What's Twitter good for?

Like many innovations, Twitter is a good angle to use to talk about something that's been talked about a thousand times before. To keep you updated on the "they"-as-a-gender-neutral-pronoun debate, I give you this article from the New York Times Magazine. (HT: Adam from ElShaddai Edwards from Mike Aubrey)

It makes all the claims that have driven the good Professor Liberman to distraction: "Writers as far back as Chaucer used ['they'] for singular and plural, masculine and feminine." "Many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars." Merriam-Webster accepts it. No examples are cited, though, disappointing my hopes of seeing a true clash of the titans as the Times rose to accept Liberman's challenge.

The article's authors (Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman) make an argument I've not heard before, which is that the idea that "he" can refer to both genders stems from "Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book." They cite the delightfully named Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade for this fact (I assume to chase it down and find examples, one would have to read her book. Ooo, it's only $137 at Amazon!)

It seems that it ought to be incredibly easy to decide between O'Conner/Kellerman and Liberman on this point: one side claims that "he" was never used as a gender-neutral pronoun before Anne Fisher; the other claims that "they" was never so used before the mid-20th century. This calls for some collating. This calls for a dissertation.

On second thought, before I send in my application for Ph.D. programs, I can think of one data point off the top of my head that seems to blow O'Conner/Kellerman out of the water: the earliest English Bible translators used "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun. Now, maybe one could argue that that usage was a carry-over from Greek and Hebrew, and that the English Bibles reshaped the language and paved the way for Fisher's declaration . . .

I've been compulsively listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me for the last few months (funniest show on radio), and I notice that Peter Sagal always says to the Not My Job guest, "Answer two of the questions correctly and you'll win our prize for one of our listeners: Carl Kassel's voice on their home answering machine." That sheds no light on the subject, I guess, since I think Liberman would accept using "their" with "one."

Husserl and the Hyrax: Part I

First, let me pay my debts. Adam directed me to the Economist article, and my descriptions of Husserl's categories come from James K. A. Smith, "Tongues as 'Resistance Discourse,'" in Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, edited by Mark J. Cartledge.

So what are hyraxes singing about? According to the article, they sing about their vital stats: weight, size, hormones, and status. Not as interesting a topic as the pangs of unrequited love, but musical tastes do differ.

Of course, the article tries to draw inferences about human singing from animal mating calls, eventually suggesting that when you sing about unrequited love, what you're really singing about is yourself--your size, anatomy, and hormones.

Let's consider this understanding of meaning or "aboutness." You see a teenage boy playing guitar and singing "Hey There Delilah" in front of a teenage girl. You could say that his song means "I am a suitable mate," that the song is about his sexual maturity and dexterity. There seems to be something to that understanding, but by itself, it's a very narrow and monochromatic definition of meaning. A richer understanding of meaning would be able to say (at least) that the song is about a woman named Delilah, beloved by the narrator, who is in school in New York City, far from her lover. One should also be able to say that the song means, "Isn't love a beautiful anguish?" or "Remain faithful to me as I remain faithful to you," or any number of other statements.

The first level of meaning, in which the song is about the singer's vital stats, seems much farther removed from the second and third levels (in which the song is about the people named in the song and about other people by extension, respectively).

In future posts we'll explore these different levels of meaning, bringing in some vocabulary drawn from Husserl in particular.

In the meantime, ponder the following ways of referring to meaning or "aboutness," all taken from the article (my italics throughout). Do they all mean the same thing? Do some correspond better to the first level? Others to the second and third?

"Zoologists have worked out the meaning of some [animal] calls . . . the rattle made by a male barn swallow indicates his testosterone levels."

"what hyraxes were singing about."

"correlations between the pattern of a hyrax's song and other details of its anatomy and behaviour."

"Wailing . . . indicates weight."

"A mid-song sound . . . communicates size."

"snorts . . . are connected to . . . hormones."

"peaks in snort-frequency provided information on . . . dominance."

"these are all honest signals."

Husserl and the Hyrax: Introduction

The title of this post alludes to a book by Umberto Eco: Kant and the Platypus, which I picked up one day in the King's Cross bookstore. I knew Eco only from The Name of the Rose (loved it) and Foucault's Pendulum (also great; should be regulated as a mind-altering substance). Oh, and I knew that in his professional life, Eco had something remotely to do with linguistics.

I have no idea what Kant would have to say about the platypus, since I couldn't make it past the introduction of Eco's book. Nor do I understand what it is, exactly, that Eco does and how it relates to linguistics. But I'm a sucker for a catchy title.

The Husserl I refer to is Edmund Husserl, a German philospher. The hyrax (or coney, or rock badger) is, as we all know, this.

In my posts on this topic, I'll try to be easier to read than Eco. Since this is the first post in the series, it's sort of like the first day of a class. You know, the day where the teacher blathers on a bit, asks a provocative question, and hands out the reading. Hence:

Blather #2: A friend of mine used to say that one of the most important questions in a debate was "What's the meaning of meaning?" Ironically, I had no idea what he meant by the question.

Question: "What's the meaning of "meaning"?

Reading: "The song of songs," The Economist, January 15, 2009.

Is this an orthodox restatement of the Golden Rule?

"Before it's all over, everything you've done to other people gets done to you."

Please respond in comments.

What's the Deal with the Apocrypha?

My dad asked me to explain the Apocrypha the other day, and I couldn't do it. I remembered some details: the Jews rejecting the books in the first century; Jerome putting them aside in the fifth century; the King James translators including them in the seventeenth century. But I had to do some reading to remember the whole story. Here's my spiel:

What's the deal with the Apocrypha?

The Apocrypha is a collection of books written by Jews in the time between the testaments, that is, between Malachi (around 400 B.C.) and Christ (first century A.D.). The Jews at the time of Christ read these books in private, but they were not read aloud in the synagogues like the Old Testament was. Early Christians, like the Jews around them, read these books as well. Like the Jews, they also seem to have read them in private rather than in the church service.

It's important to know that Christians mostly used the Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint) rather than the original Hebrew. The Apocryphal books and the New Testament were also written in Greek. So the Jews in the first century, who were arguing with Christians over religious doctrines, probably became very suspicious of any scriptures that weren't written in Hebrew. They stopped using the Apocryphal books not long after Christianity emerged.

Christians continued to read the Apocryphal books, however, and when they starting putting all the scriptures together in bound books (instead of collecting them on scrolls), they included the Apocryphal writings mixed in with the Old Testament. When the Bible was translated from Greek to Latin, the Apocryphal books were translated too. But when Jerome (an Italian monk who lived in Bethlehem and learned Hebrew) was asked to revise the Latin translation (in the 400s), he made a distinction between the Old Testament books and the Apocryphal books, which were "not in the canon." The Protestant Reformers felt the same way, but none of them seem to have felt it was appropriate to remove the books from printed Bibles. Luther did pull them out of their places interspersed throughout the Old Testament and set them between the Old and New Testaments. This was what the King James translators did as well. The stance of the reformers could be summarized with these words (from the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican church):

"And the other Books (as Hierome [Jerome] saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:" . . . and it goes on to list the Apocryphal books.

Catholics responded to this by rising up to defend the Apocryphal books, declaring at the Council of Trent that they were canonical, with the same authority as the Old Testament.

So when did the books drop out of Protestant Bibles? Well, the short answer is that it was easier and cheaper to print Bibles without the Apocrypha. The major driving force in putting Bibles in the hands of people from the 1800s on were the Bible societies. These organizations (think of them as the Gideons of that time) were made up of people from different denominations (Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, even Unitarians in the early days) who all wanted to make the Bible available. They all contributed money to the cause, but to keep everyone happy, they agreed that the money would only go to printing and distributing the straight Bible text—no notes or commentary. The Apocryphal books weren't considered part of the straight Bible text—they might be helpful reading, but they weren't important enough to print in these low-cost evangelistic Bibles.

Eventually, most Protestants lost familiarity with the books. They came to think of them as a Catholic thing, something to be resisted and argued against. But I don't think that's the right attitude to have. These books were, after all, written by Jewish believers, not by heretics or anything. It's probable that Jesus and the apostles had read them; the early church certainly read them; the Reformers read them. I'd argue that it won't damage a Christian's faith to read them. On the contrary, they can help us understand the world in which Jesus and the early church lived. They can probably teach us something about God and his dealings with his people, even if they aren't inspired and authoritative like the Old and New Testaments. There are a lot of books out there written by faithful believers, and we can benefit from them even if they aren't inspired. That's where I'd place the Apocrypha.

Works consulted:

The NIV Study Bible, "The Time between the Testaments" (Zondervan, 1985)
The Book of Common Prayer
Introduction to the History of Christianity (ed. Timothy Dowley, Fortress Press, 2002)

A Film Called Awful

Yesterday we bought A Fish Called Wanda on VHS for a quarter. We watched it today and promptly threw the cassette into the garbage so that no one ever has to watch it again. At no point was the film even mildly funny. After the first third of the movie, we wondered if we'd stumbled on another Brassed Off. Not even a brief cameo by Stephen Fry could save it. I can only assume that the entire Motion Picture Academy was high on cocaine while watching the movie and deciding to give Kevin Kline an Oscar.

Father Brown in the Excluded Middle

Happy belated birthday to Gilbert Keith. In his honor, I'll finally write this post I've been meaning to get to for months. It's inspired by an odd coincidence.

My biweekly reading group assignment was "The Blue Cross," the first Father Brown mystery. (Reading that is probably a better use of your time than reading the rest of this post, so if you leave now, I'll understand. Unless you're Anatoly Liberman, in which case, read on.) I had just read the assignment when Anatoly Liberman's Monthly Gleanings popped into my RSS reader. At the bottom of his post, Liberman returned to a well-worn topic, the use of they as a gender-neutral substitute for he.

A little background for those who don't read Monthly Gleanings: Liberman has made what I would call an aesthetic objection to they as a singular pronoun. The particularly ugly sentence he highlighted (from the Minnesota Daily, I assume) was "If a tenant has an eviction on their record, it does not mean they were a bad tenant."

Liberman regards such grammar as "a horror." He also objects that it is inaccurate to defend it as a longstanding feature of good English. In the last two decades, some respected dictionaries (Random House, Heritage, American Oxford) introduced notes that claim a long and respectable pedigree (e.g., Austen, Thackery, Shaw) for singular they. Liberman might accept the example sentences ("To do a person in means to kill them") as good English, but makes a distinction between they with antecedents like person, someone, and anyone and its standing in for tenant, borrower, and fisherman. He challenged his readers to find examples of the "bad tenant" variety that predate the 1960s and 70s.

Still with me? Okay, here's the passage from "The Blue Cross" (1910) that a reader submitted in response to the challenge:

"There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot."

This is not precisely parallel to the "bad tenant" sentence. Chesterton did not write "If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall pedestrian, he might have arrested them on the spot." But it doesn't fall into Liberman's other category. Chesterton did not write "If Valentin's quick eye had caught anyone particularly tall, he might have arrested them on the spot." What we have here is a tertium quid, an unjustly excluded middle: them stands in for regular old nouns like apple-woman, grenadier, and (or?) duchess, though not as blatantly as it did for the bad tenant.

Inexplicably, Liberman demonstrated no interest in this fascinating specimen. He dismissed it with a single sentence: "Surely, them does not refer to the apple woman, duchess, or grenadier separately." I was shocked. "On the contrary," I thought, "surely them must refer to these three separately! It cannot refer to them collectively, can it? It is precisely the indeterminacy of the gender (whether because of the mixed group or the possibility of masquerade) that prompted Chesterton to use them in place of him."

A few hours later, as I joined my colleagues—all of them veteran copy editors—to discuss "The Blue Cross," I pointed out the sentence and asked them about it.

"If the nouns were changed, would the sentence still make sense?" I asked. "Let's say it read:

'If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple seller, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duke, he might have arrested them on the spot.'"

The copy editors wrinkled their noses and shook their heads. "It would have to be 'arrested him,'" one responded. The others agreed.

Notice that this verdict both confirms Liberman's initial disdain for the "bad tenant" sentence (if the copy editors had liked "bad tenant" sentences, they would have accepted my emended "Blue Cross" sentence) and challenges his dismissal of the original "Blue Cross" sentence. There is room for the case against the frivolous extension of singular they, especially when the referent's gender is known. But I believe the "Blue Cross" sentence shows that when gender indeterminacy is forefronted in the speaker's mind, using they is a handy and longstanding tactic, even for ordinary nouns. As Chesterton shows, it can even lend itself to rather elegant writing.

Best. Magazine. Ever.

Books & Culture is the best magazine I have ever read. It's published by Christianity Today International, which is headquartered a couple blocks away from my apartment. CTI (as everyone around here calls it) has had to trim some of their publications recently. Thankfully, Books & Culture was spared. But I decided that, cheap as I am, it's time I actually subscribed. You should too. Go here to get your trial issue.

Special K, I specially direct this recommendation to you. A good chunk of the books reviewed are non-fiction, which I know you are partial to. I think you would really enjoy this magazine.

I love a good sonnet

In high school, I heard a translation of a sonnet attributed to Michelangelo. It was in a video about the Renaissance artists. I went up to the teacher after class and asked if I could play it back. I rewound and played the laserdisc over and over till I had the whole thing written down.

Ten years later, I think that piece of paper is in my apartment somewhere. But I can't find it, so here's what I remember:

In a frail boat through stormy seas, my life
In its course has now reached the harbor
The bar of which all men must cross
To render an account of good and evil done.

I now know how laden with error
Was that fantasy which made Art for me
An idol and a king, and how mistaken
Is that earthly love which all men seek.

What of those thoughts of love, once light and gay,
As now I approach a twofold death?
One is certain; the other menaces.
No brush, no chisel quiets the soul
Once turned to the divine love of him
Who stretches out his arms on the cross.

New Context, New Meaning

Lileks once wrote of attending a performance of the musical Annie: "That 'Hard-Knock Life' tune is very odd. (Wonder how many people in the audience wondered why they were playing a Jay-Z song.)"

Indeed. I remember the first time hearing a recording of Sinatra singing "Love and Marriage." It didn't compute. Why would Sinatra sing the theme song from "Married With Children"? There's no way he was a fan of that show . . .

Of course, I eventually realized that the Sinatra performance came first, but I still can't stand to hear him sing the song. Everything Sinatra touched he infused with class, but Al Bundy and Fox managed to wring all the class out of that one.

So our topic is clearly songs which once had an independent existence, but have been completely absorbed into and associated with some new context. Could be a movie that used the song ("Time Is on My Side" in Fallen?), a certain artist's signature performance (Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You"), a parody ("Just Eat It"?).

What comes to your mind?

Guitar picking

I've been whiling away many a free hour playing around with the guitar. I come home from work, do a few household chores, and play for a bit before the boss comes home and I have to get back to business. That time has traditionally been blogging time, so things have been sparse around here of late.

Here are some of the songs I've enjoyed playing. Understand that I play all of them badly.

#1: You Ain't Going Nowhere by Bob Dylan. Super super easy to play, and it sounds really cool. There are multiple sets of lyrics out there. I prefer the ones with "Gonna see a movie called Gunga Din." It's also not clear to me what the lyric after Oooweee is. I've been singing "You ride me high," but it could be something "behind"? Who knows?

#2: I Am an Orphan Girl by Gillian Welch. Chaka is sentimental. Not Thomas Kinkade sentimental, but singing this song subjects me to excessive lacrimosity.

#3: The Story by Brandi Carlile. I like the instructions that go along with the tab on this one. "Begin strumming softly . . . Start rocking out like your hair is on fire . . . Back to fingerpicking . . . Hair is on fire again." Cough loudly when I get to the F# minor, you really don't want to hear that.

#4: Don't Let Your Deal Go Down by Charlie Poole. Because there are things I need to know, like who's gonna shoe your pretty little feet?

#5: The Scarlet Tide by Allison Kraus. This one is actually a cheater transposition, and I still can't play it well. Cool song, though.

#6: Clavelitos. (Traditional Tuna song. That's right, Tuna. Nothing to do with fish.) You know this song, you just don't know that you know it. Picture an Andalucian scene, a Spanish lad with a guitar serenading a young lady on the balcony above. Okay, got that pictured? That song he's playing? That's the one.

My favorite part is the "No! te! creas que ya no quiero--es que no te los pude traer." So many preposed pronouns! It sounds so dramatic, but it's actually a pretty lame line (see the translation here; the whole song actually loses some power in translation. I'll give you a bell! Woohoo!).

Sci-fi Implausibilities

I thought the list below was about Star Trek when I first heard it. It comes from a recent episode of The Dollhouse. The scene begins with a character rattling off the list, but you don't hear the category until the list is complete. I believe the way they phrased it in the episode was "common sci-fi errors."

Of course, if they wanted to pick on Star Trek specifically, they could have added

time travel whenever the plot requires it
transferring matter to energy and back in defiance of Heisenberg
American English as a permanent lingua franca

But you protest "What about the Universal Translator? They aren't all speaking English, the translator just makes it seem that way." In which case, we can add to the list:

instantaneous, flawless machine translation

And for that matter

conducting any meaningful communication with aliens.

Understand, I'm not hating on Star Trek. I've been delightedly rewatching TNG episodes. I will be seeing the movie. But I think I would most enjoy seeing it with two of the great nitpicking fans, Phil Farrand and Joss Whedon.

Timor mortis conturbat me

It was time to renew my driver's license. Luckily, I didn't have to retake the written test; just had to look into the black box and read line 5. So with a faded portrait of Jesse White looking on (there's something extra-imperial about the fact that it was faded), the woman behind the counter rattled through her questions, checking off my answers with looping flicks of her pen.

"Has your license been suspended or canceled in this state or any other state."

"No."

"Do you have a condition that could cause you to lose consciousness."

"No."

"Do you want to be an organ donor."

I felt a rush of fear. This question.

* * * * *

I remember the first time it caught me off guard. I was getting my license for the first time; since these things are scheduled by your birthday, it would have been almost exactly twelve years ago. I didn't know that this person, this interchangeable processor in the basement of the county courthouse, would want to know what should be done with my body after I died. "Do you want to be an organ donor." My dad was with me, and I looked over at him. He shook his head and quietly said "No." I was relieved and unsettled. But the interchangeable processor didn't judge; she had moved on to the next question. It was over except for the lingering sense that I had somehow been weak; somehow faithless.

The question has been asked at least twice since then, and I've always been caught off guard. I've always said no and felt like a jerk. A cowardly, relieved jerk.

* * * * *

"Yes."

I felt like an idiot. A thoughtless, careless idiot.

The woman behind the counter looked me in the eye for the first time. "By saying yes, you acknowledge your agreement to donate your organs. Your next of kin has no authority to alter this decision. Do you agree?"

"Yes." I wanted to turn around, but I was too ashamed to make the train stop. My wife isn't comfortable with me changing our phone service to a different provider. And I just gave her rights regarding the disposition of my body over to the state of Illinois.

Idiot.

* * * * *

I don't like my new picture as well as I liked the old one. I wasn't ready when they snapped the photo. My mouth is smiling, but my eyes haven't caught on yet. (Those weak, misshapen eyes. Who's gonna want 'em?) I guess I was ready enough. I'm just going to have to go with it.