betwixt and betweenst

And now, back to some linguistic observations! (for those of you interested in reading our continued debate on truth and language, which will be ongoing but is currently on hiatus, refer to the comments of the immediately previous post)

While reading a transcript of a hearing, i encountered two neologisms (dare i say invented usages?): 'scalvaging,' which appeared twice in the speech of the same speaker, and, based on the context, seemed to cross the word 'salvage' with the word 'scavenge'. and another speaker used the word 'betweenst,' as in the sentence, 'they talked about it betweenst themselves.' the suffix 'st' is often an archaic form, as in 'whilst' and 'amongst,' and the speaker may have been using it to make his speech seem more formal or appropriate for a legal setting. as of this posting, a google search for 'betweenst' returned 708 hits, some of which seem serious, though some are clearly parodic. 'scalvage' returned 52 hits.

another 'made up' word that's gotten a lot of press on the internet is 'nother' or ''nother,' which is formed from detaching the article 'a' from the original word 'another.' it most commonly occurs when an adjective separates 'a' and 'nother' as in, "that's a whole nother story." Here are some sites that provide some different perspectives on the 'nother' usage: words at random, professor brians' list of common errors (also note that, at the bottom of the page, the professor lists words and usages commonly considered erroneous that are actually 'correct.' this is probably a whole nother post on its own.), inflections (which also contains a post called 'what has clueless, like, done to language?' that may remind some of you of our previous discussions of like usage.)

how about one more example before i get to the BIG POINT of this post? a friend recently sent me this link to a wikipedia article about the new word 'teh,' which apparently originated from countless mis-typings of the word 'the.' but 'teh' has come into its own, thanks to the internet and a generation of l33t hackers. it's got a whole grammar, much like a real word.

so, the common thread among all these usages is their inventedness. but, even if they're made up, unintentional, or uneducated, they already function as words. they convey meaning, are googleable, are recognizable to people who have never encountered them before, including court reporters. these seemingly aberrant usages, with their varied levels of social acceptability, cannot be excluded by linguists who want to study the general movement of a language.

keep in mind, all these words are 'corruptions' of previous words. they are formed arbitrarily based on ease of typing or articulation, or from 'mistaken' cominglings of other words. but these 'mistakes' are the very process of linguistic change. it is through those who do not know the rules (or choose not to follow them), or who use language quickly, that language changes itself most dramatically.

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

[WARNING: Not spell checked or re-read, because I don't care and neither should you]

I don't have to have been lied to in order to have an incorrect belief about how the world works. If every time I eat a bagel an earthquake strikes for the first few times I eat a bagel, I might well believe, based solely on experience, that my eating a bagel causes earthquakes. But further experimentation with bagel-eating would show that this belief is false/incorrect.

First off, how would you be able to recognize that your belief was incorrect? If the earth ceased to quake as you ate a bagel, how would you be able to conclude that the two incidents weren't correlated? That something had been incorrect about your original belief?

Isn't this superstition? The two events, outside of LINGUISTIC communication with others, will always be related. Just because it stops doesn't mean you can conclude the events were never related in the first place. Also, exactly who would the belief be incorrect to? This example doesn't work, because you're speaking of yourself, yourself who already knows the bagel-eating is not related to earth-quaking. Therefore you CAN conclude that the two events are unrelated.

So let's bring in the feral child, bring in a bagel, start an earthquake and get cracking. Ms. Feral Child doesn't know anything about earthquakes. Ms. Feral Child can eat a bagel. So everytime she does the earth shakes. RUMBLE. "My god," Ms. Feral Child doesn't think, "There must be some correlation between my bagel eating and earthquakes."

Stop.

We have a problem. How can Ms. Feral Child seperate the bagel and the earthquake? Well, I suppose she could've experienced earthquakes before independent of bagel eating, but this would invalidate the whole experiment out of the gate. Right? For our (your) own purposes you'd like the test subject to form an unadulterated belief that bagel-eating is linked to earth-quaking.

So now, moving backward: How can Ms. Feral Child seperate the bagel and the earthquake? I would argue that since the two events occur simultaneously and have occured without predating one another that they are in fact the same event. Bagel eating would involve the taste, the masticating, the digestion, the salivating as much as it involved the earth-quaking.

Now we, being Mr's and Mrs's Non-Feral Children know that there's no correlation between bagel eating and earth-quaking. We also know that the two events are seperate. We have two categories, bagel and earthquake. Of course, these are just morphemes attach to concepts we could've formed anyway without language. You see here's another issue with all of this: To suppose the child has "non-liguistic thought" is I suppose alright, but don't we mean "non-linguistic" in the sense of "not linguistic in the sense of our modern evolved human world". We are really imagining humans at the origin here, something we can only do looking back through the lens of our existing and categorized "linguistic thought". So this "non-linguistic thought" on the part Ms. Feral Child, how can we say it's not "linguistic thought" in a different sense than WE mean "linguistic thought".

Some would have us believe that this feral child, the human being at its origin had completely non-linguistic thought, thought completely uncorrelated to modern thought. This strikes me as ludicrous. If there thought was completely unrelated to our "LINGUISTIC" thought then how did human beings ever form this whole "LANGUAGE" thing in the first place. And, aside from that: What makes this language thing, as a pinning down of concepts succeeding and sometimes failing any different than just an evolution of this arbitrarily defined "non-linguistic thought".

Honestly, I'm losing steam here, so I'll have to come back to this, but one other thing before I sign off. In response to "A1", language is not infinite and neither is thought. This notion of concept that is undefinable seems to imply a complete non-linguistic understanding of a concept. Even if this were possible, which I don't think it is, it's not provable.

These examples are just getting more far flung and ridiculous. We need to move on. Or restructure the discussion.

this debate has begun to self-de(con)struct.

Scott and I have thought a lot about Seb's mango-eating feral child. We've shared some laughs, we may have even grown to love her. But she has to go, and heres' why: Seb writes:

Suppose again that I'm the feral child mango monopolist. I don't have language, but I have non-linguistic thought. In this sign system, I can form all sorts of concepts, like 'mango', 'flavor-X', even, maybe, 'truth', all by my self! What does this do to the thesis that truth has to be a matter of convention or agreement, when it can be signified in a sign system that can develop completely without convention or agreement?

First of all, I'm going to have to object to Seb's first distinction: language vs. non-linguistic thought. This is the arbitrary (though historically priviledged!) distinction that Derrida's "language in general" and "writing in general" terms try to overcome. Aristotle got us into this mess by asserting that language is the signifier of thought, and writing is the signifier of language. this means that thought precedes language, and writing and language are external and secondary to thought. These ideas are held self-evident by thousands of years of western philosophy, and it is precisely these presupposed boundaries that post-structuralists argue we should question.

It's a complicated knot to untangle, as jacques himself illustrates: "The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system." I don't understand this at all, and i maintain hope that that's the point.

Continuing with our close reading:

I [feral child] can form all sorts of concepts, like 'mango', 'flavor-X', even, maybe, 'truth', all by my self! What does this do to the thesis that truth has to be a matter of convention or agreement...?

I'll tell you what this does. It answers the question before it even asks it! This statement says: 'presuppose someone who has no communication with others, but has a concept of truth... does this person have a concept of truth, even without communication with others?' This feral child really has us tied up in logical knots! And, to make the example even more ridiculous, keep in mind that the feral child can't tell us whether she has these concepts! Throughout this entire debate, we've been putting OUR words and concepts into her mouth. Who are we to presume to speak for our necessarily voiceless example?

(additionally -- though i'm beating a dead feral child here -- in order to have any expectations, the child must have pattern-based concepts. These concepts (not necessarily words, mind you) would group together many sensory experiences and enable them to be linked to others. this is how language in general, spoken language, and written language all operate.)

another tenet of deconstruction is this: in any binary (true/false, inside/outside, good/evil, civilized/uncivilized), the existence of one term necessitates and relies on the existence of the other. there could be no concept of civilization without the negative example of the uncivilized. there is no idea of truth unless there is the potential for falsehood. and this, i believe, is what bugs the crap out of analytic philosophers.

The system of language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which logocentric [read: truth-based!] metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced. This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing.

western thought (oh, aristotle!) loves to imagine a perfect world with truth but no falsehood, with experience uninterupted and unmediate by language, with rugged individuals who have access to truth without the need for communication with others. but it is this communcation that allows us to know anything outside of our own personal experience - and we never experience truth in the physical world. as scott said: "What's beyond the physical reality of the tree that does not require communication with others?"

Here's an exercise we tried: try to lie without using language. try to lie without saying anything. try to make someone's experience of the world untrue. even imagine an entire 'fake' world (or a Truman Show, if you like), that is the only thing that person has experienced. without an assertion that it is 'real', nothing about it would be untrue. and if a falsehood can't be achieved without language, then neither can a truth.

posting while unawake

First, I'd like to apologize on behalf of my last post. It was most scattered, and in the future I'll refrain from posting on a whim after just waking up.

So, here's a question. In the field of "non-linguistic thought" what value does the possibility of developing a concept of 'truth' serve?

Well, supposing again I'm a feral mango-eating child, I think I would eat the one with flavor X and be unsurprised, then eat the one that tastes like a squirrel and be absolutely shocked. I might doubt that all mangoes taste like X. Or I might form a new concept of a set of objects that look like mangoes but taste like squirrels!

Exactly, a new concept of 'mangos' that taste like squirrels. What would be identifiable as untrue about a mango that tastes like squirrels? The squirrel tasting mango is the squirrel tasting mango. The two can be compared, the mangoey tasting mango and the squirrely tasting mango, but what would lead this lone feral mango-eating child to think of truth in relation to the mangos? I can't find any reason.

What I was more or less trying to get at in my previous post was this: true/false has no value outside of language. There's simply no purpose to it. Think of presenting the same feral child with two trees, one plastic and one a 'real' tree. How could the plastic tree be identified as the imposter? Why couldn't the 'real' tree be the imposter? I'd say they are both 'trees' to the feral child with some shared properties, but each with its own set of unique properties.

But even this seems to fail. Das ding ist das ding. What's beyond the physical reality of the tree that does not require communication with others?

definings, mines, terms, conditions, mines, truths

from the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. we think only in signs which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right. -Jacques Derrida, from Of Grammatology

if i were a good derridian, my answer to these questions asked in the last few posts would be as simple as: "there is no outside the text." that's why i am not a derridian. but the majority of my philosophical background has been post-structuralism, and i think an explanation of some of derrida's terms (i didn't realize how much they've informed my recent thinking!) would be useful at this point.

a text is any system of signs. ANY signs. linguistic, written, visual, musical, mathematical. you name it, it's a sign. in fact, by definition, if you can name it, it's a sign. and, for derrida, it's ALL called "writing in general." for him, writing is the process of differentiation, and every perception we have is made possible by differences. anything embedded in a system of differences i a sign. and he calls it all writing, or language.

Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word 'being' nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language, at least to the possibility of the word in general. -ibid

so, when seb wrote, "we have no word for the idea expressed by 'taste of a mango,'" i realized my mistake. it doesn't matter that we don't have a WORD. we already have a SIGN (it's the phrase 'taste of mango', or the memory of the taste, or the expectation). a system of differences exists that allows us to recognize and communicate 'taste of a mango' as distinct from 'taste of an apple' or 'taste of beef' and as distinct from the 'mango' itself, or 'to taste.' and i call this process linguistic, refering to LANGUAGE IN GENERAL, not necessarily written or spoken communication.

i didn't mean to imply that when we 'speak' (another broad 'in general' usage!) to ourselves that we do it in words or morphemes or proper syntax. but i believe the manipulation of thoughts and concepts occurs in a differentiated space - a sign system - a language. and if that is all thought, then so be it... there is no thought outside of language in general. personally, i hold out hope that there is something outside the text, but maybe it shouldn't be called thought. i certainly don't think knowledge or assignment of truth conditions can exist outside 'the text.' i believe what goes on outside these texts is always a matter of belief, not of knowledge.

i also admit that this 'language in general' vocab is a big change from the philosophy of language stuff (but i think it's critical that the two schools develop a common vocabulary and a dialogue!), and i'm so steeped in it i didn't even realize i was using it til i read seb's last comment. he wrote, "Language is a separate faculty that hooks up morphemes that are learned from the community with these [mental] concepts and knows how to sort them into sentences, lets them influence beliefs, etc. (This is an imperfect process...the concept I associate with a word may be different in all sorts of subtle ways with the concept you have attached to the same word.) So really, "linguistic categories" don't exist, except maybe if you took the conceptual contents of what lots of people thought of when you shouted "BLUE!!!" at them." Language is not external. the formation of a signifier (word, for a traditionally priviledged example) and the thing it signifies (concept, or meaning, usually) occur TOGETHER. saussure wrote that signified and signifier were two sides of the same leaf, but he always said that one came first. it is this priviledging that Derrida deconstructs.

He [Nietzsche] has written that writing - and first of all his own - is not originarily subordinate to the logos and to truth. And that this subordination has come into being during an epoch whose meaning we must deconstruct. -you know.

mango is a character from saturday night live

All this mango talk. Here would be my point: experience is beyond a concept of true or false. True you could be the only person in the world to taste a mango, but in tasting it you would be thinking or saying or in anyway acknowledging some sort of arbitrary truth about the flavor of the mango. The mango's taste would be beyond such frivolous, it would simply taste like itself and others like it. Experience in this way is beyond "truth". Truth is perhaps something in language we use to make ourselves more comfortable.

Taken another way. You and you alone have tasted the mango. Would you be able to say that the mango tastes perfectly. That its flavor is of perfection? I don't. In the case of "true" and "perfect", in order to believe that the mango's taste is true or perfect you must believe that it could be potentially false or imperfect. This instantly sets up a system of linguistic comparison, and the "truth" of the mango can only be sought through communication. If presented with two different tasting mangos, identical in appearance, how could anyone pick the true tasting mango? They would at the very least have to enter a dialogue with themselves, and even then their selection would only be based on their opinion, and not an objective truth.

And that's just the thing: Can there even be such a thing as an objective truth? The age old question, how can we be sure the world looks the same to each of us? If we can't be certain of these things how can we assess truth independent of personal communication? Language, perhaps, sets up a field of objects -words- that we all share the same or at least very similar objective mentality over. With this common objective ground can we see or experience a concept of truth. We trouble ourselves though when we let this safe field of objects, the words themselves, elide into our concept of the real world which is always beyond or ability to categorize and label.

what conditions truth?

A mango is neither true nor false. The taste of a mango is neither true nor false. An understanding, statement, or belief about the mango's taste CAN be true or false.

I personally believe in thought outside of language. I believe it is possible for Seb to taste a new fruit without immediately assigning it linguistic labels. But the moment he says, "A mango tastes like X," to anyone OR to himself, he has made a comparison that relies on linguistic categories. to determine whether or not his belief is true when he tastes another mango, he must communicate with himself over time. for his assessment of the taste to be judged "true" or "false," it must be expressed (in language or in signs).

if seb tastes the mango and never states his belief at all, then tastes another mango and recognizes the same taste, i would argue that he has not made a prediction, but has simply experienced the same thing twice. admittedly, these distinctions are pretty crude, but what i'm really trying to get at here is the fact that "true" and "false" are concepts built up in language.

let's return to the sky for a second. imagine trying to express "the sky is blue" without using words. suppose i point to my skirt (which is also blue), and then indicate the sky. setting aside for a moment the fact that it would be difficult to understand that my pointing indicated the colors, the problem we run into becomes even more severe. my skirt and the sky are both blue, but they're not at all the same color. we only recognize them both under the same label ("blue") because we already know that "blue" encompasses many different shades and hues of blue. without the already-defined totality that the linguistic label provides, there is no way for me to describe the color, even by comparison.

this example also demonstrates the extremely useful nature of words that define totalities like "sky" and "blue". without them, we'd be stuck trying to agree on definitions every time we needed to refer to them. in this framework, confirmation holism (which wikipedia article Seb linked to in his comment) is right on. but it's my belief that much of the framework from which we assess concepts already exists in the language we use to talk about it. saying "'the sky is blue' is true" takes for granted that 'the sky' is a well-defined noun (which doesn't include the air between my eyes and 'the sky', for example), the fact that 'blue' is an already-defined color that includes many shades, and the idea that the 'truth' of a statment is a simple property.

my right is falsely my true left eye

Preach Cristi. I'd go further. Forgive me if this a little lacking in evidence, maybe. A distinction that Cristi makes is words as referent to real physical objects, or visible (since the sky may not necessarily be physical, but at least our experience of it is sensual). There are of course words that refer to things which are not physical, tactile, sensual, holdable. Love, hate, malice, envy, value... True and false are also in this category. One cannot hold truth.

And here's where I think I'd go farther. We only apply a value of truth (or falseness) to a statement. When we say that "the sky is blue" is "true", we are not saying that "the sky is truly blue", but that "the sky is blue" is a true statement. There is--to my mind--no way to evaluate the truth of anything outside of language. Language is the tool by which we identify the senses.

Think of math. We are presented with numbers, which are symbolic equivalents to the amounts they represent. A number on it's own is not true or false. What can be said of the truth or falseness of two. Nothing. We can only begin to evaluate "truth" in relation to numbers by placing them in equations. 2+2=4 and the like. Only when placed in relation to one another can such an analysis begin. 2+2 does not equal 5.

A sentence is the same. The words themselves, and the things they represent are themselves beyond truth. What after all is the difference in truth between a physical chair and the word chair? Both are objects, sensually experienced. They carry no truth value of their own. They are what they are. Chair=Chair. Only when we linguistically place them in equations of action, definition and the like can we even begin to comprehend "truth" in relation to the objects. And even then it is not about the objects themselves, but about the statement.

truth conditions my right eye, too.

in a recent post i made the statement "post-structuralists argue that there is no truth outside of language; that language itself is the condition of 'truth' and 'falsehood.'" and i'm going to try to defend that against proponents of truth-conditional semantics and against Seb's well-reasoned comment in response to the aforementioned post.

objects in the world are not 'true' or 'false.' let's take a classic example:

the sky is blue.

this is a pretty widely accepted fact. i don't think any poststructuralists would argue with it, and i don't think i want to, either. but here's the key: in order to widely accept it, in order to declare it as fact, we have to first communicate about it. making an observation about the sky and saying 'the sky is blue' are two very different things.

even an internal concept that the sky is blue is linguistic, because 'blue' and even 'sky' are defined by their conventional uses. 'the sky is blue' might be understood as 'that which we have constituted as a totality called 'the sky' appears to correspond to the hue i have been taught to call 'blue.'' and of course, every term i've used in that expansion could be expanded itself.

for communication to be sucessful, its participants must begin with certain mutual understandings. some of the most basic of these are the names of colors and objects in the world. 'the sky is blue' is not a pure statement of truth because it is always mediated by these categories and assumptions.

likewise, the 'truth' of the statment is mediated by a particular concept of truth: that which is universally agreed upon; that which is measurable by instruments; that which can be recorded. there MAY be an objective truth regarding the color of the sky, but in order to AGREE on it, we HAVE to communicate about it. and in order to determine whether 'the sky is blue' is true, we have to have already agreed about what 'truth' means.

the phonetics/usage divide

as it turns out, Scott and I both have interesting, if somewhat predictable, phonetic foibles: I, like many Oklahomans, tend to relax tense vowels, which is especially notable in the "ai" diphthong in the word "while," which I pronounce similarly to "wall."

Scott's invented usage extends the rule that causes "f" to become voiced ("v") when an "s" is added after it at the end of a word. "life" becomes "lives," "wolf" becomes "wolves," "bath" "bathes", "belief" "believes" and so on. He sometimes pronounces the plural of "death" with a voiced fricative - "deatthhz." (there's no letter for that sound!) And the plural of "graph", "gravz."

Taken by themselves by linguists, these observations demonstrate regular changes that languages tend to undergo, or the application of an accent. But the more interesting thing is that these phonetic changes also depend on usage.

I do not pronounce "while" like "wall" in the sentence, "i've been saying it this way for a good long while." And Scott does not say "gravz" in the sentence, "he graphs tangents every thursday."

Both of these phonetic differences are not typically considered meaning-related. In most linguistic studies, phonetic and semantic changes are seen as occuring independently. But my more "careful" pronunciation of "while" when it's used as a noun (especially at the end of a sentence), and Scott's differentiation between singular verb and plural noun are only phonetically predictable when the meaning and the context of the words is taken into account.

Where did we go?

Well, it's been awhile since our last update. I suppose we got some 'splainin to do. I'll start with myself. My computer, god love it, basically stopped working last week. Woke up one morning and it said it couldn't find my harddrive, next thing I know it won't even load windows (I got it to work by tilting it on its side???). Right now I'm updating from an ancient computer we still have. It's got Windows 95 Plus!, you know, the one with all the "themes" and such.

But what of Cristi? Well now, that's a different animal. She's currently enjoying a relaxing(?) weekend with her extended family at reunion in Las Vegas. Last time we spoke, it was my understanding that she had one and lost no more than six dollars playing penny slots. How about that? So anyway, this accounts for her absense on the blog.

Needless to say, all of these problems will be fixed in the nearish future. Cristi returns sunday night, my computer returns... well, we'll see. I've got my fingers crossed for returning, let alone when. So soon, dear readers (are you there)? I'm sure there'll be much to talk about soon. Bear with us. We try. We really do.

truth conditions my left eye.

Here's a weird thing (taken from Wikipedia, of course!):

...close examination of natural language proved to be a powerful philosophical technique. Practitioners since have included J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Paul Grice, R. M. Hare, R. S. Peters, and Jürgen Habermas.

Hm... it seems like there are other philosophers who may have used close examination of natural language... like EVERY post-structuralist philosopher... EVER! It's a nerdy complaint, at first, but every time I encounter a text about the philosophy of language, I see more or less this same list of names, and little or no mention of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Althusser, etc.

Actually, under the entry about Habermas, I thought I saw a picture that might have been Derrida, but it turned out to be the pope. So that's pretty telling. (As it turns out, Habermas and Derrida were bitterest of enemies. Also, the first time I encountered Austin and Searle was in Derrida's "Limited Inc.", in which he really just rips them to ribbons.)

The Philosophy of Language Guys are looking for the 'meaning' of language, and the rules by which it operates. The post-structuralists tend to talk about broad categories like "discourse," "writing in general," "language in general," and never, under any circumstances, about rules. Truth conditional semantics is an excellent example of this divide. In a largely unsuccessful, but useful, project, many semanticists have tried to reduce language to truth conditions, while post-structuralists argue that there is no truth outside of language; that language itself is the condition of 'truth' and 'falsehood.'

There are those, such as Stanley Fish, and Mikhail Bakhtin, whom we've mentioned on this site before, who come from literary studies using deconstructive techniques, and approach linguistics. But for the most part, the cross-over between postmodern (which i'll use loosely to mean informed by post-structuralism) thinking and linguistics/semantics/pragmatics/philosophy of language is non-existent.

In her 2002 book, The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon includes an epilogue which amounts to a laundry list of theorists and disciplines. She writes,

It would likely be no exaggeration to say that, like all art forms... all disciplines have engaged in some way in the postmodern debates in recent yeras. Even religious studies showed the impact of postmodern theory... New areas flourished, influenced to some extent by postmodern deconstructing impulses: critical legal studies... social theory... politics.

And where is a poststructural linguistics, and perhaps more importantly (and mysteriously!) a linguistic poststructuralism?

it is imperative: you go see batman.

I was going to finish up a post about truth conditions and philosophy of language (don't worry, it's saved as a draft), but i just saw Batman!

Also, the post that's contributed the most search-engine hits to our statistics is star wars quotes out of context, and particularly the phrase "light saber sound effects."

Batman! Batman... Begins! It's a parable, a classic American tale of power, responsibility, citizenship, ninjas, liam neeson(sp?)! Watch out, i'm about to spoil the plot, but not the endless play of readings it gives rise to:

Christian Bale has freckles, and he's cute, and his dad is an all-american hero, and then... tragedy. Fear! Seduced by the dark side of the force, Christian meets Raz... Adgool? or something?... it sounded Arabic. He teaches Bruce Wayne the power of an idea over the minds of men. But, Christian soon has to make a difficult decision between two competing loyalties: loyalty to his teacher and his cult; or loyalty to his city, his fatherland.

He chooses America, and returns home to fight off both the evil foreign ninjas and petty theives who do not value their citizenship in Gotham City. The City, though, is owned by corrupt cops and mob bosses who rule by fear, though they have not mastered their own. The bad guys (ninjas) too, rely on fear. Their style is random chemical warfare attacks designed to terrorize the general public.

Throughout the movie, those who wish to terrorize their enemies must become "ideas," "symbols," "bad thoughts." It's a stirring theme--become something to be feared, and you must lose your identity. In some cases, this is how the bad guys become even more demonic, but it's also the way in which Bruce Wayne sacrifices when he becomes Batman--a cause, and a symbol with more power than a man.

Finally, Christian must decide whether, dispite its sins, Gotham city is worth saving--in definace of liam neeson, the ninja master who offers him the chance to be part of the large, redeeming cycle of history. It almost comes as no surprise that Batman's father was the last person to defend the city's honor against the ninjas, but that his failure to act cost him his life. The choice for Batman, and for all americans, seems clear.

And that's just it: it's a great movie, and it's a great movie with absolutely conservative (somewhat christian) ideas about justice and responsibility. The bad guys want to spread terror, and it's Batman's (individualistic, but motivated by charity) job to make sure the people of his homeland get a second chance to lead good lives and appreciate their city. Batman, suddenly, is a real american hero: he believes in democracy, in self-determination, and he wins, and we love it. And what if that's ok? (plus, the bad guys are hijacking weapons and modes of mass transit to attack a building that is both physically and symbolically central to the (new york) city in order to release a cloud of terror gas on the general public and liam neeson dies proudly, a martyr for his eastern cause...)

Does Gotham City deserve to survive? This is the question the movie doesn't answer. But we rest assured that Batman has always made his choice.

p.s.-- my two hours, 14 minutes, was not wasted to the world of linguistic inquiry: one of my friends distinctly asked the other to please give him "a reesee peecee," and it was clear to all listeners that he wanted one of the many available "reese's pieces."

i saw the best minds of my generation...

Check out 31 Groundbreaking Works of American Poetry. It's, like, woah. I was happy to see a lot of these books here, but also sad to see some omitted. Although, the only one that really came to mind instantly was Frank Stanford's awesome work The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. If you haven't gotten the chance to read it, you should. You should at least check out to the link to his poetry if you're unfamiliar with it. I'd specifically recommend Death and the Arkansas River from Constant Stranger.

I was really surprised to see the big guy Charles Olson on the list (WHALE of a man he was). Now, I haven't made my way through The Maximus Poems except for the often excerpted parts of it that appear in anthologies. I was, however, under the impression that the collection was not most people's bag of tricks. Instead, Olson's legacy seems to be built around PROJECTIVE VERSE and his Melville criticism (Call Me Ishmael).

Most of selections were solid, but pretty unsurprising. Was happy to see Ashbery's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror on the list, but that's about as surprising for a list of American poetry as The Beatles making a greatest bands of all time list. O'Hara's Lunch Poems another great collection.

Perhaps it's a bit recent, but I was actually very disappointed not to see Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End on the list. For the uninitiated, it's a phenomenal work of prose poetry that at least I've found has changed my opinions on the genre. Please, find it if you haven't read it.

Also, where's everyone's favorite estlin? e. e. cummings notably absent from a list of groundbreaking american poets. Pretty curious. Also, can I get a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet?

Actually, this list is pretty conservative isn't it? I mean, Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg, Eliot, Pound were all pretty wild for their day, but aren't they the poetic mainstream now? Were they ever really that groundbreaking to begin with? Well yes. They were, but there has been some truly experimental work produced by the US and A. What of that?

I wonder how a list like this will shape up twenty years from now. The current list is pretty backwards looking. Who's going to make the list that's been writing since the 90s?

Apologies for the scattershot reactions. I'm at work.

cryptic crosswords: uhm, syntactosemantic models?

7 Across: Nothing changes egg producers (7 letters). The first letter is an "o." Stay tuned!

Cryptic crossword clues are simultaneously definitions and other types of word puzzles: hidden words, anagrams, reversed words, double meanings, and more! But there's a trick: the puzzle solver doesn't know which type of word play she has encountered until she also knows which word might point to the definition. For instance, "nothing changes egg producers" might mean that a word meaning "nothing" is an anagram of the letters in "egg producers" or vice versa. It could also mean that a word meaning "nothing changes" also means "egg producers," or that a word meaning "nothing" is inserted into "egg" to form a 7-letter word meaning "producers." etc.

Also, each clue is itself a short (and quasi-logical) sentence or fragment that has nothing to do with the answer itself. So the reader must simultaneously perform several operations on the clue: reading the sentence as a whole and for its possible combinations of constituents, reading each word (and constituent) to find a)its synonyms, b)possible operations in the clue it might indicate (ex: "changes" might mean that a word's letters are scrambled), c)combinations of letters in it that might form other words, d)its homophones, and more...

But none of these operations alone is enough to guarantee a solution to the puzzle. The reader, as they read, must perform the above operations to generate possible solutions, and simultaneously cross-check them with the other operations occuring on the other words in the clue and the possible types of operations being performed by the clue writer, etc. whew! complicated run on sentences describing mental processes!

But a process like this one seems to better simulate what goes on in language processing than the model which seeks to separate semantics from syntax from phonology from morphology. As in the recently-posted recipe, which i still urge you to try, in real language processing environments, we can distinguish between "apple" and "an apple" without the presence of the article on the basis of context. we can use homophones to read through typos and misspellings (i typed "nugmeg" for "nutmeg," but the reader could still understand it), we can manipulate mulitple meanings of the same word or phrase to understand puns, irony, idiom, and metaphor ("keep an eye on crust brownness"--eww!), and can easily judge the meanings of technically ambiguous sentences and references on the basis of context ("press all into pie dish with your fingers" might sound like an ancient proverb, but "all" means all the dough, not all of creation).

And, to press all into pie dish with my fingers: we achieve understanding about the syntax of the sentence and the meanings of the indivdual words at the same time. Neither recipes nor cryptic crossword clues can be understood by sifting each word separately and then mixing them together.

Answer: OVARIES, (it's a synonym for "egg producers," and it's also 0[meaning "nothing"] + VARIES [meaning changes])

exclusionary tactics

Most first-year semantics students have encountered the Conversational Principles:

Be informative.
Don't give more information than necessary.
Be relevant.
Don't say things for which you lack evidence.
Don't say things you believe to be false.
Avoid ambiguity.
Avoid obscurity of expression.

I'm not certain that's all of them, but it's enough for now. The conversational principles are not exactly rules, they're just tendencies that most speakers will tend to follow. And, in general, they're so universally recognized that when a speaker breaks one intentionally ("flouts it," as semanticists would say), it causes certain predictable implications (or "implicatures"). For example, consider the following conversation:

A: Don't you hate that Mrs. Smith? Isn't she a cheese-reeking old bag?
B: Uh... so, how 'bout those Mets?

Since B's comment isn't relevant, it breaks one of the conversational principles (which tells speakers to Be Relevant), and implies something completely unstated in the dialogue: that B, for whatever reason, doesn't want to talk about Mrs. Smith.

The more interesting thing about the conversational principles is that, while speakers (and listeners) usually have no knowledge of them, there are certain cases in which we consider them non-operational. The implicatures usually generated by flouting the principles do not arise if the speaker is judged to be linguistically incompetent (i.e., a child, insane, a non-native speaker, sleep-talking, etc.)

And, by and large, the exclusion of those considered incompetent is useful. But, subtler and more common exclusions occur all the time, based only on the way in which a speaker uses the language. Many such instances have already appeared in our previous posts: teenagers who overuse "like" are deemed unworthy and stupid; individual poems and poets are disregarded because they do not rely on traditional rhyme and meter; bloggers are accused of corrupting the essay form; even "incorrect" spelling is used to discredit arguments.

Each of these critiques share a common feature: they are each based on a distinction between "correct" and "incorrect" uses of language. And I think in each case we (and some of our readers) have argued that, in language, there is only convention, and no correctness. In each case, understandability isn't threatened, but conventional norms are. Why protect the norms if breaking them doesn't interfere with comprehension?

How we judge each other's competence: level of education, normalcy, maturity, right-mindedness, also determines the very rules by which we listen to each other. Why respect the rules of language more than the people who use and change them?

poem for some order of time on the magnitude of days

Cristi says there should be more poetry here. I say, "OK!"

from Long Summer

1

At dawn, the crisp goodbye of friends; at night,
enemies reunited, who tread, unmoving,
like circus poodles dancing on a ball--
something inhuman always rising in us,
punching you with embraces, holding out
a hesitant hand, unbending as a broom;
heaping the bright logs brighter, till we sweat
and shine as if anointed with hot oil:
straight alcohol, bright drops, dime-size and silver....
Each day more poignantly resolved to stay,
each day more brutal, oracular and rooted,
dehydrated, and smiling in the fire,
unbandaging his tender, blood-baked foot,
hurt when he kicked aside the last dead bottle.

-Robert Lowell

Aunt Muriel's Famous Apple Pie

Here's some actual recipe syntax (as typed by a real cook) for everyone who loves apple pie and linguistics:

THIS IS FINGER LICKING GOOD!!

Preheat oven to 425 deg.
PASTRY:
1 1/4 cup regular flour
1/8 tsp salt
2tbs sugar
1 stick cold unsalted butter
1 egg yoke
2 1/2 tbs. cold water

mix dry ingredients / add cold butter—mix by hand 'till crumbly
mix egg yoke with cold water before adding to dry ingredients
press all into pie dish with your fingers

FILLING:
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp nugmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
dash salt
6 to 8 small apples (slice thin- pie will cook better, I use more rather than less—lemon juice will keep the apples from browning)
2 tbs unsalted butter

mix all together, then layer apples in pie crust and use filling to fill voids in layers(doesn't have to be fancy) dot with butter slices

CRUMBLE:
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 stick cold unsalted butter

mix dry then incorporate butter, then add to pie top- use all

BAKE:
Cover crust rim with foil until last 15 minutes
Cook @ 425 deg. For 40 minutes (keep an eye on crust brownness)
--------------------------------

Some linguistic notes to make this a more legitimate post: "the apples" or just "apples" refer to the apple slices in the filling section, but note that, for the most part, the writer avoids using articles where possible. "dry" refers to "the dry ingredients"; "butter" refers to "the butter"; "all" refers to "all of resulting mixture" and so on.

In a recipe, we've already had a first mention of "the apples", so every usage following supposes that the reader knows what apple is in question, and doesn't even require the further clarification of an article.

This is a great recipe, too!

Where did all this apple come from?

If you smash an apple with a hammer, then it becomes apple. If you smash a rock with a hammer, then it becomes rock. Or does it become rocks?

Maybe the change of the article depends upon our certainty of the object's origin. In the case of the apple, we are sure that the apple mush was at one point an entire apple. We saw the original apple. It was smashed apart. The chunks on the counter, the juice, the mush. They are apple. If we came to the scene after the smashing, would it still be apple? There would be a period of recognition. The taste, the smell, the look. Maybe we could identify it as apple. If we can't then it's something else all together.

Speedwell writes:

I disagree with the example. If you had a recipe for apple cake that called for "one mashed apple," for example, you would not think twice if the instructions said to "add the apple to the batter." By the same token, if it called for "three mashed apples,"then said to "add the apples to the batter," you would understand very clearly.

This doesn't undercut the example at all. One uses the article because of the recipe context which calls for specific quantities of ingredients. In the example sentences you have given, what is being being asked is this: "Add the "substance which we have come to call 'apple'" to the batter (not "the apple" meaning a whole apple). It is the difference between saying "the apple" and the "apple". If you follow.

Going back to Cristi's example. When confronted with the apple on the counter one could say "who got apple all over the counter?" However, if that person were commanding someone else to clean the "apple" off of the counter than they would say "clean the apple off of the counter". The same grammatical tricks are at play here as in the recipe example. Cristi?

who got this post all over the place!?

Here's a language puzzle a friend posed to me and I posed to Scott: You have an apple. Imagine it sitting on the table in front of you. Now, you hit it with a hammer once. Is it still an apple? (Most listeners say "yes".) Then you hit it hundreds of times until it's all over the table. Is it still an apple? (Most listeners say "no," Scott says, "no, then it's just apple.")

The puzzle is supposed to interrogate the point at which something loses identity, but we became fascinated with the fact that this whole distinction can be encapsulated by the difference between "an apple," "the apple," and "apple."

I've just encountered tips for ESL speakers page that explains it this way: the indefinite articles (a, an) are only appropriate if the noun in question is "countable." As in "I had three apples, now I only have an apple." But "apple" is uncountable because it's just the material, and not any sort of totality. Consider the distinction between "glass" and "a glass," or between some bodily materials ("crap," others that shall remain nameless) and their countable counterparts. I learned from the above site that some nouns are considered countable in some languages and not in others, and I think this is evidence for the fact that the distinction between "apple" and "an apple" is more conventional than natural.

Additionally, we've had some great laughs totalizing and de-totalizing common nouns, like: "ugh, who got phone all over the place!?" "hold on, i've got a sand in my eye" "would you pass me a celery?" "eww, i'm covered in chair!" (It's more fun than you'd think! Feel free to send us your results.)

Finally, we noticed that the definite article doesn't bow to the totalized/untotalized distinction. "The apple is on the table" can mean either "an apple is on the table, and we both know which apple it is" or "there's apple on the table, and we both know which apple mush i'm talking about." Either way, use of the definite article is not licensed by any quality, such as countablility, of the noun, but by the speaker's and listener's shared knowledge of the noun in question.