Close Reading

I think I was watching a clip of Miley Cyrus. I was scrolling through Twitter and didn't linger on it long enough to be sure, only long enough to catch the words, "I've evolved in front of you all." This put me in mind of something that intermittently troubles me: the paradox at the heart of the contemporary use of the word 'evolution'. The word is associated now mainly with Darwin, but I'm not sure we have Darwin to blame for that . I am intrigued by this question: how was 'evolution' used and what did it mean, before Darwin arrived to bring to public consciousness those ideas of natural selection and " descent with modification " with which the word then became associated? Etymology Online gives us clues, but not much more: https://www.etymonline.com/word/evolution#etymonline_v_29764 The paradox at the heart of current use is this: it seems to lean on the authority of Darwin's theory, which has become, at least in reputation, among ...

 I can't help thinking this is an example of infelicitous phrasing, though I am sure others will find it very felicitous: "Meanwhile, the UK government recently recognised that their close evolutionary cousins – crabs and lobsters – as sentient, and proposed legislation that would ban people from boiling them alive." This is the source text: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB In context, the sentence is more easily understood, but I still naturally -- without straining to -- misunderstood it on first reading. This example is amusing, of course, but increasingly I find this kind of slipshod prose irritating. It's like being served by a waiter who takes no care to keep his thumb from entering your soup as he places it in front of you.  The text in question, apart from its entertaining ambiguity, also contains an unnecessary 'that' on which I stub my metaphorical toe as...

 Although it seems like the battle has been well and truly lost on this front, it still bothers me that people use 'lay' instead of 'lie'. For instance: "There's a bunch of keys laying around here somewhere. Have you seen them?" This should be: "There's a bunch of keys lying around here somewhere. Have you seen them?" 'Lay' is a transitive verb. That is, it's something you do to something . In the case of 'lay', you might lay an egg or a table (though you wouldn't lay a table in the same way you laid an egg). 'Lie' is an intransitive verb. It's something you do without there being an object of the action. For instance, when you run, you don't need to say "I ran myself" in order to have an object for the verb; you just say, "I ran." So, with 'lie', we have, for instance, "I was tired and decided to lie down." Or: "You've made your bed, now lie on it." E...

The following article is a prime example of why bowing to authority in matters of thought is not a good idea: Is it time to give up on consciousness as ‘the ghost in the machine’? [Note: For some reason, the link above no longer works, but the same article seems to be viewable here .] Let me paste some extracts and give some very brief criticism. "There are those who believe consciousness is like a ghost in the machinery of our brains , meriting special attention and study in its own right. And there are those, like us, who challenge this, pointing out that what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery." Notice the biased language: "believe" versus "pointing out"; the phrase "pointing out" is, in fact, an example of the 'begging the question' fallacy of assuming one's conclusion in advance (as one of the premises of one's argument). You can't 'point out' som...

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. (...