George Packer and the Atlantic’s sad defense of inequity

Content warning: This post is about harmful language and it contains words that are used to dehumanize people. Please take caution.

In April 2023, the Atlantic published a 2,500-word opinion piece complaining about language equity style guides. The attack on these guides is misleading, wrong, and harmful. It continually misrepresents the style guides. It shows a misunderstanding of the content and the point of them. It refuses to accept others and expresses contempt for anything that doesn’t fit the author’s narrow and outdated idea of language. And it gives fuel to the fascists in their culture war.

Continue reading “George Packer and the Atlantic’s sad defense of inequity”

Janne Saarikivi’s Fascism Lite, or how to fearmonger with statistics

On May 15, Janne Saarikivi published a turd of an opinion column in YLE (Finland’s national broadcasting company). The article is a prime example of nationalistic fearmongering. It has the appearance of being well-thought out and reasoned, like the contemplations of a reflective scholar, but a peek under the hood shows that it’s just repackaged right-wing ideas. The problem is that Saarikivi’s article is likely to convince readers who do not have any knowledge about his topics. And that’s a lot of people. So strap on your Nokia boots and let’s wade through this bullshit swamp.

Continue reading “Janne Saarikivi’s Fascism Lite, or how to fearmonger with statistics”

More political scientists doing bad linguistics

There’s a new article out that uses faulty methods to study the linguistic complexity of politicians’ speech. It makes many of the same mistakes that I criticized Schoonvelde et al. (2019) for – and even references that article. But it somehow comes to the right conclusion… for the wrong reasons. I know, it’s strange. Let’s check it out. Continue reading “More political scientists doing bad linguistics”

The sociolinguistics of speaking Spanish in America

Here’s a good article on the politics of language in America today. The article talks about how Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro does not speak Spanish fluently. They make an excellent point of what this can mean to people:

The matter has become something of a litmus test from reporters whom Castro says ask him repeatedly why he doesn’t speak Spanish as though that were essential to being authentically Latino*.

The article also uses the word fluent a couple of times in the beginning, but then makes a good point about how this idea is a misnomer:

Proficiency in Spanish, and in any language, is more of a continuum than a box you can check, said Belem López, an assistant professor in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

“People have these constrained ideas that you have to speak English perfectly and Spanish perfectly,” López said, “but really that doesn’t exist.”

And, of course, there are different standards for different people:

Latinos are expected to speak impeccable Spanish, while non-Latinos are showered in praise for speaking imperfect Spanish. When white Americans learn Spanish, “it’s seen as enrichment,” a sign of high social status and education, Tseng said. In part, Tseng added, this is because their “American-ness” is never up for question.

“If Tim Kaine goes out on the street and speaks Spanish, no one is going to shout at him, ‘Speak English, we’re in America!’ ” Tseng said.

But it ain’t all bad. Many Latino parents who did not learn to speak Spanish as a first language at home are encouraging their children to learn the language. And despite the ridicule that people have had to face for daring to speak a language other than English in the US, it seems the Latino community considers it important for future generations to know Spanish.

Guess what? It’s going to be important for non-Latino people too.

Check out the rest of the article here: https://wapo.st/2JNt5LU.

 

* The WaPo uses Latino throughout the article, which is why I’m using the word here instead of Latinx, the gender-neutral form of the word. If you want to know more about Latinx, see Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia and the Huffington Post.

The language of financial crime

Hey, guess what? Rich people are just like you and me. They just use different words for their crimes. On a recent episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, journalist Oliver Bullough talked about all the ways that rich people around the world illegally hide their money. Around minute 36, Bullough talks about the euphemisms that rich people use when they fleece you:

GROSS: So if you’re a jurisdiction that has laws favorable to hiding money, you can’t exactly, like, advertise that. How does word get out?

BULLOUGH: You kind of can advertise it ’cause this is all done in – it’s all – everyone talks in euphemisms anyway. I mean, no one talks about hiding dirty money. You talk about, you know, asset protection or about – you know, no one talks about secrecy jurisdictions. You talk about confidentiality. You know, confidentiality and secrecy are the same thing, but they’re just – you’re putting a different spin on it. You know, you don’t talk about being a tax haven. You talk about avoiding fiscal friction.

GROSS: (Laughter) Oh, I like that.

BULLOUGH: It is a – you know, you – no one ever talks about a bribe. You talk about a consultancy payment or possibly a facilitation payment.

hiding dirty money asset protection

tax haven avoiding fiscal friction

bribe facilitation payment

keep warm burn the rich

Steven Pinker’s Dog Whistles

So. Steven Pinker.

Yeah I wrote about him way back in the day when I reviewed his book The Language Instinct and how it was garbage. But if linguistic nativism is your thing, then fine. You do you. Geoffrey Sampson presents a valid argument against Pinker’s claims and Pinker responded… never. Because The Language Instinct is still making that money yo.

But Steven Pinker has branched out now. And things have not gone so well. Scholars from other fields are learning that he’s kinda bad at scholarship.

So here’s a rundown of why you should not follow what Steven Pinker says or writes.

First up we got Pinker’s garbage tweet about words not having power. He links to an article in Quillette (which we’ll get to later). I’m not going to embed the tweet here, but I’ll quote it. Pinker says “The first insight of linguistics, going back to Plato, is that words are conventions, without magical powers. That’s being nullified by PC/SJW attacks on mentioning taboo words, even ironically or in works of art.” Many people pointed out how stupid this is and, indeed, it is very stupid. The first insight of linguistics? Even historians know more about linguistics than this. But what it’s really about is how Steven Pinker really wants to be able to say the n-word. Like really bad. And preferably with impunity, if that’s not too much to ask. Why does everyone have to be so uptight about Steven Pinker saying the n-word? iT’s jUsT a wOrD

Let’s not dwell on it because things get worse (somehow).

Pinker has published a book called Enlightenment Now. In the book, Pinker argues that the world is actually a better place than you think it is because of the Enlightenment. It’s too bad Pinker totally fucks up the scholarship in his book. As this article by Aaron R. Hanlon shows, Pinker doesn’t even know what the Enlightenment was all about.

History scholars staring to feel like linguists.

Do you think we’re done? We’re not done. (I wish we were done. Those three paragraphs alone were draining. On we go! Into the shit!)

Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is bad for other reasons. Here’s Samuel Moyn pointing out one of the problems:

Or take inequality. Sure, some perceive a rampant crisis in most nations, but it is all sort of boring and overblown, by Pinker’s lights. “I need a chapter on the topic,” he writes, apparently willing himself to push through his fatigue with the subject, “because so many people have been swept up in the dystopian rhetoric and see inequality as a sign that modernity has failed to improve the human condition.” In his cursory treatment, Pinker tries to downplay currently exploding levels of national inequality, by pointing out that global inequality is declining: Even if the gap between the richest and the rest in individual countries is widening, on a world scale inequality is falling slightly. Never mind that it is within their individual countries that most people are experiencing and responding to inequality, and wreaking havoc because of it. In any case, Pinker argues, it does not matter morally if some people get extremely wealthy, so long as poverty decreases.

Just as in his somewhat literal understanding of violence, Pinker simply cannot see something so straightforward as class rule, which has been massively reestablished in our time of inequality, with all the baleful effects it has had on politics. In a world in which the outsized gains of the rich allow them to live a separate existence from the rest—stooping only to buy elections with dark money and even induce populists to act in their interest—rage is not only an expected but also an understandable result. The fact that these forms of domination and hierarchy are features of the very modernity he wants to lionize is not a possibility Pinker pauses to contemplate. Each of his arguments on the subject is a way of saying he doesn’t think inequality is that important—even as populists across the world are reaping gains from the obvious conclusion that it is.

“But, Joe,” I hear you saying, “those are just scholars who know more about the Enlightenment than Steven Pinker. So what if he got some stuff wrong? It’s not like he’s a leading thinker in society!” He is a leading thinker in society. He learned how to get things wrong and not care about it in linguistics. Now he’s moved on to other fields and he also sucks at them. And he’s also an asshole about it. Here’s Jennifer Szalai:

Steven Pinker doesn’t just want you to be happy; he wants you to be grateful too. His new book, “Enlightenment Now,” is a spirited and exasperated rebuke to anyone who refuses to concede that the world is becoming a better place. “None of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become,” he writes. “People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp and kvetch as much as ever.”

The world has become amazing for Steven Pinker, so why don’t you all just shut your pie holes, huh? You want another article showing that Pinker fucks up his argument? You got it! In fact, here’s two! Go nuts! Because this nonsense of Steven Pinker writing things and people paying for his hot garbage is getting tiring. Linguists knew it first. Sorry, historians. He’s yours now. (Please take him) [Update July 30: Here’s a third article pointing out how wrong and misleading Pinker is in Enlightenment Now. It’s by Phil Torres in Salon.]

And here’s Jason Hickel asking Pinker to debate him. Hahahaha, good luck, bro. Call some linguists if you get Pinker to respond. Because he ain’t ever done that. But he still gets puff pieces in the Chronicle. I see you, Chronicle. Do better. Be more like Mehdi Hasan and don’t fall for Pinker’s bullshit.

[Update June 5] Don in the comments pointed me to a piece in Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson which is a thorough take down of Pinker, his writings and his ideology. Well, almost every way – there’s not much in there about how Pinker also sucks at linguistics. If you want something less acerbic than what I’ve written here, then check that article out. But if you want the really despicable stuff Pinker has written, read on and check that piece out later.

But friends, things get much worse. Steven Pinker promotes the website Quillette, which is website all about “free speech”. I’m putting that in scare quotes because it’s 2019 and you know what that means. Quillette likes to publish racists and sexists. They’ll even let these people publish anonymously because why should they have to own up to their bigotry? Steven Pinker has aligned himself with them. Even more so, Pinker said that campus rape is a “moral panic,” an “extraordinary popular delusion” and something akin to a witch hunt. And all because the rate of rapes on college campuses is not as high as it is in “the world’s most savage war zones”. Fuck you, Steven Pinker. Maybe you’ll listen to me because I’m also a straight white man. Steven Pinker has never had to cross the street on campus because he was walking alone and there were men walking toward him and he was worried about being attacked. Steven Pinker has never had to worry about what he’ll do while he’s out for a jog on campus and there’s a man running behind him – is he fast enough to outrun that man? Is he strong enough to overpower him? Are there enough other people around to hear him scream? Steven Pinker has never had to worry about having something slipped into his drink at a campus party. The only reason I know that women have to worry about these things is because they have told me. There are other things they have to worry about – things that neither me nor Steven Pinker have ever been forced to think about. And there are women who have been raped on campus. But Steven Pinker doesn’t care because there aren’t enough rape victims on college campuses as there are in some hypothetical war zone. Ugh. Get fucked, Pinker.

I can’t go on. I don’t want to. Go read this thread. And when someone cites Steven Pinker, tell them to get a real source for their claims. If he would act right, academia would take him seriously. If he would do actual scholarship, he wouldn’t be a problem. But every field he goes into rejects his claims. Why? Because he’s shit.

Update on that F-K paper

Three months ago I posted about a paper in PLoS ONE called “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches”. I noted that there are serious problems with that study. For the tl;dr:

After I posted on here, I also commented on the article with my concerns. The PLoS ONE journal allows commenting on their articles, but I’ll admit that my first comment was neither appropriate nor helpful. It was more of a troll than anything. The editors removed my comment, and to their credit, they emailed me with an explanation why. They also told me what a comment should look like. So I posted a grown-up comment on the article. This started an exchange between me and the authors of the article. Here’s the skinny:

1. The authors confuse written language with spoken language
2. The study uses an ineffectual test for written language on spoken language
3. The paper does not take into account how transcriptions and punctuation affect the data
4. The authors cite almost no linguistic sources in a study about language
5. They use a test developed for English on other languages

The authors tried to respond to my points about why their methodology is wrong, but there are some things that they just couldn’t argue their way out of (such as points 1, 2, 3 and 5 above).

Behind the scenes, I was talking with the editors of the journal. They told me that they were taking my criticisms seriously and looking into the issue themselves. In my comments on the paper, I provided multiple sources to back up my claims. The authors did not do in their replies to me, but that’s because they can’t – there aren’t studies to back up their claims. However, my last email with the editors of the journal was over a month ago. I understand that these things can take time (and the editors told me this much) but a few of the criticisms that I raised are pretty cut and dry. The authors also stopped replying to my comments, the last one of which was posted on April 9, 2019 (can’t say I blame them though).

So I’m not very positive that anything is going to change. But I’ll let you know if it does.

Short interview with Dr. Samy Alim

In the Pittsburgh City Paper, there’s a short interview with Dr. Samy Alim. You should read it. It’s called “” and it’s all about language and discrimination. It’ll give you a taste of what kind of research Dr. Alim has done. If you like what you read, then go check out his book (with Geneva Smitherman, another great linguist) called Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.S., about how Obama’s masterful use of language is representative of the relationship between race, language and education in the US. That book is excellent.

I can’t pick a favorite quote from the City Paper interview. Just go check it out: https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/the-linguistic-dominance-of-white-western-english-and-how-to-recognize-and-disrupt-it/Content?oid=14230061

Book review: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

One of the most viewed posts on this blog is my review/comparison of the books A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and A Patriot’s History of the United States by Schweikart and Allen. I intended to read through both books and compare them chapter by chapter, but I gave up after a while – mostly because it was clear that the latter book was simply an attempt to rewrite history to confirm social conservatives’ belief that they are the best. It was propaganda for nationalists.

Whatever those two books are, neither of them hold a candle to An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. This book is heavy. The history related by Dunbar-Ortiz is raw and you need to know about it if you want to call yourself an American. Let’s get into it.

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Speaking as David Brooks is hard

David Brooks has an opinion piece in the New York Times called “Speaking as a White Male…”. It’s about identity politics and it features the usual headscratcher ideas that we have come to expect from the Times‘ opinion page, including this nonsense right here:

Brooks Opinion Speaking as a White Male - nonsense paragraph

Wat.

Brooks’ column may be full of the stuff that only white dudes could ever think of, but I want to look at one particular thing that he says:

Now we are at a place where it is commonly assumed that your perceptions are something that come to you through your group, through your demographic identity. How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”?

Brooks’ choice of words is telling (“rise up”, “Latina”, “queer”, and “Jew”), but I’m not going to get into that here (or just yet). I can’t remember hearing anybody rise up in conversation and say “Speaking as a(n) X”. So I thought I’d have a look at the SPOKEN section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to see if we can find this phrase. The data in the SPOKEN section of COCA comes from transcripts of news shows. Not all of it is entirely spontaneous, but it’s good enough for what we’re looking for. Here’s a search for “SPEAK as _at*” (that is: all forms of the lemma speak, followed by the word as, followed by an article):

COCA Spoken - SPEAK as _article_
Search in COCA for “SPEAK as _a*”

The first thing we can see is that speaking as a is the most common form of this construction, but that it seems to be trailing off in usage from the 1990s to 2017. On top of that, 63 hits are not that much (48 hits for speaking as a + 15 hits for speaking as an = 63). Let’s take a look at the two most common constructions.

Of those 63 hits, 35 fit the form that Brooks used. I’m excluding examples like “I’m not speaking as X” or “I was speaking as X” or when the speaking as X was put into the person’s mouth, such as in this example from NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Show:

Peter Sagal: And speaking as an esteemed historian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, do in fact, in your scholarly opinion, the Yankees suck?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Without a question.

Peter Sagal: Thank you.

Of the 35 hits that are similar to the form Brooks made up, most of the words that appear after speaking as a(n) are unique, so most of them appear only once. Some favorites of mine are

Speaking as a(n)

old-time criminal defense lawyer

guy

reporter who missed that story

There are 2 hits each for Speaking as a followed by woman, individual, and mom. The words Latina, queer or Jew do not appear in the search results. There is, however, one example of speaking as a homosexual and one example of speaking as an Israeli dove. So two out of three ain’t bad?

What’s going on here, then? My guess is that Brooks inflated the number of times he has heard Speaking as a(n) X to suit his argument. It’s probable that he has heard it a couple of times, but he makes it seem like it’s an everyday thing. Of course, maybe just hearing speaking as a queer person once is one too many times for some people.

The scant results from the search could also indicate that the data in the corpus doesn’t include speech from enough people who identify as a Latina, queer or Jew. That is probably true (these people need to be represented more on our news shows), but I also think that people do not need to say speaking as a(n) X because often in conversation a person’s identity is known by the participants. Think about it: would any of your friends or family members unironically say speaking as a(n) X? When people are being interviewed, their identity is often spelled out before the interview starts. And of course there are many other ways to indicate aspects of your identity in conversation without saying speaking as a(n) X.

I don’t recommend you read Brooks’ column (read this instead). It’s bad. It’s by a white guy who claims he doesn’t understand identity politics. Come on, David. You have a column in the New York Times. You get it. You just don’t want to. If you really need some help, give up your column and hand it to a Latina person, or a queer person. Then sit back and read what they have to say. I guarantee it won’t be “Speaking as a(n) X…”