IDEALOGICAL VOTE IN HOUSE: That was the caption on PBS’s Washington Week a few minutes ago. Sigh.
*
9:36 p.m.: And now it’s online, at the 9:52 mark.
Related reading
All misspelling posts (Pinboard)
[I know: it’s a variant. But on a nationally televised show, it’s a misspelling.]
Friday, September 20, 2013
PBS misspelling
Don’t open the yellow door
You don’t want to know what’s behind that door. You really don’t want to know what’s behind that door. You Really Don’t Want To Know What’s Behind That Door. YOU REALLY — was I shouting? Oh, sorry. But you really don’t want to know what’s behind that door.
I spotted this door “somewhere in east-central Illinois.” This post is for my friends Sara and Stefan and all readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)
[You do not want to know what is behind that door.]
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Death of an adjunct
The real face of higher education: Death of an adjunct (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
Chrome New Tab page
An update to Google Chrome has changed the New Tab page, which now shows a Google search box and thumbnails of the user’s most frequently visited sites. Delete the thumbnails and you’re left with stupid grey rectangles, at least for a while.
The changes are a poor choice, for two reasons:
1. Chrome’s address bar/search box, the so-called “omnibox,” makes an additional search box unnecessary.
2. There may be good reasons for a user to want to keep browsing history out of view. Obviously embarrassing websites: of course. But also: if you’re opening a tab to show, say, a news item to your spouse, the last thing you want on the screen is the browsing you’ve been doing for a birthday present. D’oh.
Google Support has more to say about these changes: Use the New Tab page. I’m looking for directions on how to Curse the New Tab page. For now, I will make up my own.
*
9:24 a.m.: An extension solves the problem: Empty New Tab Page.
Domestic comedy
“I believe I’ve seen this.”
“Maybe you’ve just seen the hair.”
“I’ve seen the makeup and the shoulder pads as well.”
Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
[The eighties: the horror.]
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Arne Duncan on Colbert
If you missed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on The Colbert Report last night, you can watch here. It’ll take under six minutes.
One highlight: Duncan says that the best ideas in education come from “local teachers.” But hurrah for the Common Core.
And hurrah for replacing books with digital media, everywhere.
The most revealing moment: Duncan’s evasions when Colbert asks whether under the Common Core, students will read instruction manuals and memos instead of Shakespeare and Treasure Island. If students will be reading Shakespeare and Stevenson, Duncan’s claim that textbooks become obsolete “the day we buy them” falls apart. If anything, it is our devices that are instantly obsolete. But that never troubles a technocrat.
And by the way, a Secretary of Education who refers to “less dropouts” needs to go back to school.
Related reading
Carlo Rotella, No Child Left Untableted (New York Times)
[“Less dropouts”: at 5:21.]
Delete and deleterious
The question came up in class: are delete and deleterious related? It seems possible, even plausible: what’s deleterious removes wellbeing, right? Wrong.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces delete to “Latin dēlēt-, participial stem of dēlēre to blot out, efface.” Deleterious goes back to “modern Latin dēlētērius, < Greek δηλητήριος [deleterios] noxious, hurtful, < δηλήτηρ [deletor] destroyer, < δηλεῖσθαι [deleisthai] to hurt.”
Well, if these words aren’t related, they should be.
[I’ve added the transliterations.]
Grice
When I was in grad school, in the mid-1980s, reading lots of “theory,” the Dickensian name Grice was much in the air: the philosopher H. P. Grice, whose initials-only name (Herbert Paul) only added to his mystery. No book then went with that name, but there was a crucial essay, “Logic and Conversation,” which appeared in a collection of essays by various hands, Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975).
“Logic and Conversation” presents principles of conversation that have become known as Gricean maxims. Informing them all is a “Cooperative Principle”: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” The maxims concern Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner:
Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.Thinking of Grice now, after so many years, I think of the practical applications his work has. Consider how a healthy respect for Gricean maxims would improve the world of online discourse. One might add to these maxims, as Grice suggests, “Be polite,” though the Cooperative Principle seems to cover matters of both courtesy and rudeness. The “accepted purpose or direction” of almost any online discussion would preclude, say, comments whose primary purpose is to cross-examine, hector, raise extraneous issues, snipe, or drive “traffic” in the commenter’s direction. The purpose or direction of a discussion devoted to vulgar banter and insults, however, would require that one not be polite, or at least not too polite. The brief guidelines for Orange Crate Art comments — “Play fair. Keep it clean. And please be relevant” — now suggest to me, all these years later, Grice’s influence.
Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Relation: Be relevant.
Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.
From Paul Grice’s Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
As I suspected, Gricean maxims have been of interest to those working on autism. Here’s one example.
Further reading
Paul Grice (Wikipedia)
Gricean maxims (Wikipedia)
Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments (Lifehacker)
[The “avoid unnecessary prolixity” bit has to be a joke, à la “eschew obfuscation.”]
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