communications

Comment of the Day: “KABOOM! The School System ‘Applauds The Efforts Of Students Who Act In Good Faith…'”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
This is an appropriate illustration for this Comment of the Day. You'll see...

This is an appropriate illustration for this Comment of the Day. You’ll see…

The post about the middle-schooler suspended for rushing to the aid of a stricken classmate inspired a wide range of fascinating commentary, and also generated a tangential thread, as essays here often do. This one involved some commenters challenging my assertion that the ungrammatical quote from the young hero spoke to a school system that was better at no-tolerance discipline than it was at education, and that students not conditioned to view double negatives as poor communication were being handicapped by incompetent teaching. Into the fray jumped the always provocative Extradimensional Cephalopod, who walloped the debate with one of his trademark, long-form expositions on linguistic matters.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “KABOOM! The School System “Applauds The Efforts Of Students Who Act In Good Faith To Assist Others In Times Of Need” And Is Therefore Exacting Punishment So They Know Never To Do It Again.”

I agree that not all languages are created equal. Effective communication requires a few subordinate skills based on semantics (navigating within a paradigm) and empathy (shifting between paradigms). One such skill is translation, the ability to convey a set of ideas to someone who has an unfamiliar paradigm and to understand ideas they express in that paradigm. Another is background, the ability to recognize semantic cues (e.g. grammar and etiquette) and use them to create a desired impression on someone else, which is necessary to smoothly blend in with one’s surroundings, putting others at ease by appearing to be similar to them. People need to develop the power of communication in order to interact with others, and therefore regardless of how they prefer to speak, they need to be able to shift to different methods of speaking depending on the context in which they find themselves. That is the virtue of linguistic descriptivism: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Or, as my grandfather likes to say, “…as the Romanians do.”

That said, linguistic prescriptivism has virtues of its own, when correctly employed, which is rare. Language is important because it is based on semantics, which is the simplification of interactions and which usually brings with it the concept of designating anything as “proper”. Labels and names are not hard limits for thought, but they shape it by making some thoughts easier than others. Any concept for which we have a word becomes easier to think of, because we can call that concept and associated ones readily to mind instead of retrieving each concept individually. It’s the difference between using the word “bird” and describing the animal’s characteristics anew each time you want to talk about it. The latter is possible, but people might have trouble thinking about birds and what they are like.

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Would You Want To Join A Coalition With People Who Talk This Way?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Lost and Confused Signpost

I just returned home from a funeral last night, and am running off to give an ethics presentation, but saw this and cannot resist pointing it out.

From the Hill:

The United States is at war with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL), the White House and Pentagon said Friday, a day after Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly declined to use that phrase.

“In the same way that we are at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates around the globe, we are at war with ISIL,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby echoed that sentiment, telling reporters that while the effort was “not the Iraq war,” they should “make no mistake, we know we are at war with ISIL.”

Earnest said that it was important to distinguish that this was “different than the strategies previously pursued in Iraq” and that by “we,” he meant a “broader international coalition” that was fighting the terrorist organization. Earnest also said that the strategy for handling ISIS was “consistent with the counterterrorism strategy we’ve pursued in cases all around the world.”

“This president, as is expected of American presidents, is stepping up to lead an international coalition to confront that threat and to deny ISIL a safe haven. And ultimately, this international coalition will be responsible for degrading and destroying ISIL,” he said.

In a series of interviews on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly rejected characterizations of the U.S. efforts against ISIS as war.

Kerry said the administration’s plan to combat ISIS includes “many different things that one doesn’t think of normally in context of war” during an interview with CNN.

…

In a separate interview with CBS News, Kerry also rejected the word “war” to describe the U.S. effort and encouraged the public not to “get into war fever” over the conflict.

“We’re engaged in a major counterterrorism operation, and it’s going to be a long-term counterterrorism operation. I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity,” Kerry told the network.

“I don’t think people need to get into war fever on this. I think they have to view it as a heightened level of counter terrorist activity … but it’s not dissimilar similar to what we’ve been doing the last few years with al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in Yemen and elsewhere,” Kerry said.

I see! So we’re at war, though you shouldn’t call it a war, though it is like the war we officially said was not a war, and although it is in Iraq, it’s not an Iraq war, and it really isn’t going to be like what you typically expect in a war, so we shouldn’t go into war fever. It’s more like what we’ve been doing in some places where we haven’t been at war, like Pakistan.

How can anyone trust these people?