Euphemism creep and immigration — and politicization issues

First, "euphemism creep", or the "euphemism treadmill," per Steven Pinker is a real thing. James McWhorter has also written much about it.

It's when a euphemism replaces a no-longer acceptable term, but soon enough becomes no longer acceptable itself.

Think "handicapped" being replaced by "disabled," then that becoming not acceptable and it being replaced by "differently abled." Some day in the not too distant future, because of the word "differently," that will be replaced as well.

This is a field with enough to mine that I am going to write about this on various spots, including my philosophy and critical thinking blog. But, there as here, I'll use the same starting point — Substacker Corey Hutchins talking about how different media outlets in Colorado struggle (or maybe "struggle" with scare quotes intended) on how to talk about "people who aren't supposed to be here," or if I need scare quotes inside that, "people who aren't 'supposed' to be here."

Or, per old friend Brains, who used it non-disparagingly? "Ill Eagles." 

Here, it's not just ground-level, but, in media, an official style issue, as the Associated Press long ago said both "illegal immigrant" and "illegal alien" aren't allows.

I agree for sure with the word "alien." That said, quoting Hutchins, I disagree with the AP already trying to get ahead of euphemism creep three years ago.

“We don’t use the terms illegal immigrant, unauthorized immigrant, irregular migrant, alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented (except when quoting people or documents that use these terms),” the AP wrote. “Many immigrants and migrants have some sort of documents, but not the necessary ones.”

As I said in a comment to Hutchins, why not just add "allegedly" in front of "undocumented immigrants"? 

Per that Shitter link, the AP does offer alternatives. But? Most of them are kind of cumbersome, which undercuts the usefulness of language.

Also, per the authors I cited at the top of the page, this issue tends to get politicized. And, it's usually "conservatives" vs "liberals." Setting aside L/libertarians and some Green types who claim to be neither right nor left, the politicized polarity also ignores friendly skeptical non-liberal leftists.

In my first comment, Hutchins noted that I had used the word "roundup" and he had edited it out of his post, when thinking about using it, as dehumanizing. I noted that I've seen "roundup" in places like a "kindergarten roundup" at a local school district.

I also commented, in a short bit lower in his post, about a Denver TV news anchor wearing a tie from a Soviet journalist to make a statement about the Russia-Ukraine War. I first noted the fact that, pre-invasion, Zelensky was already restricting press freedom in Ukraine. I then referenced Gaza. Hutchins didn't refer to either one.

And, with that, it strikes me that he's probably framing this in a politicized sense, and within the conservative-liberal axis, or, within the two-party duopoly axis.

To me, right-thinking (NO pun, intended or unintended!) people in general should step outside that box. And, media shouldn't step into that box in general.

We all should move beyond language that's harmful, but at the same time:

• Recognize the euphemism treadmill is real;
• Avoid politicization;
• Accept we won't please everybody;
• And, per Humpty Dumpty, never let language be the master. 

And, that's that.

Noam Chomsky, intellectual genius? Not so fast: Part 1, public policy

Is Noam Chomsky perhaps above my intellectual pay grade? Yes.

Genius? No.

First, the political side, in part one of a two-parter.

Per a person touting him as such a genius, if he has been that much of a Glenn Greenwald fanboi, doesn't that alone undercut his claims there? (I'm not the only person on social media to have a reaction like that.)

And, as I've written about more than once, I have little regard for the alleged political genius of supposed actual leftists, even self-proclaimed socialists or Marxists who, nonetheless, go into the voting booth every four years and next to "President" pull the lever for the Democrat half of the duopoly. I mean, he opposed the Vietnam War, but voted for Dear Leader to continue the Iraq War and presumably before that for Slick Willie to expand NATO, that may have been an indirect contributor to Balkans wars and very much directly contributed to freezing Boris Yeltsin's Russia out of the peace process.

Last year, I busted his chops hard for telling people not to vote Green, including his signing a letter to that effect. I also busted the chops of self-proclaimed Maoist Barbara Ehrenreich and others. In other words, Noam practices "lesser evilism" and did before 2012, telling people to re-elect Dear Leader over Romney while not mentioning Jill Stein. Weirdly, if you will, Noam gave money to Ralph Nader in 2000. But, given what happened in Florida, Noam may believe the myths, nay canards, that Nader gave Bush the election.

What's REALLY funny is that the Wiki bio link has Chomsky acknowledging that we are, in fact, a one-party state in many ways. But, he still wants you to vote for the one party. Or else, he doesn't really believe that. It's called sheepdogging. He's a duopolist. So's Henwood, Reed and others.

Now, if I wanted to riff on Emerson and claim this is a foolish consistency cum hypocrisy, and call that the mark of genius, then he's a political genius. Having no idea what sheepdogging he did before 2016, I'll pass, though.

Part 2 will address Noam's big claim to fame: Linguistics and generative grammar.

A Game with Words: We must run Wittgenstein through Hume

Philosopher friend Dan Kaufman surely would or will disagree if or when he sees this, but I shall explain that header.

On Ludwig Wittgenstein, he does have a lot of insight, but, I don’t ennoble him like Dan does. (Dan might object a bit to the word "ennoble," but ... I'll stand by its sentiment.)

In part, that’s because one can go “meta” on Wittgenstein’s language games idea. I think Walter Kaufmann, with his somewhat contrarian rejection of “guilt” and “justice” as universals or quasi-universals kind of gets at that.

But, there are other issues. And, expanding on a comment I left on a post at Massimo Pigliucci's blog, here are a few of them.

1. Are we talking about descriptive or prescriptive use of a particular word, or words in general?

2. Can we even agree on what “prescriptive” and “descriptive” mean, either in general or with a particular word?

3. How do we make such judgments?

These are just a few of many ideas related to this issue.           

In short, Wittgenstein’s idea on language games, in the real world, must be run through …

Wait for it, those of you know one of my favorite philosophers …

Wittgenstein must in some way be run through Ye Olde Philter of Induction, courtesy David Hume.

Chomsky not so right on brain and language

Yesterday, I blogged about how some of the latest findings in language usage are dialing back past claims about the degree of the brain's modularity.

More on that today; it appears that language usage by the brain is more of a kluge, or "workaround," than has previously been understood.

It probably undercuts, again, claims to human "rationality," too. I'm thinking more and more the old Enlightenment duality between "rational" and "irrational" needs evaluation and modification.

In 2016, Michael Tomasello put the final stake in Chomsky's ideas. (The Chomsky fanbois still don't accept this.) Tomasello does note that Chomsky, by the late 1980s, recognized that his single "universal grammar" was as dead as a doorknob.  Instead, he tried to shift to, basically, classes of universal grammars. This still failed.

And, Tomasello adds that many of Chomsky's ideas were unfalsifiable. 

Questioning the brain's modularity a bit more

In recent years, the idea that the human brain is "massively modular" have come under more scrutiny. The latest on this? Different languages use different parts of the brain. I'm not saying the brain is not at all modular, just less modular than has been claimed.

And, this has implications far beyond language. Like for evolutionary psychology.

A gesture worth 1,000 words of language evolution

Chimpanzee gestural control is left-brain-centric, shedding new light on the evolution of human language, since it is also largely localized in the left hemisphere.

“The de­gree of predom­i­nance of the right hand for ges­tures is one of the most pro­nounced we have ev­er found in chim­panzees in com­par­i­son to oth­er non-com­mu­nica­tive man­u­al ac­tions. We al­ready found such man­u­al bi­ases in this spe­cies for point­ing ges­tures ex­clu­sively di­rect­ed to hu­mans. These ad­di­tion­al da­ta clearly showed that right-hand­edness for ges­tures is not spe­cif­ic­ally as­so­ci­at­ed to interac­tions with hu­mans,” William D. Hop­kins said.

Read the full story for more information.

Good-bye, Livonian; we will miss you, Eyak.

Eyak disappeared last year; Livonian has one speaker left. A new world atlas of endangered languages has the details of what is happening, or has happened, to these and many other languages.

Language can shape our perception of the world

This has been a back-and-forth in both philosophy and psychology ever since Benjamin Whorf mythically claimed the Eskimos had 100 different words for snow. (He didn’t, actually.) For a long time, in relatively recent years, well, ever since the discovery of DNA and the crumbling of Skinnerian behavioralism, Whorf’s ideas were cast by the wayside.

But now, a Cornell researcher has partially resurrected them.

At least with color discrimination, Gary Lupyan says a specific language background does make a difference:

Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.

This fits well with the general idea of “man the category-making creature.”

But, not everybody is ready to buy into even a limited version of Whorfian linguistics redivivus.

On the contrary side? Evolutionary Psychologist (yes, with the double capital letters, see my tages) Steve Pinker. (That, of course, means there’s a good chance the theorizing is right and he’s wrong.)

This separation of language and thought is emphasized in a recent book by Steven Pinker, at Harvard University, a skeptic of “neo-whorfianism.” In “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature,” Pinker explores the complicated ways that language and thought relate to each other. He cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways. With numbers, the importance of language evidence is much clearer. It appears that the ability to count is necessary to deal with large, specific numbers. And the only way to count past a certain point is with language.

He’s overstating the case. Lupyan didn’t say anything about forcing. Rather, as with human genes, we might say that in certain categories of reasoning, one language may create a predisposition (and perhaps no more than a mild one) toward reasoning in one way rather than another.

Science roundup – badder superbugs, human paranoia and suffering preemies

Superbugs are getting worse

Drug-resistant bacteria are prompting doctors to break out meds long resisted due to side effects. And some of them aren’t working, even.

Do you insist your family doc give you pills for what is a cold or flu? Point the finger at yourself for contributing to the problem.

Just because the virtual guy is looking at me… well, maybe I am paranoid

Since human paranoia is kind of hard to study under normal, lab-type scientific conditions, British researchers hit on something new — use virtual reality, specifically, a mock-up of London’s “tube,” to study possible paranoia.

Result? Forty percent of studied people exhibited at least one paranoiac reaction to at least one virtual reality character.

Preemie babies — lifelong effects

A study of more than 1 million adults have shown that health problems from premature births are more varied and longer-lasting than previously realized. Specifically:

• Boys born between 22 and 27 weeks had the highest rate of early childhood death.
• Reproduction rates were considerably lower for men and women born preterm when compared to those born at term. Reproduction increased in direct proportion to higher gestational age.
• Women born preterm were more likely to experience recurrent preterm birth and an increased risk of adverse outcomes in their offspring. A similar pattern was reported for fetal stillbirth and infant mortality among women born preterm.
• The lower the gestational age, the greater the risk of having less education.

Those are some not-insignificant effects; they’re also a rallying cry to political action on this as a public health issue.

Language zones of brain show human uniqueness

A new non-invasive brain scan tool, diffusion tensor imaging, provides the details of more complex human interconnections in this area compared to other primates.