The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 2: Imaginaries and other buzz words

 The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 2 -- continued from Part 1.

The first thing that struck me when I began to read The Many Faces of Christianism was the use of the word imaginaries. It appeared in the first paragraph, and about seven times in the first chapter (more if you include footnotes, none of which explained it).

Here is one of the sections in which the word appears in context:

In all of this, the bulwarks of present-day anti-liberalism, such as the notions of Holy Rus’ or the Russian World, nationalist and populist movements in Europe, as well as the Make America Great Again-campaign feature major political imaginaries: they assert a timeless connection between certain territories, certain people, and cultural or civilizational exceptionalism. All of these build on a connection of these political imaginaries with (selected aspects) of religious tradition.

One might conclude, therefore, that "imaginaries" are things that assert timeless connections between certain territories and people on the one hand, and cultural and civilizational exceptionalism on the other -- but it's still a rather nebulous concept.

I recalled, however that I had seen the term used a couple of years earlier in a book I had been editing. It popped up in Chapter 12, and I was unable to edit the sentences in which it appeared, because I had no idea what they meant. I asked the author, and suggested that he include a definition of it and a couple of other terms (like "hybridity") somewhere in the first chapter so that readers who encountered them later in the book could see what he was talking about.

He said the term had been suggested to him by a mutual friend and former colleague of mine in the Missiology Department at the University of South Africa (Unisa), Klippies Kritzinger, so I asked him what the term meant. I thought I had made a note of his reply, but I had mislaid it. I did a web search, which said it has something to do with the square root of -1. It took me some time to find Klippies Kritzinger's reply, and when I eventually did find it, it said:

I used the term 'imaginary' more or less in the sense that the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor does. He coined the term 'social imaginary', which is not the same as a theory. I use the term ecclesial imaginaries, which I first called the 'functional ecclesiologies' by which members view and experience the church. These are imaginaries such as: church as stokvel (you don't get buried from church building if you are owing on your 'dues'; church as theatre (it is mainly about entertainment: vibrant music and motivational speeches); church as school (mainly about teaching and learning); church as business (minister as CEO, flashy marketing and huge building); and so on... The wonderful biblical images of Body of Christ, people of God, group of disciples, bride of Christ, and so on are perhaps affirmed intellectually, but the actual praxis (theory-practice-theory-practice) is driven by these imaginaries. And I told Stephan that many URCSA members and students do church in these ways, which I find problematic and disappointing. I hope this helps a bit....

That did help in the case of the book I was editing two years ago, but it doesn't help much in the case of this book, which has "imaginaries" scattered throughout, but they seem to mean something other than popular erroneous conceptions of the Church. 

It does, however, seems to have become the Western theological buzzword of the 2020s, as "relevant" was in the 1960s, "contextual" in the 1970s, and "holistic" in the 1980s. It's one of those words that lots of people seem to use, but no one is quite sure what it means. 

Since retiring, however, I seem to have got out of touch with most Western theology, and I realised that I'd kept in touch with most of it while I was working through gossip in the Unisa cafeteria and editing theology study guides, but, since losing access to the Unisa library ten years ago, I've been pretty much out of touch with it. 

But reading The Many Faces of Christianism I begin to suspect that many Western theologians are as out of touch with Orthodox theology as I am with Western theology and view it mainly through Western Protestant/secular/political spectacles, and perhaps even primarily through the spectacles of the CIA.

In trying to get a handle on "imaginaries" I also asked on an English usage internet forum, some of whose members had access to more resources than I do, and it appears that it is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but suggested it may have been imported from French, and was possibly connected with the French philosopher Lacan. And yes, that seems a promising path to follow, except that  I learn that, like Lacan's other contributions to psychoanalytic theory, it was subject to a continual reformulation throughout his work. It appears to mean an image external to oneself, like a child observing its reflection in a mirror. I'll have to think about that some more, and see if there are any clues further on in the book.

Holy Rus' is mentioned as one of the "imaginaries", but if an "imaginary" in the Lacanian sense, bears the relation of the image of a child in a mirror to the child itself (as Kritzinger's distorted ecclesiologies in relation to the Body of Christ suggest), then surely in a serious work of theology they should also be discussing the child, rather than just the imaginary? But the authors of this book, in effect, live in the world through the looking glass.

There are other terms that pop up without clear definitions, for example "anti-liberalism"  in the passage quoted above, and "liberal democracy" elsewhere. My initial impression (which may change when I've read more, though I doubt it) is that for the editors and most of the authors, "liberal democracy" is characteristic of the countries of Western Europe and North America, and "anti-liberalism" characteristic of Christian Nationalists. I'm sure that the second part of that is right, but I'm not sure of the first part. Britain's terrorism laws, for example, which treat opposition to genocide as terrorism, are far more draconian than South Africa's 1967 Terrorism Act, passed at the height of its Christian Nationalism phase.

Continued in Part 3. 

 

 

Cults: what's good and what's bad about them

 In some circles, it seems, the word "cult" denotes something that is automatically assumed to be bad, and some people who make this assumption use it to denigrate groups that they don't like, while others seem to think that the word should not be used at all because they see it as derogatory. 

I find this attitude rather strange, and it seems to be difficult to discuss it. The people who think like this seem to simply take the line "It's a bad word, don't use it. End of discussion," or "it's a bad thing, so I'm just calling a spade a spade."

So what is a cult?

Is it a useful word for describing a bad thing, or a bad word used to indoctrinate people into thinking that something good or neutral is a bad thing?

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "cult" as follows:

cult n. system of religious worship; devotion, homage, to person or thing (the ~ of)

To determine whether any given phenomenon is a cult, therefore, one must determine whether it is a system of religious worship, or whether it involves devotion to a person or thing. These are fairly objective criteria, and it should be easy to determine whether a phenomenon is a cult or not.

When one has established that a phenomenon is a cult, determining whether it is good or bad is far more subjective. That would depend on whether one thinks that what is worshipped, or what receives the homage and devotion, is worthy of it.

For example, there are two books that I would like to read on the cult of the saints. One is The Cult of the Saints by St John Chrysostom, which is a series of sermons on the lives of Christian saints, and the other is The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter Brown.

In both these books the word "cult" is used in its proper and legitimate sense, and it is in no way pejorative. St John Chrysostom, in particular, regards the cult of the saints as a good thing. I too regard the cult of the saints as a good thing.

I do believe, however, that there can be, and are, bad cults. A few years ago I discussed the cults of two unscrupulous businessmen who became politicians, one living and one dead. I discussed the cults of Cecil Rhodes and Donald Trump in the course of reviewing a book called The Cult of Rhodes.

In my view these cults were bad, because I did not think that Cecil Rhodes or Donald Trump were worthy of such homage or devotion. Your view may differ. You may think that one or both of them were saints, or, even if not actually saints, at least worthy of homage or devotion. So opinions on whether the cults of these men are good or bad may differ.

But opinions on whether the adulation of these men, Trump while he is still alive, and Rhodes after he died, constitutes a cult also seems to be a contentious matter.

The word "cult" has, mainly in the 2nd half of the 20th century, been misused to describe "new religious movements", "minority religions" and various other groups of people. A recent book dealing with this misuse is 'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century, and the description on the GoodReads site is as follows:

This book focuses on how 'cult rhetoric' affects our perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs).

'Cult' Rhetoric in the 21st Century explores contemporary understandings of the term 'cult' by bringing together a range of scholars from multiple disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Ranging from the 'Cult of Trump' and 'Cult of COVID', to the campaigns of mass media, contemporary 'cult' rhetoric has become hybridised and is common vernacular for everyday people. The contributors explore these issues by analysing how NRMs have developed over the past decades and deconstructing the language we use to describe these movements.

I can see several problems in the description, but there's no way I can afford to buy the book. and owing to bureaucratic bunglings at the Unisa Library I no longer have access to an academic library so I can't get hold of it that way.

Religious organisations and groups, whether new or old, usually have cults, which they practise, but it is rather misleading to say that they are cults. All Christian bodies, for example, practise the cult of Jesus who is called Christ. Some of them practise the cult of the saints, mentioned earlier.

Cults may be either good or bad, depending on whether you judge the object or person worshipped or to which or to whom homage and devotion are paid is worthy of it. But it is high time we stopped using the word pejoratively, or demanding that it be banned simply because it assumed to be pejorative. 

 

What's your lifestyle?

The word "lifestyle" has been around for more than a century, but was only popularised a little over 50 years ago, and now seems to have been hijacked by the advertising industry. An article in BusinessTech informs us that Lifestyle Estates are Booming in South Africa:

Giovanni Gaggia, CEO of Real Estate Services, said that lifestyle estates offer a unique blend of luxury living and community engagement.

The estates typically offer several amenities, including golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, which cater to various interests and promote an active lifestyle.

They also offer a secure environment and well-maintained infrastructure to add to their appeal.

But the shanty-town lifestyle estates of informal settlements not only don't offer such "typical" features as golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, they also do not typically have indoor plumbing, sewerage, proper roads or electricity.

The advertising hype suggests that only an affluent lifestyle of conspicuous consumption qualifies as a lifestyle at all.

The earliest reference to "lifestyle" in the Oxford English Dictionary was 1915, and it is defined as

A style or way of living (associated with an individual person, a society, etc.); esp. the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life.

It only became popular in the late 1960s, however, when it was used mainly to contrast the lifestyles of the "hip" and the "straight". The hippie counterculture espoused different values from those of "straight" society, and expressed these values through different lifestyles.

One of the values that hippies eschewed was the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that was practised or aspired to by straight society.

The advertising industry, which was dedicated to promoting conspicuous consumption, fought back, and one of the ways it did so was by adopting hip jargon to promote products and services and sell them to the changing youth culture. "Lifestyle banking" was one of the earlier ones, illustrated with yachts and luxury cars.

Part of the countercultural lifestyle is, however, still reflected by my Collins Millennium Dictionary (does that make it a dictionary for "Millennials"?) which gives

lifestyle business a small business in which the owners are more anxious to pursue interests that reflect their lifestyle than to make more than a comfortable living.

Advertising hype has not taken over completely. We still talk about the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as compared with the lifestyle of peasant farmers, neither of which would be found in the so-called "lifestyle estates".

When the term first became popular it was variously spelt as "life style", "life-style" or "lifestyle", depending on the house style (house-style, housestyle)  of the publication concerned, but now the "lifestyle" spelling predominates.

The point to remember here is that a lifestyle of poverty is  just as much a lifestyle as a lifestyle of affluence, no matter how much the advertising agencies would like us to believe otherwise. 

Another point to remember is found in the OED definition: the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life

A lifestyle may be voluntary or involuntary.

The lifestyle of a prisoner is involuntary.

The lifestyle of a person living in an affluent "lifestyle estate" is voluntary. If you can afford to live in one, you can also afford not to live in one. And if you can afford not to live in one, you can also choose to avoid an affluent lifestyle, and choose rather to live an abstemious one.

For most people, lifestyle is a mixture of voluntary and involuntary. Inmates of institutions like boarding schools, hostels, communes, monasteries, old-age homes, etc may have varying degrees of choice whether to enter such institutions, but, once within them, they need to adopt features of the prescribed lifestyle or leave. 

To some extent, this might be true of "lifestyle estates" as well. The lifestyle is prescribed and circumscribed, sometimes even more than the lifestyle of informal settlements. If you live in a "lifestyle estate" and start erecting shacks in your backyard to sub-let to others, you would soon discover the limits of freedom in a "lifestyle estate".

There are many ways in which lifestyle is determined by circumstances, such as wealth or poverty, ones upbringing, one's education or the lack of it. But some, like monks, choose voluntary poverty, and this was also the case with some in the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s.

Lifestyle is also linked to values. An authentic lifestyle reflects your values; an inauthentic lifestyle probably conflicts with your values, or perhaps reflects the values you actually hold rather than the values you profess. 

Before the hippies came the beats, who didn't speak of lifestyle, though they knew what it was. Their term for what the hippies called "straight" society was "square", and as Lawrence Lipton put it in his book The Holy Barbarians (Lipton 1959:150):

The New Poverty is the disaffiliate’s answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living. It is even more important to make a life. Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honourable ancestry. St. Francis of Assisi revered poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and pious rapture. The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty of indigence, intemperance, improvidence or failure. It is simply that the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: ‘I’ll scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you or rat for you.’ It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away rebuffed. It is an independent, voluntary poverty.

But for more on that see here: It's Cool to be Hip, but not Hip to be Cool.

Interestingly enough, though advertisers frequently misuse "lifestyle", the original meaning still lives and it has not been completely skunked. If you look here, you can see that when "lifestyle" is used as a modifier, the most common usage is "lifestyle changes", followed by "lifestyle choices" and "lifestyle factors".

 

Plausible versus Credible: the Language of Genocide

The International Court of Justice recently declared that South Africa's accusation that the government of Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was "plausible", and ordered the government of Israel to desist from certain actions, and to allow others, such as "humanitarian assistance" to the people of Gaza. 

The response of many Western governments was not merely to connive at, but to actively support this possible genocide by immediately cutting off support to UNRWA, the main agency providing this "humanitarian assistance". They thus directly went against the judgement of the court, which had examined the evidence. and did so because they found some unsubstantiated allegations by the government of Israel that some UNRWA employees had participated in the October 7 outrage in Israel to be "credible".

This raises the question of what the words "plausible" and "credible" mean.

"Credible" is a much stronger word than "plausible" -- it means trustworthy, reliable, worthy of being believed. 

"Plausible", on the other hand, is a much weaker word. It means that something is apparently true.  We speak of someone who is a "plausible rogue", a person who has the gift of the gab, the ability to persuade people that something is true even though it may not be. 

The Western governments that apparently rejected the judgment of a court that examined the evidence, and yet immediately accepted unsubstantiated allegations by the accused in the case as "credible" are therefore credulous at best, but more likely to be complicit in war crimes, mass murder, and possibly genocide (if the ICJ eventually does find that the government of Israel was indeed practising genocide in Gaza). 

But it might clarify a lot of muddled thinking about such things if people were more careful about how they use words like "plausible" and "credible".

 

What is Extremism?

The use of terms like "extremism" and "extremist" seems to be increasing, but frequency of use seems to be inversely proportional to clarity of meaning.

Most people who use the terms frequently seem to think extremism is a bad thing, but they rarely say what it is that they are denouncing as bad.

I assume, since the opposite of extremism is moderation, middle-of-the road, mediocrity or sitting-on-the-fence, that people who denounce extremism favour vagueness, and not holding strong opinions about anything. One gets the impression that the role model for anti-extremists is Wither, the deputy-director of N.I.C.E. -- the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments in C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.

It is the custom of some Christian bishops to sign their official correspondence with a self-designation like "the humble mediocrity", or words to that effect, and this might give the impression that the Christian faith is anti-extremist, until one reads the words in the Revelation of St John the Divine:

And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

Whatever the Church of Laodicaea was back then, it certainly could not be accused of extremism, but its lack of extremism brought not praise, but denunciation. And people like Christian saints seem to have bee characterised by extremism. Most of us mediocrities admire them, but do not really seek to emulate them. That would be over-the-top. The safest position is a moderate disapproval of evil, and a moderate approval of good, but nothing extreme, you understand. 

Being extremist is, in fact, neither intrinsically good not intrinsically bad. It is not being it extreme that is good or bad, but rather what you are being extreme about.

Extremism and extremist are weasel words. Avoid using them, and be wary of people who use them too much. Those who are extremely anti-extremist are themselves being extremist.

Woke, wokeness and wokeism

Over the last few years the words "woke", "wokeness" and "wokeism" have become thoroughly skunked. When people use them, one is never sure what they mean by them without further definition.

One can get a vague approximation of meaning if you know that those using the words think they signify something that they approve of, or something that they disapprove of, but even then it is often pretty vague.

I'm going to stick my neck out, and say how I understand them, and try to find out how many people have a similar understanding, in the hope of clarifying the meaning, at least among people that I talk to.

Woke, as I understand it, means being aware of social injustice.

In my youth, an equivalent term was "with it", though it applied to a much wider range of things than social injustice. To be "with it" meant that you were aware of what was happening in a particular field of human activity. It could, for example, be jazz music and musicians. You were with it if you knew and appreciated the music and knew who the musicians were that people were talking about.

Woke means much the same thing, but in the narrower field of social justice. To be woke means to be aware of the kinds of injustice that are endemic and sysyemic in a particular society. There's also an interesting shibboleth here -- people who are not woke, and disapprove of wokeness, usually do not know the difference between the meanings of "systemic" and "systematic" and often confuse them, and think that people who are talking about one are talking about the other.

Wokeness is the state of being woke, it is the awareness of social injustice.

Wokeism, in my understanding, is something different. People who are wokeist are those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. They tend to major on minors, as some people say. They largely ignore the big issues, and focus attention on more trivial ones, and often use big words like "intersectionality" as an excuse for claiming that the smaller issues are just as important as the big ones.

A recent example of this kind of wokeism is the bowdlerisation of Roald Dahl's children's books by the publishers Puffin books. Perhaps the publishers were trying to be woke, but if so, they failed miserably, and were thoroughly dishonest as well, in that they misrepresented Roald Dahl.

In one book Dahl makes the point that reading books can make people aware of different countries and cultures. Kipling, for example, can take a child to India. The Puffin editors substituted Jane Austen. This censorship seems to have been automated on ebook readers like Kindle. This kind of censorship is not "woke", it's the opposite of woke; but it might be wokeism.

And then there is the matter of being anti-woke.

On 20 February 2022 Roman Pope Francis tweeted on Twitter:

#SocialJustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labour rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.
Pope Francis (@Pontifex) February 20, 2023

Now that's pretty woke. It is, in fact, the essence of wokeness. But anti-woke crusader and pop psychologist Jordan Peterson responded with:

There is nothing Christian about #SocialJustice . Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul. https://t.co/cKFt3umiAl
Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 2, 2023

As one Orthodox deacon (not me!) commented, it's a good thing this pope bloke has Jordan Peterson to tell him what Christianity is. The first sentence in Peterson's tweet is simply a lie. On the contrary, there is nothing Christian about depriving people of social and labour rights. The second sentence is a partial truth, taken out of context. Though being woke does not make one a Christian, to be anti-woke is to be anti-Christian.

New meanings for old words: Based

I knew what "based on" meant, but then I started seeing some strange usage of "based" on social media. People started talking about things being "based" off, or just "based", and I didn't know what they were talking about. 

I asked on the question & answer site Quora, but no one there was able to tell me. I then asked on Twitter, and Duncan Reyburn kindly gave me the answer:

'Based' is almost equal to Heidegger's notion of authenticity. It's a complement[aic], usually meaning something like 'courageous or not caring what others think'. The opposite of 'based' is 'cringe'. 'Based off' (usually with an 'of') at the end is just bad English for 'based on'.

So I post this in case anyone else was wondering what these expressions meant. 

"Based" looks as though it might be quite a useful word, but I'm not sure about "cringe". Cringe is what I do when someone utters opinions that are not based. Perhaps the older "politically correct" is more appropriate there -- uttering opinions because you think it is politic to do so because you fear the power of those who hold them. But yes, that is cringing too. 

"Based off" is somewhat different. I did know the meaning of "based off", it's just that people seemed to be using it in contexts where it made no sense. Something could, for example, be "based off the coast of Italy", meaning that it was based on an offshire Island somewhere. Back in the 1960s there were pirate radio stations based off the coast of Britain, on ships out at sea. In those contexts the usage makes sense, but in the ways I have seen it used in social media recently it did not. Unless "off" is the new "on" -- "Turn off the light -- it's too dark to see in here.". 

 

 

Bloated job titles and other examples of diseased language

There's an outfit called TGIF (Thank God It's Friday, in case you didn't know) that holds weekly Christian discussion meetings in the Seattle Coffee Shop Brooklyn Mall at 6:00 am on Fridays. I've been to a few of them when the topic has interested me, and I get the weekly notices of topics to see whether they may be of interest. This week's notice had some comments on inflated job titles, which I thought were worth sharing:

Job title inflation: It started when the guy who fixed my washing machine introduced himself as the Maintenance Engineer, only to be trumped by the plumber who became a Drain Surgeon. Run-of-the-mill assistants are now Facilities Administrators, 1-person organisations are headed by CEOs or Presidents, and Churchianity has seen a few (self-appointed?) Apostles of Faith and Anointed Prophets. The herbalists whose pamphlets you get given at the traffic lights are all "Dr" or "Prof", except for the one who promotes himself as "Almighty Healer, Spirit from the Mountain and the Head of all Healers Herbalists in Africa" (sic).

Job title stuffing has resulted in descriptors like Chief Executive Twitterer, Manager of Deep Web Research, Central Interactions Architect, Lifestyle Design Coach, Person-Centred Transition Facilitator, Global Troubleshooter, Head of Knowledge Creation, Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner, and Dynamic Paradigm Orchestrator. Soon, movers and shakers might become (respectively) Location Change Management Specialists and Arthymic Oscillation Technicians. [1]

While on the topic of language and usage, I also recently saw this on Facebook:

And while we were on holiday recently we stopped for lunch at Maxi's Cafe in Bethal in Mpumalanga, and there we saw this sign.

I used to know that as the "greengrocer's apostrophe", but Maxi's isn't a greengrocer.

Oh well, at least I'm not seeing "a waist of time" as much as I used to see it online in the early 1990s, so some things are improving.

As the saying went in the early 1990s, "Put knot yore trussed inn spell chequers."

Computer translation

Google has for some time offered an online translation service, and Microsoft's Bing offered a competing one, which is used on Facebook (guess why). 

The following comment on a Facebook story obviously flummoxed Bing completely, though the Google one wasn't much better. I don't think human translators need to fear for their jobs just yet.

Κοριτσια, ειπαμε να αγαπαμε τα ζωα αλλα μην το παρακανουμε κι ολας. Τα αδεσποτα δεν ειναι και ιερες αγελαδες. Στη Σοφια έφαγαν ζωντανο στο προσωπο και τα ακρα εναν ηλικιωμενο ο οποιος απεβιωσε.

Koritsia, eipame to the other animals agapame don't parakanoyme and olas. The invalid and adespota ieres agelades. In Sofia the person ate zwntano and extreme ilikiwmeno apebiwse employ the smokers. (Translated by Bing) 

 

Girls, we decided to love animals but do not overdo and olas. Straying is not sacred cows. In Sofia ate live in person and ends an elderly who died. (translated by Facebook)

Εχω υποστει και εγω επιθεση από τσοπανοσκυλα στον Ωρωπο και Φινλανδος φιλος μας στην Ακαδημια Πλατωνος πηγαινοντας για τα ΚΤΕΛ και κατεληξε στο νοσοκομειο

 

I have ypostei and tsopanoskyla in vids by affixing Wrwpo and our Finlandos filos Akadimia pigainontas for Platwnos and katelixe in KTEL nosokomeio (Translated by Bing) 

 

I have suffered from aggression, and I Sheepdogs Oropos Finns and friends in Plato's Academy Going on the bus and ended up in hospital (translated by Facebook)

The story being commented on was this one:

 

Killer stray dogs put Bulgaria on edge

ca.news.yahoo.com

Sprawling in the sun or barking and chasing cars, stray dogs have become part of urban life in Bulgaria but after a pack mauled a US university professor to death, the mood of tolerance is over.

 

Stray animals

Perhaps I should mention that in Athens stray animals, especially dogs, used to be rounded up by the city authorities and killed. Animal lovers protested, and so the policy changed. The stray animals were caught, sterilised and innoculated against various diseases, and then released again.

 

 

 

 

 

Parents keep child’s gender under wraps - Yahoo! News

If gender is the social construction of sex, isn't this child too young to have a gender yet?

Parents keep child’s gender under wraps - Yahoo! News:

When many couples have a baby, they send out an email to family and friends that fills them in on the key details: name, gender, birth weight, that sort of thing. (You know the drill: 'Both Mom and little Ethan are doing great!')

But the email sent recently by Kathy Witterick and David Stocker of Toronto, Canada to announce the birth of their baby, Storm, was missing one important piece of information. 'We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...),' it said.

That's right. They're not saying whether Storm is a boy or a girl.

Is the use of "sex" and "gender" in this article an instance of what Fowler calls "elegant variation"? Or have the words become completely interchangeable? Or is it just that journalists nowadays don't know what the words mean.

I get mildly annoyed when forms ask for my gender, and offer the alternatives of "Male" and "Female".

"Male" is not a gender; male is a SEX.

Male and female are sexes.
The genders are masculine, feminine and neuter.

Racial epithets

There has been an interesting discussion on the English usage newsgroup alt.usage.english recently. It started with someone asking whether African-Americans should be referred to as "Black" or "black" (with or without a capital "b".

I kept out of it at that stage, because I'm not American and certainly not a fundi on American usage.

But then it broadened, as these things inevitably do, and some people were asking about racial and ethnic terms in South Africa, and one person said he thought that Hindus in South Africa were called "black". And someone else said that the apartheid terminology was "Indians".

Well, no. "Indians" was the pre-apartheid terminology, and it was applied to Hindus and Muslims indiscriminately if they or their ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent, which is now divided into India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.

One of the first acts of the apartheid government was to pass the Population Registration Act of 1950, which required that everyone have their population group registered, and this was done in the population census of 1951. Everyone was given a race (or population group) classification, which was one of Asiatic, Bantu, Coloured or White (all with capital letters, because they were official). Indians, Nepalese, Pakistanis etc were all lumped together under "Asiatic". In the 1970s the canons of political correctness were changed, and Asiatics became Asians, while Bantu became Blacks.

Then there was this snippet, with my reply:

>Apparently "brown" is now used to some degree to refer to
>Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S.

It is also used as a self-description by some former so-called "Coloureds" who are still so called in official documents in our so called "non-racial" democracy (scare quotes deliberate, indicating two-finger gestures with both hands in viva voce situations).

The Population Registration Act has been repealed, yet the same racial epithets continue to be used, though they are no longer defined. Apartheid may be dead, but it still rules from the grave, and its legacy lingers on.

Deceptively large

On the newsgroup alt.usage.english we have discussions about English usage and the variations in different dialects. One question that came up recently was the meaning of the phrase "deceptively large".

Some thought that it meant that a thing was smaller than it looked, while others thought that it meant that it was bigger than it looked.

What do you think?

Trainers, sneakers, plimsolls and tackies

One of the perennial topics of discussion in the alt.usage.english newsgroup is the different versions of books published in the USA and in Britain, and the kinds of things that are changed by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the most frequently-discussed examples is the Harry Potter books, and someone recently gave this example:

I purchased one of the HP books in England and had to deal with the British terminology, much of which I knew, but I had to ask my daughter, who was living there at the time what "trainers" and "a jumper" are. (For those who don't know, they are "sneakers" and "a sweater", pull-over I think.)

When I went to the UK to study in 1966 I faced a somewhat different problem: what I knew as "tackies", "sand shoes" or "tennis shoes" were apparently called "plimsolls" in England. I visited a family I knew who had moved to England a few months before I went there, and their children, who had been to school in Pietermaritzburg, spoke of their consternation are being asked by a teacher at their English school to put their "plimsolls" on. They simply had no idea what he was talking about. And I wouldn't have either. I knew plimsolls as lines painted on the sides of ships to show how much they could be loaded, depending on the temperature and salinity of the water.

It seems that in the UK they now talk about "trainers", but trainers are posher than "plimsolls". In South Africa, however, "tackies" covers the whole range, from basic to posh, and here is a shop in a local mall that sells the whole range, which rejoices in the name "Tekkie Town" -- the spelling is phonetic, since "tekkie" is the way most South Africans pronounce "tackie", but also the non-standard spelling can probably be registered as a trade name.

And the wares they display range from the basic rubber soles and canvas top verson seen below


to the much more fancy (and expensive) versions seen here


the more expensive ones seem to have their brand labels on the outside, as if to proclaim to the world, "Look what I can afford." But in South Africa they are all called "tackies", as are wide-tread car tyres, which are popularly known as "fat tackies".

I wonder if there will be a South African version of the Harry Potter books that, instead of "trainers" and a "jumper", have "tackies" and a "jersey".

Sarah Palin’s ‘refudiate’ Oxford’s Top Word 2010

Some have criticised US politician Sarah Palin for her neologisms, like "refudiate", and have accused her of ruining the English language. Others have praised her, and she herself has apparently compared herself with Shakespeare, who also made up new words. .

Who’s laughing now? Sarah Palin’s ‘refudiate’ Oxford’s Top Word 2010 - Business News - Exec Digital:

Sarah Palin's latest self-made source of public mockery has been re-made as merit, being named New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2010 and the latest addition to its official lexicon

I think the English language is in far more danger of being ruined by stupid journalists who misuse "refute" to mean mere denial instead of "prove to be false". If Sarah Palin is guilty of malapropisms, then so are they.

And "refudiate" is a useful portmanteau word to mean "not only have I shown conclusively that it is false, but I have nothing but contempt for those whose moral turpitude led them to suggest that it was true."

Not that Sarah Palin meant anything like that by it; she probably malapropped her own neologism, if such a thing is possible. But it could prove to be a useful word.

Putt knot yore trussed in spell chequers

I have often encountered problems with computer spelling checkers, but I didn't know that there was an actual name for it. Hat-tip to Adrian Bailey of Idiot English: Cupertino/eggcorn of the week who pointed me to Cupertino effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The Cupertino effect is the tendency of a spellchecker to suggest inappropriate words to replace misspelled words and words not in its dictionary.

The origin of the term is that the spelling 'cooperation' was often changed to 'Cupertino' by older spellcheckers with dictionaries containing only the hyphenated form 'co-operation'. (Cupertino is the home of Apple Inc., and thus would be in most computer spelling dictionaries.) Users sometimes clicked 'Change All' without checking whether the spellchecker's first suggestion was correct to begin with, resulting in even official documents with phrases like 'as well as valuable experience in international Cupertino' and 'and reinforcing bilateral and multinational Cupertino and assistance actions.' Other examples include 'South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino' and 'presentation on African-German Cupertino.'

It gives a name to something that I've experienced several times. One was a book published by the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria, written by one of the priests, which had an entire chapter on the novel theological concept of the Divine Lethargy. I saw it in the table of contents, and turned to the chapter concerned to discover more, and it turned out that it was supposed to be "the Divine Liturgy", but the entire book was full of Cupertinos like this, and so was utterly useless. It seemed to have been done by the initiative of the printers, but no one had bothered to proof-read it.

Another one that affected me was a contribution I wrote for a book:
Initiation into Theology: The Rich Variety of Theology and Hermeneutics by Adrio Konig

Some one quoted something from my chapter in the book in an article, which they then sent to me, and I could not recognise it as anything I had written, or would have written. I then looked at the published book, and found that my contribution had been mangled by the Cupertino effect, applied in the interests of political correctness.

When I wrote my contribution, on the theology of African Independent Churches, the editor of the book, Professor Adrio König, of the Department of Systematic Theology and Ethics at the University of South Africa, called me several times to check the spelling of a word or the wording of a phrase in my article. I was impressed by his thoroughness, and was sure that this would be one publication in which there would be few or no errors. One of the things he asked me about was my use of the term "African Independent Churches", and he said that the tendency nowadays was to use the term "African Initiated Churches". I agreed with him that there was such a tendency, but pointed out that the terms were not interchangeable, and that they meant different things, and that in the article I used them to mean different things though the commonly-used abbreviation AIC could be applied to both, and also to the related terms African Indigenous Churches and African Instituted Churches.

Though he seemed doubtful, he appeared to accept my argument, but when the book was published, it seemed that he had run a spelling check, and substituted "Initiated" for "Independent" wherever it had occurred, including the titles of four books and articles in the bibliography. In some contexts in the article, this changed word turned the sentences in which they occurred into meaningless garbage, so I do not acknowledge that I wrote the contribution to the book, and would not include it in my CV. The contrast with the thoroughness with which he had checked for accuracy before publication was marked, and it amazed me that he was willing to throw all that work away by rashly letting a spelling checker make word salad of the book.

Another observation: why are they called spellcheckers? Witches might find spell checkers useful, but writers and publishers would prefer prefer spelling checkers. Perhaps that's why they've put a hex on so many publications.

Pleonastic sesquipedalian neologisms

Politicians and bureaucrats seem inclined, more than most people, to invent new words, but this takes the cake: 'Refudiating' Palin brings Shakespeare into Twitter exchange:

A Twitter posting Sunday from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, in which she claimed common ground with Shakespeare, started the blogosphere's week in rollicking fashion.

Palin tweeted that 'peaceful Muslims' should 'refudiate' the New York mosque being built near Ground Zero. This prompted plenty of retweets at her expense -- 'refudiate,' of course, is not a word.

After deleting the offending tweet, Palin replaced it with another, calling on 'peaceful New Yorkers' to 'refute the Ground Zero mosque plan' -- although the word she was apparently looking for was 'repudiate.'

That won't, of course, stop the misuse of "refute" -- again, mostly by politicians and sycophantic journalists who take their words at face value.

I've read dozens of news reports saying that politicians have "refuted" something when they haven't refuted it at all. All they have actually done is deny it, whereas to refute something means to prove conclusively that it is false.

Why don't the English teach their journalists how to write?

Serbia moves to diffuse war crimes dispute with Bosnia - Telegraph:

Serbia moves to diffuse war crimes dispute with Bosnia
Serbia has moved to defuse a bitter dispute with Bosnia over the extradition of their neighbour's Muslim former president on war crimes charges

That's better. Now about that headline...

Rock-solid nebulous hot air

Hat-tip to Father David MacGregor of Contact Online Weblog: Ugandan Church faces totalitarian liberal activism. for pointing to this piece of rhetorical gobbledegook.

Anglican Mainstream: Ugandan Church faces totalitarian liberal activism.:

Chris Sugden Evangelicals Now Janaury 2010

The pressure on the Church of Uganda to respond to legislation that will be placed before the Ugandan Parliament on homosexual behaviour is not restricted to Uganda. This issue is affecting other democratic nations in Africa and Asia."

Anyone who knows anything about the English language will know that "liberal" and "totalitarian" are about as far removed from each other in meaning as they can possibly be. It is impossible for anything, including activism, to be simultaneously liberal and totalitarian. It is no more possible than it is for something to be simultaneously wet and dry, or hot and cold, solid and liquid. The only place where you will find liberal totalitarians is skiing the slow-clad slopes of Sahara mountains in midsummer, or sunbathing on the sand-dunes of Siberia in mid-winter.

If you want people to pay attention to what you have to say, avoid such over-the-top rhetoric.

Pedant's corner: soldiers and troops

Grammar-cop alert.

This is a soldier:


This is a troop:


Got it? Good.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace.

Actually it's a little bit more complex than that.

Troops are usually mounted, and a member of a troop is usually called a "trooper", which is equivalent to a "private" in the infantry and a "gunner" in the artillery.

So it would be more accurate to say that THIS is a troop:



My great grandfather, Richard Wyatt Vause, was a lieutenant in the Natal Native Horse in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and he had 50 men in his troop. As he wrote in his diary after the Battle of Isandlwana

Fortunately the Zulus were repulsed at Rorke's Drift and did not get as far as Helpmekaar. I lost 30 men and 10 wounded, so have not many left of my original 50.

Coming up next in the milspeak alerts: deploy.

Tolerance, intolerance and zero-tolerance

There are two kinds of people: those who think that tolerance is a good thing, and those who think that the absence of tolerance is a good thing.

Zachary Christie, First Grader Suspended for Bringing Camping Utensil to School - ABC News:

Debbie Christie's son Zachary, a first-grader at Downes Elementary School in Newark, Del., was suspended for carrying a camping utensil that contained a spoon, fork, bottle opener and knife to school.

'I wasn't really trying to get in trouble,' 6-year-old Zachary said. 'I was just trying to eat lunch with it.'...

School administrators deemed Zachary to be in violation of their zero-tolerance ban on weapons, and he may have to attend the district's reform school.

Actually there are three kinds of people, and I suspect that the third type is actually the majority. They are the ones who think that speaking of "tolerance" as an absolute virtue, and speaking of "zero tolerance" as a virtue are equally nonsensical.