely high level of certainty where neither is appropriate. The argument that same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy isn’t a guarantee that polygamy can be proven to inevitably occur as a matter of deductive logic. Anything that follows as a matter of deductive logic should be so obvious that no one would waste time discussing it. The SSM-polygamy argument instead calls on the listener to infer that polygamy is significantly more likely given SSM and various other premises that usually go unstated.

So when you’re in a debate, don’t feel the least bit intimidated when someone tells you that your argument is a logical fallacy. See it for the rhetorical cheap shot that it is.  The best response is to politely tell your opponent that he doesn’t understand formal logic, and he should perhaps learn some before basing a criticism on it, but you would prefer to discuss the subject at hand. And it’s a pretty safe inferential bet that your opponent in fact knows nearly nothing about formal logic, because few people who have actually studied the topic would so grossly misuse the phrase ‘logical fallacy’.

There’s a special set of stories in which not only is the story itself well known, but the first sentence or two is particularly memorable. Three come to mind:

“Call me Ishmael,” from Melville’s Moby Dick. This is surely the best-known opening sentence in an English novel, which is strange, considering that it doesn’t convey any distinctive idea. Its popularity is a testament to the power of short sentences.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I think that it’s a profound thought.

“It is a sin to write this,” from Ayn Rand’s short story Anthem. It’s not as well-known of a story as the other two, but that first sentence is short, hits hard, and immediately conveys the story’s sense of paranoia.

Can you think of any others?

Update: I just remembered another, arguably the most famous: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.  That’s not technically the entire first sentence; there’s no period for another hundred words.  It’s surprisingly readable, though, for such a long sentence.