Writing – Page 21 – a sibilant intake of breath

Pinker on language

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. p. 3 (hardcover)

My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:

The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.

Fixing the apostrophe with two marks for two purposes

Both for people who are new to English and for life-long speakers, one of the most consistently confusing aspects of the language is the apostrophe.

There^†s a pretty straightforward reason for this, I think, and it^†s one that could be addressed fairly easily if people are willing to consider a minor linguistic change. There are two main uses for the apostrophe:

Indicating possession, as in: “The cat’s bed is beside the dog’s bed, on the floor between Carol’s bed and Peter’s bed” and
Indicating a contraction, as in: “I’ve noticed there’s not a lot of time ’til Christmas”

This dual use is most problematic insofar as it causes it’s/its errors. People are naturally used to seeing the apostrophe as a marker for possession, so “The dog is vexed by it’s fleas” seems intuitive.

A simple solution would be to use two different marks for the two different purposes. Since possession seems to be the use that is most intuitive for people, I would suggest using the new mark for contractions. A superscript dagger wouldn^†t change the look of printed text too much. Furthermore, the character is already included in nearly all typefaces, and isn^†t widely used for any purpose that isn^†t equally well served by a numbered footnote. People who chose to make the change wouldn^†t confuse people excessively, and English’s reputation as an incoherent hodgepodge of a language might be somewhat mitigated.

The problems with apostrophes also connect to the awkward issues involved in indicating plurality and possession for words the always end in ‘s’, over which there is no agreement even among pedantic language experts. Using two punctuation marks wouldn^†t settle that, but it may help reduce the odds of error.

Method-driven versus problem-driven

It is our impression, however, that much rational choice theory is method driven rather than problem driven, and that this is partly responsible for its defects. Empirical science is problem driven when the elaboration of theories is designed to explain phenomena that arise in the world. Method-driven research occurs when a theory is elaborated without reference to what phenomena are to be explained, and the theorist subsequently searches for phenomena to which the theory in question can be applied.

Green, Doland and Ian Shapiro. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. 1994. p. 194 (hardcover)

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Graveyard of blogs

Either because people are moving away from blogging in general or because I haven’t been seeking out new blogs, many of the sites in my blogroll haven’t been updated for long spans of time.

I feel the time to pull them from the list has come – at least in the case of blogs not updated in the past six months.

For reference, here they are:

I hope all the authors have moved on to stimulating new projects.

The next comp countdown

The official date hasn’t yet been set, but my comprehensive exam in public policy is now about a month away. Whereas the other members of my study group rattle off the authors, titles, and years of books and articles with disarming rapidity, I find myself unable to remember anything more than the haziest outlines of most sources. I have a great deal of work to do, especially if I am to avoid wasting the summer with re-preparation after a failed first attempt.

First, however, I have a stack of papers to finish grading (for tomorrow). I also have one last paper of my own to write for the 30th, along with twice-a-week comp prep meetings, for which I am meant to write draft outlines to past questions.

Essays, grading, etc

This week involves one of my last pre-comp spurts of academic work for this term.

For tomorrow, I need to write a draft comp answer on policy failure, inequality, and political economy v. institutionalist v. agent-centred theories.

On Wednesday, my interview assignment for my qualitative methods course is due. I need to finish the astonishingly time consuming task of writing the verbatim transcript, then produce about 2500 words of analysis.

Sometime between Friday and next Tuesday, I am meant to grade the papers for the U.S. government and politics class where I am a TA.

After this, there is just one more qualitative methods assignment, along with terrifying masses of work and revision for the public policy comp. I am hoping the danger of having my entire summer ruined by the need to re-prepare in the event of failure will produce the desperation necessary to force myself to do comp adequate reading and preparation over the next month.

From Kitty Fisher to Rasputin

This website is highly entertaining. Here are a few Quite Interesting nuggets:

“A famous 18th century courtesan named Kitty Fisher used to distribute pictures of herself small enough to be concealed in the lid of a snuffbox… Fisher led a sensationally dissolute life; Casanova relates that she once ate a thousand-guinea bank note on bread-and-butter.”
“Another famous kidnap victim who did not display Stockholm Syndrome was Julius Caesar. Kidnapped by pirates and then ransomed, he raised a fleet, pursued and captured the pirates, and then crucified them, as he had told them he would while in captivity – a promise the pirates had taken as a joke.”
“Normal healthy sleepers wake up between 15 and 35 times every night.”
“The only other animal with a clear-cut menopause followed by many more years of life is the killer whale.”
“Each individual part of a Saturn V rocket had a 99.9 per cent reliability rate, which means that on a good flight, roughly 6,000 of the 6,000,000 parts were expected to fail.”
“Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon, but was the first human being to celebrate Holy Communion away from the Earth, and the first to urinate on another world. He still keeps his Apollo 11 travel expenses receipt framed on his living-room wall: ‘Cape Kennedy, Fla. – Moon – Pacific Ocean. Amount claimed 33 dollars and 31 cents.’ Buzz had jokingly tried to claim for 880,000 miles at 8 cents a mile. NASA replied with an invoice for one Saturn V rocket, ready for travel, at $185,000,000.”
“The best-selling work of fiction of the 15th century was The Tale of the Two Lovers, an erotic novel by the man who later became Pope Pius II.”
“The US ban [on subliminal messaging] is a Federal Communications Commission rule rather than a law, and in 1978 they waived it so that police in Wichita could send a subliminal message to a serial murderer called ‘the BTK Killer’ to turn himself in, hidden in a news broadcast. It didn’t work; he was eventually caught in 2005 by other means (irritated that the police had failed to link one of his murders to him, the Killer called them to ask whether it was possible to trace someone from a floppy disc. The police said ‘Er – no’, so he sent the disc, and they tracked him down by Googling the metadata it carried).”
“Vitamin A is really toxic; we use it in anti-wrinkle creams because it actually kills the top layer of skin, making it look fresher. Too much, however, can be fatal.”
“In general, the only members of the UK armed forces who can wear a full beard are the Royal Navy. A sailor who wants to do so must submit a form requesting ‘permission to stop shaving’. He is then allowed up to two weeks to ‘grow a full set’. At this point he must present himself to the Master at Arms (the senior Service policeman in any ship or unit) who will decide if his beard looks stupid or is respectably full enough to be permitted.”
“Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent 30 years studying prairie dog behaviour… The result was the first dictionary of Prairiedogese, in which the different calls could be decoded – first by computer but eventually by ear. Not only could the prairie dogs differentiate between hawks, coyotes, badgers and humans, they could also differentiate between short and tall humans and even what colour shirt they were wearing. (Interestingly, they couldn’t tell male from female). Not only is Professor Slobodichikoff’s work the first successful attempt to decode a rodent language, it is probably unique among mammals.”
“In some countries, being a criminal doesn’t exclude you from having to pay tax… Of course, if you have to pay tax on an illegal action, you can theoretically claim expenses against it. In 2005, a bank robber in the southern Dutch town of Chaam was able to subtract the cost of his gun from his fine. The judge accordingly reduced the fine from $8,750, the amount stolen from the bank, to $6,500.”
“In fact, the autopsy didn’t show any poison in Rasputin’s stomach at all and what seems likeliest is that Rasputin was beaten and stabbed and then shot twice. Then, upon finding that he still had a pulse, a third man shot him in the head. What killed Rasputin was being shot through the forehead, which would kill anyone… Another interesting facet to the affair is the suggestion that it may have been an MI6 officer that killed him; the only man present with the sort of revolver which would have fired the fatal bullet was a British Intelligence officer called Oswald Rayner. MI6 had been involved in planning Rasputin’s death, worried that he was going to persuade the Tsar to pull Russia out of World War I and probably lose it for Britain. It is possible that British Intelligence actively ordered Rasputin’s death. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing for sure because Rayner burnt all of his papers before his death in 1961.”

Regarding ‘exit’

When voice fails to convince the client to support the analyst’s policy choice, the issue advocate may be forced to turn to exit as his only means of influence. He may seek other, more receptive, clients in the bureaucracy or he may leave the bureaucracy in order to be able to promote his policies from outside provided, of course, that the exit option is not too expensive. In any case, for the issue advocate, keeping one’s bags packed may be an ethical imperative.

Jenkins-Smith, H. C. (1982). “Professional roles for policy analysts: A critical assessment.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2(1): 88-100.