Year: 2010

Part I of this is getting long, so I might as well start another.

Redundancies was one I meant to do yesterday, and forgot.

• The reason why. Superfluous.
• The British “in an hour’s time.” Really superfluous. Why is “in an hour’s time” better than “in an hour”? It isn’t. It doesn’t add anything. Once you notice it, it sounds incredibly stupid.

It’s amusing that BBC presenters thoroughly mispronounce “Barack” when Catherine Sangster of the BBC Pronunication Unit has told them and everyone how it’s done. Doesn’t the BBC Pronunication Unit catch prominent mistakes of this kind? I mean the guy’s name comes up pretty often – you’d think someone would eventually notice. And they must get mail.

His name should be pronounced buh-RAAK oh-BAA-muh. When he first came to prominence, there was some disagreement about his first name, which was also sometimes pronounced buh-RACK or even BARR-uhk, but our recommendation is based on the pronunciation he uses himself…

Well quite. (And by the way it’s basically the same as Baruch – so it’s not as alien as all that.)

And then there’s the British insistence on pronouncing every single French word or name with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable, which is pretty much always wrong. Balzac, Renoir, Degas, Sarkozy, Chirac, café, etc etc etc.

But there’s also the Yank way with the letter T. Budder, bedder, pidder padder.

So it goes.

Drat. I thought I was going to be able to drop the subject now, but Aratina Cage pointed out another item. There was another dust-up at the Intersection last March, that I didn’t follow closely at the time. This one was by Kirshenbaum, and it involved taking some unattractive bluster in a few comments at Pharyngula as literal threats of violence against women. You know: as in taking “fuck you” as a threat of rape. I didn’t follow it closely because I didn’t feel like defending unattractive bluster, but I never thought it equated to literal threats.

In any case, as Aratina points out, the thread is full of comments by TJ under his many many fake names. The thread is still there. The whole thing is an attempt to make Pharyngula, and by extension gnu atheists, look bad. It’s full of fraud, and it hasn’t been corrected or even updated.

TJ got in there in a hurry. Milton C did the second comment. Philip Jr did 3, Seminatrix did 4, bilbo did 6, Vyspyr did 8, Petra did 9 and 14, bilbo did 15 and 17 and 20, Milton C did 21. Then TJ dropped out for awhile, then Petra returned at 93, Seminatrix 107, 109, 110, Milton 112, Polly-O 115, Seminatrix 118, 120 (saying “I think it paints PZ in a bad light”), 123, Philip Jr 128, 131, Seminatrix 138, 141, 142…and so on. That’s all of Kirshenbaum’s homework I’m going to do. I think Philip Jr and Vyspyr are suspected socks rather than confirmed socks; the others are solid.

So there it is. A large number of comments by a known fraud, sitting there saying variations on “I think it paints PZ in a bad light” over and over and over and over again. Not updated, not disavowed, not stamped with a warning.

That’s “journalism”; that’s “civility”; that’s “I don’t like labels”; that’s “commitment to the truth”; that’s dealing with “sore and unjustified abuse.”

So: Sheril Kirshenbaum: you need to fix that.

Jerry has a post on most-hated verbal infelicities. Solecisms, he elegantly says, but I’m going to be cagy, in order to avoid the obligatory lecture about How Language Works. There are no Mistakes; whatever most people do is Right; language is constantly evolving; lots of putative rules are just made up; language is arbitrary; what you think is a new Mistake actually goes back to Knut. Right. Got all that. Not talking about Mistakes. Talking about things I don’t like.

Because I thought I would mention a few things I don’t like.

• May instead of might. “If things had been different Hitler may have won the war.” No; he might have, but it is not the case that he may have; we know that he didn’t, so “may” is the wrong word.
• Impact as a verb.
• Beg the question used to mean raise the question.
• Dangling clauses. “Walking up the hill, a dog grabbed my lunch.”

And then there are some oddities of British English.

• Making up their own way of pronouncing Barack. I don’t get this. Why don’t people just take their lead from how he says it himself? Why do they think they get to have their own way of saying other people’s names? BBC reporters pronounce it in a really bizarre and stupid way – Ba-rakk, with the “Ba” pronounced as if it rhymed with hat. The two syllables rhyme – two short flat as, and with equal emphasis (a spondee). That’s comprehensively wrong. It’s pronounced like Barock, with the first syllable a schwa and the second accented. What’s the problem there? It’s not somehow hard for British people to say, the way a French r is hard for all anglophones to say. So why won’t they say it right? It’s so rude. It’s not as if it’s a word they already have a settled pronunciation for, so why do they insist on doing it wrong?
• Intrusive R. Laura norder, North career, Indier and China.
• Over-corrected missing R. They ah in the house. That one is perhaps a bit fussy, but it gets on my nerves. Since intrusive R is so pervasive in contemporary British English, why not just get over it and say they are in the house? People who make a self-conscious effort not to pronounce the intrusive R give an irritating little hitch when they say things like “ah in the house” – there’s a little pause and glottal stop there that just isn’t necessary. Go ahead, say are in; ah rin; it’s allowed even in your terms.
• Squeezed vowels. There are some accents (and I don’t know which ones – I don’t know enough to locate them – not Liverpool or Northern or West Country or East End or estuary) where the oo sound is so squeezed it sounds like ee. Troops are treeps. It’s irritating.

There, that’s enough being annoying for now.

There are no Mistakes, but on the other hand, there is good writing and bad writing. I’m an editor, and I do a lot of work on small verbal items of this kind. I use the subjunctive; I turn “impact” into “affect” or “harm”; I fix dangling clauses.

I also think that a lot of putative rules are made up though. The rule about prepositions at the end of a sentence, for instance – that’s a nonsense rule. Granted it can sometimes sound clumsy and inelegant to end a long complicated sentence with “of” or “for”…but it can also sound stilted and Martian to do the “of which” thing. I once had a very stilted “for which” thing in an article for TPM, and I wanted to change it into normal English, but I hesitated to do that to the author, who might think the rule is important. So I consulted Julian, and he said “normal every time!” That was what I thought. Sometimes “for which” is ok, but sometimes it just sticks out; this time it stuck out; TPM should be readable.

And that’s how it is in general. You want some flexibility, and a lot of sense of which rules (or “rules”) matter more than others, and a decent ear.

Mark Jones pointed this out in a comment. If this is accommodationism even I can live with it.

Today’s science-oriented atheists call us into right relationship with our time, and that means using all of our best information and cross-cultural experience.

Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. It is also a time of smart bombs, collapsing economies, and exploding oil platforms. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers.

So let today’s collective intelligence revitalize our faith traditions! Let us rejoice in the discovery that the atoms of our bodies were forged inside supernovas, and let us celebrate this natural process as divine.

Let the story of evolution be told in ways that engender familial love and gratitude that we are related to everything—not just monkeys, but jellyfish and zucchini too. Let us marvel at how rapidly our species has learned to care and cooperate in ever-widening circles: from family groups and tribes all the way to nation-states, and now globally.

An evolutionary God can be as vast, as real, and as all embracing as our creative Cosmos and no more inclined than the Universe to take sides in matters of war, weather, or geological upheaval.

All right! Let’s do that! Or let’s you do that, and I’ll just skip the words God and divine but I promise not to scowl or squirm or look out the window when you do, and we’ll all join hands and love each other to bits.