Filed under “language”

Where rhetoric is substance

 From Chris Rabb’s Invisible Capital on business plan competitions. As a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator, I know firsthand the opportunities they have to help their clients develop invisible capital as well as the challenges that incubators face. When I was the vice president of entrepreneurial programs at a nonprofit-based business [...]

Irrefutable gerunds

 Gerunds were referenced in yesterday’s post. Below is from William Easterly’s “Foreign Aid for Scoundrels”, published in the New York Review of Books: The concept of development helps rationalize the position of autocrats by postulating an unstoppable transition toward a bright future. This is why donors call all poor countries “developing.” Once the donors started [...]

An excellent example of Writing Practical #3

 I subscribe to too many media-strategy blogs, which rile me up from time to time with their lack of attention to content production—as in the act of writing itself. Sure, they’re strategy but the line “Before running off to create content…” from Beth’s Blog made me think of the vast majority of people I know [...]

Social Media Community Architect and Manager

 Exploring the recesses of my email I came across some bad ideas I gave to a good friend, neighbor and excellent “Social Media Community Architect and Manager” as we were exploring possible resume headers for him: If I were to take the best amalgamation of words, I would go with “Social Media Community Architect and Manager”—which [...]

Blue Ribbon Commissions in Print

 I was annoyed by my previous post quoting the New York Times’ usage of “blue ribbon panel” (and the numerous appeals to authority in that entire article) that I looked it up using Google Search’s timeline: site:nytimes.com [“blue ribbon panel” OR “blue ribbon commission”]. There were 621 results.

Metaphors and diversity

 Interactions between people with diverse backgrounds leads to richer and more effective experiences. About two months ago I attended the 140 Character Conference in Boston. Mostly it was a bunch of white guys using phrases like “filter disintermediation”. Fortunately there was a woman who described the need to “midwife” a process, and a crazy old [...]

Making language of meaning

 From Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers—whose quoting by me here is the result of coming across another example (via GiftHub) of the (false) metaphor of the tube. My account of meaning is grounded in what real people do when they speak and write. When people speak or write successfully with each other it looks as though there [...]

Wealth Parade

 From The Number’s Game: the commonsense guide to understanding numbers in the news, in politics and life, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot; on wealth and averages: A Dutch economist, Jan Pen, famously imagined a procession of the worlds population where people were as tall as they were rich, everyone’s height proportional to their wealth [...]

Typology versus taxonomy

 From “Typologies, taxonomies, and the benefits of policy classification” by Kevin B. Smith (Policy Studies Journal, Sep 2002): There are two basic approaches to classification. The first is typology, which conceptually separates a given set of items multidimensionally… The key characteristic of a typology is that its dimensions represent concepts rather than empirical cases. The dimensions [...]

Zen and Postmodern Art

 From Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy by Carl Olsen (I added paragraph breaks): Within the context of postmodern art, Mark C. Taylor identifies, for instance, two processes at work: disfiguring and cleaving. These two operations are identified by Taylor in his attempt to grasp the chora, a nonexistent that stands behind being and [...]

Frequency of occurrence of letters in English

 I’ve already posted the cake recipe from PopCo—a great novel by Alice Butler—so here another part of the back matter: a table of the frequency of occurrence of letters in English from Fletcher Pratt’s Secret and Urgent: the story of codes and ciphers, Blue Ribbon Books, 1939. To be fair, the table above is actually [...]

Numerical Indifference

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 I was really proud of myself last week when I made what I felt was a valid and illuminating numerical comparison: I wrote that the amount of Broadband Stimulus money requested for projects within the state of Alaska—projects serving rural and underserved communities—was on a per-capita basis about equal to the federal poverty level for [...]

Cleaving the visual experience

 From Jacques Racière’s The Future of the Image (translated by Gregory Elliot): The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visible instead of the figures of discourse–this is what is demanded by the contemporary celebration of the image or its nostalgic [...]

Quality of life, mind and language

 From “Business of Design”, a section of David Barringer’s excellent book There’s nothing funny about design: Definitions Quality of life depends on quality of mind, which depends on quality of language. Heightened experience requires both practiced sensory perception and the vocabulary with which to render its significance to yourself and others. To convey impressions of [...]

Mount Vernon, Port Huron and Sharon Statements in Comparison

 Apparently conservatives have a new statement named for Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home. The new Mount Vernon Statement is modeled on the 1960s conservative Sharon Statement (named for William F. Buckley’s home), though it’s slightly ironic considering the Sharon Statement was quite firm on state’s rights and Washington was a Federalist. From comparing the statements, [...]

A temperance of words

 From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy in Athens, the last bastion of intellectual paganism: its last great master had been Proclus (412–485), an ardent disople of Plotinus. Pagan philosophy went underground and seemed defeated by the new religion of Christianity. Four years later, [...]

He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.

 The following quote is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. (The John mentioned is the protagonist’s buddy who wants to escape modern technological life via a motorcycle he deigns to tune-up): Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped [...]

Three Story Intellect Model

 I netflixed Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead this weekend, so I’m in a mood of rhetoric and reason. Above is from my Critical Thinking reading (“Teacher Behaviors that Enable Student Thinking”, Arthur L Costa). The terms are a nice way to evaluate the complexity of test questions, and is comparable to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Apparently the [...]

Ace Advertising

 It’s a bad evening when Google points you back to your own blog. So to get on with it, George Creel of The Committee on Public Information (CPI) had a great quote: “In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and [...]

Gifts of Magnificence

 Gift Hub (Blogging Philanthropy from A Dumpster) is a favorite blog of mine. On “Foundation Trustees as Stewards of the Public Interest” I left this comment: Personally, I’d like to see society make a point of separating out Charity (giving to those of equal social standing) and Mercy (giving to those of lesser standing). Imagine [...]

Metaphor death

 A well-worded comment by Kia to a Gift Hub post entitled Money Has Failed in its Role of Allocating Resources towards Human Survival? (my own, typo-prone comment is lower down in the thread)—also reposted on IMproPRieTies: We are just now witnessing the collapse of the markets. We may also see the collapse of “the markets” [...]

Why framing matters

 Lewis Hyde’s introduction from Frames from the Framers: How America’s Revolutionaries Imagined Intellectual Property: The linguist George Lakoff has been insisting for some years now that progressives need to improve the way they frame their issues. Conservatives have become very good at framing– ”the death tax,” “partial-birth abortion,” “the ownership society”–and, Lakoff argues, once a [...]

Kick in the baud

 From the book pile: the graphic above and quote below are from Future Developments in Telecommunications, 2nd edition by James Martin, 1977 (“NEW completely rewritten”). A given piece of information is conveyed to humans, sometimes using a low transmission capacity and sometimes a large capacity. If we watch five minutes of a television talk show [...]

Social work is women’s work, so we don’t care

 Two articles came across my desk today that I think are strongly connected. The first is from Danah Boyd on Teaching, nursing and second-wave feminism: Since the 1970s, the number of brilliant, motivated individuals working as teachers and nurses in particular declined rapidly. Many women left these professions because they had many more opportunities and [...]

Intellectual activity

 Only those who have power, for example, can define what is correct or incorrect. Only those who have power can decide what constitutes intellectualism. Once the intellectual parameters are set, those who want to be considered intellectuals must meet hte requirements of the profile dictated by the elite class. To be intellectual one must do [...]

Political Rhetoric

 From a Wall Street Journal article on Congressional expense accounts: Summaries of such lawmaker expenses are available to the public in print, either by mail or in volumes that can be viewed in basement rooms on Capitol Hill. The House’s quarterly reports — which run over 3,000 pages apiece, across multiple volumes — are stored [...]

Business rhetoric

 “They aren’t charities. They have shareholders to report to,” he [Robert Hammer, an industry consultant] said, referring to banks and credit card companies. “Whatever is left in the model to work from, they will start to maneuver.” This wonderful rhetoric is in regards to beginning to charge annual fees and remove grace periods from people [...]

Satyagraha versus Duragraha

 This year’s Symposium on Values, Spirit and Business has the theme “How to Grow Your Business by Integrating the Gandhian Philosophy of Satyagraha”.  The Wikipedia has this to say on Satyagraha—and that “passive resistance” is not descriptive of its tenets—: Gandhi contrasted satyagraha (holding on to truth) with “duragraha” (holding on by force), as in [...]

Self, Language and Consciousness

 The Tree of Knowledge is a goldmine of concepts and ideas.  The most interesting parts are at the end—in discussions of society, communications and language. What biology shows us is that the uniqueness of being human lies exclusively in a social structural coupling that occurs through languaging, generating (a) the regularities proper to the human [...]

Notes on silence

 My roommate (a teacher) left open this week’s Newsweek with a movie review of the French film, The Class, that began with this quote, tattooed on one of the students and dubiously attributed to the Qu’ran: If your words are less important than silence, keep quiet. Which sounds suspiciously similar to the Buddhist quote: Do not speak—unless it [...]

Using distinctions to create meaning

 For Christmas, my friend Danielle bought me the book, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.  It’s getting a little long in the tooth near page 150, but I really like how they go about building up their argument.  Specifically, how they define Destinctions. I’ve been accused in the past (by my [...]

Community Organizer = Community Outreach Minister

 While wasting time on the political blogs, I ran across this interesting comment in the comments of an anti-community organizing article: Community Organizers are the same thing as Community Outreach Ministers : The problem with the title “community organizer” is that most Americans are not familiar with it because it is an inner city position/term. [...]

Search is not Serendipitous

 Erin McKean makes the point in a TED talk that, unlike paper dictionaries, online dictionary searches do not provide serendipity: finding something you didn’t know you were looking for. I take this many ways: True, but… How many people regularly flip a dictionary? How exact is search? How many people just type the word into [...]

How to make do with what you got

 I like taking on the role of facilitator to help people realize their potential, whatever it might be. In a strategic planning class I audited last year, I found myself spending more time (and enjoying myself more) turning other people’s vague concepts into plans, than I did my own. Many of the AmeriCorps*VISTA members I [...]

Failure of confidence

 Diebold (now Premier Election Systems), admits voting machines have had critical software bug for the last 10 years that can result in votes being lost. Nonsensical comments from election officials: DuPage County election officials were upset to learn their election equipment vendor has acknowledged a programming error that could cause votes not to be tallied, but [...]

Are you Ahw or Arr?

 Via some fun copy on BoingBoing Gadgets (“These “Toastabags” (phonemologically Bostonian, apparently…”) and someone’s analytical comment , I came across a way to cleave English speakers: those that pronounce R’s (rhotic), and those that don’t(non-rhotic). From the wikipedia page on Rhotic and non-rhotic accents: English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic [...]

Cleaving Running Reds from Jaybiking

 Great article on why drivers call the kettle black when they complain about bicyclists break road-laws. I found interesting the distinction between running a red light and jaywalking/riding: Let’s talk about red-light running. There are two types of red-light running. “Catching an orange” — or running the start of a red light — which every [...]

Political News Coverage

 Looks like the FCC has “demonstrate[d], once again, that at present it is difficult, if not impossible to apply public interest pressure to TV stations via the Commission’s license renewal process.” A Chicago/Milwaukee appeal was made to the FCC over a lack of local and regional political coverage from area broadcasters: less than 1% went [...]

Other words for “Lie”

 It’s another election year which means that politics are flying. From a story on NASA forcibly downplaying global warming: The report did not directly accuse them of lying, but used more nuanced terms such as “mendacity Abandoned ” and “dissembling.” The space agency complained those terms were unjust. And I enjoy how the New York [...]

Contextonomy

 Aha! I knew there had to be a word for misusing review quotes. From this week’s World Wide Words: The Weather Man hd Such extracts from reviews are called “pull quotes” in the jargon;massaging them into more favourable versions is “quote doctoring”. Another word, with apologies to Stephen Potter, is “quotemanship”(or “quotesmanship”). “Contextomy” is yet [...]

Binaries and Teaching

 From an Ars Technica article entitled YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students. The original analysis is here Thank You for Smoking move King of California download Juhasz breaks the issues down into a set of what she refers to as “binaries”—tensions between opposites that have to be balanced for proper teaching. Those binaries were: [...]

Progressive Terminology for Discussing Poverty

 .!. Because of constructive criticism of some of my organization’s archaic language, I asked the Mission Based Massachusetts Listserv, a nonprofit discussion list, what terms they use in place of “poor people”. Below are all of the responses I got, which were awesome! Some terminology… low-income under-resourced under-served (Barbara humorously notes that “overserved” is a [...]

Reject or Denounce

 .!. As so often happens in politics, the quarrel between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton came down to a matter of direct objects. Both “reject” and “denounce” are transitive verbs — they act upon a direct object — but the candidates weren’t talking about the same objects. The object of Mr. Obama’s denunciation was Mr. [...]

To “decimate”

 A good World Wide Words this week. I read it weekly, but of particular interest is language that has to do with numbers. Like decimate, which originally referred to the Roman military practice of preventing mutiny by killing one-tenth of the soldiers (drawn by lots). World Wide Words takes on its misuse: It feels right to [...]

Destructive rhetoric

 .!. I was having a hard time explaining exactly what Fred Turner means by the conclusion of his book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, I wrote about earlier. It really seems difficult to explain things without using informationalist rhetoric. This makes me think of the About Wealth Bondage page: Wealth Bondage is pervasive, the horizon within [...]

vis-a-vis viz. vis-a-vis, viz.

 viz. — namely, as follows, that is to say; introduces and element or list… an abbreviation for “videlicet” vis-a-vis — (1) face to face with another (2) In relation to or compared with: Canada’s role vis-a-vis the United States in Afghanistan (3) as opposed to

Creating meaning through interaction

 [Bakhtin explores] the idea that language is indeed ambiguous, but whereas deconstruction would highlight this ambiguity as the inability of words to convey precise meaning, Bakhtin welcomes this vagueness of language as a means by which to create meaning dialogically. Indeed, in describing the nature of the polyphonic novel, Bakhtin sees the entire scope of [...]

Knorking

 My preferred method for eating has a name–maybe misapplied–but is also culturally debasing: eating with only a fork and using the side to cut/smash-through your food before spearing it. A survey calls that a “knork”, though it is in fact an actual product. I’m going to call my method “knorking”. Battle in Seattle movie download [...]

More thoughts on an interesting thesaurus

 My associate, Rebecca, and I have been starting to think critically about Panlexicon.com, the unique, tag-cloud based thesaurus I’ve written about <a href=http://island94.org/node/128″>previously. We’re hoping to put some more time and effort into the project and in the process, learn some more about what’s happening with the language and the underlying structure of the thesaurus [...]