We now have a new word-for-a-word to keep in mind: a casual survey of recent usage indicates that ‘chink’ has now become, or is about to become, ‘the C-word’. As such, it joins what is still a very exclusive club: as far as I know, the only other members to date are ‘the F-word’ and ‘the N-word’.

Although I’m sure we’re all better off, and the world a far safer place, with ‘chink’ admitted to the Hall of Shame, my far-seeing eye detects trouble up ahead: how much longer can it be before a new word requires admission that begins with the same letter as one of the current members?

This whole euphemism-creep business is a pity all round, say I; I’m still mourning ‘niggardly’ and ‘black hole’, and now we have to kiss ‘chink’ goodbye, too. So much for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I guess.

A great many of these names persist, e.g. Archer, Bailey, Baker, Barber, Bishop, Bowman, Brewer, Carpenter, Carter, Cartwright, Carver, Chandler, Chaplin, Chapman, Clark, Collier, Conner, Cook, Cooper, Cutler, Dean, Dyer, Farmer, Falconer (Faulkner), Farrier, Fisher, Fletcher, Forester, Fowler, Fuller, Gardner, Glover, Hooper, Hunter, Joiner, Mason, Mercer, Miller, Porter, Potter, Reeve, Sadler, Sawyer, Shepherd, Skinner, Slater, Smith, Tanner, Taylor, Thatcher, Turner, Tyler, Walker, Ward, Weaver, Wheeler, etc.

But I was wondering (and if I weren’t so lazy, I’d go and do some actual research): what about those common names that refer to colors? Names like Brown, Green, White, and Black? What do those represent?

Also, why aren’t other common words for colors used as names? Why are lots of people named Brown and Green, but nobody is named Red or Yellow or Blue?

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Read all about it here, and here.

So I’m always surprised to see commercial ventures with conspicuously ill-chosen names. There’s an outstanding example right in my Brooklyn neighborhood: a hair salon called — I am not making this up — Medusa. That’s right, this beauty parlor is actually named for a Gorgon so unspeakably hideous that the very sight of her was enough to turn a man to stone.

Today I saw an ad for a hair product whose name is a word meaning “a boil, or a sebaceous cyst of the scalp”.

Here.

This idea has become more or less hegemonic amongst linguists due to the work of Noam Chomsky (and subsequent proponents such as Steven Pinker), and has also been taken as a model for work on the evolutionary psychology of morality by people like Marc Hauser. If it’s wrong, that’s a pretty big deal; it will be interesting to see how the research community responds.

Learn more here.

Bitterness
Venom
Malediction
Bile
Gall
Sewage
Filth
Racism
Poison
Contumely
Execration
Invective
Malevolence
Contagion
Vilification
Odium
Spite
Pestilence
Spleen
Virulence
Oppugnancy
Feculence
Acrimony
Putrescence
Brimstone
Churlishness
Rage
Hate

This brief offering is just a start; feel free to pitch in, readers. We all must do our part.

To clarify this important distinction, I give you the immortal Peter Cook.

Read about it here, and take it for a spin at ngrams.googlelabs.com.

A couple of decades ago, as the city tried to show a slightly more genteel face to the world, a cutesy-poo refinement appeared on the scene:

“Can I help the next customer?”

It took some getting used to, but now I hardly notice it.

Lately, though, a disturbing mutation has spread throughout the city. I first noticed it at a Starbucks, and thought it was just a grotesque, localized aberration, but now it’s everywhere:

“Can I help the following guest?”

First of all, hotels have “guests”. Delis have customers. But what really throws me into queasy disequilibrium, every time I hear it, is that “following”. I always expect names to be read off afterward, as in:

“Would the following guests please report to the delousing station immediately: Mr. Princip, Mr. Guiteau, Mr. Czoglosz… “

It’s all too much for me, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to this one. But here’s what I’ve been wondering: is this bizarre neologism local to New York, or has it metastasized? What say you, readers?

“Consumers are cutting back this holiday season, but not as much as in recent years.”

In other words, consumers are spending more this year than last year. How is that “cutting back”? Who writes this stuff?

This sort of thing drives me crazy. I’m starting to think I should stop listening to the news. Or at least cut back.

We read:

The language’s demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America’s daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.

In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling “pronounciation” has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation.

On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was “Alot,” which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month.

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”

Some will say that Mr. Weingarten is over-exaggerating the problem; that English isn’t really in such dire straights. Others could care less. But as a daily blogger, faultless English is my stock and trade, and I think that for all intensive purposes he’s right.

That’s my opinion, anyway. What’s your’s?

One of these populations, as of last week, no longer exists. The last of the Bo-speaking subtribes of the Great Andamanese culture, a woman named Boa Sr (don’t ask me how to pronounce it), has died at the age of 85 or so. The language, which represented a chain of cultural transmission that may have been as much as 70,000 years old, has died with her.

Read this poignant story here. Don’t miss the audio clip.

So for tonight, then, a brief and enjoyable item (and high time; the mood has gotten altogether too dark and negative around here lately).

For several years I have had on my sidebar a link to a website called Language Log, and for at least the last two of them I have neglected to visit. My good friend Jess Kaplan wrote to me yesterday, however, to point out a couple of items there that he had just enjoyed, and that got me back in the door. I had forgotten what an outstanding blog it is.

For tonight, then, we direct you to a fine pair of posts (here and here) explaining why Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, is probably the worst prose stylist ever to make a living writing books (even that title contains a gaffe), and an item examining the relative frequency of “you know” vs. “I mean”. But don’t stop there. This is a site that is curiously difficult to navigate away from.

The word is “behavior”; specifically the sense of the word that applies to what living creatures do. Although there are entire academic fields that have the word in their names, it appears that just what constitutes “behavior” is rather a difficult question for even the boffins themselves to answer.

The question was brought to the floor by Daniel Levitis, a teaching assistant at Berkeley. We read:

Daniel Levitis was working as a teaching assistant for an animal behavior course at the University of California in Berkeley, and on the first day of class, the professor explained that the shorthand definition of a “behavior” is “what animals do.”

O.K., that’s the freshman-friendly definition, Mr. Levitis thought. Now how about the unabridged, professional version? What is the point-by-point definition of a behavior that behavioral biologists use when judging whether a particular facet of the natural world falls under their purview? After all, animals digest food and grow fur, yet few behavioral researchers would count such physiological and anatomical doings as behaviors.

Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley.

His interest piqued, Mr. Levitis investigated with a survey of professionals:

To perform their linguistic investigation, the researchers composed an online survey with two basic parts. In the first, they presented 13 “potentially diagnostic” statements about behavior, compiled from their sweep through the scientific literature, with which respondents could either concur or not. “Behavior always involves movement,” for example, and “is always an action, rather than a lack of action.” Or, “behaviors are always the actions of individuals, not groups” and “something whole individuals do, not organs or parts that make up an individual.” Or, “a developmental change is not a behavior.”

In the second part, Mr. Levitis and his co-workers offered 20 instances of natural phenomena and asked, Behavior, yea, nay or can’t say? “A sponge pumps water to gather food,” for example, or “a plant bends its leaves toward a light source” or “a beetle is swept away by a strong current.” Does a flock of geese flying in V formation count as a behavior? How about when a person decides not to do anything tomorrow in the event of rain, or when a female ant that is physiologically capable of laying eggs doesn’t do so because she’s not a queen? (If you’d like to take the survey and see how your responses compare with scientists’ and other readers’, please go to nytimes.com/science. Warning, spoilers ahead.)

Nearly all of the items were designed as borderline cases that tested the validity of one or more statements in the first half of the survey. “Flocks of geese fly in V formation,” for instance, contradicted the notion that behaviors are the actions of individuals rather than of groups. A person deciding on inactivity in the event of rain and an ant forgoing reproduction because she’s not royalty both flouted the premise that a behavior is always an action. One offering, “a spider builds a web,” contradicted none of the 13 stipulations about behavior and thus served as an experimental control.

The results showed little, if any, agreement amongst those who participated, and often evoked inconsistencies even amongst answers given by a single respondent.

If this vagueness and inconsistency of meaning is possible even with a familiar term used by professional scientists to refer to the very subject of their expertise, it seems naively optimistic to imagine that very much of human discourse consists of a meaning in one interlocutor’s mind being faithfully transferred to, and subsequently represented in, another’s.

Indeed, Mr. Levitis’s project points out that the problem runs far deeper than the failure of language to provide a reliable channel for transferring precise meanings from one mind to another; it reminds us that even within ourselves the labels and concepts that, taken together, provide the scaffolding upon which our world-picture is erected are not the solid objects, the sturdy posts and beams, we imagine them to be, but are, rather, nothing more than diffuse and amorphous nebulae of associations. Though we often imagine that language is essential to the organization of our storehouse of concepts and ideas — indeed, it is hard for us to imagine how we could have meaningful concepts at all without language to give them definite form — it begins to seem that what we have instead is a collection of familiar terms, like “behavior”, that point not to anything solid, but into a mass of clouds. And although we humans can easily — blithely, glibly — share the words, each of has his own personal cloudscape, unique and irremediably private, and available even for our own introspection only with sustained and quite unnatural effort. We do not know ourselves; we do not understand most of the things we think we know; and to imagine that we really understand anyone else must surely be little more than a comforting fantasy. We roll words around in our minds, and pass them around amongst ourselves, but really we are far more alone than we imagine.

Read the article here.

Reading the New York Times the other day, I noticed the following in an Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof about moral types:

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

“Professor Haidt” is the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has done extensive research into the orgins and underpinnings of human morality.

Here’s another quote, from Harvard’s Steven Pinker:

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design.

And here’s Stephen Jay Gould:

In the domain of organisms and their good designs, we have little reason to doubt the strong, probably dominant influence of deterministic forces like natural selection.

Here’s a biology text from the University of Chicago Press: The Evolution of Vertebrate Design.

From the abstract of a lecture given this month by the American Society of Cell Biology:

Familiar features help to elucidate the origins, functions and design parameters for the secretory pathway, endosymbiotic organelles, the cytoskeleton, and cell cycle control.

Here’s the title of a paper from the Journal of Mammalogy:

Allometric scaling of body length : Elastic or geometric similarity in mammalian design.

Here’s another scholarly paper, from the University of Bonn:

The biomechanical design and morphofunctional evolution of presacral vertebrae in Sauropodomorpha deduced from shape analysis and FESS.

What do all these quotations have in common? The word “design”.

When biologists use this word to describe the bodies of living creatures, they obviously have something different in mind than a pre-Darwinian speaker of English would. While both would use it to describe intricate assemblages of working parts that perform some function, the difference is that the modern, technical usage of the term carries no implication of teleology, of having been assembled by an intentional designer for a preordained purpose. In the evolution of life there are no Aristotelian “final causes”, no “skyhooks” lifting the process from above. In short: design sans Designer; design not by purposeful plan, but by natural process. But the use of the word seems apt enough otherwise; it certainly feels appropriate, for example, to look at an albatross’s body as an exquisitely designed flying machine.

To use the word in this way — even though those who do so quite explicitly understand that when they say “design” they have in mind a concept cleanly filleted of all teleology, as what is effectively an instance of technical jargon — remains nevertheless a source of philosophical vexation in some quarters. One of those quarters is the popular website The Maverick Philosopher, where the host, Dr William Vallicella, has devoted more than a few comments and posts lately to this very topic, for example this recent item.

This persistent inconsistency in the way the word “design” is understood is extremely unhelpful, and I see no sign of its being resolved anytime soon. (Another word similiarly fraught with confusion and disagreement is the word “for”; there are many intelligent and philosophically sophisticated people who maintain, for example, that our eyes, since they lack a conscious designer, and were shaped solely by evolution, are not “for” seeing.)

Daniel Dennett, who is himself rather a polarizing figure in these discussions, has made quite clear what “design” ought to mean in light of our radical new (and at 150 years old, very recent indeed, in the timeline of human thought and language) insights into the process by which living things, and indeed intentionality, have arrived on the scene. In a 2005 paper, Atheism and Evolution (which is well worth your time, and available here), Dennett writes:

A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or the artifact of a living thing[.]

This seems almost exactly right to me, with one quibble: it is not quite general enough. This engine of design discovered by Darwin and Wallace will work with not only living things, but with anything that meets the essential qualifications: replication with variation, along with some sort of differential selection amongst the variants. It happens that living things are the only such replicators we know of at the moment, but the process does not strictly require life. (Indeed, at the close of Dennett’s article he talks about Lee Smolin’s provocative idea (see here) that universes themselves may be subject to such a process, replicating themselves by way of black holes.)

But the point is: a definition of the word “design” that does not include the process that created the staggeringly intricate designs of living things is simply inadequate. Such a definition rules out of court, by mere terminological fiat, nearly all of the design in the world, leaving only the tiny remnant, childishly crude by comparison, that we humans have managed. This absurd philosophical convention — and it is nothing more than that — is due, I maintain, to an atavistic, anthropocentric fixation on conscious agency, and in particular an obdurate resistance to the idea of intentionality as an objective feature of the natural world, and an equally dogmatic unwillingness to decouple the ideas of intentionality and consciousness.

Dennett continues:

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” was in fact a new and wonderful way of thinking, completely overturning the mind-first way that even David Hume had been unable to cast aside, and replacing it with a bubble-up vision in which intelligence — the concentrated, forward-looking intelligence of an anthropomorphic agent — emerges as just one of the products of mindless, mechanistic processes. These processes are fueled by untold billions of pointless, undesigned collisions, some vanishing small fraction of which fortuitously lead to tiny improvements in the lineages in which they occur. Thanks to Darwin’s principle of “descent with modification,” these ruthlessly tested design innovations accumulate over the eons, yielding breathtakingly brilliant designs that never had a designer — other than the purposeless, distributed process of natural selection itself.

The signatures of these unplanned innovations are everywhere to be found in a close examination of the marvels of nature, in the inside-out retina of the vertebrate eye, the half-discarded leftovers in the genes and organs of every species, the prodigious wastefulness and apparent cruelty of so many of nature’s processes. These departures from wisdom, frozen accidents, in the apt phrase of Francis Crick, confront the theist with a dilemma: if God is responsible for these designs, then His intelligence looks disturbingly like human obtuseness and callousness. Moreover, as our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution grows, we can sketch out ever more detailed accounts of the historical sequence of events by which the design innovations appeared and were incorporated into the branching tree of genomes. A voluminously predictive account of the creative process is now emerging, replete with thousands of mutually supporting details, and no contradictions at all. As the pieces of this mega-jigsaw-puzzle fall into place with increasing rapidity, there can be no reasonable doubt that it is, in all its broad outlines if not yet in all its unsettled details, the true story of how all living things came to have the designs we observe.

Dennett responds also to the pervasive prejudice that sees “mere” matter, and the “mindless” processes of Nature, as somehow too lowly to have produced something as exalted as we:

Between the richly detailed and ever-ramifying evolutionary story, and the featureless mystery of God the creator of all creatures great and small, there is no contest. This is a momentous reversal for the ancient conviction that God’s existence can be read off the wonders of nature. Anyone who has ever been struck by the magnificent intricacy of design and prodigious variety of the living world and wondered what–if not God–could possibly account for its existence must now confront not just a plausible alternative, but an alternative of breathtaking explanatory power supported by literally thousands of confirmed predictions and solved puzzles. Richard Dawkins has put the point crisply: “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (1986, p. 6).

Undermining the best argument anybody ever thought of for the existence of God is not, of course, proving the non-existence of God, and many careful thinkers who have accepted evolution by natural selection as the explanation of the wonders of the living world have cast about for other supports for their continuing belief in God. The idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, could never accept the full inversion, proclaiming that “the marvelous complexity of forces which appear to control matter, if not actually to constitute it, are and must be mind-products.” (quoted by [Stephen Jay] Gould, [The Flamingo's Smile,] 1985, p.397.) More recently, the physicist Paul Davies, in his book, The Mind of God (1992, p.232), opines that the reflective power of human minds can be “no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces.” This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn’t the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin’s inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of “mindless, purposeless forces.”

The community of evolutionary scientists and philosophers are already untroubled by the use of “design” in the broader sense that I am defending here; it might be seen, perhaps, as having been appropriated as technical language, in the way that many ordinary English words have been taken up in other technical fields. (Also, it is common for words to become more inclusive over time: for example, the word “guitar” once meant only what we would now refer to with the retronym “classical guitar” — the present argument over the use of “design” is rather like having a debate with a purist over whether my Stratocaster is really a “guitar” at all.) But so stubborn is the resistance to this broadening of the meaning of the word that I think we simply need a new one.

Any suggestions?

This ghastly coinage describes a grim reality of modern life: the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure. The article’s author seems to see this as a sign of progress; I certainly do not. We read:

What happened? Why do Americans want to mix work and play? Well, first, there’s more work and less play, according to Conley’s book “Elsewhere, U.S.A.”

“For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you’re going to have an extremely long workweek,” he says. These busier Americans often want to save time by taking care of business and pleasure simultaneously.

Ah, business and pleasure, simultaneously. What a blessing!

Indeed, why stop there? Readers are advised to be on the lookout for “wex”, “wefecation”, “wisease”, “wemotherapy”, and, if the wemotherapy doesn’t work out, perhaps even a stay in a “wospice”.