41. "Politically correct"

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"Politically correct" is a putdown but how, exactly, does it put down?  I think it's mainly by making a serious human issue a matter of etiquette.  "Correct" is what you are when you avoid criticism by those who have read Emily Post.  Your offenses, as when you use the word "fag," are offenses only against the finicky.  "Considerate" would be a lift-up alternative.  With the word "fag" you aren't considering the feelings of a fellow human being.

Are putdowns ever justified?  Of course.  Every movement has its finicky fringe, discrediting the sensible center, and the more effectively it is mocked the better progress the movement makes.  Liberals can thank James Finn Garner for his Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.  American Protestantism can thank God it had Oliver Wendell Holmes making fun of the moral bully, "yon whey-faced brother,"

Who, though he carries but a doubtful trace
Of angel visits on his hungry face,
From lack of marrow or the coins to pay,
Has dodged some vices in a shabby way,
The right to stick us with his cutthroat terms,
And bait his homilies with his brother worms.

Would that the finicky fringe of every religion could be ripped in this way.

Is down-putting dangerous?  Clearly.  Do it clumsily and you put yourself down.   When a contributor to the Urban Dictionary says that "weak people that don't have the balls to say what they feel and mean are politically correct pussies" he puts himself on the side of he-men standing up to women (like Aunt Polly, and schoolmarms, and everybody's mother) who tyrannically enforce good manners, but in doing that he reveals the sexist basis of his objection, lowering himself and maybe hurting his cause.  He wouldn't have gotten into that if his word "correct" hadn't opened the door.

In some cases the dangers are multiple, and deeper.  Bill Maher said on his show (provocatively titled Politically Incorrect) that the 9/11 hijackers "were not cowards."  The advertisers who dropped his show apparently thought it unforgivably incorrect not to call the hijackers "cowards."  President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer thought Maher incautious, noting that he had him in mind when he said, "People have to watch what they say."  

You can see red lights flashing all around this one.  I think, looking at Maher's fault, that Fleischer meant, "Choose the words that tell us you stand with your nation (or this administration) against terrorists."  He and the advertisers are judging words by what they signal.  Maher has signaled an incorrect (disloyal) stance.  Their red light flashes, "Danger to the nation!"

People with loyalty to the language judge words by how well they refer to what they see in life.  We've recently (Post #40) observed them, in this blog, judging that "self-appointed" refers to Laurent Gbagbo very well and to organic-food gurus not so well.

Here those language people (you can really scramble the issue by calling them "finicky") will see that "coward" cannot refer to men deliberately giving their lives for a cause.  They know that there's a whole raft of words that can well refer to them ("monsters," "fanatics," "barbarians," and so on) but "coward" is not one of them. Their red light flashes "Danger to the language!"

Dangers to the nation can be short-term or long-term, major or minor.  In World War II the long-term danger to the language was so outweighed by the major danger of Adolf Hitler that you could say anything about him (or show anything, as the British did with movies of him at the French surrender, doing a jig he never did) as long as it promoted solidarity against him.  That, though, was a short-term, and possibly unique, thing.  On the whole I think the long-term drift from reality begun when signals become more important than reference is the greater danger.

40. "Self-appointed"

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"Self-appointed" is a put-down word that says, "You stepped in and made yourself a judge, or an expert," or whatever. Its lift-up opposite, "other-appointed" (i.e., in the usual way), though never spoken, is felt in the emphasis on "self." That opposite is a shadow, always there — for some readers anyway.

Here's a test. Jed Lipinsky calls Max Goldberg "a self-appointed organic-food guru" (NYT 2-3-11). Do you find yourself wondering if organic-food people ever get together to appoint their guru? Do you pity Goldberg? Those people, at that meeting, are his only escape from the put-down. Unless he keeps his mouth shut; one word from him on organic food and he's appointed himself guru.

Here's a more complicated test. A Times editorial writer refers to "a self-appointed gang of six senators" (5-19-11). Nobody appoints gangs. "Groups" will be the word, neutral and maybe looking for a lift. "Gangs" is already a put-down. So, do you see a put-down on a put-down, worth a giggle, or do you see an impossibility, three Republican and three Democratic senators saying, "Let's make ourselves into a gang"? That's worth a gasp. If you gasp I think you're seeing the shadows behind "gang of...." — bandits, LA motorcyclists, Chinese plotters against the state. "Six U. S. senators, in conclave duly assembled, did today....” Those most conscious of shadow-opposites will gasp the loudest.

This way lies the guffaw. A Times letter-writer calls Osama bin Laden a "proud, self-appointed mass murderer" (5-10-11). No, he just couldn't wait for the annual meeting of the Mass Murder Association.

That's the extreme. In between, in the Times, we have a "self-appointed pension-reform warrior," a "self-appointed spokesman for fandom," and "self-appointed wise men" (Paul Krugman). And, outside it all, we have "self-appointed" used accurately. Robert Mackey calls Laurent Gbagbo Cote Ivoire's "self-appointed president" (NYT 4-7-11). Exactly. Gbagbo ignored election results and declared himself president. The put-down was in the fact itself, and nobody could deny it or laugh at it.

How is it that writers come to turn the laugh on themselves? Out of uncritical love for the put-down, I think. They see what a smack "self-appointed" delivers to bad guys like Gbagbo and they want to deliver it to all bad guys — whether or not it's justified. Bad guys deserve it. Any stick to beat a dog.

Serious writers may realize that they are, oh temporarily, speaking loosely, but they may not realize the danger in what they are assuming about their readers: that they, too dull to see shadow-opposites, are all taking the words loosely. They have entered the world of half listeners and loose thinkers, people whose assumptions about each other spread and legitimize a loose vocabulary — the one where "democratic" means "good" and "fascistic" means "bad." It's a world where loose words in the right cause are easily forgiven. You don't laugh at good guys. It's sharing that view that sets you up for surprise when you hear laughter.

39. "Democracy"

"Those are bad things the U.S. is doing in Iraq," the Turkish tourist said to me, "and it's supposed to be a democracy." I saw that "democratic" to him meant "good," as in the same loose, worldwide vocabulary "fascistic" meant "bad."

It was 2004, and a teaching moment to take advantage of, since he had obviously seen in me, lagging behind my group at Pisidian Antioch, an opportunity to learn something. He was curious and earnest, with enough English to profit by my explanation. I, well aware that in Turkey the once-high "favorable" rating of the U.S. in the polls had fallen to record lows, was eager to teach him.

How would I (how would you?) define "democracy" for him? And do it without any detectable salesmanship? It was over-enthusiastic salesmanship, I suspected, that made him and a third of the world think "democracy" meant "good." I didn't want him to think of me in the future when he said, "Hey, I've been sold a bill of goods."

I kept that future moment before me as I pondered my definition. I saw him becoming more familiar with the behavior of democracies in history — Britain, first on democracy's poster, fighting two of the least justifiable wars in history, the Opium War and the Boer War; the U.S., goaded by its yellow press, pouncing on the Spaniards and then the Filipinos. Definitely not good. The people can be as brutal as dictators.

I also saw him in the past, though. He had no doubt seen or read about the army stepping in to change the government of his country four times since 1960. He had seen or read about bloody changes in neighboring countries — Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria. He would know about personal or tribal power struggles.

The minimal definition of democracy I produced for him (though of course not at the time) was this: "It's just a way of changing rulers without bloodshed." If he wanted more I would tell him that it gave power to the people likely to be most troublesome if deprived of it, the majority. I think that would do the job but I'm open to suggestions.

38. "Very, very not bad"

I heard Andrew Ross Sorkin say "very, very not bad" on CNBC this morning and thought, he being a very smart financial columnist for the New York Times, that it was a cute, original, little smack at one of our reflexive understatements.

Then I found that it was not original, except by accident. Damien Burke, on Twitter in 2009 had said, "Well, I must say it was very not bad, very very not bad at all... " I know, there's no expression whatsoever that isn't on Twitter, but then I discovered that a car expert in an online forum in 2005 said, "How bad [is a double-clutch downshift on the track]? Very very not bad. Less bad than not doing it. That's code for good....” Apparently there was already an in-group taking its cute little collective smack at reflexive understatement.

Google shows me that in the last two years the expression is all over the place — in reviews of restaurants ("a little fancy for my taste, but the food is very very not bad"), TV programs (Christiane Amanpour, "very, very not bad"), books, and computer hardware, where it appeared first in 2001 and now appears more than anywhere else. (In the New York Times since 1851 it has appeared only once, in a hockey blog in 2009.)

Word people with a weakness for smacks at reflex usage can easily go overboard on one, even a little one, and I think maybe I was about to do that this morning. Imagine a technology that can work so quickly, almost at the speed of light, to keep them from doing that. Without Google I could have been asking for Sorkin's autograph.

37. "Begs the question"

The television news commentator summarizes Casey Anthony's activity for several weeks, then, after a pause, says, "...which begs the question, Where was the body during this time?" In living rooms around the country those who know what "begging the question" means (assuming in your premise what you purport to demonstrate in your conclusion) cry, "No, no, not again."

But it's actually a tough call. Nothing in the fallacy Aristotle identified goes with anything we today associate with begging. It does, maybe, if you put yourself back in the kind of arguments Greek philosophers used. "You are pleading with us to concede you the answer to the question before us, rather than have you argue for it." In other words, "You're no man mixing it up in the arena; you're a beggar with your hand out at the door." It's a great move, but you have to be into that kind of game. If you're not, there goes "begging."

Should we lament? No. Even if we hang on to it, even if we can put ourselves right back in the Athenian debating circle, we're in trouble. The word doesn't fit what we're doing. What we're really begging for there is an answer, the answer we prefer. The "question" refers to what's at issue. You can't beg for that. It's already in front of the company.

On the other hand everything in the news commentator's usage fits. What's doing the begging? All that evidence just reviewed, Casey driving around enjoying herself so. It's crying for somebody to ask, "Where was the body?" If it was in the trunk, oh, oh. Please, please, ask the question.

And then, in the sentence itself, all the conditions are satisfied. After that comma you've got to state the question. That noun has to have an appositive. Ah, there it is, "Where was the body?" In the old formulation you didn't state the question. You just stopped. You'd already put down your opponent. If he showed he didn't know what the question was he went further down. Everybody knew what the question was.

I say let's forget Aristotle. Or let him be remembered only by those knowingly engaged with each other in his kind of debate. Academics. For the rest of us, let begging be begging we can see and the question be a question we can hear. Modern usage should win this one.

36. "Defense"

Words change meaning. Twenty-five years ago "defense" in the mouth of an American Secretary of Defense meant defense against attack by Soviet nuclear weapons. The NATO treaty provided it to European nations, with U. S. weapons making an "umbrella."

Yesterday Secretary of Defense Robert F. Gates warned those nations that the U. S. was getting tired of expending "increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources...to be serious and capable partners in their own defense" (NYT 6-11-11).

Same word, referring to the same treaty. Coming from the same country, through the same official source. But not the same ears hearing it, and not processed the same way by what's between them.

Let me guess that process, as it might be going on between the ears of Angela Merkel, leader of one of several nations failing, the U. S. believes, to play their NATO part. Make her also a leader in word inspection, always starting with what words actually refer to. Here she sees that being a partner in Germany's own defense means joining an attack on the Libyan army. Merkel: "Ah, Gates's 'defense' now means 'offense.'" She, a good listener, hears that the word reverses its dictionary meaning (root: "to ward off") so she adjusts her internal vocabulary to fit the situation.

If she goes the other way, and tries to find something in the situation to fit the word Gates wants her to use, she can do it. Germany can be thought of as defending itself against her partners' impulse to go to war. That's what practically all of Europe saw itself doing when George Bush called for allies going into Iraq. But what in this case? She'll have Germany defending itself, in the end, against the humane instincts of Barack Obama. That doesn't fit the reality of diplomacy and world opinion. There are just too damned many realities.

35. "Cordially"

Is "cordially" in a class with "frankly" and "honestly" and "I must confess that...", those expressions we throw in to compliment our own candor? (Do you doubt that we do that? Have you ever heard "I must confess" without hearing a follow-up that wasn't, though possibly naughty, a credit to the speaker?)

Maybe, I know, throw-ins are too dead to count. Maybe they're all like "a bit of," the British understatement tic. Nobody pays much attention.

But maybe not. If there's still a flick of self-praise in some of them we don't want to feel it in those that are innocent. If I sign a note, "Cordially," and mean only to show warm feelings toward my reader I should surely be free of criticism.

On the other hand, if I sign off, "Your cordial host," I think I'm fair game for the word-grump. "Look. You do the hosting. I'll tell you how warm and hearty you are."

There's clearly a wrong side here. You're on it when you say things appropriate only in the mouth of the other person. Going home you want your guests to say, "He was such a cordial host." If you jump in and say it first it's personal PR. You're in a class with the publisher who turns a blurb-word into a title: The Trout Fisherman's Bible. (Grump reviewer: "You do the book on fishing. I'll decide whether it's referenced enough to be called a Bible.")

It's the difficulty in drawing the line that makes "cordial" interesting. "I send you my most cordial greetings." What side is that on? The word just seems to generate borderline cases.

34. "Mission creep"

Once again, for those who remember, the contrast with World War II: "Your mission is to bring about unconditional surrender." The troops under you leap at the enemy's throat. In the Somali operation (Restore Hope), for which the expression was first used (by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post) the mission was to provide humanitarian relief to starving Somalis. Then to protect those providing the relief. Then to take out the warlord who was endangering them. Then to punish the warlord for fighting back and taking out some of our people. Then...but President Clinton called a halt to it and we left (Operation United Shield). The difference from WWII is as great as the difference in combat deaths: WWII 291,000; Somalia, 29.

Some of what Wikipedia tells us about the term, "that it often implies a certain disapproval of newly adopted goals by the user of the term" is certainly right, but some is plainly wrong. Mission creep is not undesirable "due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts"; it's undesirable due to each failure breeding more attempts to avoid failure, as the Somalia case shows.

Clinton's call was a tough one because he was bucking one of the forces fundamental in human nature, and especially strong, I think, in American nature: the drive to succeed. We hate failure. We don't like to admit failure. We don't like to see our President admit failure. In anything we've undertaken, large or small.

No wonder Presidents keep asking the Pentagon to dial things up a little. No wonder Secretaries of Defense hate it. Get one little, clean mission you think you can accomplish and, clink, there's another one, a little bigger, a little dirtier. With a lot of potential blame hanging on it. Secretary Gates knew the story well when he alerted senators to what preoccupied him in Libya: "mission creep."

It's a great expression, but there's one thing wrong with it. "Creep" fails to convey the actual distance covered. For President Johnson's ordering of the Marines to use their arms against the Viet Cong at Da Nang it suggested another small advance, an elbow forward. In reality it was a leap over the broadest chasm in the American psyche. Once our troops started battling enemy troops, once they were (in the public eye) no longer "advisers" or "trainers," we had undertaken a war and war was a thing we could only win or lose. It was us against them, by God, and when success didn't come it was hang in there, it was stand on the goal line, it was Valley Forge. Only summer soldiers and sunshine patriots bugged out.

On the combat side of that chasm familiar forces kicked in to keep us going forward. There was the debt to those who had died. Did they give their lives in vain? There were the promises to those we'd come to help. There was our worth as an ally. There was the credibility of our future threats. And there was, as always, the force of mounting reciprocal paybacks that Clausewitz makes a feature of every war.

Most of what President Johnson chose to do in Viet Nam fits the notion of a creep. Bomb the North from carriers far at sea. Pause. Bomb. Pause. Creep, creep. Raise the troop level, slowly, quietly, making sure you announce the change only in a noon release. Creep, creep, creep. Announcement of what the Marines were going to do, however, though it was framed like the others, was not a creep. There was no disguising it. It was "Up Guards, and at them!" Now we'll get those communist bastards.

"Creep" also fits what we then did, though it's far from what Hoagland had in mind: move further and further from reality. Everything lodged in the public mind about the evils of communism was now released, in increments of illusion. It was us against Marx. With guns. Do you know that that bastard was already only ninety miles away, in Cuba? The whole "soft-on" vocabulary kicked in. Hardness was shown in words. Symbolic stands became more important than real stands.

I think of the bumper sticker that appeared about that time: "Victory over communism, not co-existence." Can words ever put you further from the real world? An abstraction winning over an abstraction, and not in a graduate seminar but on the battlefield!

It's easy for us now, knowing that those were not really communist bastards (they were nationalist bastards), to see what our people needed then: better words, fitting better with reality. They needed "mission creep." Maybe a columnist using that expression then would have given the country a better idea of what was happening. Maybe a staff member could have given the others, given Johnson, a better idea.

But no expression fits reality perfectly. They would still need somebody, drawing on something in some vocabulary, to say, "OK, but here it's not a creep, it's a leap. Anybody have a word that'll get that across to the President?"

33. "Science says"

Anybody who says, "Science says...," tells you right away that he's not a journalist, not one who writes for the New York Times anyway. Journalists are not responsible for any of the clear instances that turn up in a search. Who is responsible? Readers. Of the 28 instances in the last year they, in their comments and letters, produced 16 of them. We have a clear line between popular usage and professional usage.

The professional takes more care. Care here means recognizing that the word "science" doesn't refer to anything that holds beliefs. Science is a way of arriving at beliefs. It can't say anything. Scientists hold beliefs. They can say a lot. You've got to get that straight at the beginning if you're going to go anyplace in your story or discussion.

Most of the time there's no great harm in using "science" in the popular sense. We're at a party or at the beach, and don't really want to go anyplace. But sometimes we want to make a serious point, and break into a serious discussion to do so, as many of those readers who wrote to the Times wanted to do. We either harm our case (when our popular misconception is exposed) or harm the discussion (when it's not).

Do we risk harming a discussion any time we personify an abstraction? Evolution says...Religion believes...Capitalism holds...Society demands...Feminism denies? Paul Davies, a physicist, was about as far from a beach party as you can get when, a while back, he personified science on the Times Op-Ed page (11-24-07), arguing that, like religion, "science has its own faith-based belief system." He was breaking into the most serious discussion you can have, that going on between philosophers, people who take the greatest care with what they believe. Care is their profession. Say they let Davies in. What's that going to do to their long-time discussion of religious beliefs as tested by scientists?

I think we can see right off that it's going to make it less modest. The eyes of the philosopher are going to be lowered here, following the gaze of the scientist, which is always on a particular claim made in a particular religion. Is it a claim of historical fact? Does it pass the test of such claims?

With raised eyes here we can have all sorts of interesting discussions, but we can't have a discussion that will interest philosophers. Philosophers, the ones I have read anyway, are interested in what makes a question hard. What makes the reconciliation of science and religion hard is just this thing we're looking at, a claim and a test. The Bible says 4004 years. The geological test shows a deep negative. That's where the shoe pinches. OK, let's discuss it.

What Davies will do is bring into the discussion a shoe shaped just like the science shoe, except where it pinches. The belief-system he attributes to scientists, a structure based on a belief in "the rational intelligibility of the cosmos," is one I can well imagine scientists holding. But I can't see it interesting scientists. They don't look that high. And it will bore the pants off of philosophers. Answers come too easy up there.

How did Davies subject himself to the snub I see him getting? By starting off on the wrong conceptual foot with that personification of that abstraction, science.

We observers, though, can't walk away thinking that philosophers, with their exemplary care about what they believe, have had the last word. There are other discussions and other kinds of care. Those who are very careful about what they value can be exemplary too, and say things to philosophers. A discussion where they try to work things out, never ignoring the hard part, could be very interesting.

That leaves us, surprise, with a word problem. Can we call those value people talking to philosophers "philosophers"? No, we've already used "philosophers" for people very careful about what they believe. There doesn't seem to be a good word for those very careful about what they value. Maybe "sages"?

32. "Mob"

It's hard to use the word "mob," and especially hard if you're a citizen of a country in debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for its form of government. "Mob" suggests that the people you see throwing off society's control cannot be trusted to control themselves. Rousseau (in our standard reading of him) says that they can. You can trust man's basic nature, which is good.

If you don't trust it how can you justify giving common people the vote, and letting them serve in legislatures, and sit on the bench? Distrust takes you to the wrong side of the revolution, American or French, that gave you your government.

What made that side — king, nobles, clergy — so wrong? Their centuries-old view, encouraged by the church, that man's good nature had been corrupted by his disobedience in the Garden. That's so unenlightened. Who wants to be on their side?

We're sure that we don't, then we see a lot of young people go way out of control on a foreign city's streets and want to call them a "mob." But, alas, the society that would control them is very much like the kings, nobles, and clergy that in times past have tried to control our own young people. We've long ago, most of us, given up calling them a "mob." They took down the Bastille, for God's sake.

Our history textbooks have made us so conscious of the gains made by people throwing off society's control that we think Rousseau must surely be right. No, we don't think. We just assume, so deeply in America that some people, like college students, are shocked when other people, like the police, show that they don't take them to be basically good, and might need controlling. In the sixties, before the riots that closed Ohio University, police were stationed on rooftops, looking to spot lawbreakers. Students, as the editorial page of their newspaper showed, were outraged at the insult to them.

It has probably never been harder to express doubt about young people than it was on American university campuses than it was in the sixties. These were the leaders in the battle for civil rights and the end of the Viet Nam War. These were the highest scorers yet on our college entrance tests. And if they didn't know it Commencement speakers would tell them, "You are the best." But of course they did know it. "You have broken the best heads in the country," a Harvard student told the police from his Commencement lectern.

It was not a time to go back over history and count the losses suffered when people throw off society's control — the Reformation slowed by mobs pillaging in its name, Puritans discredited by their zealots, socialists ruined by anarchist allies. Nor were the parents of these people the ones to do it. It would reverse everything that made them happy as they listened to the adulation ("American youth-worship," said Europeans) in those Commencement speeches.

Even now it's hard to call those children in their later group actions a "mob," or class what they lost the nation with the losses of earlier mob actions. I want to say that young people failing to control themselves (yippies, crazies, druggies) delayed the changes the nation needed to make (they gave Richard Nixon, I think, what he needed to be elected), but I know that even at their worst they were doing a good thing: refusing to be complicit in the second-stupidest war in our history.

And the police on those rooftops were doing a good thing, trying to control a mob. I'm glad they were there, and I wish they had arrived at the ROTC building in time to keep the students from burning it down. I'm grateful for the troops the governor sent to Athens to restore order. A lot of the faculty, those who had stood watch all night to save the other buildings, are grateful to them.

It has occurred to me that we are a lot like the citizens of New York City after the troops that President Lincoln sent in had beat down those rioting over the draft in 1863 (they had killed hundreds, many of them blacks), as Herman Melville sees them:

and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And more — is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

31. Word To Be Grateful For.

"Ultra-enlightened." Anonymous Associated Press reporter describing the couple who decided to leave it up to their baby to decide what sex he (she) was. 31 May 2011.