Maverick Philosopher

2. The opposite tort on the mother tongue is the omission of needed qualifiers. To say that Professor Windbeutel has published a number of ‘quality’ papers leaves unspecified whether their quality is high, low, or middling. Of course, it is understood in this context that ‘quality’ does duty for ‘high quality.’ But one who values precision will say exactly what he means.

Some of his female students feel that Windbeutel is a ‘chauvinist.’ But what they mean is that he is a ‘male chauvinist.’ So here is a second example of the omission of a needed qualifier. A chauvinist is someone who believes his country is the best in all or most respects. The word derives from ‘Chauvin,’ the name of an officer in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. This fellow was convinced that everything French was unsurpassingly excellent. To use ‘chauvinist’ for ‘male chauvinist’ is to destroy a perfectly useful word. If we acquiesce in this destruction, what then are we to call Chauvin? A ‘country-chauvinist’?

Note also that Chauvin was himself a male chauvinist in that he was both a male and a chauvinist. Thus ‘male chauvinist’ is ambiguous, having different meanings depending on whether we take ‘male’ as a specifying adjective or as a sense-shifting (alienans) adjective. An important and seductive distinction one ought to be aware of.

While we are on this chauvinist business, there was a time when ‘white chauvinist’ was in use. Those were the days before leftists seized upon ‘racism’ as their bludgeon of choice. Vivian Gornick in The Romance of American Communism (Basic Books 1977, p. 170) tells the tale of a poor fellow who was drummed out of the American Communist Party in the 1950's on charges of ‘white chauvinism.’ His crime? Serving watermelon at a garden party. And you thought that Political Correctness was something new? PC originated with the CP.

3. Then we have expressions derived from foolish analogies. Politicians speak of ‘jump starting the economy.’ Why, did it stall? To jump start the economy would be like trying to start a running engine. It is a silly analogy.

People sometimes ask for my ‘feedback.’ But I don’t want their ‘feedback’; I want their thoughts, their reasons, their considered opinions. When I was a student of electronics, I learned about amplifiers and feedback loops: part of the signal is fed back to the amp’s input to boost output. That’s the basic idea. Note that the feedback process is internal to the amplifier. But presumably communication between two people is interpersonal, not intrapersonal. Not only is ‘feedback’ built on a faulty analogy, it also aids and abets the dubious tendency of interpreting persons in technological terms. We invent technology, and then re-invent ourselves in its image and likeness. Very strange, very dubious, and a worthy topic of further rumination. I once heard an academic clown say he was is 'input mode' when what he meant was that he was open for questions.

4. Redundancy seems to be on the rise. Al Franken speaks of ‘lying liars’ in the title of a book that was on the New York Times bestseller list a few years ago. Does he mean to imply that there are two kinds of liars, those who lie and those who do not? If he says that his locution is for emphasis, then I should like to emphatically emphasize that he is a boneheaded bonehead as well as a lying liar who lies about the meaning of the verb, ‘to lie.’ I pointed out in earlier posts that a lie is not the same as a falsehood. But I won’t beat that drum on this occasion.

There is a series of booklets with such titles as The Basic Essentials of Backpacking, The Basic Essentials of Map and Compass, etc. Where were the copy editors on this one? Do the publishers plan to bring out companion volumes entitled The Nonbasic Essentials of Backpacking and The Basic Inessentials of Ferret Husbandry?

It is easy to fall into redundancy. A preliminary draft of a scholarly publication of mine contained the phrase, ‘as an added bonus.’ ‘Added bonus’ amounts to ‘added addition.’ A redundancy only Al Franken could love. But I caught it in time. And while I am in a confessional mood, I wrote a draft many years ago in which I committed the logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent! How could I? (This is the logical fallacy whereby one infers a proposition p from the propositions If p, then q, and q.) Well, how could Thomas Aquinas succumb to a quantifier-shift fallacy in the third of his Five Ways of proving the existence of God (Summa Theologica, q. 3, art. 3)? But I caught my mistake in time, unlike the doctor angelicus. Nevertheless, I remain unworthy to erase his chalk board.

Many speak of exercising 'due diligence.' As opposed to what, undue diligence? If I am diligent in the performance of my duties, is that different from being duly diligent in their performance?

5. Let’s not forget expressions the idiocy of which derives from Political Correctness. One of my favorites is ‘homophobia.’ A phobia is an irrational fear. But one could be morally opposed to homosexual practices without having any fear of them, let alone an irrational fear of them. ‘Homophobia’ is a question-begging epithet. People who use it beg the question against their opponents: they presuppose what they need to argue for, namely, that there cannot be any reasonable moral opposition to homosexual practices. The tactic here is to psychologize the opponent so as to make it appear that opposition could only have an irrational origin in some psychological defect. Leftists and liberals use terms like ‘homophobia’ to close off debate and render genuine issues intellectually invisible. Whatever one’s stand on this issue, it is a genuine one that ought not be occluded by the use of a silly PC expression.

Conservatives need to be reminded that they play into the hands of their opponents when they adopt such terms as ‘homophobia.’ When leftists hijack a semantic vehicle, conservatives should attempt to regain control, not go along for the ride.

A second example is ‘native American.’ I am a native Californian. That means that I was born in California. Last time I checked, California was a state of the USA, though this may change. Given that ‘America’ denotes the USA, it follows that I am a native American. Why can’t our dear liberals wrap their silly heads around such a simple piece of reasoning? No doubt, ‘Indian’ is a misnomer; but to replace one misnomer with another is hardly progress. If you say that I can’t be a native American because my ancestors came from Italy, then I will point out that the ‘native Americans’ originally came from Asia across the Bering Strait.

A third example is ‘assault weapon.’ This is a question-begging epithet used by liberals to preclude rational debate about semi-automatic long guns. The latter, non-emotive, expression is the one that a reasonable person would use in debating such issues as whether to renew the law banning them. The liberal uses ‘assault weapon’ to appeal to people’s fear of being assaulted thereby rendering rational debate more difficult. The idea is to suggest that semi-automatic rifles could only be used to assault people. Their use in legitimate self-defense, not to mention such recreational activities as target-shooting, is thereby ignored. But why, our liberal friends querulously ask, would anybody need such a weapon? Well, suppose you live in a border town like Douglas, Arizona. Every night your property rights are violated by illegal Mexican aliens and OTM’s (other-than-Mexicans), a non-null subset of which are Islamic militants. The federal government, a legitimate function of which is border control, does little or nothing to stop the incursions. The handgun that an average American might use to defend his property and family might not be adequate in a situation like this. By what right does the government deny its citizens the means of self-defense?

Of course, the use of emotive language is not confined to liberals. Referring to a fetus as a ‘baby’ makes it more difficult to think clearly about abortion.

A fourth example of how Political Correctness interferes with rational thought and speech is provided by the substitution of ‘undocumented worker’ for ‘illegal alien.’ Note first that the two terms are not coextensive: an illegal alien need not be a worker; he might be a petty criminal or a terrorist. And an undocumented worker might be a citizen who is a contractor or vendor not in possession of the requisite licenses to ply his trade. Second, there is nothing offensive about ‘illegal alien’: it is an accurately descriptive term. By definition, anyone who violates a law does something illegal, and anyone who comes from another country is an alien.

6. There are expressions whose currency is due to no good reason, but simply reflects the suggestibility and lemming-like behavior of people. Let someone prominently placed commit a linguistic howler, and you can be sure that others will fall in line. The perfectly good word ‘affect,’ used as verb, has fallen into desuetude to be replaced by the miserable ‘impact’ used as a verb. Thus, ‘Mary was deeply impacted by her father’s death.’ You mean her sire’s demise induced constipation in the poor girl? Why this barbarism when ‘Mary was deeply affected by her father’s death’ is available? Part of the answer has to be that people are lemmings who uncritically repeat whatever they hear.

A second example is ‘beg the question.’ To beg the question is to presuppose what one need to prove. Suppose the question is whether or not God exists. A theist might argue: God exists because His existence is affirmed in the Bible, and the truth of the Bible is guaranteed by its being the word of God. An astute atheist will reply that the theist begs the question: the premise that the Bible is the word of God presupposes the existence of God, which is precisely what the theist needs to prove.

Why then do people use ‘beg the question’ to mean ‘raise the question’ as in ‘What Dan Blather said begs the question of why liberals cannot see the leftward tilt of the elite media outlets’? Why destroy a perfectly useful expression?

7. I will end with expressions that represent a misuse use of religious notions. I have time for only one quite prevalent example: the use of ‘miracle’ to refer to any wished-for, but improbable, event. A child falls into an abandoned mine shaft during bad weather. She is finally rescued, alive and well, after several days of searching. People proclaim ‘a miracle.’ Why, did the rescue involve a violation of the laws of nature? (Had the child died, people would have bemoaned the ‘tragedy.’ Why, was hubris involved in her fall into the mine shaft?)