Another tragic death

The word "legendary" finally died today. It had been on life support for some time, but it took the Chicago Tribune to push it over the edge:

Alexis Cohen, legendary 'American Idol' contestant, killed in hit-and-run in New Jersey

Legendary for her cursing rant against Simon Cowell

I acknowledge that this is a tragedy for her family and friends, and I'm not trying to make light of her death.

But when a headline writer for a major metropolitan newspaper destroys the meaning of a word in some lame bid to draw attention to one of the more minor stories of the year, it is not wrong to wonder just how low our standards will go.

Review - Alphabet Juice

» Alphabet Juice

The subtitle tells you a lot of what you need to know to evaluate this book:

The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

Roy Blount Jr. is a writer of numerous books and articles that cover a large spectrum of topics, and, apparently, all the while he was harboring a love of words. Not just words that he could put together into salable writing, but words as words, and this Alphabet Juice is an exploration of words.

This is a simply wonderful book, organized in the classic way, alphabetically, as Blount takes us through "A" to "Zyzzyva." Yet it is not the typical book of word and phrase origins (as in the books by the Morrises). There are poems, and stories, and strange little fragments of ideas, so it doesn't stand so much as a reference work, but as an excursion by one writer through the language he loves.

There are a couple of things you should know before picking up this book, as it may color your view of it. First of all, Blount is prescriptive, but idiosyncratically so. He laments the loss of certain meanings and connotations as definitions change, but he has no problem with the likes of "ain't." The best summary is his own (in the entry for worthy enough):

It's up to those of us who care about words to hang on to their intrinsics and their connections - connections to the world, and to our minds and fingers. We don't have to contribute to the inflation of words. We have to struggle to keep words from becoming arbitrary.

Second, Blount is a big advocate of what he calls "sonicky," something we learned in school as "onomatopoeic," that is, the idea that the sound of words somehow reflect their meaning. It's self-evident in coinages like "fizz," but most linguists believe it a limited theory.

On the other hand, Blount embraces it wholly, and, after reading Alphabet Juice, you may be convinced yourself. At the very least, you will think more about the sounds of words, and that's enriching no matter what theory of language you prefer.

I haven't given you a real flavor of this book, so I will close with a couple of short examples. If you like these, you'll probably enjoy the book. First, under id:

Odd that this and ID are so different; the latter makes you (and your ego) respectable, the former au contraire.

And, under reservationist:

Can this, at last, be my religion? I'm not an indifferentist or a nothingarian, I'm a reservationist. One who refuses to believe in anything - even the reservations - without reservations. I'm not boasting. I'm not trying to proselytize. I'm not even saying I'm a good one. I'm just saying, that's what I am, perhaps.

This from a story about trying to hire a car to take him to LaGuardia. (And I have a sneaking suspicion that I should have named this blog The Reservationist, perhaps.)

Titles

A question for the gathered throng: When do titles expire, or become ex-? I ask this because, in watching This Week on ABC yesterday, George Stephanopoulos and his guests did something I've heard before, and that is to refer to guest Newt Gingrich as "Speaker."

Last I checked, Gingrich wasn't speaker of anything except his own particular (and rather strange) view of the world. He was Speaker of the House, but that ended over 10 years ago. While it might be ungainly to refer to him constantly as "ex-Speaker," that argues for dropping the whole thing, not for dropping just the "ex."

Is there some standard published somewhere that tells us which titles expire and which don't? I know that Miss America becomes a former Miss America the minute the crown is placed on another woman's head, and Presidents of the United States seem to remain "Mr. President," but, for all the titles in between, I just don't know.

Using words

I recognize the power of specific words, but I think that effect is often overestimated. Take as an example the news about merging financial companies Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney. They're using their bailout money for, ahem, interesting purposes (from Sam Stein through Kevin Drum):

The soon-to-be-merged financial giants — Morgan Stanley and Citigroup's Smith Barney — announced the payments during an internal conference call last week, but warned advisers against describing them in terms that would cause PR headaches.

"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration."

I've worked in corporate America a long time, and I never fail to be amazed at the ineptitude with which executives use words. That a president of a large firm would believe that "retention award" would somehow get people to say, "Ah, that's fine, at least it's not a bonus," is laughable.

Certainly, I've seen these before. AIG paid these out last year, even after we the people kept the insurance giant afloat. Lucent Technologies, despite the use of near-Enron accounting tricks, ponied up similar money back in 2002.

What I think happens is that management gets scared to death that the rats will desert the sinking ship, even if it's not clear that there's another ship to jump to. Then they'll be faced with two extra problems, one real, the other PR: they'll have to find replacements, and they'll be forced to explain the exodus. Neither of these is easy, and CEOs don't like hard; despite all their big talk about going head-to-head with the "big challenges," they actually prefer a path that is laid out for them. Risk is anathema, and they'll do a lot to avoid it, especially when they're playing with other people's money.

---

Since we're talking about executives and words (and Kevin Drum), let me point out that Drum missed the point of a recent Hendrik Hertzberg post:

If America is a classless society*, why is that a manual worker gets paid wages and a middle manager or cop or teacher earns a salary, but a corporate boss condescends to accept “compensation”?

Compensation. I have to say, I get a little dizzy with disgust whenever I hear that word used to describe some C.E.O.’s pay envelope. “Compensation package” is even worse. What, exactly, are these people being “compensated” for? Are they victims of crime? Or is it the long hours, the loneliness, the inability to spend time with their children—so much more terrible than the plight of a middle-aged immigrant mother working double shifts as an office cleaner? Or the fear of having their company go on public assistance, in which case, thanks to Obama, their welfare payment will be slashed to less than $10,000 a week? Or the fear of getting laid off with nothing but a golden parachute to put food on the table and lifetime use of the private jet to get around on?

The poor dears.

——
*I know—straw man. But still.

Drum commented on this:

This really isn't so hard. "Wages" refers to hourly earnings. "Salary" is typically a fixed yearly amount for exempt employees. "Compensation" is used for corporate honchos because you need a word that encompasses the fact that a big part of their earnings are in stock, deferred salary, capital gains, pension payments, and various perks. There's really nothing very sinister about all this.

He failed to see that Hertzberg's primary complaint was about the word "compensation," not that "honchos" had a different term to refer to their paychecks. He hasn't answered the question, "What are these people being compensated for?"

Cows...and more, alas!

The redoubtable John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun, about whom I wrote earlier today, has responded in a post titled, McIntyre is having a cow about Wikipedia (title taken from a statement I made in my post).

In his post, McIntyre puts forth his brief as to the inherent unreliability of Wikipedia. As a copy editor for close to 30 years, he feels that Wikipedia is a refutation of what he has worked for:

I work as an editor. My whole professional effort for nearly three decades has been to make sure that the published texts at the newspapers for which I have worked are, as far as human fallibility and the pressures of time will allow, factually accurate, grammatical and clear.

To do this requires knowledgeable, trained editors. To become a copy editor at The Baltimore Sun, an applicant has to run the gantlet of the usual scrutiny of resume, interviews and reference checks — and a grueling test that covers a dozen categories of general knowledge and an extensive section of texts to be edited. Those who have taken it remember it.

The book and magazine and newspaper publishers who have been dismembering their editing staffs have been doing so in desperation, for economic motives. What leaves me spluttering is the Wikipediaphiliacs’ apparent belief that such editing doesn’t matter; everything will even itself out.

McIntyre correctly points out the fallacy in that last theory, concluding:

The consequence is that you can trust Wikipedia only when you already know the information.

That seems right on the money, as I indicated when I stated that I link to Wikipedia only when I'm sure it provides a reasonable summary of a topic I know fairly well (I am deliberately ignoring the case where the information changes after I link to the entry; that gives me a headache). McIntyre then links to a post by David Sullivan, who writes (and I'm going to quote even more of it than McIntyre did):

Yet certainly the idea underlying Wikipedia is: We have met authority, and if it is not all of us, it is illegitimate. The idea of editing -- the idea of newspapers -- in the end rests upon, yes, dear reader, we do in fact know some things in more depth and detail than you do, and are better trained to judge them, just as you may be better trained to design a house or repair an electrical system. I believe this. Yet a voice in my head still says, yes, and Robert S. McNamara said he knew better than the American people did what needed to be done in Vietnam. Just as it can be hard for a parent who recreationally used drugs to draw a firm line for children, it can be hard to oppose proferred advances that aim to give all power to all the people. Yet standards cannot result from universal input on standards, because who then has the right to say, alas, it is your ox that shall be gored?

So here's my story: I felt, and likely still feel, just the way that McIntyre and Sullivan do, that there need to be standards, that we just can't plunk down words or computer code any old way we happen to feel like it and have any hope of being understood. That doesn't mean I want to take away playfulness in language, or observe rules of foolish consistency (I do end sentences with prepositions sometimes, and I've probably split a few infinitives), but there is value in defining things in a consistent manner. I've done a bit of informal translation, and it was amazing to me just how difficult it can be to find just the right word.

But, behaviorally, I've relaxed my standards considerably in dealing with the outside world. I'm reminded of a project I worked on, and I have two anecdotes:

First, I had a manager who would run memos by me for correction and annotation. He was a great guy, but not much of a writer, so I would mark them up fiercely. After a time, he began calling me "Mr. Picky." After a few days of this, I turned to him and said, "Just how un-picky do you want your programmers to be?" He returned to calling me by my name, but I realized something.

Second, same project, to pump up our clients, someone would put posters up telling how great this lousy project was going to be (it turned into a big lawsuit later). These posters were seasonally-oriented, a seemingly dubious choice given that the biggest problem was how late the project was becoming. At any rate, one day a new poster was spread across the walls of the client, and it said, "Alas, spring has sprung" (and then some other words about how great everything was going to be).

All of my readers are smart and see the problem right away. "Alas" is a term of sorrow or regret, not one of celebration. (It was actually an appropriate choice, but that was not the place for honesty.) No one who saw this poster in preparation, not from the client, not from the high-priced big-city consultant, pointed out the actual meaning of this word.

That same evening, a partner in my firm happened by. He was a man known for his emphasis on quality, even a certain fastidiousness. I said, in my offhand way, "Didn't anyone notice the problem with the first word of the new poster?" He looked, grunted, shrugged, and walked away.

And there's the essential problem of standards and Wikipedia and all the things that McIntyre and Sullivan (and I) are writing: no one cares. Imprecision is seen as spontaneous and genuine, precision is the province of stuffy lawyer types.

When I say to a manager that we should get the menu items and order consistent in an application, and he says we don't have time for the "extras," we know that no one cares. When I point out that a word in documentation doesn't have the right connotation, I can see that no one cares.

So now I tend to let things like that go, and I'm not real happy about it, but my desire for correctness, at this time, in this culture, can only be perceived as negative, as fussy. I have to go along with Anything Goes, or risk calling attention to my age in a field where 40 is suspect, 45 questionable, and 50 too old (because only old people are so picky). I swallow my feelings that customers are ill-served by this lassitude.

I'm not proud of that, because it means I'm contributing to it, but that's the way of it.

Mahatma Blagojevich

My delusional governor (there are those who think that his media tour indicates mental instability; I don't know about that, but, even if there is calculation to it, I think he's addled if he thinks he'll get anything out of it) has begun comparing his ordeal to those of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Mohandas Gandhi.

Yes, I'm certain that Mandela's greatest concern was figuring out which jogging suit to pull out of the closet each morning.

But I don't want to talk about that today. I find the topic kind of depressing, as these clowns are supposed to be representing us instead of posturing for the cameras (and that is not limited to Blago; why the Cook County clerk is getting news time for her opposition to the new Chicago schools CEO, I can't imagine).

No, I'd rather talk about how this story has brought to life one of the most egregious misspellings in the language, namely, the oft-written variants of the name of Gandhi. Most of them get the letters right, but the 'h' seems to bother people if properly placed after the 'd.' So we frequently see "Ghandi," and I mean often.

There seems to be some aversion to putting 'h' after 'd,' probably because it's quite uncommon (though not in Indian languages that have been Romanized; in Sanskrit, the voiced aspirates are spelled gh, jh, dh, and bh). "Gh" may seem more common, though it's really not when placed at the beginning of the word. Perhaps "spaghetti" has inured us to this combination.

Which reminds me, of course, of the famous "ghoti," pronounced as "fish." This is often attributed to Bernard Shaw, which is almost certainly incorrect. But I won't delve into this, as you can find a good discussion here, though I would be remiss if I didn't mention "ghoughpteighbteau," pronounced, quite obviously, "potato."

Naturally, given the ways of the Internet, I'm not the first to be disturbed by this, there are all kinds of results from a Google search of "gandhi spelling." One of the more interesting sites that discusses this is that of Paul Brians of Washington State University. There are quite a few common English errors chronicled here.

You may have noticed that there's no link in the paragraph above. That's because there is a remarkable page at this site that has some very specific requirements about how and where to link. Remarkable to me, because this site has apparently been so successful that Brians can get picky as to the specific link he expects people to use (rather than being pleased that anyone wants to). But I'll go along, take his word for the contention that wrong links cause him problems, so here is the preferred link.

[Note: not surprisingly, Language Log discussed the Gandhi thing already, back in 2004. The discussion isn't particularly deep, but there are some good links, so it's worth reading.]

Words, numbers, they really matter

[I have returned from the coast, about which I'll have more to say later, though posting will be light as I catch up and regroup.]

Kevin Drum has a post, Public Cool on Warming, in which he asserts that a Pew poll on the nation's priorities is "grim news for those of us who think we're rapidly destroying our planet: the public couldn't care less." There is a list of 20 issues, and people were asked if they thought each was a "top priority"; global warming was cited by only 30%, the least of any of the 20, and Drum finds this worrisome.

And I suppose it is, in a way, but this kind of survey is so fraught with problems that I find it hard to work up quite as much indignation. The greatest problem, I think, is the question about "a" top priority, which, apparently, leaves it up to the person polled to determine how many things are "top."

Predictably, the two largest numbers on the list (you can read more here) are the economy and jobs, at 85% and 82% respectively. (Read farther down in the link for the actual statement that was surveyed; Drum's recreation of the graph states, for example, "Military." The actual question was, "Strengthening the military," which is important to know.)

For my part, I'm quite concerned about climate change, but I'm not sure I'd call it a "top" priority right now, except in the way that I could consider all 20 as "top" priorities. That's because I don't believe we can make a whole lot of progress on climate change without getting our economic house in order. Imposing a carbon tax or whatever other scheme is in vogue this week will impose costs on society, particularly on those who are already struggling, and that kind of remedy is going to be a tough sell until we see the stock market going up and unemployment going down.

And it's pretty easy to see the problem with some quick math. 13 of the 20 categories have been collected since January 2001 (actually, a couple fell off in 2003 for some reason, but they were back the next year). The average percentage garnered by those 13 in 2001 was 64%, in 2009 54%.

If we take the spirit of the reporting, that these are, as Drum puts it, "important domestic priorities," the averages would indicate that people believe there are fewer things to worry about now than they did in 2001. Of course, that's nonsensical, other surveys are pretty much unanimous that Americans are considerably more concerned about life and the future than they were last year at this time.

That's the problem, that crises tend to focus the mind and make people reconsider what they think of as "top." The average in 2002 was 52%, even lower than currently, and people were certainly concerned about issues in the wake of 9/11: it's just that other issues paled in comparison to security and terrorism.

And that's what's happening today, as the economy has everyone focusing on it, and global warming or global trade or immigration simply don't match up. So take this latest Pew survey with a grain of salt, and realize that deriving specific conclusions from it is hugely problematic.

Oh, the enormity of it all

I've written about You Don't Say, the blog by Baltimore Sun copy editor (and teacher) John McIntyre, before; it's a witty series of articles about words and language. It squares with my own sensibilities considering language (he calls himself a "mild prescriptivist"), in that I dislike seeing the language corrupted for no reason but laziness, but accept that English is a living thing that will change.

For those who don't follow the camps of language theory, there are two broadly defined camps: prescriptivism and descriptivism. The former is the idea that language should have rules, allowing mutual understanding, even across time. The latter is the idea that language develops the way that people use it, that it is a fluid thing, adapting as necessary to the needs of the person or time.

One of the great misunderstandings is when a descriptivist is asked to be a prescriptivist, as in the case when a linguistics professor (who tend toward descriptivism) writes a usage column for a periodical (the Chicago Tribune had such a column, On Language, for four years, ending only recently). The professor is asked questions such as, "When do I use 'ain't'?," clearly looking for guidance. The answer is, generally, "Use 'ain't' any time you would normally use it," which is very little help.

I personally lean toward the prescriptivist school, not because I believe that language can't or shouldn't change, but because there is value in retaining distinctions. "Legendary," in its traditional use, has a meaning, one which is lost when we apply it to any rapper who's gotten a song in the Billboard Urban Top 50. When meaning changes merely for marketing or self-aggrandizement, my sense is that we've lost far more than we've gained.

McIntytre has a good entry today on the word "enormity," which used to mean something evil, but now is more commonly used as a synonym for "something large." I'm kind of sorry to see its original sense lost, as does McIntyre:

I use the word in its strict sense; it’s a useful word to have in stock. I teach my students that there is a distinction here that fastidious writers observe. But I can’t ignore that the other sense appears to have become prevalent and that no one misunderstands it.

But I too am uncomfortable with those who leap on every example like this one and use it as a bludgeon or a class signifier. McIntyre:

Buckeye Sam posted a comment on the Words to the Wise entry: “Anyway, regarding "enormity," it's my one-word usage test.”

There, in a single sentence, you can see encapsulated what people dislike about purists and the mavenry. Someone is listening to you, not paying attention to the substance of what you say, but waiting for you to make a mistake. And it might not even be a mistake; it could be some aribitrary and idiosyncratic “rule” of which you are unaware, and about which there is dispute among the professionals. The purist is impatiently waiting to give a thumbs-up-thumbs-down judgment, and he is a hanging judge in a court from which there is no appeal.

Precision in the use of language is important. So is a sense of proportion.

I certainly agree with that last sentiment. I can be very impatient with misuse of the language by people who should know better (I just heard one of the local anchors read some copy that described our upcoming cold snap as "unbearable"; clearly that's an attempt to magnify the situation to attract those viewers who love Armageddon, but it's quite inappropriate), but that kind of judgment needs to be tempered by understanding.

And that doesn't just apply to words...

[By the way, in a later post, McIntyre recommends the blog Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. I can't recommend it yet, but I'm going to check it out.]

Addiction

I'm pondering some changes to the approach I will take to the blog; while I do that, I will likely be writing just some quick posts the next few days. So I will start with a phrase that has been bothering me: that the United States is "addicted to oil."

This is a favorite of Tom Friedman's, but others have picked up on it as well. And it's simply untrue.

What is true is that we are accustomed to the lifestyle that cheap oil has afforded us, and there is, I think, a real sentiment that all of these magical changes that are being proposed will be (pick one or more) unworkable, more costly, or in some way much less convenient.

Had we started with cars that never required fluids or maintenance, then someone said we can no longer make those, so we have to move to vehicles that need to have some stinky fluid poured into them every 300-400 miles, and another stinky fluid needs to be changed every 3 months, and there will be regular disruptive maintenance, we would be up in arms. Instead, of course, these relatively small matters replaced the necessity to house and feed a horse or two, and so seemed infinitely better.

By the same token, if the magical energy fairy came down and waved a magic wand and turned all of our cars and SUVs and mini-vans into machines that could be powered by, say, paper, and the requirements for ownership were exactly the same, we'd jump at the chance.

So it may be convenient shorthand or, more likely, alarmist rhetoric to say that we're "addicted to oil," but it's nonsensical, and we should cut it out.

"Guru" - welcome to buzzword heaven

Just when I write a post (yesterday) about the infelicitous term "journo-guru," comes an even more egregious misuse of the term "guru." Hardly have we gotten by Newsweek's printing a story (and I use that term in its definition as "fib") seriously considering "Is Obama the Antichrist?" (prompting some intelligent people to cancel their subscription) than we move on to stupidity and word misuse.

Now, I understand that this article was written by the Associated Press, but some editor at Newsweek felt it was worth posting on their website. (By the way, I generally only link to things that I want you to go look at for some reason, Gentle Reader, but, in this case, I'll make an exception - feel free to ignore this piece of "journalism.") In it, we get the reaction of the AP's "panel of baby-name gurus" to the naming of the new child of the "pop-rock power couple," Ashlee Simpson-Wentz and Pete Wentz. This child will be called Bronx Mowgli Wentz (no comment needed).

There's a lot wrong with the preceding two sentences, but I want to know what a "baby-name guru" is. Because a "guru" is a spiritual teacher, and I don't see how these experts, people who make their money consulting to gullible couples on the best name for baby, could possibly be seen, other than in their own fantasies, as spiritual teachers. (By the way, anyone who wants to contend that the Web is an unalloyed positive needs only consider the power it gives these hucksters to extend their money-making enterprises.)

Should we really wonder that the rest of the world will rejoice when our excess wealth is pared away, leaving (one can hope) no extra money for hiring baby-name gurus?

Diagram this sentence? Wait, someone already has

Just ask, as I did Wednesday, that someone diagram the utterances of Sarah Palin, and, look, the wonders of the Internet, someone (Kitty Burns Florey) has already given it a try (link from Kathy Schenck). Of course, Kitty hasn't yet gotten around to the sentence I quoted, but her stab at some of Governor Palin's earlier oratory is a hoot.

Diagram this sentence

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

From our near vice president (and future president?) Sarah Palin, talking to Wolf Blitzer (via Kevin Drum).

1 potato, 2 potato...oh, potatoes

No, not a Dan Quayle post.

English has this irksome rule for pluralization that says that "zero" items are treated as plural, leaving "one" item as the only singular. Anyone who has worked in programming for any length of time has dealt with this rule; if you have used a substantial number of programs, you have likely seen one (or more) violate this rule.

Yet, it's pretty simple to implement correctly in every computer language I know. I won't bore you with too much code, but it is often as simple as:

(num == 1 ? sstr = "" : sstr = "s");
itemstr = num + " item" + sstr;

which simply means you put the 's' on the end of "item" in all situations except that for which the number of items is 1.

It is one of those things which is simple enough that, when I see a program that has failed to do it correctly, I grow concerned about the overall quality of the program. At the very least, it suggests to me that the company has little concern for the polish, those finishing touches that make a program a pleasurable experience.

So it's pretty irritating when a program that I use every day hasn't been able to get it right. And that program is...Blogger. That's right, the basis for all the blogspot.com blogs has, at least on some goodly number of their templates, managed not to get this right.

But if you look right now, you'll see that, on humble Androcass, it is correct. And that's because it is quite easy to fix. I finally got bothered enough to open up the code, and I didn't even need the kind of code I listed above. I was so surprised that I went out to the Web to verify that it really was that simple, and it was. Since I like to give credit to those who did the work first, I'll point you to this post, which describes the two modifications very succinctly.

(The odd part is that Blogger does have a provision for treating the two cases differently, so somebody thought of it, but they then failed to execute it and make it right. Strange.)

To augment the instructions, you hit Customize from your blog, then Edit HTML. Under Edit Template, you check Expand Widget Templates. Then follow the instructions, and your blog will look far more professional (unless you really don't care, in which case you're probably already not reading).

I use the Rounders 3 built-in template, but I have seen other Blogger blogs and believe that it's a larger problem than just that template.

Making history - 1/26/08

[Obama's winning the nomination and the choice of Palin as the Republican running mate have intensified this trend, to the point where commentators believe that people will vote simply to "make history." If that's true, it's sad, and shows me that we may never escape identity politics.]

I've written before about the misuse of the word historic, a word that, for a variety of reasons, is applied to almost any event of whatever significance. It's an inflationary word, one that is used to pump up all manner of fairly trivial events. The vast majority of events described as historic will not be noted by history (except as stored on various servers on the Internet, preserved for all time, the Domesday Book of our time), because they offer no insight on the flows of history.

Now the word has come full force into the presidential campaign. It has become commonplace for commentators to throw around the word in every story reported or written. That a black man, or a woman, might become the president of the dominant world power is treated as the story, and is seen as justification by some voters to throw their vote one way or another.

There have been 43 presidents. Given the importance of the United States on the world stage, every president has found himself prominent in the mix of world events. Some have risen to the challenge, some have not. Some changed the direction not only of the U.S., but of the globe. Every single one, yes, even Millard Fillmore, can be considered historic.

It is interesting that the country may be ready to elect either an African-American or a woman. I don't know that I fully buy into the vast significance, because this country still has race and gender issues, issues that will not disappear simply because one person has been elected to one office. It certainly does not denote the kind of self-congratulatory back-patting that we will go through if one of these people does become president.

But the issues that confront this nation transcend identity politics. There are so many challenges facing anyone that would take the job of president, and those are not black challenges, or female challenges (what constitutes a women's or black issue, anyway? I well understand the legal and moral hurdles that an earlier generation of activist had to overcome, and I'm not suggesting that we are precisely where we should be on gender or race, but do we want a president who will see redressing past wrongs as a big priority?).

Even if a president didn't want to be historic, world events would prevent that. The office, by its very nature, is historic, and it's very hard, especially in real time, to decide what will be more or less historic. I'm hoping the next president will make history, not because of the color of skin or the presence of certain chromosomes, but by helping this country deal with its internal divisiveness, uniting us in taking a path back to where we should, and can, be.

This post is historic, by the legendary Androcass - 1/6/08

[No change here; if anything, these words are being used more now that they were back in January. And Britney Spears is called "legendary" by some nitwits, just search Google if you want to see it for yourself.]

Two words that have become abused, almost beyond meaning, are "legendary" and "historic." The reason is the constant need for aggrandizement, for hype, even for promotion of self-importance.

"Legendary" is applied to anyone you've ever heard of, and has been reduced to the meaning of "famous." I'm not sure that Britney has been called that yet, but it wouldn't surprise me. The original definition, synonymous with "fictitious," has been lost in the rush to inflate everyone. A quick Google search shows the following legendary figures: Bob Marley (at least he's dead), Dr. John, The Jordanaires (they woo-wooed behind Elvis), football coach Bo Schembechler (most college football and basketball coaches are legendary), Bobby Darin, Van McCoy (do the Hustle), Alfredo Alcala (who?), Eartha Kitt, Sandra Dee, and on, and on.

"Historic," which used to carry at least some sense of something that had already happened, whether it had yet stood the test of time or not, now means something that the speaker or writer thinks will be important. Football playoff games are historic before they are played (the New England Patriots game last weekend was historic either way; they were going to win to go to 16-0, or they were going to lose to fall short). Charlie Gibson desribed last night's debate as historic before it happened, despite the sheer number of debates that have already occurred.

Folks, "historic" means something of significance, something that people will remember and talk and think about in decades and centuries to come. World War II was historic, no football game is (what was the result of that Bath-York soccer game back in 1734?).

It seems to me that both of these words have taken this prevalence (and, therefore, much less importance) due to a need/desire to seem significant. Charlie Gibson believes the debate is historic in no small part because he's a part of it. Sandra Dee is legendary because that makes your obsession with her somehow acceptable.

But all that ends up happening is that the words lose their meaning and their significance. If everybody is legendary, if every event is historic, than nobody and no events are, and we lose yet another distinction.

Redemption

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.
Wo! have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them-a can-a stop-a the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfill de book.
Won't you help to sing
Dese songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs -
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom. (Bob Marley - Redemption Song)

I said yesterday (I'm not sure if my wife heard it, I may have been talking to myself - I do that a lot while contemplating Olympics coverage) that it would take no time before Al Trautwig said that Alicia Sacramone would be looking for redemption in the vault finals in gymnastics. (Alicia's the young woman who fell off the balance beam while competing in the team qualifications, possibly costing the American "women" the team gold medal.)

As it turned out, I didn't even have to wait for Al, as the announcer promoted the event by intoning, "Alicia Sacramone looks for redemption in the vault final."

Let's look at the definitions for the word "redemption" (we'll actually look at "redeem").

• To recover ownership of something by paying a sum.
• To set free, rescue or ransom.
• To save from a state of sin (and from its consequences).
• To restore the reputation or honour of oneself or something.

(By the way, these are all transitive, so Alicia can't really look for redemption, she can only hope to redeem herself.)

Neither of the first two seems to apply here, though one does wonder if the Chinese team might favor one of these ("Win gold, or your family disappears under the Three Gorges Dam!"). So we're left with one of the latter two definitions.

"Redemption" is actually one of my pet peeves, as it is a word used to describe any opportunity to do well after having done poorly. Sports announcers use it all the time now, in their usual effort to create drama where the actual drama likely suffices. I don't come from a particularly religious background, but "redemption" has, at least to me, always carried fairly strong religious overtones, one of the reasons the Bob Marley song I quoted above has such resonance.

That leads us to the third definition, that of saving someone from a state of sin. The wide receiver who drops a ball, the slugger who strikes out, Sacramone, they probably aren't being given the opportunity to do that. Given the false importance with which we weigh down our fun and games, we can't rule this out as the relevant definition, but I prefer to think we're not that quite gone.

So we come to the last, "To restore the reputation or honour of oneself or something." (Yes, it's a British definition, but it's the most concise and complete I found.) This is very likely the one that the commentators intend to use, but it is at least as irrelevant as any other.

To anyone other than gymnastics fans, Alicia Sacramone had no reputation until the NBC cameras first focused on her in Beijing. Yes, she's wearing a USA uniform, but that, in and of itself, doesn't give us the right to assign any particular expectations to her.

If she has no reputation, then there is no need for her to restore it. She owes us nothing, save perhaps an honest effort, certainly not a certain score on the balance beam. I've done nothing for Alicia Sacramone, so my job is simply to admire what she does without placing the burden of my hopes and dreams on her.

If Sacramone feels she needs to redeem herself in the eyes of her parents, who have supported her all the years of her life, or for her coach, who has given untold hours toward her success (but was paid for it), that's between her and them. My guess is that this Brown student who has also found the time to pursue a world-class gymnastics career has already paid them many times over, but that's their business.

To trot out a word of such importance and serious import, and misapply it so casually, actually makes me a bit queasy when I hear it. Alicia's accomplished more "for" the United States than most 20-year-olds, and she has a right to fail or succeed without feeling as if she's let 300 million Americans down, the vast majority of whom never heard of her before a week ago.

(By the way, there are a number of articles on the Web implying that there should be some consolation for Sacramone in being Googled for her hotness. I don't know her, of course, but I'm guessing that she's not quite so shallow as to see the search histories of adolescent minds as replacement for a lifelong dream that didn't turn out as she had hoped.)

Quasi-empire?

Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan, in which he responds to a reader who dislikes Sullivan's use of the term "empire." Without getting into the specifics of the post itself (Sullivan pretty well captures my thinking on this, and I still think we need to put ourselves into other people's heads - how would we feel if Canada decided to garrison some troops in Wichita, no matter how noble the stated reason?), I'm fascinated that so much of the argument concerns the term.

Without getting into Sapir or Whorf or Saussure here, there are times when we really do frame our arguments based on the words we have. Maybe our presence in Iraq is not the expression of empire, but it's something, and a lack of a word for it should not (but often does) constrain our discussion.

I had a similar experience about a month ago when a post of mine received fairly harsh comments from a reader over the term "recession." That many people in this country are hurting seems to me of far more importance than the term we use to describe it, but, to this one reader, the way to cast aspersions on my idea was to point out that the term was not wholly accurate.

So we have a presence in Iraq that isn't quite an empire, and we have an economic situation that isn't quite a recession. Can we find new words for these concepts, or, barring that, discuss them on the merits rather than worrying about which term applies?

Programmer? Developer? Engineer?

[Interesting weekend - for the first time in a while, I dropped in only long enough to post on Sunday; otherwise, I was off from Saturday morning until now. There really is life going on outside the Web.]

I have some thoughts about the essential paradoxes of the positions being taken by those in power, but I haven't worked them out thoroughly. So I'll write about something of which I was reminded in an article by Norm Matloff of UC-Davis, to which I was pointed in a comment by Citizen Carrie. Matloff writes:

The job title Computer Programmer has for some years been in the process of being replaced by the title Software Engineer. Same job, fancier name. So don't be fooled by the fact that the BLS separates the two titles in their data.

As someone who has been in this field for quite a few years, I'm disappointed to see this collapse of titles (I knew it was happening based on the ads I've been seeing, but I hadn't realized it was pervasive enough to be seen by academe).

The problem, of course, with any language change of this type is that it removes important and useful distinctions (I wrote a post about this months ago, referring to the words "legendary" and "historic" - I understand why the descriptivist linguists think of this as part of the natural process of language change, but what are we supposed to use for events or people that really are "legendary" or "historic"?). Once you call every entry-level position Software Engineer, you lose the ability to set the bar (and the salary) for a job that actually requires engineering skills.

To me, these terms are two elements of a spectrum to which a third term needs to be added: developer. I do not say that there was ever a time at which these terms were used the way I will propose, but I believe there was a time when we seemed to be moving toward a standard. Apparently, we are moving away now.

A programmer is someone who works at writing code for a computer to execute. They can most readily be defined as what they are not, that is, not developers or engineers. They tend to write code to the exclusion of all else unless required to do something else, their code tends to need rework to be made robust, and they enjoy the hacker mentality. They may be very productive if measured by raw lines of code, but come up well short if measured by effective lines of code. You might think that programmers are only valuable as a transitional state on the way to one of the other two categories, and that companies would have a strong incentive to help them move, but, in practice, that often doesn't happen. There are an amazing number of programmers who have 15, 20, 25 years of experience and are still just throwing code down, hoping it works.

A developer represents the next level of proficiency. This is someone who understands the interactions between various parts of a project, has some inkling of the business side and its requirements, and voluntarily does non-code activities (though reminders may be necessary). They have an idea as to what makes a professional; perhaps they've read one or more books on software development but have little interest in anything more than cherry-picking the hints they like to use. The better ones have some idea of development as an exacting discipline, and have confidence in their abilities in tackling new challenges.

An engineer represents the highest level of professionalism. They recognize that writing code, while still the most fun and satisfying, is a relatively small part of the job. Requirements need to be gathered; if the engineer isn't doing that themselves, they are reviewing them rigorously. Similarly, testing needs to be seen as an essential part of the process, and the engineer devotes a good portion of time to that. Most importantly, they see software development as more than just slapping down code to accomplish a task, but as a communication to the future, a way of explaining a business process through a computer language. No challenge is too great as long as the problem can be broken down and expressed as a sequence, and the tools used are whatever is most useful to the task at hand.

If you know anything about the current job market, you recognize that the engineer can have big trouble. There is a perception that the emphasis on quality is inimical to the goals of the business, namely, churning out product to the waiting market. Were there true engineers with any power working on Vista, it couldn't have been released in its initial state. Engineers, with their insistence on repeatable process and bulletproof standards, are seen as troublemakers (and I would grant there are times some engineers focus too much on the product and not enough on the "needs" of the company...but someone has to).

There are many engineers who believe that no one in software should call themselves "engineer," because there is no generally accepted licensure for software engineers. But, as you can see in my taxonomy, there is a fair amount of rigor in the definition. A software engineer should be someone who reads assiduously in the technical literature and the process literature. He or she should be as well-versed in The Mythical Man-Month as The Art of Computer Programming.

That we are inflating the title of a hack programmer into the title of a rigorous engineer is distasteful. The worst effect is that the person who has experience as a true engineer is competing against those who have merely possessed the title, and the latter will undercut the former on compensation every time. And the company will never know the difference, mainly due to the "evaluation crisis" (about which I wrote briefly before, and should probably write more). So not just the titles collapse, but the reward structure as well - and then there is no incentive to put in the work necessary to be an engineer, so we don't have any.

Then where do the jobs go?

Th Th

I was listening to the Cubs game last night on WGN 720, and Pat Hughes, their fine announcer, said that Colorado Rockies outfielder Seth Smith was the only name he could think of that ended in two "th" sounds (he opined that an impaired person might say Garth Brooks that way).

I don't think he was trying very hard, since he forgot the undoubtedly vast population of Elizabeth Smiths out there. Faith Smith may also mind being overlooked.

Boycott, girlcott, we all cott

Via Andrew Sullivan, John Hinderaker on Power Line:

Barack Obama has boycotted Fox News for the past two years. Obama's boycott ended today, as he was interviewed by Chris Wallace. The result suggests that Obama had nothing to fear from the ostensibly hostile crowd at Fox.

I didn't see the Fox interview with Obama, so I'll assume that what I've heard is right, that he did a good job. No, my point today has to do with the word "boycott."

When did "boycott" change from a group action to an individual one? Apparently, it has, but I didn't notice it until a few weeks ago when various politicians (e.g., Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton) began urging President Bush to boycott the Olympic opening ceremonies.

I have always understood "boycott" to refer to the action of a group, refusing to buy products or do business with some offending party. I'll grant the definition in a number of dictionaries I consulted do not entirely specify a group: from American Heritage, "To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion," though the word "together" is there.

The first time I remember the use of "boycott" was the grape boycott organized by Cesar Chavez. In all the years since, though, I can never remember it being applied to the actions of a single person.

The question is, is this change in usage meant to aggrandize the person or the event? Do we talk about Obama or Bush boycotting something because we want to make them more important, or because we want to make more out of what is a matter of individual choice to call attention to the issue?

Given the identity of the callers in the cases above, I'm assuming the latter. But if it's a "boycott" without a statement of larger principle, is it even important? If Bush decided not to attend the Beijing Olympics out of solidarity with Tibetans or Sudanese (and what in his presidency would make anyone believe that these are sufficient reasons to get him to do anything?), we would hardly expect him to call out the Chinese directly - he would cite "scheduling conflicts" or "ranch brush emergency," anything but risking a Chinese loss of face.

Or maybe it's a way of embarrassing the "boycotter." Clinton and Pelosi don't think Bush will accede, so they make an issue of it and inflate it further by using the term, "boycott." Similarly, Power Line isn't traditionally a pro-Obama blog, so they, in effect, ridicule him subtly by terming his previous failures to appear on Fox as a "boycott" (though Hinderaker was fairly positive, to his credit, while still insisting that McCain would win in November).

I don't profess to fully understand this, but I know that, when I refuse to do business at one company or another, I'll feel a little more proud thinking that I'm boycotting.