Close Reading

How did 'positive' come to mean 'good' and 'negative', 'bad'? Few people would want a positive result after being screened for cancer--right? I suppose the primary meaning I have in mind for the word is something like 'active' or 'existing'. For instance, a positive dislike for peanut butter means that someone doesn't merely lack a taste for peanut butter, but actively dislikes it. We might say that 'positive' is convex whereas 'negative' is concave; 'positive' is presence and 'negative' is absence. In fact, entering "positive dictionary" into a well-known search engine that has perhaps turned the world into a panopticon, I find the first result is: " ... consisting in or characterized by the presence rather than the absence of distinguishing features." The online Cambridge Dictionary has first a version of what I think is the most common modern usage of the word:  "... full o...

 I will try to transcribe here something that I encountered recently on Twitter: "as someone who studies linguistics, i will never not laugh when someone says 'that word doesn't exist' like, my good bitch. if a word is regularly used by a certain amount of people then it exists." I often wonder why it is considered admirable to treat language with such disrespect. Would it be considered the mark of a good swordsman, let's say, that he never sharpened his blade, actively blunted it and, indeed, left it out in the rain to go rusty? But if I express impatience with a student of linguistics who misuses the full-stop (for example), I know what kind of rejoinder I can expect. The same person continues: "if it has its own grammatical rules then its [sic] perfectly valid. it's part of their lexicon now, sweetie. 'It's a made up word' honey all words are made up. Linguists didn't just fucking excavate athens and were like BEHOLD!!! VOCABULARY!...

 This is just a quick post about the worldwide loss of languages, prompted by this article: Irish language ‘definitely endangered’ as linguists predict it will vanish in the next century "UNESCO’s Atlas, along with Google, estimates that there are between 20,000 and 40,000 Irish speakers in the world." It seems that one of the most important factors in the decline of the Irish language is that it is not passed on intergenerationally, partly because people tend not to stay in the place where they were born these days. A language expert, Federico Espinosa, is quoted in the article.  He says: "Maybe to take the stigma out of being an endangered language there are about 7,000 languages in the world and about half of them are predicted to be extinct by the end of the century, which is by UNESCO’s reckoning as well as Google.” This seems to be a misuse of the word 'stigma', though I am not sure whether this is a simple mistake or something like a Freudian slip. (...

 That is the assertion strongly promoted in this article at a website called 'Bright Side': Turns Out Your Cat or Dog Can Feel Offended When You Call Them a “Pet” The claim made in the headline is not substantiated anywhere within the article and I have not read the study linked to. If your cat or dog is offended at being called a pet, I would suggest you take them to visit Newcastle, where 'pet' is used to address humans as a term of endearment. From the article:  "PETA believes that using the term 'pet' evokes associations with an inanimate object and even with an animal being disposable." PETA may believe that, but I am inclined to believe that this is projection on their part. Let's look at the actual etymology of the word , shall we? "...'domesticated or tamed animal kept as a favorite,' 1530s, originally in Scottish and northern England dialect (and exclusively so until mid-18c.), a word of unknown origin. Sense of 'indul...

"Those who would prefer telepathy to language are the linguistic equivalent of those who would prefer taking pills to eating a meal." I composed this aphorism yesterday after reading a tweet in which someone had expressed exactly that preference for telepathy (to the detriment of language). I can't find the tweet now, but I think the preference was justified in terms of language being divisive or in some other way an obstacle to a desired end. I am not sure my aphorism works very well, since, depending on how we imagine telepathy (or how we have experienced it, if we have), we might think that telepathy is a greater feast than language. Nonetheless, something about the aphorism holds true, I think. Those who see language as divisive see it as merely instrumental, and as not sufficiently instrumental in the purpose for which it is used; in other words, it is a poor tool with no intrinsic value. I doubt that such a view of things does justice to the reality of language. On...