Category Archives: Language

Martin Luther King Was Good At Talkin’

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As part of my contribution to celebrating MLK day, in this time of transition in race awareness in the United States, I haves an informal rhetorical analysis of King’s “I have a dream” speech. Professional Rhetoricians have analyzed this speech at a much more sophisticated level than I could ever do. This is just from a person who writes the occasional speech pointing out some of the rhetorical devices, or really, pointing out that they are there and helping you find them on your own (with LOTS of hints).

Especially notable is repetition, but not just by repeating things. The repetitions are a framework for space and place references, which are often metaphors, or for other references, and the repetitions evolve through the speech, and are used to circle back on some of the same themes so they are produced very effectively three or four times.  This is speech is a locomotive, and the repetitions are the track it is barreling down.

You can read the speech here. 

Look for the meter.:

I am happy to join
with you today
in what will go down
as the greatest demonstration
in the history of our nation

There are many,many other segments of this speech that come in a five-five-five or similar poetic meter.

Look for reference to classics/bible:

  • Five score years ago, a great American… we’ve come to this hallowed spot. (from Pereclies Funerary Oration and the Gettysburg Address).
  • wallow in the valley of despair
  • Lots of others

Look for nearly hyperbolic adjectives with repetition:

Fatal to overlook the urgency. Fierce urgency. Urgency of now.

Look for rich metaphors being asked to do a lot of work:

  • We’ve come to cash a check, a promissory note written byh the founders, America has defaulted on this note.
  • Invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
  • Threshold of palace of justice
  • Cup of bitterness and hatred
  • Winds of police brutality

Look for building metaphors on metaphors:

America has defaulted on the check but the bank of justice is not bankrupt.

Look for poetic repetition:

  • One hundred years later…
  • We cannot be satisfied
  • I have a dream dream dream
  • Let freedom ring

Look for metaphor mixed with repetition and indirect reference, esp. using space/place:

Cannot walk alone
As we walk… we shall always march
We cannot turn back.

Further look at the “I have a dream” part

  • “I have a dream that” = five beat rhythm
  • “I have a dream that” repeated four times, then shifted: “I have a dream TODAY!” Twice
  • Many of the “I have a dream” clauses re-visit earlier parts of the speech, stating the same idea again but in this elevated prose.

Look for use of place and space, including spatial shifts in phrases, and where the adjectives sit in the language:

In Dream section, place (and person) repeated: This nation, just Georgia, just Mississippi, Alabama, Every valley, every hill and mountain, etc.

Mountain of despair, Every valley and every hill and mountain, rough spaces made plain, crooked places made straight, etc. etc.

“Let freedom ring” repetition, repeating themes for THIRD time, making use of space and place AGAIN. by this time the listener is totally in the groove with respect to the framework of metaphors, the cadence of repetition, and the space/place framework.

Again, five beat repetition in “Let freedom ring from”

Rich juicy adjectives for each of the places mentioned (mighty, prodigious, curvaceous) replaced for a few beats with a built in strong adjective as part of the place name (Stone Mountain, Lookout Mountain) etc.

Reverse of ring repeat in first “last line. “

These last two things (have a name in rhetoric, I forgot it if I ever really knew it) bump the listener.

Denouement

Full of repeats, classic references, more place/space references, the whole shebang in one little paragraph followed by:

Powerful repeats (“free at last”) with a couplet of iambic pentameter to finish it off:

Thank god Almighty
We are free at last


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Do not read this important message!

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Do not read this until you have time for the equivalent of one or two chapters in a book. But if you can settle down for a while and you care about messaging, and your copy of “don’t think of an elephant” is across the room and you don’t feel like getting up, dig in. Also, please respond, tell me what you think. This is a set of thoughts in progress.

Here is my message: Use training in “Framing,” “Race Class Narrative,” or similar ways to improve your communication abilities to become a better producer of messages in the same way an athlete uses strength and aerobic cross training to become a better athlete. Message training is to the hopeful messenger what running 5 miles a day and pumping iron three times a week is to an amateur softball player. You will get better. Continue reading Do not read this important message!


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The Great British Baking Show Translator

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Why do we like The Great British Baking Show? It lacks a chef who’s whole shtick is to be an asshole. The judges are fair, consistent, and open, even if the White Supremacists at The Sun are annoyed when a British-born Bangladesi from Bedfordshire wins. The judging process is meant to be entertaining, educational, and encouraging, if sometimes very baudy. The contestants reflect interesting diversity in both their own backgrounds and their diverse approaches to cooking. There is interesting and evolving interaction between the people on the show. We like the tent and the challenges it creates, especially in some seasons.

And of course, many of us watch the show to see the crashes.

Without further ado, a glossary. Add more to the comments if you’ve got em. Continue reading The Great British Baking Show Translator


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Ritualized Language Can Be Inaccurate and Annoying

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Rituals are things people do in a more or less consistent matter, often to the extent that the manner of doing is more important, or at least, more persistent, than any possible original reason for doing the thing. Ritualized behaviors are all around us, even in highly modern settings like medicine. As a possibly apocryphal example, I will refer to the story of the oven roast. Grandma had the best recipe for a roast beef, and passed it on to daughters, not by writing it down, but rather, by showing how to roast the beef, and the daughters wrote it down. That recipe was passed on, in written form, to grand daughters, and one day one of the grand daughters roasted the beef for the whole extended family for Sunday dinner. One of the younger folk marveled at the great roast beef, and someone else noted that it was grandma’s recipe.

“But what makes it so good, better than when I cook it,” an in-law said.

“I’m not sure. Maybe it is cutting the end of the roast off before putting it in the oven?” said the granddaughter who had done the roasting that Sunday.

“Yeah, grandma,” said the other granddaughter, causing grandma to sort of wake up and pay attention for a moment. “Why does cutting the end of the beef off before roasting it make it taste so good?”
Continue reading Ritualized Language Can Be Inaccurate and Annoying


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If I suggested you read this, it is because you used “ad hominem” wrong

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The term “ad hominem” means directed against a person.

If you are a racist, and I say you are a racist, then my statement is ad hominem. Note that the statement may be technically correct. I’m saying something about you, and you really are a racist, so my statement is correct. On the other hand, if you are not a racist, and I say you are a racist, that is an incorrect ad hominem statement. My statement is incorrect. Either way, I have not committed an “ad hominem fallacy.” I’ve simply made a statement about you, that may or may not have been correct.

So, what the heck is the meaning of the term “ad hominem fallacy” you may ask? (Note that the term “ad hominem” itself, or “ad hom” for short, has come to imply “ad hominem fallacy.”) In the above example, you might think that if I call you a racist and you are, that I have not committed a fallacy, but if you are a racist, I’ve not. In neither of the above examples, have I committed the ad hominem fallacy.

If I sent you to this post to read it, it is more likely because I think you’ve committed the fallacy of the ad hominem fallacy. This is a meta-fallacy. You have claimed that an ad hominem fallacy has occurred because someone has called someone a racist (or some other nasty thing, I’m using “racist” as an example here, obviously) whether the accusation is right or wrong. But your reference to the ad hominem fallacy is in fact a fallacy because none of that relates to what an ad hominem fallacy actually is.

An ad hominem fallacy is when you are arguing over an issue, like are cats better than dogs, and you go after the person you are arguing with and attack them as a person as part of your argument. That is not the same as the question of whether the person is in fact worthy of this attack.

Let me give you an example.

Me: Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: No, dogs are better than cats.

Me: No. You are, in fact, Hitler, and Hitler is a total jerk, so therefore, cats are better than dogs.

Here, I am wrong in two ways. First, you can’t say that cats are better than dogs. Or visa versa. Second, I’m arguing that the other guy in this argument is wrong because he is a jerk. I was committing an ad hominem fallacy.

However, I am right about one thing. Hitler is a jerk. So, let’s play it out again from a slightly different angle.

Me: Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: No, dogs are better than cats.

Me: Hitler, you are a complete jerk, did you know that?

Hitler: So I’ve been told.

Me: In any event, you are wrong. Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: Really, you can’t say one is better than the other.

Me: You know, you are right about that. You are still a jerk.

Hitler: So I’ve been told.

Hitler is still bad.
Here, our discussion about cats vs. dogs actually came to a reasonable conclusion and, indeed, a consensus. Who knew both Hitler and I could be so reasonable? Also, I made an ad hominem attack on Hitler. I called him a jerk. In so doing, I did not commit an ad hominem fallacy. I made a statement of belief about Hitler’s jerkiness, and very likely, I was right. I did not use Hitler’s jerkiness as part of my argument about cats vs. dogs. Even if I was wrong, and Hitler is a nice guy with a bad reputation, my statement was still not an ad hominem fallacy. It might have been wrong, but it was not an ad hominem fallacy. It was about him, so technically, it was “ad hominem” but not a fallacy.

An ad hominem fallacy is when you use a personal attack on a person in order to devalue or dismiss an argument they are making. It is NOT when you make a statement about the person, which may or may not be a personal attack, in and of itself. I maintain Hitler is a jerk, and I don’t care about cats vs dogs. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but while that is an attack on the man, it is not a logical fallacy. If I say his opinion about dogs vs cats is wrong because he is a jerk, THAT is an ad hominem fallacy.

I sent you here because I think you got that wrong, and I wrote this post because I’m weary of that common fallacy, about a fallacy, being toted out in the middle of arguments.


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Schrödinger’s Lie: A quantum leap in understanding metaphors

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Sex, Lies, and Power

When I was a graduate student, and later, teaching, at a Great East Coast University*, one of my adivsors was the famous Irven DeVore. We taught a very large introductory biology class nicknamed “Sex” but also known as “Human Behavioral Biology,” or, in the school’s tradition of naming all important courses after World War II bombers, “B-29.”

The fact was not lost on DeVore that we intended to enthrall, or at least, lock in the room four times a week, batches of 500 or so individuals who were training up to grasp in their hot little hands the very levers of power. Our job was to teach them what human behavior was all about. Clearly, that was an awesome task. And, DeVore reckoned that the best way to responsibly carry out this task was to inform the students what was actually going on, so they would be less likely to miss the point.

“You are all destine to eventually grasp the very levers of power,” he would tell them. “And here, we are undertaking the awesome task of learning about human behavior. During this course, there will be occasions when we will simplify the subject matter, in order to make important points. In effect, we’ll tell the occasional white lie to arrive eventually at a greater truth.”

There would be a pause.

“It is not lost on me and should not be on you, that now and then we are casting false pearls before real swine.”

Another pause. One in 15 students would then giggle. A different 1 in fifteen students would sneer. The rest would not emote, but they would dutifully write down the words.

What’s a meta for, anyway?

After my own fledging as a tosser of pearls, I departed from DeVore’s philosophy. I replaced white lies with truthful placeholders. Instead of “All genes code for proteins,” it would be “All proteins are coded for by genes, and that is the job of many but not all genes.” That was an easy one, and the placeholder there is the implication that there are other genes that do other things. A more difficult case might be “On balance, wealthy individuals have more offspring than poor ones, but half the time you measure this it will seem untrue. But, most of those times, you are measuring it wrong, and you can learn all about that in a 3000 level course we offer on Thursday afternoons.”

A white lie, in education, is a simplification that is demonstrably untrue, but used in cases where getting at the full truth involves more advanced material than appropriate for the course, or in some cases, just takes up too much time and doesn’t get you much in return.

In a sense, analogies are white lies, but with an even higher purpose.

The reason to analogize, or create a metaphor, is not to gloss over details, but rather, to bring the conversation to a more advanced understanding of something. A good metaphor causes an “aha” moment and a nudging of thinking in the direction of truth. It is not explicitly a lie, but an analogy is always in fact part lie. Usually the lies stay in the background and can be ignored, but if a given analogy is worked too long or too hard, you can almost never avoid stumbling over them.

For example, varying amounts of water running through pipes of varying sizes at varying speeds is a very good analogy for electricity when you are teaching the very basics of voltage and amperage. But this metaphor breaks the moment you realize that electricity doesn’t really slow down or speed up like water does. It breaks even more when you realize that alternating current lives outside the wire (pipe) a good bit of the time, and can actually be transmitted across vast distance of space and then picked up by another wire. Your lawn sprinkler is not a great analogy for a radio.

This aspect of analogies is often lost, perhaps sometimes willfully, though I think usually unconsciously, and can lead to arguments. This is not an uncommon way people are either wrong on the internet, or we identify wrongness in others. Or, inappropriately accuse others of being wrong.

Quantum Leap

I find this more often true in the physical sciences. For example, the use of the “quantum leap” as a metaphor is considered by most unacceptable. In physics, at the quantum level (at a very very small scale), it turns out that things (matter/energy, or particle/wave doohickeys) can not move through space or time, or energy levels, at just any old increment. There is a minimum. (See Planck’s Constant.) It is almost like everything exists in a giant four dimensional egg carton (the three dimensions of space, and a fourth of time) and everything is an egg that has to go in one of the spots eggs go in, never in between.**

In this world, the term “quantum leap” would simply mean the egg goes from one egg holding space to another, with absolutely no inbetweenness happening.

In the metaphorical use, a quantum leap means you go from one place or state to another without any inbetweenness. In some remote areas of the world where even today roads are not built, local transport was always on foot, then suddenly, it could be via bush plane. More specifically, the movement of important people or highly valuable goods went from walking to flying. That is a quantum leap in transportation.

In the TV show Quantum Leap, scientist Sam Beckett intends to “leap” across time using a fancy machine. Things go differently than planned, and one of the things that ends up happening is that he leaps across space and time but also into different individuals (I think, I never watched the show). People, especially physicists, complain about this use of the phrase “quantum leap” because a true quantum phenomenon is a quantum phenomenon because it is happening at this very very small scale where space, time, and energy increments are at the absolute minimum.

However, it is not a mistake to use the quantum metaphor for this TV show. The leap is there. The leap without the inbetween is a feature of the story. At quantum size scales, everything leaps. Here, the metaphor is used to refer to that same sort of leaping, also known as saltation.

If you think the metaphor is only correct if it is applied to objects with particle-wave duality and at scales where the you can see and feel Planck’s length, then maybe you don’t know what a metaphor is.

A Metaphor is like a your checklist of things to fix in your house this weekend. Not completely checked off.

Think of a metaphor as a list of attributes. Like this:

  • It is very small, at size scales of 6.4 X 10-34 or so.
  • Things go across space in increments of that unit size, not continuously.
  • Things go across time in increments, not continuously.
  • Things go across energy levels in increments, not continuously.

Then, you check off one item on that list, maybe two, because you are using those attributes in your sentence. Sam Beckett leaps across time and space, he does not glide gracefully through time and space like the rest of us. That sort of thing.

If, at the end of your sentence, you’ve found that you have checked off all of the attributes, and if your attribute list is pretty complete, then you have not invoked a metaphor. You have merely stated a truth. You are not using features of a thing to expound about another thing. You have simply expounded about a thing, remaining in a single meaning-generating dimension. Your metaphor has collapsed on itself and become itself. You said nothing interesting. You might make a good Wikipedia writer.

A fact used in a metaphor is like Schrödinger’s cat. You never know if it is real or not real until you use it. Then, it is either a bit of truth because that part of the metaphor is transferred between the frame of the metaphor and the frame of the object of discussion, or it is a bit of a lie because it is the part of the frame of the metaphor that you are leaving behind.

In the case of Sam Beckett, the nano-nano scale of quantum mechanics is not a feature of the TV show’s main character. His saltational behavior is. He leaps, quantumly, across time and space.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, when Schrödinger originally invoked his his famous dead-not-dead cat, he did so to underscore the abject absurdity of certain aspects of quantum mechanics. Others took this absurd joke and ran with it, asserting that it was part of actual reality, not a joke about reality. This is a case where a metaphor has bitten the writer in the ass, and so, it is appropriate that it is a cat because they are capable of biting in both real and metaphorical worlds. Also, note that Planck’s constant was originally conceived as a white lie as well, a kludge to help make the math work. Later, Planck and others realized that the apparent mathematical necessity of rounding everything off to an interval worked to solve matter-energy problems at that level not because it was a cute trick of math, but because it was a deep truth of reality. That is a little like deciding to count all your expenses and income in sums ending in two, and suddenly all the money in your wallet has become two dollar bills. Since two dollar bill is a metaphor, that leaves you with a pocket full of metaphors.


*Which shall be unnamed, because when I tell people I went to Harvard, they get mad at me, presumably, because they did not.

**Don’t take my description of quantum mechanics to the bank. But that’s roughly my understanding.


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Signs will be in both native and immigrant’s languages in northern Minnesota

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Apropos recent discussion on Native American issues in Minnesota, we have this from MinnPost:

Tourists visiting Bemidji this summer may pick up a few words of a “foreign” language.

That’s because the first city on the Mississippi River way north in Minnesota may be the only town off a reservation trying to incorporate the area’s indigenous Ojibwe language into daily life.

All over town Ojibwe language signs are posted right alongside English language labels, and for a just cause. The signage is part of a broader effort to preserve the language spoken by an estimated 60,000 persons across areas of the northern United States and into Canada as well as to bridge cultural divides between whites and American Indians.

Words such as “boozhoo,’’ an Ojibwe word for “welcome” and many other Native American terms crop up around town, in an appliance store, the local hospital, the convention center, a local coffee shop, and this spring in the public schools. …


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Counting Chinese Words

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It has been said that “word frequency” is the most important variable in language research, despite the belief by many that it can’t be used as a variable because no one really knows what a word is. (see: Minifalsehood: We can’t tell what a word is!?!? and A run in my stocking …)

A recent study in PLoS looks at a heretofore under investigated area, word/character use in Chinese.

Continue reading Counting Chinese Words


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