Latinate Aphorism of the Diem

Retrospect is viginti-viginti.

Determined

I've written before about being baffled and belligerent about the tendency to blur the lines of gender.

Not sexuality; anyone who studies human history for longer than the last 120 years or so comes to realize that the division of people into "gay" and "straight" is not so rigid as we've chosen to make it.

But gender is biology. Except in cases of extreme deformity or mutilation, it is one thing or another, in a way that sexuality or race never can be.

Yet some people persist in trying to use laws to change biologies. I'm perplexed. So is Eric at Classical Values, who attempts to get behind a conservative scare campaign and finds much, in fact, to be disturbed about:

This leads to another, much more disturbing question. If I can be whatever gender I want without regard to my present anatomy, the anatomy of my birth, or my biological sex, then why do these biological limitations apply only to sex?

What about race? Is that determined biologically, or by birth? Or can that be a state of mind too?

Well?

I'd written about it from the view of language precision and common sense. The ripple effect in a culture increasingly defined by pigeonholes is one I hadn't taken up, but he has.

Ballsy

It's odd that people use the word balls to mean reckless, impudent courage. Nothing I know does so much to make a man cautious as awareness of the vulnerability and exposure of the old beans.

-phobic

[posted by Callimachus]

Here's a news item from tonight's AP wire:

Television actor Jason Wahler hurled racial and homophobic invectives at a police officer when he was arrested over the weekend after punching a hotel security guard and passing out drunk in a hallway, a Seattle Police Department report said.

I'm not really interested in another story about a dumbass celebrity who can't handle his liquor, but I am interested in language. And the use of "-phobic" in situations like this strikes me as odd and wrong.

"Phobia" pretty clearly means "fear, horror, aversion." As a clinical condition in psychology, someone can express his horror or aversion to something (perhaps something lurking in himself) by being aggressively hostile to it.

But it seems a big reach by the AP or anyone else to say that every such insult is a mask over a fear. I would presume the sorry lush was just reaching for hurtful words to fling, and slurs against a man's sexuality are among the oldest, and still most common, weapons that come to hand in such a case. Ask any guy who's lived longer than fourth grade.

The insult to homosexuals is collateral damage, as they are not the intended target (I see no references to the cop actually being homosexual). Just as calling a guy a "pussy" in a heated argument is an insult to women, but not primarily meant as one.

[My friend Kat used to wonder why guys took that as an insult at all, since they all seemed to be so damned fond of the stuff.]

I wonder why the AP couldn't have said "hurled racial and homosexual invectives ..." since "invectives" covers the notion of insult (and note the use of "racial" instead of "racist").

Phobia is Greek, and it drifted into psychology from medicine, where it was used since classical time in compounds. Hydrophobia, the old word for "rabies," is attested in Late Latin from c.420 C.E. in the writing of Cælius Aurelianus, and from 50 C.E. in the Greek of Celsius. It literally means "dreading water," and the ailment was so called because human sufferers show aversion to water and have difficulty swallowing it.

Psychology began to pick it up in the late 19th century: agoraphobia (1873), claustrophobia (1879), acrophobia (1892), xenophobic (1912). By 1905, the formulation was common enough to be parodied, as someone did in the delightful ergophobia "fear of work."

[The Greek phobos "fear" originally meant "flight," which is still its only sense in Homer, but it became the common word for "fear" via the notion of "panic, fright."]

From there, presumably, -phobic drifted into pop psychology and thence into journalese, where it is used selectively for certain hostile or abusive behaviors without inquiry into motive. Is this Wahler fellow afraid of homosexuals? Who knows? Not the AP, I am sure. He got into a piss-drunk fracas with a cop and called him a "faggot."

He also called him the N-word -- curiously, because the cop in question is not black. Hell, I'm the whitest man you'll ever meet, and I've been called the "N-word" -- by a black panhandler berating me for blowing him off when he hit me up for a dollar outside a Subway store. Clearly it's not always about race, or fear.

Sometimes, though, such words might be used toward a known homosexual, and with a deliberate intent to wound. But, once again, I don't think "-phobic" is necessarily accurate. It implies a knowledge of underlying motives that usually can't be proved. Unless you assume that any use of such words is rooted in fear, and that involves buying into a psychological theory.

In other cases, a more accurate Greek word is brought into play: misein "to hate." You see it in misanthrope and misogyny. This would seem a better word, but I can't think of a euphonious combination of "miso-" and "homo."

The old "anti-," as in "anti-American," seems serviceable here, too.

Greetings from Thailand

[posted by Callimachus]




Here is your language back. Some settling of content may have occurred during transit.

Sent by our friend Kat as part of an explanation for why she sometimes slips out of idiomatic English when she goes back to Thailand.

Agglutinate Yourself

One of my dictionary correspondents has been regaling me with tales of Finnish, which he has learned. I love the idea of an agglutinative language, though I've never tried to learn one. Latin is as close as I've come to one.

One result of this type of grammar is that complex ideas can be contained in single words. Many Eskimo languages also are agglutinative, and I remember reading that in one of them the sentence "He also can make big boats" was a single word.

In Finnish, the word juoksentelisinkohan means "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly." I think someone should claim that as a Blog name.

Another result is that words exist in an overlapping range of cases, genders, and moods that can look utterly daunting to a writer in English or Chinese. My correspondent sent along this link to a site where Fred Karlsson, author of a book on Finnish grammar, lists the 2,253 ways to write kauppa (Finnish for "shop").

Kauppoineennekinkohan, for example, expresses in English "would that be with your shops, too?"

What's amazing to me is, everyone I've met who has learned Finnish (or Hungarian, which is similar, and related) tells me how delightfully easy it is once you get the hang of it.

Dirty Words

Want to make your world strange? (Without chemicals, I mean?) Learn an ancient tongue.

The familiar turns exotic. Blue is blue, right? The word ought to be recognizable and unchanging over millennia. But names of colors turn out to be among the slipperiest words. If you read the "Odyssey," you meet Homer's "wine-dark" -- oinopos -- an adjective which Homer uses 17 times of the sea and twice of oxen, and Sophocles uses once to describe someone's arm. Ancient Greek references to the star Sirius, an icy blue to us, describe it as "red."

Even closer to home, in Anglo-Saxon, the spectrum of color is strange. In "Beowulf," yellow is the color of linden wood (used to make shields). The favorite color-adjective for gold, however, is red.

Is color real? Was the sea a different color to the Greeks? Did the Saxons see the same colors that we do? Was Homer blind? (Well, yes, but his audience wasn't.)

Yet, as this "Scientific American" article explains, color perception is remarkably consistent across the human spectrum. (One exception is the tendency to blur blue into green.)

Kay and Berlin hit on color terminology in the early 1960s while comparing notes on their field research. Kay, a New York City–born, New Orleans–bred cultural anthropologist, had just returned from 15 months in Tahiti. Berlin, a linguistic anthropologist reared in Oklahoma, had been researching a Mayan language of southern Mexico. "We found that in both our languages, all the major color terms but one were exactly like those in English, and in the one area of difference, they differed in exactly the same way." (They grouped green and blue to form what Kay and Berlin called "grue.") That two such profoundly unrelated languages should name colors alike seemed to point to some universal linguistic pattern.

In the mid-1960s Berlin and Kay ended up at Berkeley. They had their graduate students scour the Bay Area for native speakers of foreign languages, quizzing them with standard color chips, not unlike those used as samples for paint. Their object was to establish the meanings of basic color terms--that is, those that could not be analyzed into simpler terms (such as "blue-green") and were not defined as characteristic of a given object (such as "salmon"). Later Berlin and Kay collaborated with other researchers to expand their sample to 110 languages.

Color lexicons vary, first of all, in sheer size: English has 11 basic terms, Russian and Hungarian have 12, yet the New Guinean language Dani has just two. One of the two encompasses black, green, blue and other "cool" colors; the other encompasses white, red, yellow and other "warm" colors. Those languages with only three terms almost always have "black-cool," "white-light" and "red-yellow-warm." Those having a fourth usually carve out "grue" from the "black-cool" term.

The tree of possibilities turned out to have branching points, some of them rather rare. Still, the manner in which languages can build up their color words is tightly constrained, suggesting the existence of universal constraints on semantic variation.

I still don't know what the Greeks were seeing. But I think the case with the Anglo-Saxons is that, like the New Guineans, they saw color with different values than we do.

Many surviving color words from Old English -- dun, wan, sallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, murky, dark -- refer to colors which are not hues. These words have more to do with chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) than with hue (wavelength). We tend to think of color only as hue.

Old English brun and hwit both meant "bright, shining," though now both are used to mean hues -- "brown" and "white" (although we still speak of "burnished" wood or metal). One of the knottiest linguistic problems in Old English is blæc, which is the common ancestor of the seemingly irreconcilable modern words "black" and "bleach." The Old English word seems to have been used to refer to a type of colorlessness.

Out of all this you can get an insight into that world. Look around you and subtract all the artificial, man-made pigments from your world. Then look at what is left, and you may see why glitter and dark mattered more than pink and purple in naming what you see. Northern Europe through most of the seasons is a landscape of brown, gray, and dull green. The eruptions of color in spring and fall must have been brief and amazing, with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.