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George Carlin - 7 Words You Can't Say On TV

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use/Distinction

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One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called "use/mention distinction". Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it.

Simply put, the use/mention distinction is this. Let's look at use first.

In order to choose an easy case, let's say that the word I'm using is a noun. If I use a noun, I utter or write the noun in order to refer to what the noun refers to. So if I write "Neptune is the farthest planet from the sun in our solar system", the word "Neptune" in that sentence refers to the planet Neptune.

If I mention a word, on the other hand, I am not using the word. Let's take the case of nouns again. If I mention the word "Neptune", then I'm referring to the word itself, rather than the object to which the word refers. So, for example, in the sentence '"Neptune" isn't the only seven-letter planetary name', I'm referring to the word "Neptune" rather than the planet Neptune.

Simple, right?

So why does it seem so hard for people to get it?! For example, there was the recent kerfuffle over an Augsburg University professor who, in discussing James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, had a student who quoted Baldwin's use of the N-word. The professor, then, in discussing the student's mentioning of the word, employed the word himself.

Note: Baldwin used the word, but the professor, Phillip Adamo, did NOT; he merely mentioned the word by discussing the student's quotation of Baldwin.

Adamo himself was clear on this point. He's quoted as saying

I see a distinction between use and mention. To use the word, to inflict pain or harm, is unacceptable. To mention the word, in a discussion of how the word is used, is necessary for honest discourse.

Ironically, however, the very article from which I take that quote - a piece in Inside Higher Ed entitled "Too Taboo for Class?" - discusses Adamo's employment of the N-word in a ham-handed way that erases the use/mention distinction. Indeed, the first sentence in the tag-line under the title is, "Professor is suspended for USING the N-word in class" (emphasis mine).

Now, although I don't think that Adamo should have been punished at all for mentioning the word, I actually think that he's wrong when he says, at the end of the brief quote, that mentioning the N-word - the actual six-letter word that begins with "n" and ends with "r" - "is necessary for honest discourse".

In fact, all that's necessary for honest discourse is some way of referring to the word so that we know which word we're talking about. And to do that, the euphemistic "N-word", though inelegant, is perfectly serviceable.

And when it comes to actually employing the word itself, I agree with Jelani Cobb, the New Yorker staff writer and Columbia University journalism professor, who is cited at the end of the Inside Higher Ed piece as suggesting that

the potential downsides of actually saying it are large enough, and the likelihood of derailing conversation high enough, that it's not worth saying even if you have the most purely pedagogical motives.

Thinking about why Cobb is right is helpful, and may be useful in explaining why, though the use/mention distinction is so simple, it's nevertheless so tricky.

It seems to me that the problem is that, even when you emphasize that you are merely mentioning the word, rather than using it, the violent, racist echoes of the word are too loud to ignore.

Here's one way that I've found helpful in making sense of this property that certain words have of being morally loaded, even when someone explicitly states that they don't intend to employ those words in a way that carries their morally loaded connotations. It involves the notion of quasi-realism, coined by the philosopher Simon Blackburn.

Roughly, quasi-realism is a position regarding the nature of moral beliefs or moral claims. In order to describe it, let's first look at a view that is VERY different from quasi-realism, a naive moral realism.

According to this naive moral realism, there are moral facts just like there are other sorts of facts, like facts about whether grass is green, or water is wet, or fire is hot. And since there are moral facts, we can have moral beliefs or make moral claims, and what makes those beliefs or claims true is that the beliefs (or claims) line up with the facts.

So on the naive realist view moral beliefs or claims work exactly the same way as other beliefs or claims. My belief that grass is green or my claim "Water is wet" is true just in case grass really is green or water really is wet. And similarly, my belief that torturing puppies is wrong is true precisely because torturing puppies really is wrong.

The naive realist view certainly is admirably simple. Unfortunately, for many philosophers, it's also simply too naive. Many philosophers just don't see how there could be any such things as moral facts, nor do they think that speech acts that look, superficially, like moral factual claims are actually claims at all, when you drill down to their underlying logic.

Let's call the philosophers who are skeptical about naive moral realism for these reasons "moral anti-realists".

The beauty of Blackburn's quasi-realism is that he shares all of the anti-realists' qualms about naive realism. However, Blackburn thinks that he can both deny that there really are moral facts AND still talk as if there are such facts.

The reason Blackburn thinks that he can do this is that people treat discussions about moral facts as expressions of moral views.

So, suppose I said something like, "Torturing puppies isn't really wrong". People would think I'm a monster! And my attempts to reassure them that I was simply trying to make a point about the metaphysics of morality probably wouldn't be terribly helpful.

So suppose, like Blackburn (roughly!), you think that expressions of moral condemnation are really just expressions of negative emotions associated with the things you're condemning. According to the metaphysics of this view, what you're really doing when you say something like "Torturing puppies is wrong" is that you're saying something roughly like "Torturing puppies: BOO!" In other words, you're not in fact making a claim at all, but expressing an emotion.

What makes Blackburn's view quasi- realism, though, is that Blackburn thinks that it's perfectly acceptable for anti-realists to talk as if realism were true. That's because claims like "It's true that torturing puppies is wrong" or "It's a fact that torturing puppies is wrong" or "Torturing puppies really is wrong" are themselves understood as expressions of negative emotions associated with torturing puppies. Even though these are claims about language or about facts, they're taken to be claims about the actions that are the subject of that language or those facts.

And, conversely, if you were to try (correctly, in Blackburn's view) to state the metaphysical facts by saying "It's not true that torturing puppies is wrong" or "There's no fact of the matter about whether torturing puppies is wrong" or "It's not the case that torturing puppies really is wrong", then people would think you're a moral monster with no regard for cute, little puppies, rather than simply an analytic philosopher. And again, that's because although you're trying to talk about a CLAIM - the claim that torturing puppies is wrong - people take you to be talking about the action that is the subject of that claim, the act of torturing puppies.

We don't need to get too deep into the details of Blackburn's theory. For our purposes, what we've done so far is enough.

It seems to me that Blackburn's theory of quasi-realism can be useful in discussing cases like Professor Adamo's employment of the N-word.

As the quote from Jelani Cobb noted, the problem with employing the N-word is that it risks derailing the conversation in which it appears - even when the speaker has the purest of motives. The puzzle, though, is why that should be the case - particularly when someone, like Professor Adamo, explicitly notes that they are MENTIONING the word, rather than using it.

In the study of the pragmatics of language there is a phenomenon known as "cancellability" that refers to the possibility to retract some implications of what one literally says by explicitly noting that you don't intend your listener to draw those implications.

Suppose, for example, somebody asks me, "Is there a gas station nearby?" If I say "Yes", the implication is that not only is the gas station nearby, but it is also open and currently selling gas. I can cancel that implication, however, by saying, "Yes, but they're replacing the underground gas storage tanks, so you can't get gas there."

What Blackburn's discussion of quasi-realism suggests is that morally charged discussions have implied consequences that are often difficult to cancel. If I say "It's not true that torturing puppies is wrong" - even if my intent is only to make an abstruse philosophical point about the fact (assuming it is a fact) that no moral claims are factual - it's difficult to keep my listener from attributing to me evil intent toward cute, cuddly puppies.

That's because when you make a claim like "It's not true that torturing puppies is wrong", it sounds suspiciously like you're saying that it's permissible to torture puppies - even if that's not in fact what you're saying at all.

I think something similar is going on in the N-word case. When someone like Professor Adamo even mentions the N-word, their listeners assume - wrongly, in this case - that the good professor is implying that it's permissible to use the N-word. And because of the charged nature of the notions surrounding the word, it's not easily possible for the professor to cancel those implications, even when he attempts to make clear that he is merely mentioning the word for pedagogical purposes.

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The N-word and the Misleading Simplicity of the Use/Mention Distinction | 3 Quarks Daily

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by Joseph Shieber One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called "use/mention distinction". Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it. Simply put, the use/mention distinction is this.

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There are few professions that allow one to be as verbose as a judge. Sometimes, this freedom can result in powerful judgements that weave brilliant legal interpretation with sparkling prose.

At other times, legal judgements are so complicated that they make little sense to normal people.

In rare times, as happened recently in India, they even bewilder lawyers directly involved in the case.

A bemused Supreme Court bench sent back a convoluted judgement from a high court judge in the state of Himachal Pradesh to be re-drafted because it was simply unintelligible.

"We will have to set it aside because one cannot understand this," MB Lokur and Deepak Gupta were quoted by the Hindustan Times as saying on 14 April.

And what was so complicated about the judgement, which ruled in favour of a tenant locked in a years-long battle with a landlord?

Here is an extract:
"However, the learned counsel...cannot derive the fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiescence... given its sinew suffering partial dissipation from an imminent display occurring in the impugned pronouncement hereat wherewithin unravelments are held qua the rendition recorded by the learned Rent Controller..."
And more:
"The summum bonum of the aforesaid discussion is that all the aforesaid material which existed before the learned Executing Court standing slighted besides their impact standing untenably undermined by him whereupon the ensuing sequel therefrom is of the learned Executing Court while pronouncing its impugned rendition overlooking the relevant and germane evidence besides its not appreciating its worth. Consequently, the order impugned suffers from a gross absurdity and perversity of misappreciation of material on record."
The lawyer representing the tenant, Aishwarya Bhati, reportedly joked in court that she needed to hire an English professor to understand the convoluted ruling.

'Ridiculous language'

But the UK-based Plain English Campaign (PEC) said it had seen similar language deployed in the past by judges, though the wording in this case was "preposterously overblown".

"There is simply no reason or excuse for it," the PEC's Lee Monks told the BBC. "We've often heard the defence that these are 'legal terms' but that's very often a cop-out.

"The idea that something like '...fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiescence' is at all necessary is ridiculous."

While that may be true, judges in the Indian sub-continent, and elsewhere, clearly enjoy the freedom they have to show off their verbal dexterity and cultural knowledge in judgements - though they usually make more sense.

On Thursday, a judgement from Pakistan's Supreme Court ruling that there was insufficient evidence of corruption to remove Nawaz Sharif from the role of prime minister began by mentioning Mario Puzo's 1969 novel The Godfather, before quoting 19th Century novelist Honore de Balzac, in the original French.

Back in India, a 268-page Supreme Court judgement last year from Justice Dipak Misra was particularly verbose in dismissing a challenge to the constitutionality of the criminal offence of defamation brought by Subramanian Swamy, a politician.

The judge wrote, in a sentence described by the journalist and former law lecturer Tunku Varadarajan as "among the worst sentences I've encountered in all my years of reading legal materials":
"This batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of 'reasonableness' ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one's reputation""
But Indian judges, with few exceptions, "love purple prose which they mistake to be or believe to be Shakespearean English", says journalist Binoo K John, who wrote a book - Entry from Backside Only: Hazaar Fundaas of Indian English - about the peculiar use of English in India.

"So considering the long history of such prose, it is not all all embarrassing in India," he told the BBC.

Meanwhile, at least one High Court judge in England has listened to calls to simplify the language used in judgements.

Justice Peter Jackson published a simply-worded ruling last year in a family court case so it could be understood by the children affected by it.

He even used an emoji.

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Does this court judgement make any sense?

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There are few professions that allow one to be as verbose as a judge. Sometimes, this freedom can result in powerful judgements that weave brilliant legal interpretation with sparkling prose. At other times, legal judgements are so complicated that they make little sense to normal people.

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'Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it,' the writer Hanif Kureishi told a journalist in 2009. Salman Rushdie's notorious novel, like Kureishi's figure of speech, is indeed looking like a relic of a bygone time. When it was published 31 years ago, the global furore was unprecedented. There were protests, book-burnings and riots. Iran's leader Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Rushdie, a bounty was placed on his head, and there were murders, attempted and successful, of supporters, publishers and translators. The author spent years in hiding.

Three decades later, the novel remains in print, widely available, and the author walks about a largely free man. But if the skirmish over The Satanic Verses was won, a larger battle might have been lost. Who now would dare to write a provocative fiction exploring the origins of Islam? The social and political aspects of the Rushdie affair obscured one of the key ideas at stake: can someone from a Muslim background take material from the life of the prophet Muhammad to compose an innovative, irreverent and resolutely godless work of fiction?

Subsequent experience suggests not. The cases of the caricatures in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 and the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at various times between 2006 and 2015 will make anyone, Muslim or not, think twice about representing the prophet Muhammad in anything but a conventionally reverent manner, for fear of giving offence or of grievous bodily harm, or both. The Danish and French cartoons, however, were treading on terrain already fertilised by The Satanic Verses. They were deliberately testing the limits of free speech and self-censorship. Other cases, such as Innocence of Muslims, a short film posted to YouTube in 2012, were more clearly anti-Muslim provocations where it is difficult to discern any genuine concern for free speech. The Rushdie affair was the first in a series of conflicts over the portrayal of the prophet Muhammad. In hindsight, though, it looks more like the end of an era than a beginning.

The fact that The Satanic Verses is such a lengthy and challenging novel is the first hint that one should distinguish between the Rushdie affair and the book itself. People can routinely describe the novel as, to cite a couple of academics in the West today, a 'portrayal of Islam as a deceitful, ignorant, and sexually deviant religion', containing 'abusive language and insults directed at the prophet Muhammad and his wives'. Such a reading stems from the affair, which has subsumed the novel itself. The social and political circumstances were outpacing literature, and those circumstances are even more pronounced today. The increasing prominence of radical Islam, or Islam as a political force, is obviously one factor. The other factor, especially in the West, is the increasing emphasis on culture and ethnicity, religion included, as a means of self-definition. Rushdie had intended, he said at the time, 'to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person', but the idea of what constituted 'religion' was itself changing.

The Satanic Verses is a sprawling, surreal epic of immigrant experience, set in London and Bombay (as it was called at the time). It follows two Indian men, the only survivors of a flight blown up by Sikh terrorists over the English Channel, who miraculously survive the fall and land on the beach below. One of them, an actor famed for playing gods from the Hindu pantheon, finds a halo has appeared over his head. The other, who has lived in England for years trying to distance himself from his Indian roots, develops horns on his head, a devilish tail and appalling halitosis.

Intertwined are three subplots in the form of dreams experienced by the increasingly unhinged Indian actor. Each of these subplots deals in some way with Islam, and each is based on recent events or historical accounts. The Imam is a Khomeini figure plotting and carrying out a revolution. Part IV, 'Ayesha', features a young girl who claims to be receiving divine messages instructing her and her followers to walk to Mecca through the Arabian Sea, claiming that the waters will part for them. The section that gets all the attention, though, is 'Mahound', a satirical rewriting of the career of Muhammad. The book's title refers to an infamous story from the early days of Islam, and also to the strong possibility that the entire novel is narrated by the Devil.

The Satanic Verses repeatedly shows us the point of view of a person asked to believe in something he doubts

In his dreams, the actor, Gibreel Farishta (the angel Gabriel) finds himself the unwilling conduit of messages to a prophet named Mahound, in a surreal city obviously based on Mecca:

Mahound's eyes open wide, he's seeing some kind of vision, staring at it, oh, that's right, Gibreel remembers, me. He's seeing me. My lips moving, being moved by. What, whom? Don't know, can't say. Nevertheless, here they are, coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words.
Being God's postman is no fun, yaar.
Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.
God knows whose postman I've been.

The themes of these subplots are, like those of the novel as a whole, ambiguous and impossible to summarise. One constant, however, is the question of belief, or more accurately, the shades of doubt between belief and disbelief. Rushdie's is a modern, individualist perspective, and The Satanic Verses repeatedly shows us the point of view of a person asked to believe in something he doubts, like certain of Mahound's associates and the husband of one of the most zealous devotees of Ayesha the seer. This is not a perspective with much precedent in Islamic literatures.

For Rushdie, the essentials of religion are fairly simple. He is not concerned with scriptural hermeneutics or jurisprudential subtleties. Religion is not even a matter of ethics. It is a matter of whether you believe in God or not, and if you don't, which he doesn't, what to do about this fellow Muhammad?

Studying history as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Rushdie was fascinated by how much information we have about the origins of Islam. Compared with any other prophet or founder of a religion, we know a good deal about the life of the Muslim prophet (what we don't know is equally vast, and the tradition might not be quite as reliable as many suppose but, on the whole, the point stands). So how does one read the story of the messenger of God, when one doesn't believe in God? This question was foremost on Rushdie's mind. As he told a TV interviewer in 1989:

When Muhammad returned to Mecca in power, he was very, very tolerant. And I think, if I remember correctly, only five or six people were executed after the retaking of Mecca. And of those five or six people, two were writers, and two were actresses who had performed in satirical texts. Now there you have an image that I thought was worth exploring: at the very beginning of Islam you find a conflict between the sacred text and the profane text, between revealed literature and imagined literature. For a writer, that conflict is fascinating and interesting to explore. So that's what I was doing, exploring.

Rushdie's details are not entirely accurate, but the sources do record that Muhammad held a particular grudge against those who had satirised him, and requested or hinted at the need for their execution. The image is a powerful one, all the more so for a writer of fiction, and this opposition between prophetic word and poetic word would find its way into The Satanic Verses.

It was not just a matter of the origins of Islam. Such images were made more powerful at the time by the unexpected return of religion. Up to the 1980s, it seemed that secularism was on the rise everywhere, and the Islamic world was no exception. But then things began to change. Islam and Islamic movements were suddenly more prominent. There were kidnappings and suicide attacks in Lebanon. Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, was assassinated by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The mujahideen rose to prominence in Afghanistan. The Islamist regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq took power in Pakistan. And, above all, there was the Iranian Revolution. It might be difficult now to recall how the grim visage of Khomeini symbolised for many (and not just Westerners) a new and frankly frightening religious force in the world. Religion was supposed to be on the way out - but here it was. Rushdie shared this incomprehension.

These gaps and contradictions in the Quran are the areas that Rushdie chose to investigate

In exploring the life of Muhammad, Rushdie poked and prodded the Islamic tradition in its most sensitive regions. Early Islamic sources contain a number of elements that are at odds with the conventional, 'orthodox' or popular versions of Islamic origins. For example, there are a number of instances where Muhammad appears to be all too human in his apparent desires and actions, such as an occasional vindictiveness or his numerous marriages. Muslim tradition tends to downplay these elements or rationalise them as part of his larger, divinely inspired plan. Anti-Muslim polemicists, however, have long seized on such accounts as evidence of Muhammad's malignity, and mention of human weakness or personal idiosyncrasies tends to be taken as a provocation. Rushdie's satire is provocative, certainly, but it is not part of that tradition.

Islam is premised on the authenticity and integrity of the Quran, but there are some indications in early Arabic accounts that the collection of the Holy Scripture was not as complete and accurate as convention would have us believe. It is important not to exaggerate these elements, though: Muslim scholars have been aware of them for centuries, and Islam has flourished quite well nonetheless. If the conventional narrative has a few holes, any skeptical alternatives have many more. Even so, these gaps and contradictions are present, and who is to say that one should not consider them and what they might mean? These are the areas that Rushdie chose to investigate.

The Satanic Verses contains, for example, a heavily fictionalised story of Ibn Abi Sarh, who worked as Muhammad's scribe, copying down the revelation as the messenger recited it. Several sources tell us that Ibn Abi Sarh, when taking dictation, continued to write after Muhammad had ceased to speak, completing phrases with words he thought appropriate. When his additions went unnoticed, he was shaken. How could these be the words of God? They were his own! He left and fled to the prophet's enemies. When the Muslims had conquered Mecca and Islam was triumphant, Muhammad demanded that Ibn Abi Sarh, among other apostates, be killed. He was eventually persuaded to grant clemency to his former scribe, but later expressed his regret that his companions hadn't simply cut off his head.

In Rushdie's novel, the Ibn Abi Sarh character has gone into hiding from the prophet whose verses he altered. 'Why are you sure he will kill you?' he is asked. 'It's his Word against mine,' he answers.

Even more sensitive is the story of the satanic verses. In the earliest days of Muhammad's prophetic mission, he was despairing of winning any more converts to his cause. Opposition was fierce. His message of one unique god was not welcome in a community that had long worshipped a variety of deities. Then, he received a revelation that seemed to resolve his problem: in addition to the one god, Allah, one could pray to three other minor gods, all female. Some of his enemies prostrated themselves alongside Muhammad: it seemed as though a compromise had been reached between his strict monotheism and the multiple deities of the Meccans.

There are different versions of what happened next. Either the angel Gabriel appeared and told Muhammad that Satan tampered with the words, or he realised himself that he had recited something not right, something that sacrificed his most fundamental principle. Subsequent divine revelation announced that, while Satan might interfere with a prophet's recitation, God will intervene to remove the offending part. The 'satanic' words, those affirming the existence of the three female deities, were then excluded from the revelation, and strict monotheism was reconfirmed. The polytheists of Mecca resumed their hostility, but Muhammad had compromised nothing.

Today, virtually all Muslims consider the episode of the satanic verses to be a fabrication. It is inconceivable, they say, that Satan's words could have found their way into the revelation. It is inconceivable that the messenger of God, the prophet who serves as a guide for all believers, could have committed such an error. The story was surely a falsehood concocted by the enemies of Islam. In the 1960s, an Egyptian scholar went so far as to propose that all mention of the incident be excised from future editions of historical texts.

But the problem is that many historical texts do contain the anecdote, in around 50 slightly varying versions. Moreover, as the book Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam (2017) by Shahab Ahmed convincingly shows, the first generations of Muslims did not question the incident. Only gradually, with the development of certain doctrines regarding the sinlessness of prophets, did the story become impossible to accept. Even Ibn Taymiyyah, the 14th-century firebrand and intellectual forefather of Salafism, accepted the veracity of the satanic verses story.

In his book, Ahmed proposed that the story served particular functions in different contexts for the very first generations of believers: it might have originated to explain certain obscure Quranic verses; it might have been an uplifting narrative of triumph over adversity, of succumbing to temptation at a moment of despair, and then returning to the straight path. In other words, it is possible for believers to find meaning in a non-orthodox interpretation of the anecdote. Likewise, it is possible for a nonbeliever such as Rushdie to find something valuable in the life of the prophet, even when God is out of the picture. The Muhammadan revelation becomes a matter of human history and behaviour, a story of belief and credulity, of power and knowledge, one that has echoes throughout human experience.

None of this is to say that The Satanic Verses does not offend. It clearly does. For those who make it that far into the novel, the scenes in which the prostitutes adopt the names and personae of Mahound's wives are guaranteed to send the faithful into fits. Neither the novel nor its author makes any suggestion that this is meant as a comment on the prophet's wives, real or fictional, and to claim otherwise, as many have, is simply incorrect. At the same time, one can hardly claim surprise that people are offended.

Anti-Muslim sentiment (and politics) has reached levels where any criticism of Islam is suspect

One might argue that whatever his criticisms, Rushdie should have been more respectful. But this is a dangerous path, one that misjudges what is at stake. Is it not the case that many great works of Western literature, from François Rabelais to Voltaire, James Joyce to Philip Roth, offended a good number of religious groups and authorities? This was the argument of Sadik Jalal al-Azm, a Syrian philosophy professor who was arrested in 1970 on blasphemy charges stemming from his book Critique of Religious Thought (1969), in which he condemned religiosity in the Arab world, and blamed it for many social and political ills. He wrote various pieces in defence of The Satanic Verses and its author, including 'The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie' (1989), an extended comparison with Rabelais and Joyce, noting the difference between the canonical status granted to Western authors who challenged religious authority or orthodoxy and the, at best tepid, support for Rushdie:

Perhaps the deep-seated and silent assumption in the West remains that Muslims are simply not worthy of serious dissidents, do not deserve them, and are ultimately incapable of producing them; for, in the final analysis, it is the theocracy of the Ayatollahs that becomes them. No wonder, then, if a Muslim's exercise in satirical courage and laughter should pass mostly unsung for what it is ... Did not Rabelais, Voltaire and Joyce know what they were doing? Is not Rushdie breaking new ground in Muslim cultural and historical consciousness? If so, then, are not adverse reactions to be expected? Or are Muslim societies and cultures supposed to remain where they have always been?

Some might protest at the assumption of Muslim backwardness in need of secularisation, but al-Azm argues that there is a long list of Muslim writers who have faced various trials for their expression of independent or secular thought. Rushdie, he says, is part of this lineage. It is certainly true that anti-Muslim sentiment (and politics) has reached levels where any criticism of Islam is suspect for its motives, but one wonders about the fate of this intellectual tradition of secular dissent. In the current climate, the fate of a highbrow novel might not be the most pressing issue, but it does seem that those who value literature should at least be aware of what is at stake.

Should we, in any case, assume that everyone of Muslim background takes offence? No. In 1989, a Pakistani reader wrote to The Observer newspaper in London:

Salman Rushdie speaks for me in The Satanic Verses, and mine is a voice that has not yet found expression in newspaper columns ... Someone who does not live in an Islamic society cannot imagine the sanctions, both self-imposed and external, that militate against expressing religious disbelief ... Then, along comes Rushdie and speaks for us. Tells the world that we exist - that we are not simply a fabrication of some Jewish conspiracy.

Al-Azm, too, noted that the controversial sections of The Satanic Verses spoke to him personally, that he too had wondered what kind of a man was Muhammad:

Was he a world-historic figure or an instrument of Divine Will and Plan? Was he a pious God-fearing figure of traditional legends or a shrewd and calculating long-distance trader and merchant? Was he a servant of the Spirit and its higher ideals (having read some Hegel) or a philanderer and womaniser? After some exposure to Freud I did ask myself questions about the psychoanalytic significance of his earlier marriage to a woman fit to be his mother and his later infatuation with girls fit to be his daughters.

Rushdie was not the first person from a Muslim background to have doubts about religion. However, he will probably be the last for some time to express them so explicitly in literary form, for it is indeed unlikely that anyone would publish The Satanic Verses today. It's not likely it would even be written today, and this is not solely due to sensitivities regarding Muhammad. The nascent political Islam of the 1980s is even more present, but vastly transformed. Three decades ago, it was symbolised by the disapproving gaze of Khomeini, satirised to great effect by Rushdie. But the Iranian leader's face was replaced in the popular imagination by the oddly blank countenance of Usama bin Laden, who in turn has been displaced, more frighteningly, by legions of anonymous and brainwashed ISIS volunteers.

The prevalence of Islamist movements throughout the world, whatever one thinks about them, was unimaginable when The Satanic Verses was written. A 21st-century novel that takes Islam as one of its subjects would treat matters differently. The questions of belief and history that Rushdie tackled in his book have not gone away, but they might seem less urgent. We are more concerned at present with what people do, rather than whether they believe in God and his prophet or not. It must seem clear to all but the most vulgar polemicists (and perhaps the most fanatical militants) that the essential tenets of Islam cannot explain everything we see today.

Rushdie's satirical look at religion comes across quite differently when Islam is conceived of as an identity

For many of Rushdie's time, place and class, religion was something to be avoided. It represented anti-intellectual backwardness and the cruel oppression of women, minorities and artists; it encouraged hypocrisy and frowned at laughter; it promulgated what an Arab literary critic called a 'pre-Copernican' worldview. Rushdie's conception of what constitutes religion is perhaps not so distinct from 18th-century Enlightenment critique.

However, the timing was not good. The assertion of an Islamic identity was on the rise among Muslim communities in the 1980s, in Britain and elsewhere. This self-conscious assertion of Islam as an integral or central element of one's culture was relatively new, at least on a large scale, and it does not always mesh seamlessly with the conventional view of religion as a set of doctrines and rituals. Rushdie's satirical look at religion comes across quite differently when Islam is conceived of as an identity. What began as a critique of ideas is taken as an insult to a group, and often a marginalised group, at that.

The increasing prevalence of Islam as identity is hard to overstate: recall that Rushdie was well-known as a man of the antiracist, anticolonial Left. Most of his defenders at the time came from his fellow travellers on the Left. Today's Leftists tend to a different stance on the issue of representing Muhammad (with an analogous reversal on the Right).

Rushdie's satire has nothing to do with the crude criticism of Islam that has become widespread and that Rushdie himself (somewhat understandably) has engaged in, which posits a fundamental incompatibility with modernity or the need for an Islamic 'reformation'. It is instead the kind of critique that only a novel can provide. It points to the cracks and weaknesses in the certainties of the tradition; it tells us that commands and prohibitions can reveal more than their issuers intend, that Muhammad's power and status might have changed his behaviour, that the Quran as we know it might not in fact be the direct word of God, that if the scripture says that the prophet's wives should remain behind a curtain, some imaginations will run wild about what is going on in there - that to talk of belief implies the existence of doubt and nonbelief. It is these aspects of The Satanic Verses that have been eclipsed by the Rushdie affair and its aftermath, but it is these that will persist well after the current social and political landscape has changed.

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Can there ever be another novel like The Satanic Verses? - Bruce Fudge | Aeon Essays

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'Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it,' the writer Hanif Kureishi told a journalist in 2009. Salman Rushdie's notorious novel, like Kureishi's figure of speech, is indeed looking like a relic of a bygone time. When it was published 31 years ago, the global furore was unprecedented.

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Can women fight for gender equality by adopting misogynistic language?

As soon as I met them, all I wanted to do was fit in with The Bros. My boyfriend and I had just started dating, and when he introduced me to his group of guys, I wanted to impress. I caught on quickly to their roast-your-friends sense of humor, and jumped into the arena with my skewers drawn. Within an hour of meeting them for the first time, I began dishing serious burns like I had known them for years. After the words left my lips, the room would get so quiet you could hear the grease drip from the well-cooked meat of my latest victim.

Then, the boys would burst out laughing, and exclaim to him over and over: "Where did you find her??"

The boys seemed to like me because I Wasn't Like Other Girls. I was confrontational and sometimes downright aggressive, which is usually a death sentence for women trying to get people to like them. But instead of burning me at the stake, the boys accepted a witch into their brotherhood and took me in.

As the weeks passed, the bros and I became friends, but that didn't mean I was One Of The Boys. My final rite of passage into becoming a bro didn't happen until I uttered one simple word: bitch.

Bitch. Every time there were shots to be taken, bongs to be hit, or weights to be lifted, the boys would urge each other on with their age-old mantra: Don't be a bitch. One night, as one of the bros was turning down a third shot, I blurted out:

"What, you tellin' me you're a bitch?"

He narrowed his eyes at me, laughed, and downed the shot. Later that night he clapped me on the back and told me I was one of them. I was a "bro."

I had gotten what I wanted. I belonged. But as we continued to joke and tease, I started to worry about the meaning of the words we chose. Each time we said "Don't be a bitch," I wondered what that actually meant. Was "Don't be a woman" what we were really saying? Were our thoughtless jokes, in some subconscious way, promoting a contempt of femininity? Did our words have a power we couldn't quite perceive?

I began to think I had betrayed my feminist values by condoning the jokes we made. I felt complicit in a system of language that associated weakness with womanhood, and motivated men to be more machismo by threatening to classify them as women if they failed a test of manhood.

Not that, in any way, my bros were machismo. They were sweet, sensitive, caring, and kind. Which is why I felt so confused about the slang they used. In our group, "don't be a bitch" was never an ultimatum, it was still perfectly acceptable to say no after being told to stop being a bitch. But it seemed to me that "Don't be a bitch" could be translated to "Don't be a woman," making the use of the phrase a dangerous practice for our perception of womanhood.

But then I realized there was something I wasn't considering. As soon as I began to say it to them, they included me in the ritual, telling me not to be a bitch as well. I thought the phrase "Don't be a bitch" translated to "Don't be a woman," but that if that were the case, it wouldn't make any sense to say it to me. Telling me "don't be a bitch" felt as natural as telling anyone else in the group. It was as if we had removed the feminine nature of the word, making it a gender-neutral term that meant something like "chicken" or "scaredy-cat".

I think the effect of me saying "don't be a bitch" was actually the opposite of what I feared. Instead of promoting harmful, gendered language, I was helping to change the definition of bitch to a gender-neutral term. By including me in the group, the boys were helping to de-associate the word bitch from the idea of womanhood, and adopt a gender-neutral system of slang.

The truth of the matter is, our gendered curse words are harmful. Words like bitch, pussy, dick, asshole, and douchebag promote negative ideas about women, hyper-masculine ideas about men, and polarize the genders to extremes. But the good news is, we as a collective determine what these words mean. By treating these words as gender-neutral, we have the power to make them gender-neutral, just as the bros and I have done with the word "bitch."

So call your brother a bitch, your sister a dick, and everyone an asshole. Keep the root definitions of these words, but remove the gendered connotation they carry. That way we can enjoy the ritual of roasting each other, guilt-free.

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How becoming a bro made me rethink our use of gendered swear words

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As soon as I met them, all I wanted to do was fit in with The Bros. My boyfriend and I had just started dating, and when he introduced me to his group of guys, I wanted to impress. I caught on...

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The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness

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For the longest time, I believed that there’s only purpose of life: And that is to be happy.

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If you don't speak Japanese but would like, momentarily, to feel like a linguistic genius, take a look at the following words. Try to guess their meaning from the two available options:

1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?
2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?
3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?
4. iraira (a) happy or (b) angry?
5. guzuguzu (a) moving quickly or (b) moving slowly?
6. kurukuru (a) spinning around or (b) moving up and down?
7. kosokoso (a) walking quietly or (b) walking loudly?
8. gochagocha (a) tidy or (b) messy?
9. garagara (a) crowded or (b) empty?
10. tsurutsuru (a) smooth or (b) rough?

The answers are: 1(b); 2(a); 3(a); 4(b); 5(b); 6(a); 7(a); 8(b); 9(b) 10(a).

If you think this exercise is futile, you're in tune with traditional linguistic thinking. One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign - a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture - is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise - eg, 'cuckoo', 'achoo' or 'cock-a-doodle-doo' - there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn't feel more 'slimy' any more than it feels 'dry'.

Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel 'slimy'; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary. (The experiment is best performed using real audio clips of native speakers.)

How and why do ideophones do this? Despite their prevalence in many languages, ideophones were once considered linguistic oddities of marginal interest. As a consequence, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have only recently started to unlock their secrets.

Their results pose a profound challenge to the foundations of Saussurean linguistics. According to this research, language is embodied: a process that involves subtle feedback, for both listener and speaker, between the sound of a word, the vocal apparatus and our own experience of human physicality. Taken together, this dynamic helps to create a connection between certain sounds and their attendant meanings. These associations appear to be universal across all human societies.

This understanding of language as an embodied process can illuminate the marvel of language acquisition during infancy. It might even cast light on the evolutionary origins of language itself - potentially representing a kind of 'proto-world', a vestige of our ancestors' first utterances.

How should we define an ideophone? All languages contain powerfully emotive or sensual words, after all. But ideophones share a couple of characteristics that make them unique. For one, they constitute their own unique class, marked with their own linguistic rules - in the same way that, say, nouns or verbs also follow their own rules in how they are formed and used. In Japanese, for instance, ideophones are easy to recognise because they most often take the form of a two-syllable root that is then repeated - such as gochagocha (messy), nurunuru (slimy) or tsurutsuru (smooth).

Native speakers also have to agree that words in this class, as a whole, depict sensual scenes with an intensity that cannot be expressed by vocabulary outside the class. 'So you could just describe it in dry, arbitrary words, but what [ideophones] do is enable you to experience it yourself,' Mark Dingemanse at Radboud University in the Netherlands told me.

Ideophones are more prevalent in some languages than others. English has relatively few; by comparison, more than 4,000 Japanese words are classed as ideophones, meaning that they're a hugely important part of anyone's vocabulary. They can also be found across Asia, Africa, South America and Australasia. (My personal favourite ideophone is ribuy-tibuy, which means 'the sound, sight, or motion of a person's buttocks rubbing together as they walk' in Mundari, spoken in Eastern India and Bangladesh.)

Some of the earliest formal studies of ideophones come from anthropologists who travelled in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century. Analysing Bobangi, a language spoken in Congo, the linguist John Whitehead in 1899 described 'colouring' words that were 'among the most graphic in the language', adding that 'often they have such force that sentence after sentence can be constructed by means of them, without the use of a single verb.'

The Ewe word for 'duck' evokes an uneven walk, and is accompanied by an exaggerated waddling motion

Even more influential was the German missionary Diedrich Westermann, who described the Lautbilder or 'picture words' of Ewe, spoken in present-day Ghana and Togo. Like Whitehead, Westermann emphasised the fact that these words could depict vivid and complex scenes. For example, zɔ hlóyihloyi captured the manner of someone 'walking with many dangling objects'; another, zɔ ʋɛ̃ʋɛ̃, the 'gait of a fat and stiff person'.

Part of their power comes from how the words themselves are produced: ideophones are often spoken in a dramatic tone of voice and accompanied by visual gestures to help you visualise the scene. The Ewe word ɖaboɖabo, for instance, translates as 'duck'; in addition, the repetition of its basic syllables evokes an uneven walk, and the sounds are accompanied by an exaggerated waddling motion. 'It's a really good example of an ideophone as a word that imitates not just sound but a whole sensory scene,' Dingemanse, who speaks Ewe, told me.

That observation is significant in itself. In the West, we have tended to think of language as primarily one modality - words, as either speech or writing - but there is now a growing appreciation that bodily gestures and hand signs are also incredibly important for meaning-making.

Yet Westermann's later research found that there was also something special in ideophones' phonological features. Comparing the ideophones of half a dozen West African languages, he noted that certain 'front' or 'closed' vowels - such as the [i] sound in the English word 'cheese' - tended to be used to represent concepts that were light, fine or bright, for instance; while 'back' or 'open' vowels - such as the [ɔ] sound in 'talk' or the [ɑ] in past - tended to be associated with a sense of slowness, heaviness and darkness. Meanwhile, voiced consonants such as 'b' or 'g' - so-called because they require the vocal cords to resonate - were associated with greater weight and softness, while voiceless consonants, such as 'p' or 'k', tended to be used to represent lighter weights and harsher surfaces. So, for example, in Ewe, someone kputukpluu is thinner than someone who is gbudugbluu.

He found similar relationships with linguistic tones. In many languages, the pitch at which a syllable is spoken can change a word's meaning. Westermann found that words representing slowness, darkness and heaviness tended to have lower tones than those depicting speed, agility and brightness, which were formed of higher tones. Many also include the repetition of syllables, which can be used to signify number and a continuous action or state. So, for instance, in Ewe, kpata is used to denote one drop falling, but kpata kpata depicts many drops falling.

Such 'sound symbolism' - as it is known in the literature - should not be seen as a one-to-one, rigid 'coding'; a particular phoneme can be associated with a whole range of sensations to do with weight, shape, brightness or darkness and motion. But Westermann's research offered some of the first concrete evidence that certain linguistic sounds might be somehow better-suited to evoking certain concepts for listeners than others.

These patterns have now been observed in the ideophones of many other languages. To take a couple of examples from Basque - a language isolate that also has more than 4,000 ideophones - tiki taka, with its closed, frontal [i] sound, means taking quick, light steps, while taka taka, with a more open [a] sound, denotes taking heavier steps; tilin tilin means 'small toll', and tulun tulun 'big toll'.

Meanwhile, in Japanese you have gorogoro, which, with its voiced 'g' sounds, represents a heavy object rolling continuously, while korokoro, with a voiceless 'k', represents a lighter rolling object. Similarly, bota means a 'thick/much liquid hitting a solid surface', while pota means a 'thin/little liquid hitting a solid surface'. If you are a Pokémon fan, you might even notice these sound-meaning relationships in your favourite characters. Pikachu, for instance, is named after the Japanese ideophone pikapika, which means sparkle. As Westermann had noted, the voiceless consonants and front [i] vowels are often associated with brightness in a number of languages.

Importantly, psychological studies suggest that these general sound-symbolic connections are universally understood throughout the world. Consider the following experiment. Given two words, kiki and bouba - which term is most appropriate to describe the following shapes?

An early version of this experiment can be found in the writing of the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the late 1920s, who tested participants in Tenerife. But the result has now been repeated many times, in many different cultures. In almost all cases, bouba is chosen to represent the shape on the right by the vast majority of participants, while kiki naturally seems to fit a spiky, pointed object.

The evocative power of ideophones might therefore reflect on an inherent sound symbolism understood by all humans. Although we don't know the exact origin of these universal connections between sounds and meanings, one attractively parsimonious answer comes from human biology and the bodily experience of speech. According to this theory, subtle feedback from our mouth and throat primes us to associate certain phonemes with certain concepts. The mouth tends to form a rounder shape when we form an [o] sound, compared with an [i] sound - which might help to explain the kiki/ bouba phenomenon. Voiced consonants such as 'b' also last for a marginally longer time than voiceless consonants such as 't' - which might explain why they are associated with slower speed.

Nasal sounds are found in words associated with the nose, such as 'snout', 'sniff' or 'sneeze'

Although nuanced, these 'vocal gestures' - in which our articulatory system subtly mimics the concept we wish to convey - might just be enough to prime us to intuitively feel that a word is more or less suited to a particular concept.

Sound symbolism might also emerge from the sensations associated with how we make noises. The marked resonance in the front of our face might explain why nasal sounds are more often found in many words associated with the nose, such as 'snout', 'sniff' or 'sneeze' in English.

However, that doesn't really explain how sounds could convey a concept such as the brightness of glitter. Another theory chalks this up to more general cross-talk between brain regions, where our neural wiring means that activation in one sensory region triggers a response in another. We know this happens in people with synaesthesia - such that a particular musical note can evoke a colour, say - which is thought to be caused by an overabundance of neural links, as if the brain were a too-dense forest whose tree roots have become entangled. Some scientists believe that a similar, though less pronounced, phenomenon could lie behind sound-symbolic connections. Interestingly, synaesthetes tend to be more sensitive to sound symbolism than average members of the population, offering some circumstantial evidence for the idea.

Whatever its origins, analyses of thousands of languages reveal that most cultures use sound symbolism to some degree. Unsurprisingly, languages with many ideophones make more systematic use of sound symbolism to evoke meaning. In one experiment, for instance, Dingemanse and his colleague Gwilym Lockwood gave a group of Dutch participants a list of Japanese ideophones, their translations and their antonyms. (Lockwood also provided the quiz at the start of this article.) He found that they could guess the right answer with around 72 per cent accuracy. He then tried the same experiment with regular Japanese adjectives. The participants still scored above chance - they were right about 63 per cent of the time - but finding the meanings of the adjectives from the sounds alone was harder, compared with the ideophones.

As part of the same study, Dingemanse also asked Dutch participants to memorise various lists of word pairs. In one, the ideophones were paired with the correct translation that matched their sound symbolism ( kibikibi was paired with its true meaning, 'energetic', for instance). In another, the Japanese ideophones were paired with words of the opposite meaning ( kibikibi was paired with the Dutch word for 'tired').

Over all the experiments, the participants found it far easier to learn the ideophones paired with their correct meaning, remembering about 86 per cent of the 'congruent' word pairs, compared with 71 per cent of the word pairs in which they had been given the wrong translation of the ideophone. Once again, this was not true in another experiment that measured how well they learnt Japanese adjectives - supporting the idea that there is something special about ideophones, and the way they are formed, that makes them particularly vivid.

Perhaps because of historic 'Eurocentrism' in linguistics, and its concentration on more formal, written sources, such research has not always received the attention it deserved. (One linguist in the 1990s even went as far as to describe ideophones as the 'lunatic fringe' of language.) Dingemanse points out that even Westermann's detailed writings had been largely ignored - a 'forgotten treasure' - until he recently unearthed them. But in the past decade, more and more linguists and cognitive scientists are coming to recognise them. 'The topic has seen rapid adoption, and many people are now working on it, and those that aren't at least feel they should acknowledge it,' Dingemanse told me in an email.

This burgeoning understanding is of great philosophical importance, suggesting that we should embrace some long-abandoned theories of language. Millennia before Saussure had proposed the 'arbitrariness of the linguistic sign', philosophers had debated whether some words are inherently better at expressing an idea. Plato, for instance, records the philosopher Cratylus arguing that there should be a natural connection between a word's form and its meaning. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as iconicity, the opposite of arbitrariness.

The sheer number of documented ideophones suggests that these ideas are worth revisiting. 'Languages are on a spectrum; each language is on a balancing point between the forces of arbitrariness and iconicity,' says Marcus Perlman, a linguist and cognitive scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Dingemanse agrees, noting that while 'there are still lots of degrees of freedom in language', the general principle of absolute arbitrariness needs to be modified to acknowledge that both arbitrary and iconic features play a role in transmitting meaning.

Japanese parents use ideophones far more frequently during the first few years of a child's life

Recognising the importance of iconicity could solve some lingering scientific mysteries, including the process of language acquisition during childhood. To understand why this is a conundrum, put yourself in the mind of a baby or toddler, hearing the swell of conversation around her. Imagine, for instance, that she is watching a rabbit hop across the lawn - while her mother or father says: 'Look at the rabbit! Look at it hop!' How is the baby meant to know which word refers to its own actions, which word refers to the rabbit itself, and which refers to its movement? More importantly, how does she know to generalise what she has learnt - so that the same word applies to all rabbits of different colours and sizes? Or that the word 'hop' can apply to any creature - even a human - moving in a stop-start, jumpy fashion?

Gestures such as pointing, and the parent's gaze, could obviously assist in distinguishing some elements of the scene. But Mutsumi Imai at Keio University in Japan and Sotaro Kita at the University of Warwick in the UK argue that sound symbolism can also give subtle cues that help a child to identify what a word is referring to - an idea they call the 'sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis'.

As evidence, Imai and Kita have shown that one- and two-year-olds, when given a sound-symbolic word, were more likely to direct their attention at the appropriate object or movement. The children also found it easier to remember and generalise the sound-symbolic words afterwards - such that, if they learn a new verb, they know it can be applied to other scenarios, suggesting the sound symbolism helps them grasp that the word refers to motion.

It's telling that Japanese mothers and fathers consistently use ideophones far more frequently during the first few years of a child's life. This raises another big question: how do children learn languages such as English, without such a widespread, systematic use of sound symbolism? There is now some evidence that parents in these cultures invent their own, or select existing words with slightly more sound-symbolic forms (such as 'teeny-weeny' to mean small). To achieve the same ends, they might also use prosodic cues, such as intonation, stress and rhythm, as well as more dramatic pronunciation - another feature of ideophones.

Even more profoundly, ideophones might offer us a glimpse of the early origins of language at least 40,000 years ago. The emergence of speech is a longstanding mystery for evolutionary theorists. In general, the evolution of a complex trait such as language should happen gradually. But if the arbitrariness principle holds, and speech is meaningful only by convention, our amazingly open-ended communicative abilities would have required a huge evolutionary leap. Without a recognised form of language already in place, how could humans' first vocalisations convey anything useful to their peers?

For this reason, many theorists have preferred a 'gesture first' theory - the idea that language arose first with pantomimed hand gestures that slowly evolved into more conventional signs. But this hypothesis only shifts the problem, because it doesn't fully explain how or why most humans now communicate primarily through speech rather than with signed languages.

According to some scholars, including Imai and Kita, the research on sound symbolism - and ideophones in particular - can help us to solve that puzzle: the iconic associations between sound and meaning could have offered a starting point for the group to develop a shared lexicon.

The first words must have conveyed whole scenes rather than discrete objects

Some preliminary evidence in favour of this hypothesis comes from Perlman. In one of his studies, a group of participants played charades, but instead of using gestures, they were allowed to use only completely novel vocalisations for concepts such as 'man', 'rock', 'knife', 'hunt', 'cook' and 'sharp' - while others guessed what they meant. Contrary to expectations, their accuracy - around 50 per cent - was far higher than chance would have allowed (in this experiment, around 10 per cent). 'For the majority of these concepts, people had really consistent intuitions about what sounds map onto what kinds of meanings,' Perlman told me.

Admittedly, many of the utterances took the form of sound onomatopoeia - a knife's vocalisation involved a 'whooshing' sound of a blade, for instance. But combined with the research on sound symbolism and ideophones, it supports the notion that iconic vocalisations, where the word's form somehow 'resembles' its meaning, might have been a starting point for communication between speakers with no previous language.

Kita hypothesises that, like ideophones, the first words must have conveyed whole scenes rather than discrete objects, evolving only later to be more like conventional words. And like ideophones, these utterances might have been dramatic in nature - using a tone of voice, facial expression and gesture - with the sound symbolism to help other group members connect the utterances to their meaning, such as an object's appearance or movement. The sound-symbolic patterns that we still find today are like linguistic 'fossils', Kita says, that can help us to guess what those early words might have sounded like.

There is a danger, however, that these evolutionary theories entrench the idea that today's ideophones are somehow primitive - a prejudice that has lingered since those first detailed studies of African ideophones. But Dingemanse says that this view could not be further from the truth. Ideophones move us a little closer to understanding how, through sounds alone, two individuals can share sensual experiences across time and space. They should remind us that language is deeply rooted in the body; that each word is, in some small way, a performance-piece that deploys many of our senses. 'Poetry helps you see things in a new light, helps you savour words, is evocative of sensory scenes,' Dingemanse told me. 'That is exactly what ideophones do in many of the world's languages.'

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In the beginning was the word, and the word was embodied - David Robson | Aeon Essays

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If you don't speak Japanese but would like, momentarily, to feel like a linguistic genius, take a look at the following words. Try to guess their meaning from the two available options: 1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?4.

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Compassion is how we win this thing

Photo by Porter Rockwell via flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0

If we are to address the challenges presented by American masculinity, we need to start by stating what we hope would be obvious: masculinity is not toxic; our culture's narrow, conformist, violent, bullying, man-box version of it is.

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Why Calling It 'Toxic Masculinity' Isn't Helping

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If we are to address the challenges presented by American masculinity, we need to start by stating what we hope would be obvious: masculinity is not toxic; our culture's narrow, conformist, violent, bullying, man-box version of it is.

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'I pray for friends I've lost, family, like my uncle who passed away,' Bruno told me. We were chatting in the nave of the Church of the Santa Cruz of the Souls of the Hanged, a small Catholic church in central São Paulo. Built near the old city gallows, regulars go there to pray to the dead. 'When I'm here, I feel well,' he said. 'I even feel that the other side is well.' Bruno told me there was something special about the place, that it left him with a 'sensation'. 'The fact that you're remembering, recalling someone that did right by you, it leaves you with even more saudade,' he told me.

Saudade is a key emotion word for Portuguese speakers. Though akin to nostalgia or longing, the term has no direct equivalent in English. As the Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil sings in ' Toda saudade', it is the presence of absence, 'of someone or some place - of something, anyway'. One can have saudades (the singular and plural forms are interchangeable) for people or places, as well as sounds, smells, and foods. One can even have saudades for saudade itself. That is because 'it is good to have saudades' ( é bom ter saudades), as the common saying goes. There is a certain pleasure in the feeling. Though painful, the sting of saudades is a reminder of a good that came before.

Writing in 1912, the Portuguese poet Teixeira de Pascoaes defined saudade as 'desire for the beloved thing, made painful by its absence'. It is an acute feeling, often described as occurring in the heart. The language of saudade is evocative. Portuguese speakers complain of 'dying of saudades' ( morrendo de saudades), or wanting to 'kill saudades' ( matar saudades) by fulfilling desire. Though hyperbolic, the word's morbid poetics throw light on how affective ties make for a meaningful human life.

Popular tradition relates saudade to the feeling of distance and loss suffered by the families of men off at sea during the age of Portuguese discoveries. While this folk history captures the term's poetic ambivalence, its etymology is unclear. The archaic form soidade appears in 13th-century troubadour verses recounting the laments of distant lovers. Most scholars suggest that this form derives from the Latin solitate (solitude), and was possibly later influenced by the Portuguese word saudar ('to greet') before arriving at the present form. But some scholars have offered alternative etymologies, including one that traces saudade to the Arabic sawdā, a word that can denote a dark or melancholy mood. It is a high-stakes debate: saudade is integral to Portuguese self-understanding, and the question of the word's origins reflects deeper concerns about Portuguese ethnicity and identity.

Saudosismo, an early 20th-century literary movement, was largely responsible for establishing saudade as a marker of Portuguese identity. Founded two years after the 1910 republican revolution that ended a centuries-long monarchy, Saudosismo promised cultural renewal during a time of uncertainty. In 'The Making of Saudade' (2000), the Portuguese anthropologist João Leal writes that Saudosistas sought to restore the 'lost splendour' of Portuguese cultural life, 'replacing foreign influences - held to be responsible for the decline of the country since the Age of Discoveries - with a cult of "Portuguese things", reflecting the true "Portuguese soul".' Hailing saudade as the authentic expression of the 'Lusitanian spirit', the movement put the emotion at the cult's centre.

Portuguese speakers commonly boast that saudade is untranslatable. Though an old claim - King Duarte of Portugal (who reigned 1433-38) asserted saudade's singularity as early as the 15th century - the Saudosistas are responsible for its ubiquity today. In the movement's manifesto, Pascoaes repeated the claim that the term could not be translated, and asserted that 'the only people who feel saudade are the Portuguese'. Linking the feeling to Portuguese ethnogenesis, he argued that saudade's sublime union of desire and pain reflected the 'perfect synthesis' of Aryan and Semitic blood that obtained in the Portuguese people. Though contemporaries pointed to close equivalents in other languages, Pascoaes's nationalist embrace of saudade appealed to a cultural elite trying to find its way.

Are there culturally specific emotions? At issue is whether the emotions signified by words such as saudade are unique to particular cultures, or instead whether humans everywhere can experience the same range of emotions but recognise and emphasise those emotions differently based on the cultural availability of certain emotion concepts. The psychologists Yu Niiya, Phoebe Ellsworth and Susumu Yamaguchi suggest that 'emotions named by a language may act as magnets for emotional experience, attracting undefined feelings' toward well-known concepts. This would also mean that emotion words such as nostalgia or saudade take on different affective shadings in different places and historical periods.

Brazilian intellectuals have often distinguished their saudade from that of the Portuguese. In 1940, the Brazilian writer Osvaldo Orico described Brazilian saudade as 'more happy than sad, more imagination than pain ... a saudade that does not cry, but sings'. Orico's notion of a happy saudade reflected the joyous, optimistic notion of brasilidade ('Brazilian-ness') that emerged during the early years of the first Getúlio Vargas regime (1930-45). But saudade can also be critical or resentful. In his 2017 study of saudade in Brazilian cinema, the cultural studies scholar Jack Draper at the University of Missouri writes that midcentury directors such as Humberto Mauro deployed saudade for rural folk life as a way of commenting on developmentalism and rural-urban migration. And in today's divisive political climate, some conservatives openly express saudades for Brazil's military dictatorship, which they imagine as the antidote to rife corruption, violence and economic distress.

But can one really feel saudades for a dictatorship, empire or any other polity? Or is it that the word is so cherished, potent and prevalent that it is easily used for political ends? Perhaps both. Because if devotees such as Bruno at the Church of the Souls tell us anything, it is that saudade is always a pleasure and an indulgence. It is a feeling that manages to give, despite being a confrontation with what has been taken away. It is revelatory: when caught in saudade 's grip, we become aware of that which is most important to us, that which makes us what we are.

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Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence - Michael Amoruso | Aeon Ideas

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'I pray for friends I've lost, family, like my uncle who passed away,' Bruno told me. We were chatting in the nave of the Church of the Santa Cruz of the Souls of the Hanged, a small Catholic church in central São Paulo. Built near the old city gallows, regulars go there to pray to the dead.

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How the word became a virtue signal in 2018

A h, fuck! What an indispensable, multitasker of a word it has become! No longer relegated to that marginalized category once known as profanity, fuck now wears many syntactical hats and is a staple of Trump-era vocabulary. In addition to being a fun way to embed a little malediction into words that otherwise might be chalked up as run-of-the-mill resistance jargon ("inter-fucking-sectional," "patri-fucking-archy"), fuck is enjoying a long tenure as a synonym for shit. Not giving a shit (which sounds downright 1980s) has now evolved into "not giving a fuck." By extension, you can now describe something as "[adjective] as fuck" (abbreviated for tweeting purposes to "AF") You can be tired as fuck, sick as fuck, angry as fuck, and so on. I guess if you find yourself in an especially tragic situation (for instance, banned from Twitter), you can be fucked as fuck.

Can you imagine if Rhett Butler had said to Scarlet O'Hara, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a fuck"? Instead of embodying the essence of male privilege, he'd come across as someone with a top-rated podcast. Or a person with a lot of Instagram followers - a fuck-ton of followers, even.

There's a linguistic satisfaction to saying fuck. The word has nice consonants. The feeling of curling your lower lip around your lower teeth to make the "f" sound is a reliably good one. There's a deeper visceral satisfaction, too. Because the word was so long verboten, because it's still technically R-rated language even though no one really thinks about such ratings anymore, it still feels a little dangerous. It feels adult, at least insofar as children under 12 are the only people from whom it would be shocking to hear the word.

In other words, saying fuck gives you the feeling of being a teenager trying to feel like an adult. Given the degree to which this sensation is in many ways preferable to the feeling of actually being an adult, is it any wonder fuck is now as commonly used as those perennial teenage favorites, such as "like" and "you know?"

Fuck is filler. It is unimaginative. It is the verbal equivalent of cuff tattoos and plug earrings. It gestures at being a badass while belying the deeper truth that you run with the pack. It is the colloquy of the proverbial basic, the pumpkin spice latte of speech.

So why does everyone use it? For the same reasons rich old men date young, beautiful women: Because they can.

Once upon a time, FCC regulations and corporate standards and practices policies kept four-letter words out of the public sphere. There were essentially two modes of expression: the way people talked on TV and in print, and the way people talked in private (and in R-rated movies). Even though Tupac Shakur might have coined the "I Don't Give a Fuck" usage back in 1991 with the track of the same name from his debut studio album, 2Pacalypse, it took a solid two decades for fuck to find its way into the water of mainstream discourse.

Now we have books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, and Fuck Love: One Shrink's Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship. We see liberals wearing T-shirts that say "Fuck Trump" and conservatives wearing T-shirts that say "Fuck Your Feelings." We see high-level media professionals - mainly left-leaning journalists and commentators - dropping the F-bomb on Twitter as though it were nothing more than a punctuation mark. We see utterly prosaic sentiments that, dressed up with fuck, are instantly transformed into the kind of deep thoughts that show up in text boxes on your friends' Facebook feeds: "If You Can Dream It, You Can Fucking Do It." "It's About the Fucking Journey, Not the Destination." "The Future Is Fucking Female." (That last one seems particularly open to interpretation.)

We saw, at the Tony Awards last summer, Robert De Niro raising his fists in the air and proclaiming, "It's no longer 'down with Trump.' It's 'fuck Trump!'" This was bleeped out on the network broadcast but met with a euphonious standing ovation in the theater and was trending on Twitter before De Niro even left the stage.

Fuck overuse has been going on for a long time now, but I'm declaring 2018 the official year of fuck. As De Niro demonstrated, fuck is no longer just filler. It's now a standalone deal. De Niro felt no obligation to tell us why - or in what manner - we should fuck Trump. There was no onus upon him to elaborate on his sentiment or to explain how his thinking had evolved from Trump as someone we should merely be "down with" to someone deserving of the nation's collective fucking. It was enough to just yell "fuck" and bask in the reflected glow of his own virtue signal.

To quote film critic Anthony Lane mocking Yoda's blathering New Age syntax in his classic review of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, "break me a fucking give."

Dropping "fuck" into your argument doesn't strengthen your point. It blunts it. It reveals you not as a badass but a lazy ass. And before you tell me that 2018 sucked so fucking much that there's no choice but to let the fucks fly, consider what would happen if we admitted this year just plain sucked. Consider what would happen if we literally gave no fucks about the current situation and let the whole mess speak for itself in plain language. Consider what would happen if we could no longer wrap ourselves in the warm linguistic blanket of fuck and had to face the world in boring, G-rated terms.

Feels pretty cold out there, doesn't it? Well, guess what? It is.

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Why 'F*ck' Is the Word of the Year - Words That Matter - Medium

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How the word became a virtue signal in 2018 A h, fuck! What an indispensable, multitasker of a word it has become! No longer relegated to that marginalized category once known as profanity, fuck now wears many syntactical hats and is a staple of Trump-era vocabulary.

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Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. By and large, it still does. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent - this makes you a so-called prescriptivist - or you show off your knowledge of language change, and poke holes in the prescriptivists' facts - this makes you a descriptivist. Group membership is mandatory, and the two are mutually exclusive.

But it doesn't have to be this way. I have two roles at my workplace: I am an editor and a language columnist. These two jobs more or less require me to be both a prescriptivist and a descriptivist. When people file me copy that has mistakes of grammar or mechanics, I fix them (as well as applying The Economist 's house style). But when it comes time to write my column, I study the weird mess of real language; rather than being a scold about this or that mistake, I try to teach myself (and so the reader) something new. Is this a split personality, or can the two be reconciled into a coherent philosophy? I believe they can.

Language changes all the time. Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive. Take decimate, a prescriptivist shibboleth. It comes from the old Roman practice of punishing a mutinous legion by killing every 10th soldier (hence that deci- root). Now we don't often need a word for destroying exactly a 10th of something - this is the 'etymological fallacy', the idea that a word must mean exactly what its component roots indicate. But it is useful to have a word that means to destroy a sizeable proportion of something. Yet many people have extended the meaning of decimate until now it means something approaching 'to wipe out utterly'.

Descriptivists - that is, virtually all academic linguists - will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. It's just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), which lists a word's senses in historical order. You'll see things such as the extension of decimate happening again and again and again. Words won't sit still. The prescriptivist position, offered one linguist, is like taking a snapshot of the surface of the ocean and insisting that's how ocean surfaces must look.

Be that as it may, retort prescriptivists, but that doesn't make it any less annoying. Decimate doesn't have a good synonym in its traditional meaning (to destroy a portion of), and it has lots of company in its new meaning: destroy, annihilate, devastate and so on. If decimate eventually settles on this latter meaning, we lose a unique word and gain nothing. People who use it the old way and people who use it the new way can also confuse each other.

So I do believe that when change happens in a language it can do harm. Not the end of the world, but harm.

There is another fact to bear in mind: no language has fallen apart from lack of care. It is just not something that happens - literally. Prescriptivists cannot point to a single language that became unusable or inexpressive as a result of people's failure to uphold traditional vocabulary and grammar. Every language existing today is fantastically expressive. It would be a miracle, except that it is utterly commonplace, a fact shared not only by all languages but by all the humans who use them.

How can this be? Why does change of the decimate variety not add up to chaos? If one such 'error' is bad, and these kinds of things are happening all the time, how do things manage to hold together?

The answer is that language is a system. Sounds, words and grammar do not exist in isolation: each of these three levels of language constitutes a system in itself. And, extraordinarily, these systems change as systems. If one change threatens disruption, another change compensates, so that the new system, though different from the old, is still an efficient, expressive and useful whole.

Begin with sounds. Every language has a characteristic inventory of contrasting sounds, called phonemes. Beet and bit have different vowels; these are two phonemes in English. Italian has only one, which is why Italians tend to make homophones of sheet and shit.

There is something odd about the vowels of English. Have you ever noticed that every language in Europe seems to use the letter A the same way? From latte to lager to tapas, Italian, German and Spanish all seem to use it for the ah sound. And at some level, this seems natural; if you learn frango is 'chicken' in Portuguese, you will probably know to pronounce it with an ah, not an ay. How, then, did English get A to sound like it does in plate, name, face and so on?

Nobody in a 15th-century tavern (men carried knives back then) wants to confuse meet, meat and mate

The answer is the Great Vowel Shift. From the middle English period and continuing into the early modern era, the entire set of English long vowels underwent a radical disruption. Meet used to be pronounced a bit like modern mate. Boot used to sound like boat. (But both vowels were monophthongs, not diphthongs; the modern long A is really pronounced like ay-ee said quickly, but the vowel in medieval meet was a pure single vowel.)

During the Great Vowel Shift, ee and oo started to move towards the sounds they have today. Nobody knows why. It's likely that some people noticed at the time and groused about it. In any case, there was really a problem: now ee was too close to the vowel in time, which in that era was pronounced tee-muh. And oo was too close to the vowel in house, which was then pronounced hoose.

Speakers didn't passively accept the confusion. What happened next shows the genius of what economists call spontaneous order. In response to their new pushy neighbours in the vowel space, the vowels in time and house started to change, too, becoming something like tuh-eem and huh-oos. Other changes prompted yet more changes, too: the vowel in mate - then pronounced mah-tuh - moved towards the sound of the modern vowel in cat. That made it a little too close to meat, which was pronounced like a drawn-out version of the modern met. So the vowel in meat changed too.

Throughout the system, vowels were on the move. Nobody in a 15th-century tavern (men carried knives back then) wants to confuse meet, meat and mate. So they responded to a potentially damaging change by changing something else. A few vowels ended up merging. So meet and meat became homophones. But mostly the system just settled down with each vowel in a new place. It was the Great Vowel Shift, not the Great Vowel Pile-Up.

Such shifts are common enough that they have earned a name: 'chain shifts'. These are what happens when one change prompts another, which in turn prompts yet another, and so on, until the language arrives at a new equilibrium. There is a chain shift underway now: the Northern Cities Shift, noticed and described in the cities around the Great Lakes of North America by William Labov, the pioneer of sociolinguistics. There is also a California Shift. In other words, these things happen. The local, individual change is chaotic and random, but the system responds to keep things from coming to harm.

What about words? There are only so many vowels in a language, but many thousands of words. So changes in the meanings of words might not be as orderly as the chain shifts seen in the Great Vowel Shift and others. Nonetheless, despite potential harm done by an individual word's change in meaning, cultures tend to have all the words they need for all the things they want to talk about.

In researching Samuel Johnson's dictionary for my new book, Talk on the Wild Side (2018), I made a startling find. Johnson, in describing his plan for the dictionary to the Earl of Chesterfield in 1747, wrote that

[B]uxom, which means only obedient, is now made, in familiar phrases, to stand for wanton; because in an ancient form of marriage, before the Reformation, the bride promised complaisance and obedience, in these terms: 'I will be bonair and buxom in bed and at board.'

When most people think of buxom today, neither 'obedient' nor 'wanton' is what comes to mind (To my wife: this is why a Google Images search for buxom is in my search history, I promise.)

Turning to the OED, I found that buxom had come from a medieval word buhsam, cognate to the modern German biegsam, or 'bendable'. From physical to metaphorical (the natural extension), it came to mean 'pliable' of a person, or - as Johnson put it - obedient. Then buxom kept on moving: a short hop from 'obedient' to 'amiable', and then another one to 'lively, gay'. (William Shakespeare describes a soldier of 'buxom valour' in Henry V.) From there, it is another short jump to 'healthy, vigorous', which seems to have been the current meaning around Johnson's time. From 'good health' it was another logical extension to physical plumpness, then to plumpness specifically on a woman, to big-breasted.

I don't know how we did without hangry so long in English, because I spent about a third of every day hangry

Two paragraphs ago, I used the words 'leap' and 'jump'. But we see the 'leaps' only when lexicographers, looking back, chop up a word's history into meanings for their dictionaries. Words change meaning gradually, as a small number of speakers use them in a new way, and they in turn cause others to do so. This is how words can change meaning so totally and utterly; mostly, they do so in steps too small to notice.

Again, no chaos results. Every time buxom changed meaning, it could have theoretically left a hole in the lexicon for the meaning it had left behind. But in each case, another word filled its place: in fact, the ones I have used above ( pliable, obedient, amiable, lively, gay, healthy, plump and so on). For useful concepts, it seems, the lexicon abhors a vacuum. (I don't know how we did without hangry so long in English, because I spent about a third of every day hangry. But sure enough, someone coined it.)

Words also weaken with frequent use: The Lego Movie (2014) was on to something with its song 'Everything Is Awesome', because Americans really do use this word rather a lot. Once powerful, it can now be used for anything even slightly good, as in This burrito is awesome. It can even be near-meaningless, as in Steven Pinker's lovely example: 'If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome.'

But do we really lack ways of communicating that we're impressed by something? No language does, and English-speakers are spoiled for choice from the likes of incredible, fantastic, stupendous and brilliant. (All of which have changed from their etymological meanings of 'unbelievable', 'like a fantasy', 'inducing stupor' and 'shiny, reflective', by the way.) When those get overused (and all are in danger of that), people coin new ones still: sick, amazeballs, kick-ass.

The thousands of words in the language are a swirling mass constantly on the move. Again, when one piece moves, threatening a gap or an overlap, something else moves too. The individual, short-term change is random; the overall, long-term change is systemic.

At the level of grammar, change might seem the most unsettling, threatening a deeper kind of harm than a simple mispronunciation or new use for an old word. Take the long-term decline of whom, which signals that something in a question or relative clause is an object (direct or indirect), as in That's the man whom I saw. Most people today would either say That's the man who I saw or just That's the man I saw.

What word is the subject in a clause, and what is the object, is a deeply important fact. And yet, precisely because this is so, even radical grammatical change leaves this distinction intact. Readers of Beowulf are in no doubt that virtually every word in that epic poem is vastly different from its modern counterpart. What those who can't read Old English might not realise is how different the grammar is. English was a language like Russian or Latin: it had case endings everywhere: on nouns, adjectives and determiners (words such as the and a). In other words, they all behaved like who/whom/whose does (there was even a fourth case).

Today, just six words ( I, he, she, we, they and who) change form when they are direct or indirect objects ( me, him, her, us, them and whom). In a longer view, modern Anglophones speak godawful, brokendown Anglo-Saxon, lacking all the communicative power that those endings provided. How, one can imagine Alfred the Great asking, do English-speakers know what is the subject of a sentence and what are the objects without those crucial case endings?

To my six-year-old, everything is epic, which strikes my ear as awesome must have done my parents'

Why did the case endings disappear? We don't know, but it was probably sped up as a result of two waves of conquest: adult Vikings and Normans coming to Britain, and learning Anglo-Saxon imperfectly. Then as now, things such as fiddly inflections are hard for adults to learn in a foreign language. Many adult learners would have neglected all those endings and relied on word order, raising children who heard their parents' slightly stripped-down version. The children would then have used the endings less than earlier generations, until they disappeared entirely.

Once again, the grammar responded as a system. No civilisation can afford to leave the distinction between subjects and objects to guesswork. Word order was relatively flexible in the Anglo-Saxon period. Then the loss of case endings fixed it in more rigid form. The gradual disappearance of case signalling resulted in a potential loss of information, but the solidification of word order made up for it.

Even the deepest-seeming change - to the grammar - never destroys the language system. Some distinctions can disappear: classical Arabic has singular, dual and plural number; the modern dialects mostly use just singular and plural, like English. Latin was full of cases; its daughter languages - French, Spanish and so on - lack them, but their speakers get on with life just the same. Sometimes languages get more complex: the Romance languages also pressed freestanding Latin words into service until they wore down and became mere endings on verbs. That turned out OK, too.

Spontaneous order doesn't sit well with people. We are all tempted to think that complex systems need management, a benign but firm hand. But just as market economies turn out better than command economies, languages are too complex, and used by too many people, to submit to command management. Individual decisions can be bad ones, and merit correction, but we can be optimistic that, in the long run, change is inevitable and it will turn out all right. Broadly trusting the distributed intelligence of your fellow humans to keep things in order can be hard to do, but it's the only way to go. Language is self-regulating. It's a genius system - with no genius.

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Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system - Lane Greene | Aeon Essays

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Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. By and large, it still does. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances.

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by Bernard Comrie

No one would disagree with the claim that language and thought interact in many significant ways. There is great disagreement, however, about the proposition that each specific language has its own influence on the thought and action of its speakers. On the one hand, anyone who has learned more than one language is struck by the many ways in which languages differ from one another. But on the other hand, we expect human beings everywhere to have similar ways of experiencing the world.

Comparisons of different languages can lead one to pay attention to 'universals'-the ways in which all languages are similar, and to 'particulars' -the ways in which each individual language, or type of language, is special, even unique. Linguists and other social scientists interested in universals have formulated theories to describe and explain human language and human language behavior in general terms as species-specific capacities of human beings. However, the idea that different languages may influence thinking in different ways has been present in many cultures and has given rise to many philosophical treatises. Because it is so difficult to pin down effects of a particular language on a particular thought pattern, this issue remains unresolved. It comes in and out of fashion and often evokes considerable energy in efforts to support or refute it.

Relativity and Determinism

There are two problems to confront in this arena: linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. Relativity is easy to demonstrate. In order to speak any language, you have to pay attention to the meanings that are grammatically marked in that language. For example, in English it is necessary to mark the verb to indicate the time of occurrence of an event you are speaking about: It's raining; It rained; and so forth. In Turkish, however, it is impossible to simply say, 'It rained last night'. This language, like many American Indian languages, has more than one past tense, depending on one's source of knowledge of the event. In Turkish, there are two past tenses-one to report direct experience and the other to report events that you know about only by inference or hearsay. Thus, if you were out in the rain last night, you will say, 'It rained last night' using the past-tense form that indicates that you were a witness to the rain; but if you wake up in the morning and see the wet street and garden, you are obliged to use the other past-tense form-the one that indicates that you were not a witness to the rain itself.

Differences of this sort have fascinated linguists and anthropologists for centuries. They have reported hundreds of facts about 'exotic' languages, such as verbs that are marked or chosen according to the shape of an object that is being handled (Navajo) or for the relative ages of speaker and hearer (Korean). Such facts are grist for the mill of linguistic relativity. And, indeed, they can be found quite readily in 'nonexotic' languages as well. To cite a fact about English that is well known to linguists: It is not appropriate to say Richard Nixon has worked in Washington, but it is perfectly OK to say Gerald Ford has worked in Washington. Why? English restricts the present perfect tense ('has worked') to assertions about people who are alive. Exotic!

Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that such differences between languages influence the ways people think-perhaps the ways in which whole cultures are organized. Among the strongest statements of this position are those by Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half of this century-hence the label, 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', for the theory of linguistic relativity and determinism. Whorf proposed: 'We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way-an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language' (Whorf, 1940; in Carroll, 1956, pp. 213-4). And, in the words of Sapir: 'Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. ...The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' (Sapir, 1929; in Manlbaum, 1958, p. 162).

Investigating Language and Thought

How can such bold claims be substantiated beyond examination of individual languages themselves? If one takes the hypothesis seriously, it should be possible to show that Turks are more sensitive to evidence than are Americans, but that Americans are more aware of death than Turks. Clearly, the hypothesis cannot be supported on so grand a level. Rather, experimental psychologists and cognitive anthropologists have sought to find small differences, on controlled tasks, between speakers of various languages. Maybe Navajos are somewhat more sensitive to shapes of objects, for example.

The results have been mixed. In most cases, human thought and action are overdetermined by an array of causes, so the structure of language may not play a central causal role. Linguistic determinism can best be demonstrated in situations in which language is the principal means of drawing people's attention to a particular aspect of experience. For example, if you regularly speak a language in which you must pick a form of second-person address (you) that marks your social relationship to your interlocutor-such as Spanish tu ('you' for friends and family and for those socially subordinate) vs. usted ('you' for those socially above in status or for those with whom you have no close connection) or French tu versus vous -you must categorize every person you talk to in terms of the relevant social dimensions. (As a thought experiment of linguistic determinism, think of the categorizations of social relationships that would have to be made if Spanish became the common language of the United States.)

Going beyond thought experiments, some of the most convincing research demonstrating some degree of linguistic determinism is being conducted under the direction of Stephen C. Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic s in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Levinson and his collaborators distinguish between languages that describe spatial relations in terms of the body (like English 'right/left', 'front/back') and those that orient to fixed points in the environment (like 'north/south/east/west' in some aboriginal Australian languages). In a language of the second type one would refer, for example, to 'your north shoulder' or 'the bottle at the west end of the table'; in narrating a past event, one would have to remember how the actions related to the compass points. Thus, in order to speak this type of language, you always have to know where you are with respect to the compass points, whether you are speaking or not. And Levinson's group have shown, in extensive cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies, that this is, in fact, the case.

Much more research needs to be done, but it is not likely that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis will be supported in the strong form quoted above. For one, language is only one factor that influences cognition and behavior. For another, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were really true, second language learning and translation would be far harder than they are. However, because language is so pervasive-and because we must always make cognitive decisions while speaking-weaker versions of the hypothesis will continue to attract scientific attention. (For a lively debate on many of these issues, with much new evidence from several fields, read Gumperz and Levinson 1996.)

Suggested Readings

Gumperz, J. J., and Levinson, S. C. 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lucy, John A. 1992. Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Sapir, E. 1929. "The status of linguistics as a science". Language 5. 207-14. Reprinted in The selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality, ed. by D. G. Mandelbaum, 160-6. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Whorf, B. L. 1940. "Science and linguistics". Technology Review 42: 227-31, 247-8. Reprinted in Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. by J. B. Carroll, 207-19. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press of MIT/New York: Wiley. 1956.

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by Bernard Comrie No one would disagree with the claim that language and thought interact in many significant ways. There is great disagreement, however, about the proposition that each specific language has its own influence on the thought and action of its speakers.

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"POLITICAL language", wrote George Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." No leader will admit to having had people tortured, but Dick Cheney did say: "I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme"-which means the same thing. Notice how, as Orwell put it, "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details."

Wars sound horrible in plain English, so they have always generated a smokescreen of euphemism. "Kinetic action" means "killing people". "Collateral damage" means "killing people accidentally". Politicians typically use the word "kill" only to describe what our enemies do to us; not what we do to them. In a speech in May explaining his drone warfare policy, for example, Barack Obama spoke of "lethal, targeted action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces". As Orwell said, when "certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract".
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Orwell worried that sloppy language disguised bad ideas. Some influential Democrats today have a different complaint: that Republicans use words more skilfully to win political battles. Conservatives are shameless and simplistic, they grumble, and it works. When Mr Obama was struggling to explain the circumstances under which doctors might discuss end-of-life provisions with Medicare patients, Sarah Palin yelled "Death panels!" and spooked a huge chunk of the electorate.

"[C]onservatives use language more effectively than liberals in communicating their deepest values," writes George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, in "The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic". Liberals "present the facts and offer policies", he claims. Republicans, by contrast, go straight for the gut. Newt Gingrich, while Speaker of the House in the 1990s, encouraged his footsoldiers to repeat focus-group-tested words like "sick", "pathetic" and "coercion" when talking about Democrats, while parroting "family", "children" and "liberty" as Republican values.

When Republicans and Democrats use different terms for the same thing, the Republican phrase is nearly always shorter and more concrete, observes Joseph Romm, the author of "Language Intelligence". He has a point. When arguing about abortion, Republicans favour "life" (evocative) while Democrats talk about "choice" (abstract). Republicans talk about "taxes" and "spending" while Democrats want to raise "revenue" for "investment". George W. Bush had the "Patriot Act", whereas Mr Obama has the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act". The former is an awful law that is hard to oppose; the latter an awful mouthful that is hard to remember.

Mr Lakoff urges Democrats to be more concrete. "Have I seen it with my own eyes?" he asks. "Can I take a pen and draw a picture of it?" "Air", "water" and "soil" are better than the "environment", for example, which is perhaps why the "Clean Air Act" is the law of the land but the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" (a cap-and-trade bill for greenhouse-gas emissions) crashed to ignominious defeat.

Republicans are also better, Democrats fear, at agreeing on a message and sticking to it. Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, once said: "There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time."

Democrats sigh that they are too sophisticated to feel comfortable reducing complex ideas to pithy two-word phrases. And they struggle to unite around a slogan because their base includes disparate groups (blacks, Latinos, unions, educated urbanites) who do not, themselves, speak the same way. The Republican base is varied too, including both small-government types and devout Christians, but they unite around slogans such as "liberty", whether freedom from taxes or the freedom to pray in schools. If only Democrats could "frame" issues better (in Mr Lakoff's phrase), they would win more battles.

Not all weasels are Republican

But hold on. Democrats have won four of the past six presidential elections, so they can't be doing everything wrong. And many of them use short words deftly. Barack Obama's 2008 slogan, "Yes we can", whipped crowds into a frenzy of approval (though one of Mr Obama's speechwriters is said to have hated it). Bill Clinton's formula "safe, legal and rare" helped bolster support for legal abortion. Democrats invoke "working families" to remind voters that "poor" and "scrounger" do not mean the same thing.

Democrats can be shameless, too: the campaign ad showing Paul Ryan tossing an old lady in a wheelchair off a cliff was not exactly nuanced. They repeat messages aggressively: Mr Obama in 2012 never stopped reminding voters that Mitt Romney was rich. And their rhetoric is often misleading. When arguing about budgets, for example, they use the word "cut" to mean "spend less than was previously planned". So a "savage cut" can actually be a large increase. This is such a potent subterfuge that Republicans use it too, at least when talking about military spending.

Politicians will never use language the way Orwell did, marrying clarity of thought with precision. A politician has to win elections, which means convincing lots of people with widely varying interests and opinions that he is on their side. Alas, that requires waffle, fudge and snappy slogans. These are hard to coin, as Mr Lakoff inadvertently proves. He has urged Democrats to refer to taxes as "membership fees" and to argue that "Patriotism requires Medicare for all." Somehow, neither has caught on.

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"POLITICAL language", wrote George Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." No leader will admit to having had people tortured, but Dick Cheney did say: "I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme"-which means the same ...

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thanks to K Bailey

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Donald Trump Presidential Campaign Announcement Full Speech (C-SPAN)

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George Orwell

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Lon Po Po

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Lon Po Po A Red Ridinghood story from China

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Angela carter

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Grimms 1812

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French Classic

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The Story of English episode 1 - An English Speaking World - Part 1 / 7

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LAST week's column was about the languages that have both formal and informal pronouns for you. It seems that, at least in the European languages, the informal pronouns are ascendant.
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But they are a far from gone, and their persistence brings to mind another topic. That is the idea that languages shape thought in profound ways, a topic that Johnson has looked at before. In some languages, literally every time you say you, you have to express how you see the relationship between you and the other person. Is that person a friend, family member or child? Or, rather, a colleague, boss, old person, telemarketer or simply someone you don't feel close to? The word depends on the relationship.

So do these languages force their speakers to pay more attention to social relationships? The idea is popular, but controversial among linguists and psychologists.

One argument for the language-shapes-thought hypothesis is that while languages may not constrict thought, they may nudge or steer it. Roman Jakobson, a linguist, once said that "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." How do two-pronoun systems play into this? In German, I must choose du or Sie every time I address someone. According to the logic of language shaping thought, I should therefore be more aware of social relations when I speak German. But in reality, I have found the need to use a certain form of "you" a boring chore-tricky and a bit tedious. Trying to figure out the best way to address people is more of a speed bump than a new way of seeing the world.

A believer in the language-shapes-thought idea might argue that speaking German doesn't push me to always be more conscious of social relationships because I'm a non-native speaker, and so I haven't developed the habits of mind of lifelong German speakers. But plenty of native speakers of two-pronoun languages find this system irksome and awkward, just as I do. Native ability in French does not allow one to immediately sort all the world's people neatly into tu and vous. Marginal cases abound. A new coworker your age? The next-door neighbour you are meeting for the first time, but whom you will soon be asking for a cup of sugar? A stranger at a bar? Certain older relatives? Native-speakers of double-"you" languages report many such situations. And they differ quite a lot internally on how much attention they pay to formality-as do English-speakers, despite the lack of two pronouns.

In other words, in a strong version of the language-shapes-thought hypothesis, every German should always have an immediate instinct regarding who is du and who is Sie. But they don't. They may care which pronoun to use, but they often struggle (and are aware of the struggling), because the language forces this binary distinction on the nebulous relationships of the real world.

But there is another way in which the double-"you" distinction may nudge thought. It refers to what Dan Slobin, a linguist, has called "thinking for speaking". Speakers of different languages may well see the world similarly most of the time, but when people are specifically planning to say something, different languages may temporarily force speakers to pay more attention to certain distinctions. For example, every time a German person says "you", a little attention must be paid to formality. So split pronouns (or other features) may act as a kind of "prime" for certain thoughts or behaviours. Primes can be powerful. Every time I refer to my boss, for example, the formal "you" may prime me to be more aware of the formality and hierarchy of our relationship. So too when I must address an old friend.

But such priming is transient. A bigger question is whether differences between languages persist when people are not "thinking for speaking"-ie, whether they condition something we might call a robust worldview. When silently strolling down country lane, do speakers of different languages think in profoundly different ways? The popular view is "yes", but furious debate among researchers continues.

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Johnson: Does speaking German change how I see social relationships?

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LAST week's column was about the languages that have both formal and informal pronouns for you. It seems that, at least in the European languages, the informal pronouns are ascendant. But they are a far from gone, and their persistence brings to mind another topic.

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JOHNSON is a fan of the Freakonomics books and columns. But this week's podcast makes me wonder if the team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt aren't overstretching themselves a bit. "Is learning a foreign language really worth it?", asks the headline. A reader writes:
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My oldest daughter is a college freshman, and not only have I paid for her to study Spanish for the last four or more years - they even do it in grade school now! - but her college is requiring her to study EVEN MORE! What on earth is going on? How did it ever get this far? ... Or to put it in economics terms, where is the ROI?

To sum up the podcast's answers, there are pros and cons to language-learning. The pros are that working in a foreign language can make people make better decisions (research Johnson covered here) and that bilingualism helps with executive function in children and dementia in older people (covered here). The cons: one study finds that the earnings bonus for an American who learns a foreign language is just 2%. If you make $30,000 a year, sniffs Mr Dubner, that's just $600.

But for the sake of provocation, Mr Dubner seems to have low-balled this. He should know the power of lifetime earnings and compound interest. First, instead of $30,000, assume a university graduate, who in America is likelier to use a foreign language than someone without university. The average starting salary is almost $45,000. Imagine that our graduate saves her "language bonus". Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe (a statement dubiously attributed to Einstein, but nonetheless worth committing to memory). Assuming just a 1% real salary increase per year and a 2% average real return over 40 years, a 2% language bonus turns into an extra $67,000 (at 2014 value) in your retirement account. Not bad for a few years of "où est la plume de ma tante?"

Second, Albert Saiz, the MIT economist who calculated the 2% premium, found quite different premiums for different languages: just 1.5% for Spanish, 2.3% for French and 3.8% for German. This translates into big differences in the language account: your Spanish is worth $51,000, but French, $77,000, and German, $128,000. Humans are famously bad at weighting the future against the present, but if you dangled even a post-dated $128,000 cheque in front of the average 14-year-old, Goethe and Schiller would be hotter than Facebook.

Why do the languages offer such different returns? It has nothing to do with the inherent qualities of Spanish, of course. The obvious answer is the interplay of supply and demand. This chart reckons that Spanish-speakers account for a bit more of world GDP than German-speakers do. But an important factor is economic openness. Germany is a trade powerhouse, so its language will be more economically valuable for an outsider than the language of a relatively more closed economy.

But in American context (the one Mr Saiz studied), the more important factor is probably supply, not demand, of speakers of a given language. Non-Latino Americans might study Spanish because they hear and see so much of it spoken in their country. But that might be the best reason not to study the language, from a purely economic point of view. A non-native learner of Spanish will have a hard time competing with a fluent native bilingual for a job requiring both languages. Indeed, Mr Saiz found worse returns for Spanish study in states with a larger share of Hispanics. Better to learn a language in high demand, but short supply-one reason, no doubt, ambitious American parents are steering their children towards Mandarin. The drop-off in recent years in the American study of German might be another reason for young people to hit the Bücher.

And studies like Mr Saiz's can only work with the economy the researchers have at hand to study. But of course changes in educational structures can have dynamic effects on entire economies. A list of the richest countries in the world is dominated by open, trade-driven economies. Oil economies aside, the top ten includes countries where trilingualism is typical, like Luxembourg, Switzerland and Singapore, and small countries like the Scandinavian ones, where English knowledge is excellent.

There are of course many reasons that such countries are rich. But a willingness to learn about export markets, and their languages, is a plausible candidate. One study, led by James Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School, has estimated that lack of foreign-language proficiency in Britain costs the economy £48 billion ($80 billion), or 3.5% of GDP, each year. Even if that number is high, the cost of assuming that foreign customers will learn your language, and never bothering to learn theirs, is certainly a lot greater than zero. So if Mr Saiz had run his language-premium study against a parallel-universe America, in which the last half-century had been a golden age of language-learning, he might have found a bigger foreign-language bonus (and a bigger GDP pie to divide) in that more open and export-oriented fantasy America. And of course greater investment in foreign-language teaching would have other dynamic effects: more and better teachers and materials, plus a cultural premium on multilingualism, means more people will actually master a language, rather than wasting several years never getting past la plume de ma tante, as happens in Britain and America.

To be sure, everything has an opportunity cost. An hour spent learning French is an hour spent not learning something else. But it isn't hard to think of school subjects that provide less return-economically, anyway-than a foreign language. What is the return on investment for history, literature or art? Of course schools are intended to do more than create little GDP-producing machines. (And there are also great non-economic benefits to learning a foreign language.) But if it is GDP you're after, the world isn't learning English as fast as some people think. One optimistic estimate is that half the world's people might speak English by 2050. That leaves billions who will not, and billions of others who remain happier (and more willing to spend money) in their own language.

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Johnson: What is a foreign language worth?

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JOHNSON is a fan of the Freakonomics books and columns. But this week's podcast makes me wonder if the team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt aren't overstretching themselves a bit. "Is learning a foreign language really worth it?", asks the headline.

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T HE PHRASE "to have your cake and eat it", much used in relation to Brexit, is a bit odd. In its current form it is not the paradox it purports to be, since having and then eating a cake is the usual sequence; in its original form ("eat your cake and have it too"), it has more force. As a metaphor for Brexit, it was always a bit of a joke.
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Some metaphors are more persuasive-and more dangerous. Take the metaphor of a "deal". Typically, if a deal is rejected, the status quo ante obtains, notes Anand Menon of King's College London. Brexiteers believe that, to get a better "deal", Britain should just stay cool and be willing to walk away. "No deal is better than a bad deal," some claim.

That would be true if Brexit were like buying a second-hand car. You size up the vehicle, hoping not to spend all of the £5,000 in your pocket. But the dealer wants the lot. You walk away; he still has his car, you still have your £5,000. But this is not the case with a no-deal Brexit. Supply lines, trade links and more would be disturbed. You don't keep the £5,000. You end up with less-and no car.

Metaphors are vital mental shorthand. Contemplating abstract things is easier with the use of concrete and familiar mental images. Time is a horizontal line; life is a journey. Note that they are consonant with each other. If time were instead routinely thought of as a ladder, the notion of life as a journey down a road would clash with it. In a classic book, "Metaphors We Live By", George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two linguists, use the fact that metaphors like this chime with each other as evidence that they are deeply rooted and so strongly influence people's thinking.

Metaphors need several elements to work. One is simplicity. If you compared Brexit to a complex contract, with a "break clause" corresponding to the current imbroglio, you would have a more precise metaphor-but this would confuse a lot of people not familiar with such documents.

With simple metaphors, some of the details won't fit; life may be a journey, but you don't need a passport. But their central elements should illustrate central elements of the phenomenon they describe. If they don't, the metaphor will mislead (which, for politicians, is sometimes the point). Consider "war", another popular trope. Wars on poverty, drugs and terrorism have all failed. Why? Politicians aim to summon one element of the "war" metaphor when they use it: an intense national struggle. But there is another crucial part of war, namely the adversary.

In a real war, they fight back and might win. When your side prevails, the foe might be persuaded to formally surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri. Drugs or poverty or terrorism don't do that, leaving the public that had been roused by the talk of "war" frustrated. The metaphor backfires. You don't need to be Sun Tzu to know that you shouldn't declare a war that cannot be won.

Or take a similar tempting metaphor, one deployed by America's president. Donald Trump cannot stop talking about "winning". Someone can win a sporting contest (or a war); such encounters generally have clear losers, too. Sometimes there are "win-win" situations, but that name is a kind of intentional paradox, like the eaten but extant cake; the core meaning of "to win" is to triumph against an opponent. And sure enough, Mr Trump seems to think any transaction from which the other party emerges satisfied must not have been a "win".

Real as it is, the influence of bad metaphors is limited, as is the benefit of replacing them. A study at Stanford University found that switching from describing crime as a "beast" to describing it as a "virus" led participants to propose different solutions. They thought the "beast" should be fought with law and order. As a "virus", they were more likely to recommend public-health-style policies. But the law-and-order approach still commanded a majority, merely a smaller one. So changing metaphors is not magic.

All the same, it is important to combat misleading examples with better ones. This is hard, since people are attached to their old frames of reference, but possible. The new metaphor must be stark and compelling. For instance, Brexit is far more like a divorce than a financial deal. Separating will be painful, doing so acrimoniously even costlier, with assets wasted in the squabble and the children embittered. This metaphor may be more accurate, but it is also less cheerful. So it runs up against another deeply rooted feature of human cognition: the desire not to think about anything unpleasant.

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THE PHRASE "to have your cake and eat it", much used in relation to Brexit, is a bit odd. In its current form it is not the paradox it purports to be, since having and then eating a cake is the usual sequence; in its original form ("eat your cake and have it too"), it has more force.

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WHEN using any kind of translation helper-dictionary, Babel Fish or Google Translate-remember that if you don't know the target language, you should always have a native speaker take a look at the final product. Otherwise, your results might be as flamboyantly incompetent as those in this shop window, which I passed not long ago in midtown Manhattan.

To attract foreign tourists, the store's owners have tried to translate "Welcome" into a variety of languages. But in almost every case, they chose something inapt. Here they are, starting at the top left:
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Welcome (English): OK, this is right.

Empfang (German): Nope. This is "welcome" in the sense of a reception, like "they received a fine welcome," or the reception area in a hotel. It can't be used to greet people. That would be Willkommen.

accueil (French): Nope. This means "reception" or "greeting". They want bienvenue.

boas-vindas (Portuguese): Nope. Boas-vindas is a noun used the phrase dar as boas-vindas, "to give a welcome". But they want bem-vindo.

прием, (priyom) (Russian): Nope. This is another noun meaning "reception" or "receiving" or sometimes "welcome", but Russians say dobro pozhalovat' to welcome people.

yookoso (Japanese): Yes! Finally one correct, although store and restaurant owners would probably prefer irashaimase .

歡迎 (huan ying) (Chinese): Two in a row correct. (And besides Johnson's own typos, we were wrong in initially writing that the sign mixed traditional and simplified Characters.)

bienvenida (Spanish): Partial credit. Bienvenida would be appropriate to welcome a single woman. Bienvenido or bienvenidos is more neutral, since the masculine adjectives are also traditionally gender-neutral for mixed groups.

welkom(Dutch): On a roll, and finally unambigously correct! This is what an actual Dutch person would say.

(Latin): Nope. Passing Romans will recognise this as a past participle meaning "accepted" or "welcome", but this was not used a greeting in Latin. They might want salve.

καλωσορίζω (kalosorizo) (Greek): Nope. Johnson's Greek is paltry, so a friend, Coulter George of the University of Virginia, pitched in: "The problem with καλωσορίζω (apart from orthography - it should be written as two words) is that it would literally mean 'I arrive well'. The proper form καλώς ορίσατε is a past tense 'You arrived well!', or more idiomatically, 'How nice that you've come!'"

мэндчилгээ (mendchilgee) (Mongolian): Mongolian! I admire the effort to attract New York's many Mongolian tourists, but this doesn't seem to be quite right either, according to online phrasebooks and dictionaries for Mongolian. We must confess, though, that Johnson's Mongolian is worse than paltry. Any readers who can help, please do.

mottakelse (Norwegian): Nope. Once again, they have found the word for "reception" or "welcome area", but not the greeting in Norwegian, which is velkommen.

Besides the odd language selection (Mongolian and Latin, but no Italian or Arabic), what's striking is the common use of the wrong part of speech: a verb phrase here, a noun there. But on a shop sign, "welcome" is not an adjective ("you are a welcome guest"), a noun ("please accept my welcome") or a verb ("I welcome you".) it is an interjection. If you're looking up something you don't know in a bilingual dictionary, in other words, you improve your chances by at least trying to find the right part of speech.

For this advice, you're mendchilgee in advance.

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WHEN using any kind of translation helper-dictionary, Babel Fish or Google Translate-remember that if you don't know the target language, you should always have a native speaker take a look at the final product. Otherwise, your results might be as flamboyantly incompetent as those in this shop window, which I passed not long ago in midtown Manhattan.

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Is it About Consent?

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It happens every winter. The clocks change, the chill settles in, and, like the flurries of the first snowfall, a new cascade of shocked friends and acquaintances pepper my social media feed with the observation that, oh my God you guys, the lyrics to the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are actually super rapey.

Aside from this being a little repetitive at this point (this phenomenon's been on a perennial hot streak for like a decade), this assertion is also, well, wrong. Because like with all art - even popular art - you can't draw any sort of valuable conclusions about it without a demonstrable understanding of two things: nuance and context. They'll get you every time.

Penned in 1944, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a duet usually staged between a man and a woman. The lyrics place the pair at the guy's home following a date, with the woman lamenting that she has to leave and the man trying to convince her to stay. The complaints of skeeviness stem first from the song's overall tone, in which a man is putting pressure on a woman to engage in assumedly intimate behavior, and second from one now-infamous line in which the woman muses, "Hey, what's in this drink?"

Well, I'm not the first to point this out, but based on the frequency of people bringing it up, it bears repeating. Consent isn't actually a problem in "Baby, It's Cold Outside," because if you pay attention, you'll notice that the inclination to leave isn't coming from the woman-it's coming from the society that wants to control her.

Here are all the statements she gives on the topic of heading home:

I really can't stay

I'vegotta go away

My mother will start to worry

My father will be pacing the floor

I'd better scurry

The neighbors might think

I simply must go

Ioughtto say "no, no, no, sir"

My sister will be suspicious

My brother will be there at the door

My maiden aunt's mind is vicious

There's bound to be talk tomorrow

Emphasis added by me. The lady here expresses her concerns through a whole lot of words like better, gotta, and must. But not once does she say she wants to go or would rather call it a night or would prefer to GTFO. She anticipates admonishments from every member of her shitty, judgmental family, but she never implies the slightest moral qualm of her own.

What's happening here isn't all that hard to figure out, especially if you remember that the song was written in 1944. The woman wants to spend the night with her date. She just knows that if she does, she'll be scarlet-lettered by her community for having the audacity to make her own premarital sexual choices. She's not consternating over letting this guy down; she's consternating over being publicly and privately maligned for doing what she wants. And clearly this is normal for her, as well as for listeners at the time, who were expected to understand all of this and relate. The problem with this song doesn't have to do with consent. The problem has to do with slut-shaming.

This is actually the backstory for the notorious "What's in this drink?" line. Watch some old black-and-white movies. Making a crack about how strong your drink is or whether you've been "slipped a mickey" was a way of humorously acknowledging that you'd like to use intoxication as an excuse for "being bad" and doing something your repressive society wouldn't smile upon.

Once you start looking, you'll actually find a lot of examples in 20th-century films of situations that look "rapey" at first, but in reality serve to demonstrate the magnitude of shame placed on women for "surrendering their virtue." In the classic 1959 romcom Pillow Talk, Rock Hudson plays a fuckboy named Brad who lives in a bachelor pad fitted out with switches next to the sofa that can automatically dim the lights, lock the door, drop a swanky jazz record onto the turntable, and expand the couch's pull-out bed with a single click. Aside from this obviously being douchey, it catches a lot of flack these days, mainly for the lock - since, in all fairness, remote locks don't have a great rep right now.

Realistically, the deadbolt is probably there not to keep girls in but to keep party crashers out. Earlier, we see his wingman Tony Randall waltz in like he owns the place. But it's easier to draw this conclusion when we consider that none of the many ladies Brad romances ever protest. There's no Pepé Le Pew discomfort as they purr in his arms, sigh wistfully into the phone, and enjoy his embraces with melodramatic reverie. But as Brad juggles booty-calls with a dozen of them, it's clear there's still something shady going on. It's not between Brad and the ladies; it's between the filmmaker and the ladies: They're meant to seem pitiful. Especially compared to our heroine, Jan (Doris Day), a can-do career woman who will have none of Brad's sass. Jan sets herself apart by not allowing herself to be seduced. She would never fall prey to the wiles of some playboy with a great chin and totally ruin herself. Brad's many girlfriends never want to leave his arms, let alone his apartment, but we can infer that if that lock were indeed meant for them, it would only be to buy Brad a few more seconds in which he could entice them to finally submit to their own raging desire for him - despite the consequences of becoming pitiful, fallen women as a result.

Don't get me wrong, both Brad and the man in "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are kind of being dicks for pursuing a sexual agenda, even a fully consensual one, while blissfully ignoring the consequences their sexist society will reap upon their partners in the cold light of day. Despite my admittedly flippant attitude and more than occasional cursing, I don't look down on anyone for misreading "Baby, It's Cold Outside" or Pillow Talk or anything else. We're experiencing a pandemic crisis of consent, for fuck's sake, where rapists admit to their crimes but still don't think they're rapists. We should be reexamining the things we've taken for granted, revisiting narratives that women may well have once accepted only as inroads to happiness within the confines of an inherently oppressive and unsafe world.

But that doesn't mean we should just let it go when a piece of media like this trips our wires necessarily. By accepting this new but incorrect reading of "Baby, It's Cold Outside," we're negating the real feminist issue that the woman in the song is so artfully acknowledging. An issue that women today are still very much dealing with. This not only squanders a classy and adorable chance to tacitly bitch about slut-shaming while listening to holiday music, but it also swashes a coat of paint over discussions of the whole issue in popular culture, making it that much easier for actual slut-shaming to continue.

Not to mention that when activists and socially aware people get something wrong but decide to just barrel forward with the premise anyway, it's bad for the cause. It makes us look myopic and makes the cause look trivial. Besides, we already have mountains of books and movies and songs that feature genuinely offensive content we have to reckon with in order to enjoy our favorite things. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna try to edit Mickey Rooney out of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

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The Problem with "Baby, It's Cold Outside" Isn't Consent. It's Slut-Shaming.

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It happens every winter. The clocks change, the chill settles in, and, like the flurries of the first snowfall, a new cascade of shocked friends and acquaintances pepper my social media feed with the observation that, oh my God you guys, the lyrics to the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are actually super rapey.

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I always thought the catchphrase "HEY, YOU GUUUYS!" was originally from The Goonies. But apparently, it's a reference to the 1971 PBS children's program The Electric Company. I was a titch too young to have caught either of these in real time, but like many kids, I grew up with an ancient VHS tape containing back-to-back, taped-off-of-TV recordings of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator.

From this early exercise in psychedelic kids TV programming to its present iteration, the phrase "you guys" has had quite a journey. Most recently, there's a perfectly chill, very reasonable feminist movement endorsed by people I respect arguing for women to no longer call one another "guys" at all. And for the life of me, I cannot get on board.

Did you know this was a thing? I've been talking about the battle over this phrase exclusively with hardcore rhetorical criticism nerds for years, but it's only recently become a debate you can read about on Bustle or hear referenced on a hilarious sitcom. I feel like the argument is pretty self-explanatory but just to summarize it quickly: Some feel that making "you guys" the indiscriminate, universal greeting for all humans is low-key sexist because it emphasizes the culturally established notion that male is the standard.

There's also the added possibility that a trans woman could hear this phrase and be particularly troubled by being referred to, basically, as male. Thus only adding to the pain caused by male being considered the standard. Because if male is the standard, then it does follow that female is somehow non-standard. This is why it's socially acceptable to walk up to a group containing both men and women and say, "Hey, guys," but it is not standard to walk up and say, "Hey, ladies" or "Hey, girls" or whatever. (Though a few heroes like Jonathan Van Ness are doing their part to change this.)

Words do more than simply communicate their prescribed dictionary meanings.

Alice Walker goes so far as to say that when one woman calls another by a male-gendered name, it points to a basic fear of being female. And I'm not dismissing this assertion. There is absolutely a pervasive undercurrent of subconscious misogyny in American culture - a fact I've acknowledged in plenty of my own writing.

You know the kind of thing I'm talking about; it's perfectly socially acceptable for a woman to wear trousers because it makes her more like a man, something society still unconsciously considers to be (wince) an improvement. But it's dramatically less acceptable for a man to wear a skirt because this makes him more like a woman - and what could possibly be more degrading than to be more like a woman?

So yes, I get what Walker is talking about. But I also think it's possible for two or more truths to exist simultaneously in this morass of extrapolation and abstraction that serves as the road map through our culture's social-psyche. And for me, there are other truths about gendered language that are no less relevant than the claim of female-phobia.

The sticking point for me is that words do more than simply communicate their prescribed dictionary meanings. Words come packed with associations and histories, with connotations, moods, and tones. For example, in a discussion about race, it can be neutral to use the word "black." This does not mean that, therefore, it's also neutral to use the word "yellow" simply because both words correlate a racial background to a crayon color. That's because the meaning of a word doesn't depend merely on its literal definition but on the way it has been used throughout history. "Black" has largely been used as a relatively unbiased shorthand for an American of enslaved African heritage. "Yellow" has almost exclusively been used as a dehumanizing slur for an American of Asian heritage. That's just how it is. Language doesn't evolve in straight lines.

While it's true that the origin of the word "guy" is indeed gendered masculine in the human sense, not just the grammatical sense, it's also true that - because of the longstanding subjugation of women - so are most words.

Similarly, when it comes to gender, there are subtle but purposeful differences in word choice. If I'm using figurative speech to describe the cocksure, self-reliant way I tend to follow investigative leads, I might say, "I'm a bit of a cowboy when it comes to research." I would not say that I'm a bit of a cow girl when it comes to research because that doesn't conjure the same image of self-assured independence. When I'm talking about the rowdy but cooperative way I work with my family to rebuild the wall in our kitchen, then I might say, "Hey, I'm a home renovation cowgirl."

These are great examples because 1) even though there are different connotations for cowboy (resourceful, laconic, loner) and cowgirl (resourceful, raucous, cooperative) they're equal in terms of cultural value, and 2) they're both so very, very dorky that you can be assured they're taken from my actual life.

These connotations are probably rooted in fiction, but my point is that I'm not going to accept the arbitrary idea that I cannot identify with one of these two literary concepts because the concept itself is supposed to have a gender and I'm only supposed to relate to the one that matches my gender. That is freaking asinine.

Likewise when I put on a plaid shirt and muse that I always wanted to be a lumberjack. Or when I beat my family to the top of a hill and claim the title "king of the mountain." Or when I fantasize about producing and starring in a shitty comedy called Chairman of the Board about a surfer who inherits a Fortune 500 company - even though I have never surfed and apparently Carrot Top stole my idea in 1998. I certainly don't need to rework the famous turn of phrase that makes the existing title totally geniusand call myself the chair woman of the board, as if leaving it as-is will somehow confuse everyone.

Don't get me wrong, my allusive language isn't strictly masculine by a longshot. My babble is just as full of "queen," "goddess," and "aviatrix," not to mention "weirdo," "genius," and "BAMF." Sometimes, if it happens to be what I'm feeling, I modify a masculine term to be feminine. When a friend needs a ride, I've been known to volunteer as a wheelwoman rather than wheelman. (It's a mafia term for a getaway driver. God, I'm exhausting to be around.)

My point is that words, whether they're masculine, feminine, or neutral, convey a wealth of feeling and narrative from which I refuse to be excluded. My BFF doesn't receive a coronation when I call her "queen," and the U.N. doesn't recognize my authority over a pile of dirt when I win king of the mountain, so why should the gender component of these words be considered any less abstract than everything else about them?

Which brings us back to "guys." This problem might not exist in the first place if English had a built-in gender-neutral pronoun - so that every other goddamn sentence didn't call such strict attention to gender - or if English had grammatical gender and we were more accustomed to seeing the gendered component of a word as random and incidental with no relationship whatsoever to the humanconcept of gender. While it's true that the origin of the word "guy" is indeed gendered masculine in the human sense, not just the grammatical sense, it's also true that - because of the longstanding subjugation of women -  so are most words.

Are we succumbing to internalized misogyny when we don't call a woman doctor a doctress? Or a woman author an authoress? How about getting promoted to office administratrix or taking the bar exam and becoming a mediatrix? While some of these words do sound pretty cool rolling off the tongue, the reason we don't use them anymore is because at some point, women stopped tolerating the notion that our spoken language must be packed full of conventions erected specifically to set us apart.

Focus on achieving a society in which notions of gender don't have the power to enforce limitations on people in the first place.

Are you following me here? On the one hand, "guys" is a male term, male is the standard, and, thus, taking on the term means taking on maleness. But on the other hand, what's heretofore categorized most "standard" words as male in the first place is their exclusivity. No women allowed - you need special terms for women! By transcending and finally destroying that exclusivity - making these words and concepts open to both men and women - the words cease to be masculine at all. They join in the rolling bumrush our whole culture is enjoying toward a far more neutral center.

I think that despite living in a hellscape of misogyny, women on the whole actually have unfathomable resilience when it comes to loving rather than fearing our own femininity. Internalized misogyny is definitely a thing, but it can also be the hammer that makes everything look like a nail. I've noticed that when women co-opt previously masculine language, we don't use it to replace the feminine language we already use; we just expand our vocabularies to include both. I'm sure that in the years to come, I'll be bummed out by some of the developments in our linguistic evolution, mourning some equivalent of the fact that teen daughters don't greet their friends with "Hey, girls!" like they used to. But I just don't find this to be the act of self-negation that some do.

Instead of policing women for refusing to be held hostage by the misogynistic origins of gendered language, maybe we should focus on achieving a society in which notions of gender don't have the power to enforce limitations on people in the first place. Because the group who really struggle with a paralyzing, conditioned fear of being feminine are men. We wouldn't even be having this conversation about women using male gendered words if men used female gendered words. It goes right back to women in slacks vs. men in dresses.

Using language to erase that particular manifestation of misogyny is trickier. In the long term, I think this rigid fear will soften as society slowly moves toward actual equity - not just in language, but in everything. In the meantime though, if you want to start addressing groups of men with "Hey, girls!" you have my full support. I'm kind of a wise guy.

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You Guys, Feminists Aren't Supposed to Say 'You Guys'

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I always thought the catchphrase "HEY, YOU GUUUYS!" was originally from The Goonies . But apparently, it's a reference to the 1971 PBS children's program The Electric Company. I was a titch too young to have caught either of these in real time, but like many kids, I grew up with an ancient VHS tape containing back-to-back, taped-off-of-TV recordings of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator.