Posts filed under ‘Writing & Language’
How Words Mean Things and Remain Useful
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments thread of a post at Engage. The part that I find interesting (as well as worrying) concerns the question of whether or not today’s anti-Semitism is racist. Some are arguing that it isn’t.
I’m going to come back to this later because I have more to say about it, but for now (for lack of time) just this: I think that trying to make a case that anti-Semitism, or some anti-Semitism, or today’s anti-Semitism, isn’t racist because Jews are not a “race” is about as accurate and helpful as arguing that no Arab can possibly be anti-Semitic because, hey, Arabs are a Semitic people, too.
Uh, You Mean Oslo, Mr. Mortished
Carl Mortished has an insightful article in The Times which, to anyone interested to know what really happened at Copenhagen, is well worth a read.
Mortished is the World Business Editor at The Times and his article on Copenhagen has the substance and level of analysis to justify that title.
All the more unexpected, then, for him to think, apparently, that Obama picked up his Peace Prize in Stockholm. Mortished writes:
The cheek of the Obama roadshow must baffle and irritate China’s political leaders. China didn’t threaten the world financial system with junk bonds; its army has not invaded other countries (although it has suppressed internal uprisings), but Mr Wen was not fêted in Stockholm. No Nobel for the Chinese Premier.
It’s bad enough that any editor at The Times doesn’t already know that the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo. But this Obama-in-Oslo thing was only just all over the news!
Well, read the article anyway. (And it may get corrected, as I’m going to e-mail Mortished about this now.)
…and Andrew Sullivan Probably Isn’t, But…
Several things make Andrew Sullivan a great blogger. One is his immediate, visceral approach: he says what he thinks about something in any given moment. Another is his intellectual honesty: he will say “I was wrong” when new information prompts him to correct or adjust something he’d said. A third (and by no means the last) is his human touch: he lets his emotions show, he comes across as a real person and not a calculated media persona.
Add to this the fact that I also agree with him on just about every substantive issue and it’s no wonder he’s one of my favourite bloggers. What are those issues? The Media. Iraq. Sarah Palin. President Obama. Health Care. Torture. Gay Rights. Israel. And many others.
Whoah, wait a minute — Israel? Absolutely. And why not? As far as I can make out, Sullivan thinks that all of the West Bank and Gaza should become a proper, independent Palestinian state, and so do I. As far as I can make out, Sullivan doesn’t think that Israel has any business building anything at all on territory it conquered in 1967, and neither do I.
No, I don’t have any problems with Sullivan’s positions on Israel/Palestine.
And I most certainly don’t have the slightest problem with his position on torture, nor with his powerful and necessary criticism of how the issue is dealt with (or not dealt with) by the NYT and WaPo.
But sometimes I’m bothered by some of his symbolism and language. One example: the “some of my best friends are Jews” moment he had recently (which I posted about here). Another example: a point made by his colleague Jeffrey Goldberg about Sullivan being amused by things Jew-baiters write.
And so I do have a problem with this: “The fight for America to remain a torturing nation is resilient. It’s what the neocons believe in: the torture of terror suspects, especially Arab or Muslim ones…”
Now just hang on a minute. “Especially Arab or Muslim ones”? How could you possibly know this, Sullivan? What other categories (non-Arab/non-Muslim) of terror suspects has America been dealing with in recent history, the treatment of whom recommended by the “neocons” might have allowed for an observation of contrast to justify this accusation? There is simply no basis for it. It’s a specious, gratuitous smear. It appears that Sullivan is so disgusted by the neocons that things which he merely imagines become, for him, reality. But – and this is the crucial point – the reason they become reality for him is that, as a result of his prejudices, they seem probable to him.
Sullivan uses the word “neocon” a lot. In the mouths (or pens or keyboards) of some people, this is code for “Jew”. I have always been, and I remain, willing to give Sullivan the benefit of the doubt; it is easy enough, after all, to see why a guy who considers and calls himself a “conservative” would want a way to distinguish between his world view and that of a set of people he so strongly (and rightly) disagrees with. But when I see it juxtaposed in this way with a completely baseless, gratuitous smear that quite clearly has no relation to any kind of reality at all, and that, moreover, and perhaps more to the point, conjures a set of prejudices that many who use the word “neocon” in as code for “Jew” would happily impute to those they so name, I begin to wonder: what are Sullivan’s real feelings about Jews? (In reality I began to wonder that quite a while ago.)
I’ll tell you what I think they are. I say this in full recognition of the very real possibility that I could be completely wrong. I say it in full recognition that it’s based merely on having read the guy’s blog, not on having met him, much less spoken to him at length. So, I could be wrong, but here’s what I think: I think Sullivan thinks that while Jews had a rough time of it up to and, especially, including the Second World War, they’ve since been in the ascendancy and today are doing so well that we really needn’t worry about them. Let’s support the downtrodden by all means, and fight against racism that is directed against disenfranchised minorities, but the Jews, my God, they’re rich and powerful; they practically run US Foreign Policy through AIPAC, they practically control Hollywood and Wall Street, and we really don’t need to worry on their behalf.
It sounds harsh, and maybe it’s too harsh, but I find that’s really the best I can credit Sullivan with at this point. I wouldn’t call him an anti-Semite. But is he a Jew-baiter?
Well, he was amused enough by an image of Anne Frank in a keffiyeh to link to a post about it on the blog Little Green Footballs, giving his own post the chortling title “LGF Bait”. Now think about this. Sullivan is a very sophisticated man. Think about the name Anne Frank, or the image of her face: what do these things connote? Of course. Jew. Now think about Sullivan’s use of the word “bait”. And now ask yourself: is it really believable that a guy like Sullivan could have decided to do that post, and link to that image, and title his post as he did, all without the idea of “Jew Bait” ever occurring to him? It’s impossible to imagine. I think Sullivan thought his title very clever and funny indeed, that’s what I think.
Update: I’d neglected to mention how Sullivan had been quite captivated by Ron Paul during the last Republican primaries. I only once met someone who was actually loony enough to be a proud Ron Paul supporter. In almost the same breath that that person declared his adoration of Ron Paul, he also managed to reveal that he was a raving anti-Semite. Not that, knowing what one does about Ron Paul, this was in any way a surprise. (I excused myself from the table in order to avoid punching the man in the face. Later it occurred to me that I probably should have taken the latter course of action.)
Magical Movements at the Jewish Chronicle
In the Spectator we find this note from Martin Bright, posted yesterday:
I was delighted, not to say honoured, when Stephen Pollard approached me to become the political editor of The Jewish Chronicle.
Wait a minute. Can this be true? How does approaching Martin Bright help Stephen Pollard become the political editor of the JC? And at what distance from Martin does this strange effect fully take hold on Stephen?
(Via Norm)
Crazy GSK Merger Madness in 2001
In the course of my work I came across this article by the Vice President of IT Strategy of the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline. Mr. Elfering begins:
GlaxoSmithKline, like many big companies today, was born of a merger in 2001 between GlaxoWelcome and SmithKline Beecham.
This amazes me. I had no idea that more than one company was ever born of a merger between GlaxoWelcome and SmithKline Beecham – not to mention all of them in the same year!
Or did Mr. Elfering really mean: “GlaxoSmithKline, like many big companies today, was born of a merger; in our case it was between GlaxoWelcome and SmithKline Beecham in 2001″?
Of course there are many other ways one could word it, too, to give the meaning I think Mr. Elfering was probably aiming at.
It was the Groan, not the Beeb
Today on Facebook someone tagged me with this BBC 100 books meme. Fine, but first of all, it wasn’t the BBC, it was the Guardian. Maybe it was the Beeb who said that probably most people will have read only six of those 100, on average. And maybe not; I’ve not the time to find out. Certainly that would mean the Beeb has an extremely low opinion of the public as readers – an opinion that need not necessarily, for that, be mistaken.
I thought I’d have a look see how many of them I’ve read. The results are below — forty-seven and a half. And a half? Yup. Look, they’ve put in there, as one entry, the “Complete Works of Shakespeare”. Hey, no fair — that’s a whole buncha books. I’ve read some of them, so I’m giving myself a half for that entry. (Note that Hamlet has its own entry. Oh well — if they want to count Hamlet twice, then so shall I.)
Where a “(?)” appears, that means I’ve never heard of the book. A “(yuck)” means I not only haven’t read it; I don’t want to. (I would read the others I’ve not yet read, had I the time.) Books that I started and abandoned are indicated as such (and not counted towards my score of 47.5).
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – No
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – No (yuck)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – Yes
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – No
8 1984 – George Orwell – Yes
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – No (?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – Soe
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – No
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – No
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – No (?)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – No
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – No
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – Yes
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes (meh)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh- No
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Yes
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Yes
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – Yes
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – Yes
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – No
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – No
36 The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein – No
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – No (yuck)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No (abandoned)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – Yes
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No (abandoned)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – Yes
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – Yes
51 Life of Pi – Ann Martel – No
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – No
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No (?)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Yes
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon – No (?)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Yes
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – Yes
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – No (?)
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – Yes
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – No
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – Yes
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – No
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Inferno – Dante – No
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – Yes
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – Yes
80 Possession – AS Byatt – No
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – Yes
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – Yes (meh)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – No
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – No
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Yes
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – No
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – No
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – Yes
Hey BusinessWeek: That’s not a Why, it’s a That
In this article, James Cooper writes:
Continued weakness in the labor markets is sure to limit the strength of the recovery, especially in the second half, but it will not prevent an upturn from taking hold. History shows why. In each of the past four recessions, GDP growth has always turned up before payrolls have. In fact, the lag has been increasingly greater since the 1973-75 recession, when payrolls hit bottom one quarter after real GDP did. In both the 1981-82 and 1990-91 downturns, employment didn’t hit bottom until three quarters after real GDP’s nadir. And after the 2001 recession, it took seven quarters for jobs to stop falling.
He says that labour market weakness will not prevent a recovery from starting, and promises to explain (or rather, have history explain) why this is so. But he doesn’t keep his promise: there follows no explanation as to why. There is only a recounting of historical evidence that this is usually how it goes.
Declining Standards at The Economist?
I agree with every word in The Economist’s leader this week on what Obama needs to do about Israel and Palestine.
Well, not every word. One I disagree with is the second-to-last word in this sentence:
The American president may think he has enough on his plate without worrying about the dog’s dinner simmering away in the corner: the sickly Middle East peace process, with its often nauseous ingredients.
I wonder how the writer knew that the ingredients are feeling nauseous. Did he ask them? Were they looking a bit green around the gills? And did he go in-depth with his reporting and find out what it was that was nauseating them? I myself have always found some of the ingredients of the Middle East peace process to be nauseating. But that they themselves are also feeling nauseous shows just how bad things are.
Two other words I don’t agree with occur in this sentence:
[The leaders of the Arab world] could also push much harder to help reconcile the two Palestinian groups—and, by the by, insist that Hamas unambiguously disavows violence and, at least de facto, says it accepts Israel.
“Disavows” should have been the subjunctive, ”disavow”, and, likewise, “says” should have been “say”.
What’s going on at the Economist? Have the summer interns taken over the shop?
English Language Watch: Refute, Rebut, Deny
Oliver Kamm has a column in The Times that I hope will be read by many people. In it he explains the difference between “refute”, “deny”, and “rebut”. The confused and illiterate misuse of these words in public discourse is something that has always irked me no end. Thank goodness for the Oliver Kamms of this world. (Oliver Kamm is a good thing for other reasons, too. Check out his blog.)
