entitlement inversion

Isn't language interesting?

I saw this meme posted on Facebook today. I've seen others like it many times before. They may have had the exact same language. I'm not sure.

But the actual argument is, essentially, "These things are not entitlements because we are actually entitled to them."

I find that curious.*
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*Please note that I am not taking a position on Social Security and whether or how it should be changed. I'm just observing the inversion of language.

 

so why isn't "crepant" a word too?

Years ago, I sent my boss an email about two reports that didn't tie. I referred to the numbers that should have matched (but didn't) as "the discrepant figures."

"Discrepant?" my boss chuckled, questioning my choice of words.

"They don't match. There's a discrepancy." I clarified.

He questioned whether it was a real word, and I suggested he check dictionary.com.

Of course it was there, and my boss conceded the point. These years later I can admit that I wasn't sure it would be in the site -- I wasn't really sure it was a legitimate word.

A couple weeks ago I was reading an article about freedom of religion and came upon a quote by the 17th-century Puritan, Nathaniel Ward*, in which he used the word:

He that is willing to tolerate any religion or discrepant way of religion, besides his own, unless it be in matters merely indifferent, either doubts of his own, or is not sincere in it.

Despite it being more than a decade after we had had the exchange, I emailed my former boss the quote, noting that I am not the first person to use the word.**

My former boss simply noted that coming up with a quote from the 1600's doesn't really prove that a word is in general use today.

*No, I hadn't heard of him either.
** I also noted that I don't agree with or endorse the sentiment.

if you can't get a seat at roosevelt avenue...

You know those cute folksy expressions that, at least in the popular imagination, are the mark of rural
speech patterns? Well, I think we urban folks need some of them too. So I'd like to propose some folks-sounding urban phrases and expressions.

The first one, by the way, harkens back to my high school days. There was some guy I vaguely knew (he was two grades ahead of me) who used it as the quote under his picture in the yearbook. I think I know what it meant, but I'm not sure. Anyway, After that one, the rest are from my fertile mind. I am open to suggestions for more expressions.

• If you can't get a seat at Roosevelt Avenue, you're not really trying.
• Even Times Square gets snow.
• Don't open a bodega and call it Whole Foods.
• He couldn't get mugged if he tried.
• Don't snatch my purse and then say you have no ID.
• Like homeless to an E train.
• If you'r crossing sixth, watch out for the roaches.

on language: i can't imagine

SOmetimes I need to control the literal side of my nature.

Case in point: The idiom, "I can't imagine." As in "I can't imagine anyone would prefer Chicago-style pizza over New York."

Every time I use that expression I have to stifle the urge to pause and say "Actually, I can imagine it as evidenced by the fact that I did." To claim that I can't imagine something is to prove that I can.

Yes, I know that idioms mean what they mean even if they're not literally true. Still...

a word about language: who's winning?

What does it mean to be "winning" a game?

By common usage, you are "winning" if you are ahead by some commonly-accepted measure. In most sports -- and that's where I'm going to stay for the rest of this post -- that means you've scored more points.

In a football game, suppose a team is down by two points with five seconds left, but they have the ball on their opponent's five yard line. They've stopped the clock and they're bringing in their kicker to attempt a field goal. It's an easy chip shot for him. He's perfect from that distance. We may debate which team is likelier to win (and, of course, I set up a situation where the team with fewer points is more likelier to win). Still, we say that the team with more points is winning.

In baseball, if the visiting team team scores a run in the top of the first inning, we say they're winning -- even though the home team hasn't batted yet.*

But I think we're doing it incorrectly. And I'm not saying that we should be indicating which team is likelier to win.

What does it mean to be winning? It means you are in the midst of a process, at the end of which you will have won. If we accept that, then a team is winning of they will ultimately win. It doesn't matter if that team is down by 40 million runs. Or goals. Or whatever it is that points are called in the sport they're playing. If they will ultimately win the game then they are winning.

Yeah, I know. I know. Words and phrases have meaning beyond their etymology. Since we all know what is meant by the simple question, "Who's winning?" there's no need to get all pedantic about it. Besides, communication would be hampered if we could never say who's winning until the game is over.

Still, every time someone asks me who's winning I want to say, "I dunno. Ask me after the game."

*Unless you're my sister, who will indicate which team is winning based on the score after the last completed inning**
**Unless the home team scores and goes ahead in the bottom of the inning, in which case she will acknowledge that they're winning because the visiting team cannot score again until the next inning

a word about language: the learning curve

At work, I was talking to someone about a new project I'll be taking on. It was noted that there would be a steep learning curve.

The meaning of that expression, as everyone knows, is that it would be difficult to learn what's needed. I suppose the expression came about because it's hard to climb a steep hill. So, steep learning curve means hard to learn. But that always sounds wrong to me. If the learning curve is a graph showing how much is learned over how much time, a steep learning curve means that a lot is learned quickly, which seems to imply that the subject is easy to learn.

So, guess what I found? I did a Google search to find an image to include with this post -- while I have no data to back me up, I am willing to bet that including a  graphic makes it more likely that people browsing this blog will stop and read. And I found a site that seems to agree with me.

I have no experience with that website, but the author made the same point as I did above. Only she made it better, and seems to imply that in technical fields, the concept of "learning curve" is handled the way I instinctively think of it. To quote:

The typical plotting of a learning curve shows the time (or experience) for learning on the x axis and the percentage of learning on the y axis. In science (and contrary to popular usage of the term) a steep learning curve represents a quickly-learned subject. Difficult subjects will have a longer duration to complete learning and, as such, a shallower curve. The relative percentage of learning can show how some subjects can be mostly learned quickly while some difficult aspects may remain resulting in plateaus in the graph where learning stalls. 

Now try convincing the world of that.

british slang explained! (one bit of it, anyway)

TLDR: It refers to fifty pound notes.

One of my favorite pop songs is Wreckless Eric's "Take the Cash." But there's a passage in the second verse that I simply couldn't figure out. It starts at a minute into this video.

What was that.."power ring on the dill" "sweetest in the whetties"? For decades I couldn't figure it out. I tried looking it up on the intertubes, but online lyric sites are often unreliable. Here's one example (Spoiler alert: It has mistakes.).

Eventually I had my chance to ask the man himself...I approached Eric at one of his house concerts. He explained it. "It's the sweetness of the readies makes the bell ring on the till."

"OK," I asked, "what does 'readies' mean?"

He told me that it means money. That then reminded me of another song. Dr. Feelgood's "As Long as the Price is Right" uses the word also. At just over half a minute in this video, you can hear the line "If you've got the readies."

And that being a synonym for money made sense in context. Mystery solved!

Of course, now I had another mystery -- why does "readies" mean money? It took me a couple of years, but I finally asked a Brit who was staying with us. Years? Yeah, it was a mystery, but not uppermost in my mind.

So I asked if "readies" is a slang term for pound notes or something.

"Fifty pound notes," he explained. Because they're red.

It all made sense! Reddys! Not readies! So simple...

Now, if only Eric can explain why, at the end of "Take the Cash," he calls it "K.A.S.H."

house of cards -- a bad biblical translation

I was watching House of Cards (good show, by the by -- I love antiheroes), and came upon this scene.

Frank discusses the concept of justice with a priest, and they discuss the ten commandments. After the priest says that the ten commandments can be read a million different ways, Frank says that "Thou shalt not kill" seems pretty clear.

The unintended irony of that line was not lost on me, since it hit on one of my pet peeves. I have heard people criticize the Bible for since it seems to contradict that commandment frequently. Despite the commandment, there is a lot of killing in the bible -- both in warfare and as capital punishment. And it all seems to have God's approval. This, some argue is contradiction.

But the problem is in the translation. The commandment is לא תרצח, "lo teer'tsach." Though it's commonly translated as "Thou shalt not kill," a more accurate translation would be "Thou shalt not murder." The difference is that killing in warfare, or as the penalty for a crime (as carried out by a an organized and fair justice system as part of an organized system of laws within society) is not the same as murder.

It seems to me the priest should have known this, and pointed out that important distinction to Frank.

work on shabbos? try calling it melakha

Over a year ago, I posted this item about a conversation I overheard. In a nutshell, someone was having trouble with the idea that rational numbers are countable. His problems boiled down to the fact that he didn;t understand the precise definition of "countable." The rational numbers don't meet his intuitive definition.

I was thinking of another example where words have specific meanings, and people get confused because they aren;t quite aware of it. That example is halakhah -- Jewish law. People know that, observant Jews cannot perform work on the Sabbath. But it can seem confusing. You can't carry a housekey with you when you go for a walk (unless you stay inside an enclosure -- the definition of which is more complicated than I will go into here). I've known people to have housekeys made into pins or tie-bars so they can take them with them by wearing them. Meanwhile, though carrying a key is "work" and against the rules, you can carry a 50-pound sack of concrete back and forth in your living room. For hours. No problem.

How is carrying the concrete in your living room not "work"?

The answer is that the prohibition isn;t against "work" (whether that be as defined by physics or colloquial usage). The prohibition is against a class of activities, the Hebrew word for which is "melakhah." I won't attempt to give a definition of melakhah or list the activities in the class. "Melakhah" is often translated as "work" because that's proved useful as a shorthand. But the key is to remember that it's just shorthand, and sometimes it's wrong.

grammar rage volume ii: the exception that proves the rule

This time I turn my attention to the misused phrase, "the exception that proves the rule."

The phrase is often used to mean "the exception to the rule." Consider the hypothetical conversation:

"Of course colas have caffeine. But root beers don't."
"Well, Barq's root beer has caffeine."
"Yeah, well, that's the exception that proves the rule."

It kind of goes along with the (incorrect) idea that every rule has to have an exception. Of course, the logic doesn't hold. Finding an exception to a rule doesn't prove that the rule is a rule. If anything, it weakens it.

Unless...

Suppose there's no rule explicitly stated, but an exception is explicitly stated. The statement of the exception implies the existence of the rule. Because, if there were no rule, there would be no need to state the exception. And that's what "the exception that proves the rule" is all about.

Suppose, for example, there's a sign along the curb: "No parking Wednesdays 9 AM - 10 AM." Because there's a sign specifying a limited time when parking is not allowed, one can reasonably infer that parking is allowed at other time. The exception, the stated fact that you can't park during that one hour every week, proves the rule, that you can park there other times.

grammar rage volume i: begging the question

Yeah, I suffer from grammar rage. There are certain abuses of the English language that get under my skin. I'm not sure why. I'm sure that there are ways that I abuse the language and don't know it. And they probably annoy other people. But they don't annoy me. Since I don't know about them. This blogpost is about one such abuse. Begging a question.

I often hear people talk about something begging a question.

"Well, that just begs the question: How did he get all that money?"

"That certainly begs the question: Where does all that garbage go?"

The problem is that they are using the phrase to mean "raises the question." It kind of sounds right, the way they say it, since one can easily see the phrase as a shortened version of "begs for the question to be asked." But it's wrong.

To "beg a question" is to answer a question by restating the premise without actually giving any additional information.

Sometimes one of my kids asks me why I don't find a particular joke funny. If I answer by saying "I just don't see the humor in it," then I'm begging the question.

a meaningless number

You know what annoys me way more than it should?

Statements that refer to an amount -- typically potential savings or prices as "up to <amount or percentage> or more!"

It's on my mind today because I got an advertising flyer in the mail from Liberty Mutual Insurance. They want me to switch my auto insurance. Actually, I'm happy with GEICO, thank you very much. But the following three statements appear in bold:

• Save up to $519.52 or more a year.
• starting with savings of up to $519.52 or more a year.
• On average drivers save up to $519.52 or more a year

The problem is that the statements are essentially meaningless. Because the phrases "up to" and "or more" are included, it doesn't really say anything. The statements could be rewritten with $1,000. Or $10,000. Or $57,873,293.61. It would still be just as true.

I've seen this kind of thing in ads for sales -- "all prices reduced up to 50% or more!" And it always annoys me.

Maybe I need decaf