Virtually social
March 12, 2010 10 comments
Deborah Orr in the Guardian:
An astonishing number of news outlets have reported that poor Ashleigh Hall (above) “met” her rapist and murderer Peter Chapman on a social networking site. It’s rather like saying that you “met” someone by letter, “met” them on the telephone, or “met” them by carrier pigeon. Had the teenager “met” the serial sex offender only on the internet, then she would not have suffered her terrible fate.
This might seem like a petty semantic point, but as discussion rages about how to make social networking sites more safe, it might be worth looking at the language used to describe virtual encounters [...] Electronic contacts are not meetings, and they should not routinely be described as if they are.
One can see the point, but I fear this is a losing usage battle. People do routinely say, for example, that they met on a dating site or a forum, in that their initial communications occurred there; and this is now part of what meeting means, to the extent that people often feel the need to add something extra in order to specify only the old meaning: eg, a face-to-face meeting, or a meet-up. And OED gives for sense 4 of meet (v.) the following:
To come (whether by accident or design) into the company of, or into personal intercourse with; to ‘come across’ (a person) in the intercourse of society or business.
Is there some sense in which to exchange messages on Facebook or the like is not to come into “personal intercourse” with someone? Perhaps, but this would need to be argued rather than asserted.
In the mean time, one might as well complain that a message delivered electronically is not mail; yet the same process that is happening to meet has already irrevocably happened with that word — you now need to say something like snail-mail or physical mail to be sure of being understood to mean actual paper letters.
If we try to abide by Orr’s proscription and avoid saying that people met online, what exactly should we say instead?
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Mysterious ways
March 11, 2010 21 comments
David Aaronovitch thinks that the election in Iraq is a miracle, and he wishes people would stop talking about the war, because by God, after all, it’s been seven years already? This combination of views is entirely logical, in that only if you forget the war and its aftermath — as Aaronovitch wishes so desperately to do that he now, remarkably, considers any and all “casualty figures” to be “implausible” — can you think of the recent election as a miracle, ie:
A marvellous event occurring within human experience, which cannot have been brought about by human power or by the operation of any natural agency, and must therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the Deity or of some supernatural being; chiefly, an act (e.g. of healing) exhibiting control over the laws of nature, and serving as evidence that the agent is either divine or is specially favoured by God.
Indeed, so painful have the last seven years apparently been for Aaronovitch that his new defensive fantasy is to self-hypnotize himself into believing it has all been a bad dream; or so one might infer from the way the article begins:
Imagine for a moment that you’ve woken up to the election results from North Korea.
Of course, if you’ve just woken up to something and have no idea about, or have successfully repressed the memory of, what preceded it, it is probably easier to take it as a miracle — or even as, in Aaronovitch’s words, a bloody miracle. Perhaps the phrase bloody miracle makes you think of God smiting the enemies of the righteous with inexplicable sanguinary violence, but I am sure that cannot be what Aaronovitch really means.
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You spin me right round
March 10, 2010 8 comments
It used to be that a revolution was a very important kind of change, but now the term can be applied to any old way of trying to persuade “consumers” to buy a new version of something they already bought a new version of a couple of years ago: right now, for instance, a 3D TV. Personally, I have never owned a television that was not three-dimensional? But a breathless Samsung press release, apparently published by mistake as a news item in the Guardian, puts me right with quotes in the epic register from media-industry titans:
“It’s quite simply the entertainment revolution of our time,” said DreamWorks’ chief executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg. [...] Samsung’s president of visual display products, Boo Keun Yoon, told the Guardian that [...] “I believe 2010 will be the year of the 3D television revolution.”
This would be, then, one of those revolutions instigated from above: it’s the people attempting to hawk 3D TV products who are predicting revolution, rather than the pixel-addled masses who are agitating for it.
The worlds of marketing, management and politics no doubt teem with revolutions even less consequential than this one, and I must sadly conclude that the word revolution is pretty much clapped out through excessive hyperbolic use. In the mean time, if ever we feel the need to refer to a change of really considerable magnitude and import, what word should we use instead?
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Arrows of time
March 9, 2010 11 comments
On the occasion of Joe Biden’s visit to the middle east, Benjamin Netanyahu let fly a corker:
“I very much appreciate the efforts of President Obama and the American government to lead the international community to place tough sanctions on Iran,” he said.
“The stronger those sanctions are, the more likely it is that the Iranian regime will have to chose between advancing its nuclear programme, and advancing the future of its own permanence.”
An unspeak.net reader comments:
Surely the most roundabout way of threatening another government like ever?
It’s right up there. I for one am not even sure whether Netanyahu was saying that merely “sanctions” against Iran the Iranian régime would threaten the future of its own permanence — rather than, presumably, the present of its permanence, which is assured, but somehow fails to guarantee even so that it will exist indefinitely — or whether he meant to incorporate an additional threat that Iran might get, oh, I don’t know, nuked to smithereens for good measure; after all, sanctions alone don’t normally have the effect of actually making a country disappear from the pages of chronology. I wouldn’t be surprised, indeed, if exactly this ambiguity were intended — but in any case, as, um, existential threats go, it’s an impressively macho mouthful.
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Constitutional plutocracy
March 8, 2010 9 comments
Political chatter in Britain is much exercised over the issue of Michael Ashcroft’s hitherto secret status as a non-dom, despite his promise to take up permanent residence in the UK as a condition of his being made a “lord”:
“Hague told Tony that Ashcroft would pay huge amounts of tax,” said a source. “That was the deal. That was what we all understood at the time.”
That was the deal, complains the Guardian source indignantly, as though the fact that someone allegedly reneged on a deal is more objectionable than the fact that such a deal could ever have been made in the first place. All parties in this row, indeed, seem to have agreed not to question the assumption that it is entirely normal and unobjectionable that one should be able to buy a peerage, with whatever combination of massive political donations and vague undertakings to pay tax like the little people do seems most appealing to the aspiring “lord”.
At the time of Ashcroft’s “elevation”, it is true, there were some dissenting voices:
[F]ormer Tory MP Sir Anthony Grant said: “This is a mistake. It looks very bad. I think we want to detach ourselves from this notion that people only have to give money and then they can waltz into what is, after all, part of the legislature.”
Yet criticism of Ashcroft now focuses on an alleged broken promise, rather than the fact that the very possibility of making and accepting such a promise was already an index of deep constitutional corruption — corruption of such long-standing pervasiveness and gravity that it makes the MPs’ expenses scandal look like the trivial sideshow it was; corruption so familiar, perhaps, as to be almost invisible. But it would be in no leading politician’s interest to point this out: why endanger a convenient way of rewarding wealthy friends for giving you money?
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Bon voyage
March 5, 2010 24 comments
So, Tony Blair’s memoir is to be entitled The Journey. The claim to have gone on a journey, of course, is contemporary pop-pseudopsychology’s favourite way of rationalizing the dreadful or valorizing the pointless. Any idiot who has managed to stay alive between one date and another can be said to have gone on a journey in the interim. So, of course, can anyone who hasn’t managed to stay alive, but has become a traveller to an undiscover’d country, etc. No doubt meditation on this latter fact explains Blair’s suit of solemn black on the front cover. I don’t know what explains the eyes and partly bared teeth.
What do you think Blair’s booky-wook ought to be called, readers?
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A bear of Liddle brain
March 4, 2010 22 comments
Further to our discussion of constructions using the suffix –tard, Rod Liddle offers:
By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.
Tragically, libtards is not an original coinage: it already boasts 136,000 google hits, but I must admit it has a certain brio. (Interesting that it is instantly comprehensible even with the attenuated prefix: you don’t have to say liberaltards.) I note without comment here that Charlie Brooker has described Liddle as looking like “a failed Womble who’s just been shaken awake in a shop doorway”.
What is the right epithet for a Rod Liddle, readers?
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Overlord syndrome
March 3, 2010 6 comments
Strange news from the world of videogames, where the heads of development studio Infinity Ward, makers of the $1bn-grossing Modern Warfare 2, have been sacked by the studio’s parent company, Activision. In section 18 of an SEC filing, Activision noted:
The Company is concluding an internal human resources inquiry into breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward. This matter is expected to involve the departure of key personnel and litigation.
Insubordination is a curious term to add to the straightforward (and, one would have thought, sufficient if true) “breaches of contract”. If the OED is to be believed, it was introduced into English by Edmund Burke in 1790, when he refers to “all the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipation, and insubordination” among soldiers. It has since become possible, of course, to use insubordination in a non-military context, to mean general rebelliousness or defiance of authority. But my own feeling is that anyone who is not actually a military commander, yet complains of insubordination among his hierarchical inferiors, must be a bit of a windfucker. Either that, or he has been playing too many military-entertainment simulators and can no longer tell fantasy from reality?
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Like, totally, dude
March 2, 2010 19 comments
If you’re going to complain about a new use of language, it’s as well to check that it is actually new. Thus Ian McMillan in the Guardian:
[T]here’s one recent language development that, if I were a cartoon character, would make me shake my fist and go “Grrrrrrrrrr!”. A few years ago, when people on radio or television were asked questions that required a yes, or an affirmative that was slightly less than yes (if that’s possible), the interviewee would reply “… It is indeed”, which is somehow weightier than yes, somehow more definite and more triumphant [...]
These days “… It is indeed” (I’m using the ellipsis to represent the breathy, almost theatrical flourish that always seemed to accompany the phrase; imagine invisible semi-verbal flowers pulled from a sleeve) has been replaced by “Absolutely!”, with an exclamation mark.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say that “Absolutely!”, as well as being the new “… It is indeed!”, is the new yes.
A recent language development? The new yes? I think this is a job for the HTOED:
02.08.06.10 | 04 as an emphatic affirmative sure 1803– • rather 1836/9– (colloq., orig. vulgar) • absolutely 1892– (colloq.) • a thousand times, yes 1897; 1982 • definitely 1931–
So absolutely has been used as an affirmative reply for at least 118 years; and, as HTOED defines it, it is an emphatic affirmative — ie, it is not just a flowery alternative to yes, it serves a different function (whether to express surprise, admiration, or deference, as it might be).
My interest was meanwhile piqued by HTOED’s reference to the affirmative rather having “a vulgar origin”, so I heaved out the OED:
Rather 7. Colloq. (vulgar). Used as a strong affirmative in reply to a question : = ‘I (should) rather think so’; very much so; very decidedly. In this use the first syllable is frequently prolonged.
1836-9 Dickens Sk. Boz., Gt. Winglebury Duel, ‘Do you know the mayor’s house?’ .. ‘Rather’, replied the boots, significantly.
This is news to me, at least, since I had thought that rather in this sense was associated with drawling aristocrats. Perhaps they initially began to imitate this example of “low speech” through inverted linguistic snobbery, and then came to own it?
What is your preferred strong affirmative, readers?
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Why me?
March 1, 2010 9 comments
Is it just me, or does George Osborne look as though he has a sneering rubber George Osborne mask permanently superglued to his moonling face? Anyway, the Conservative Party in Britain has announced its new election slogan, which is:
Vote for Change.
I initially assumed this was a desperate act of bribery, according to which the Tories were promising a handful of coins to anyone who bothered to make it down to the polling station — you know, vote for change? — but no. It really does mean as little as it appears to. In a way it is a masterstroke, the reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of a campaign slogan, the ne plus ultra of “communications”-led politics. The sole idea-oid it contains is the contemporary anti-idea that change is always desirable in and of itself, even though one can of course think of many changes that would be undesirable, such as if the planet were to be struck by an asteroid, or drinking beer made illegal.
Opposition parties always play on the message “We’re not the other lot”, but they rarely have nothing else to say. At least Barack Obama’s slogan, for example — the aspartame-based syrup of Change You Can Believe In — added another empty signifier to the first. Depending on the concept change alone just looks lazy. As a reason to choose a candidate, moreover, Vote for Change recommends racist loon Nick Griffin just as much as it does foundation-caked estate-agent-impersonator David Cameron.
What change would you like to see, readers?
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