Language Finesse

31/10/2022

Jake Golden: Every time you light a lighter, it gets lighter. Eventually it will become so light that it will no longer light.

08/10/2022

Ten years already since writing the Life Orientation Gr 10 and Gr 12 school textbooks. And still getting royalties every year. What a good investment of time😊

21/07/2022

Fascinating article.

Speaking a second or even a third language can bring obvious advantages, but occasionally the words, grammar and even accents can get mixed up.

22/06/2022

Far be it from me ...
(from The Economist)
The subjunctive ... can be distinguished by the lack of the usual -s on first- and third-person singular verbs, as in take instead of takes. (The subjunctive of to be is be.) Everyone knows a host of fixed phrases using it, even if they don’t realise they are subjunctives. Far be it from me. Heaven forbid. So be it. These are not declarations but a sort of wish, equivalent to May it be far from me. May heaven forbid. May it be so. Britain and America even have distinctive national refrains with a subjunctive: God save the queen and God bless America. These look a bit like imperatives, but they are not; the faithful do not order the creator of the universe around.

22/04/2022

"Science is organised knowledge. Wisdom is organised life."
Immanuel Kant

28/02/2022

Today's mixed metaphor headline from news24: "Ramaphosa doubles down on Ukraine fence-sitting".
Sounds like he might end up with a pain in the arse ...

22/02/2022

Interessant ...

A South African developer has launched Wortel, an Afrikaans version of the word game sensation Wordle.

22/02/2022

It should be called Twosday

11/02/2022

Watch the "Five books that helped shape our world" video at BBC Ideas. Explore other related content via our curated "The Open University" playlist.

31/01/2022

18/01/2022

Books, books, books ...

24/12/2021

Wishing you all the best this holiday season!

13/12/2021

Bookshops, eat your hearts out😂🤣

From NEWS 24:
Zuma's book to 'set record straight', claims spokesperson.
Mzwanele Manyi said the book can be bought for R300 or R1 000 (for a signed copy) at "Car Boot sales" in Johannesburg on Sunday.

27/11/2021

Word of the week: grue (noun): a word used by linguists to refer to the part of the colour spectrum between blue and green. Many languages, particularly those used in sunny climes, do not distinguish between the two colours.

20/11/2021

The gloomy Dane

13/11/2021

For the love of reading

27/10/2021

I'm proofreading a huge textbook on epidemiological research. Most interesting but quite technical. Then I must create an alphabetical subject index for the back of the book.

01/10/2021

From The Economist

Why the word “woman” is tying people in knots

It is almost always women who are ordered to dispense with a useful word

“Bodies with vaginas” is an odd way to refer to half the human race. Yet it was the quote that the Lancet, a medical journal, chose to feature on the cover of its latest issue, telling readers that “historically, the anatomy and physiology” of such bodies had been neglected. After complaints about dehumanising language, the Lancet apologised. But it is not alone. A growing number of officials and organisations are finding themselves tongue-tied when it comes to using the word “woman”.

A British hospital has instructed staff on its maternity wards to offer to use the phrase “birthing people”. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a member of America’s Congress, talks of “menstruating people”. On September 18th the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) republished a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Supreme Court judge, on the anniversary of her death. The quote was a defence of a woman’s right to have an abortion. But the aclu’s version—for which it, too, later apologised—replaced every instance of “women” with “people”. In Britain the opposition Labour Party is tying itself in very public knots over questions such as whether only women possess cervixes.

This linguistic shift is being driven by both compassion and fear. Compassion, because organisations are keen not to be seen to be excluding those whose sense of their gender does not match their s*x, such as people who identify as trans or non-binary. And fear, because they are worried about attracting the wrath of online mobs should they be deemed to have violated a set of rapidly changing taboos about gender and s*x that hardly existed five years ago—and which, outside a few rarefied circles, still don’t. Most dictionaries define a woman as an “adult human female”. Among some activists, this is a gross provocation, for they see it as denying that males can be women, too.

Language changes constantly (the word “taboo”, for instance, is an 18th-century import from Polynesia). But doctors, bosses and politicians should think carefully before throwing away widely understood words, or using them in new and radically different ways. In the rush to seem up to date, they risk doing a disservice to their own patients, employees and voters.

One reason is that many of the new terms come across as dehumanising. As the Lancet discovered, many people—trans men as much as anyone else—dislike being described as collections of ambulatory body-parts and secretions. More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.

Furthermore, understanding could suffer. Medical advice, for instance, has to be clear and intelligible by all. That is why Britain’s National Health Service often prefers words like “stomach ache” to “dyspepsia”, or “heart attack” to “myocardial infarction”. One survey conducted by a cervical-cancer charity suggested that around 40% of women are unsure about the details of what exactly a cervix is. This implies that asking “people with cervixes” to turn up for screening appointments may not be clear or intelligible, especially to women who have English as their second language.

XX-rated
Most broadly of all, the point of language is to communicate. Insisting on unfamiliar or alien-sounding terms will make it harder to discuss issues that affect only or disproportionately girls and women, such as female ge***al mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage or the persistence of pay gaps.

Many countries are debating whether safety or fairness should sometimes trump inclusion. Should male prisoners, even violent ones, who identify as women be housed in women’s prisons, as may happen in America, Britain, Canada and elsewhere? Should women’s sports be reserved for biological females, or should any athlete who identifies as a woman be allowed to join a women’s rugby team?

Cowed by the insults and viciousness such discussions provoke, many people are fearful of taking part. If harshly policed, baffling and alien-sounding language is added to the price of joining the debate, even fewer will be willing to elevate their cephalic protuberance above the parapet.

17/08/2021

Today's educational post

04/08/2021

From The Economist, 31 July 2021:

Business
Bartleby

Jargon abhors a vacuum
The reasons behind management gobbledygook

No child aspires to a life talking the kind of nonsense that many executives speak. But it seems that, as soon as managers start to climb the corporate ladder, they begin to lose the ability to talk or write clearly. They instead become entangled in a forest of gobbledygook.

The first explanation for this phenomenon is that “jargon abhors a vacuum”. All too often, executives know they have nothing significant to say in a speech or a memo. They could confine their remarks to something like “profits are up (or down)”, which would be relevant information. But executives would rather make some grand statement about team spirit or the corporate ethos. They aim to make the business sound more inspirational than “selling more stuff at less cost”. So they use long words, obscure jargon, and buzzwords like “holistic” to fill the space.

Another reason why managers indulge in waffle relates to the nature of the modern economy. In the past, work was largely about producing, or selling, physical things such as bricks or electrical gadgets. A service-based economy involves tasks that are difficult to define. When it is hard to describe what you do, it is natural to resort to imprecise terms.

Such terms can have a purpose but still be irritating. Take “onboarding”. A single word to describe the process of a company assimilating a new employee could be useful. But “to board” would do the trick (at least in American English, which is more comfortable than British English with “a plane boarding passengers” and not just “passengers boarding a plane”). The only purpose of adding “on” seems to be to allow the creation of an equally ugly word, “offboarding”, the process of leaving a firm.

Overblown language is also used when the actual business is prosaic. Private Eye, a British satirical magazine that often mocks corporate flimflam, used to have a regular column pointing out the absurd tendency of companies to tag the word “solutions” onto a product; carpets became “floor-covering solutions”. (Bartleby has long wanted to start a business devoted to dissolving items in water so it could be called “Solution Solutions”.) Nowadays, the target for mockery is the use of the term dna, as in “perfect customer service is in our dna”.

In her book about life in the tech industry, “Uncanny Valley”, Anna Wiener used the term “garbage language” to describe “a sort of nonlanguage which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient”. Tech executives spouted a very grand vision of how they would reshape society but their rhetoric often clashed with the hard reality of what they were doing, which was to sell advertising or monopolise users’ time. It is a variation on the old Ralph Waldo Emerson dictum: “The louder he mentioned his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”

The third reason why managers use jargon is to establish their credentials. What makes one person fit to manage another? It is hard to identify any obvious attributes; managers are not like doctors, who prove their expertise through passing exams and practical training. If you can speak the language of management, you appear qualified to rule. If others don’t understand terms like “synergy” and “paradigm”, that only demonstrates their ignorance. In a sense, managers are acting rather like medieval priests, who conducted services in Latin rather than in the local language, adding to the mystical nature of the process.

Once corporate jargon is established, it is hard for managers to avoid using it. The terms are ever-present in PowerPoint slides, speeches and annual reports. Not to use them would suggest a manager is not sufficiently committed to the job. Junior staff, for their part, dare not question the language for fear of damaging their promotion prospects.

Of course, new words will inevitably be coined in the world of business, as in other areas of life. Technology has ushered in a range of terms, such as hardware and software, which were once unfamiliar but are now widely understood. But a lot of the more irritating jargon has been brought in from other areas of life, like the self-help movement.

All this matters because the continued use of obscure language is a sign that the speaker is not thinking clearly. And if those in charge aren’t thinking clearly, that’s bad for the business. People who are in real command of the detail are able to explain things in a way that is easily understood. And if a manager’s colleagues understand the message, they are more likely to get the right things done. Jargon gets in the way.

04/08/2021

Well said.

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Secondly…

01/08/2021

Karoo sunset

29/07/2021

Recipe for relaxation after a day's work: walk under a sunset sky, especially when it looks like yesterday.

10/07/2021

After a glorious 2-week holiday in northern KZN, all feasible roads along our route home keep getting blocked by protesters against Zuma's incarceration. This after we had to keep our rental car to drive the 1600+ km home because flights are suspended due to Covid. Yesterday we had to turn back on N2 South and find accommodation in Mtunzini. Comfortable place. Will stay here till Monday. In touch with people along the route who provide updates. Hopefully we can get home Tuesday.🙏🏻

11/06/2021

Haha. Grateful I don't have to do Welsh oral exams, or spelling for that matter😂 We passed this station on a train trip in 2016. The signboard is extra long ...

05/06/2021

The sorry lot of a translator. Hats off to Anna Moschovakis for £50,000 prize she will split evenly with author David Diop for this year's International Booker winner At Night All Blood is Black.

29/05/2021

Out, out, damned blot!

An Argentine TV presenter confuses the Immortal Bard with a British namesake who died this week.

27/04/2021

Something useful to learn this public holiday 😉

16/04/2021

Why words matter: how a wrong word crashed a plane
https://codewords.tech/when-words-fail-so-does-your-product-c38d48ee3894

With safety and software now constantly intertwined, neglecting the language in your product does not fly

14/04/2021

I shudder to think of the dangers I never knew may lurk in restrooms!