Dithering and Talking Points

October 28, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Daily Show calls itself “a fake news show,” but it often does what the “real” news shows won’t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as “spontaneous and unrehearsed” (as the opening of Meet the Press used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. The Daily Show will give a quick montage of clips in which different people on different shows all use the same unusual word or phrase.

Last night it was “dithering.” A series of right-wingers, culminating in Dick Cheney, all accuse President Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan.

(The Daily Show does not allow me to embed the video. But click here and slide to the 8:30 mark.)

It was just like the old days, when The Daily Show would string together clips from Bush Administration figures and right-wing commentators all using the same key words. But then, the statements all came on the same day, so the central direction was obvious. (I mean, it was obvious to Daily Show viewers, not to viewers of “real” news programs.)

The popularity of dithering may be more a case of contagion than planning. Note the dates of the O’Reilly and Cheney clips, more than two weeks apart.

Dithering is not a frequently used word. Lexis-Nexis shows only 27 instances in TV news transcripts for the first nine months of the year. The first use in connection with Afghanistan comes on September 24 – on Australian ABC, but the speaker was from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. So it’s likely that dithering represented one idea of how to attack Obama. That idea took hold.

Over the course of the next month, dithering begins to reverberate. Republican senators use it in hearings in early October, TV news people bounce it back, and right-wing commentators start yodeling it loudly.

They are changing the rationale for why we are in Afghanistan. What’s really going on here is a dither, a big dither, indecisiveness. (William Bennett on CNN, Oct. 18)

And finally the Cheney quote on Oct. 21 that is echoed in every news story about that speech.

The White House must stop dithering while America’s forces are in danger.

Quite possibly, Cheney’s speech was written by someone at the American Enterprise Institute or someone else in that neo-con circle. Still, I don’t see the dithering as a matter of “talking points” distributed by the RNC. Instead, it’s an example of what I mentioned in yesterday’s post – a word (dithering, issues) that spreads because it just sounds “right,” at least to certain people.

I expect that the dithering life cycle will be mayfly brief. Issues to mean problems was slower to catch on, and it may hang around for a good while.

Houston, We Have an Issue

October 27, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

When did problems become issues?

I remember when an issue was a point of contention, something people disagreed about, like the issues in a political campaign. Now, an issue can be just another difficulty, or what we used to call “a problem.”*

This morning my orthopedist told me that he too has “shoulder issues,” especially when he’s under stress and unconsciously tenses his shoulders. I wanted to say that I didn’t have issues, I had pain, and that the pain was a problem.

But I didn’t. Not enough time. This doctor works fast, and talks fast. “Trap strain” was his diagnosis, and it took him about as long to make it as it took you to read this sentence.

I and everyone I’ve mentioned it to think that issues started among psychotherapists. Patients’ problems became “issues.” (“You seem to have an issue with women you perceive as powerful.”) Those patients were disproportionately educated and wealthy; more of them also might have worked in the media. A Robert Weber New Yorker cartoon shows two parents as their infant child in a highchair throws food wildly all over the kitchen. The caption: “He has some food issues.”

He has some food issues.

That was in 1999, and apparently issues was fresh enough to be funny to New Yorker readers and their therapists. But I suspect that it was already late in the day and that the term was already filtering out into much broader use. I doubt that the magazine would publish that cartoon today. Last May, their “Ask the Author” page contained the sentence, “There are allergies, peculiar diets, and all sorts of food issues.” And nobody was chuckling.

So it all starts with psychotherapy and the media elite, to use a term of denigration popular on the right (George W. Bush used to pronounce it as a single word – “medialeet”). It then flowed downward and outward, much like fashions in names and clothing. To repeat an anecdote I used in an earlier post on language, only few years after that cartoon appeared, I heard a burly jock, a former defensive lineman for the Jets, talking about the team’s prospects in the upcoming season. “Well, the Jets have right tackle issues.”

At least, that’s my guess. But I need some some evidence. If I were a linguist, I’d know how to track these changes. I tried Lexis-Nexis, searching for “has an issue.” But Lex thought I was just kidding about the has, despite my using quotation marks, and it returned everything with the word issue.

I wish I could figure out how to solve this problem. Or do I mean how to resolve this issue?

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*Issue as a point of contention is not the earliest meaning of the word, but it does go back to at least the early 1500s. My OED, admittedly not a recent edition, does not even mention the problem sense of the word.

Wisdom and Crowds, One More Time

October 25, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the early months of this blog, I had some posts about The Wisdom of Crowds. The argument that James Surowiecki makes in his book of that name is that the collective wisdom of the general public, at least those who are interested in some topic, is superior to that of a few experts. (See this post for an example).

In other posts, I framed the issue as The Wisdom of Crowds vs. The Smart Money, and I wanted to see how the contest played out on the gridiron. Well, not the gridiron exactly, but in the betting about what went on there. My thesis was that the bookies (The Smart Money) were better at predicting outcomes than was the general public. (See here and here.)

Today, the NFL offers us two games that will provide more evidence. In the Steelers-Vikings game, the bookies made the Steelers a 4-point favorite. Since the beginning of the week, the public has been backing the Vikes. Three-fourths of the money has been bet on Minnesota. Usually, that would drive the line lower as bookmakers tried to make Steeler action more attractive in order to balance their books. But instead, the line has gone up to 6. Even with their books heavily weighted with Viking bets, the bookies seem to be asking the public to bet still more on the Vikes.

The Jets-Raiders game later this afternoon has a similar discrepancy. Jets opened as 7-point favorites. Public money came in on the Jets (about two-thirds of all action), but the line went down. Most books have it as 6 ½ or even 6, and it may go even lower by 4 p.m.

In both games, the bookies were responding not to the wisdom of the crowd but to the wisdom of a small number of sharp bettors, i.e, smart money.

If you follow the smart money, take the Steelers minus 6 (less, if you can find it) and Oakland plus as many as you can get (one online book still has them at 7). On the other side, the crowd, in its wisdom, 1) loves Bret Favre, and 2) doesn’t see how anyone can ever bet on the Raiders.

Sociologists, of course, will back the team whose head coach was a sociology major. Go Steelers!

(Mike and Ben having a chuckle over a basic flaw in Parsons' Social System.)

UPDATE: The Steelers won and covered, thanks to a couple of turnarounds by the defense. Twice, the Vikings looked certain to score only to have the great Bret Favre fumble or toss an interception that the Steelers returned for a TD. The smart money on the Raiders didn't look so smart. The Jets won easily, 38-0.

Culture, Relativism, and Bank Ads

October 23, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The word values has become pretty much the property of conservatives, who take an absolutist position. Values tell us what’s right and wrong, and by God some things are just wrong. Abortion, gay marriage, Al Qaeda. And some things are just right. The War on Terrorism, Freedom, Democracy.

This view is neatly summed up in William Bennett’s phrase “moral clarity,” which stands strong against the wishy-washy liberal view called moral relativism. Sheesh, don’t get conservatives started on moral relativism. Here’s a guy on Glenn Beck’s show:

a certain segment of society who has been indoctrinated with a certain moral relativism. . . . And it quite frankly puts our civilization in danger.

Here’s Bill Bennett himself:

Most Republicans believe there are such things as objective values, things we can arrive at through reason, and discussion, and experience, and faith . . . A lot of liberals are still suffering from the relativism of the '60s and '70s. [Nice word choice – “suffering.”]

But for the past year HSBC has been banking on cultural relativism with their Different Values ad campaign.

Some of the ads give a pair of value-laden words (good, bad) with a picture for each. Then the pictures are switched. Papaya - good; chocolate cake - bad. Or is it the reverse? Same words, different pictures.



Other ads show the same picture, but with different value labels. What idea is triggered by this old convertible – Freedom? Status Symbol? Polluter?

(Click on the image for a larger view, and read the relativistic ad copy.)

(I especially like this one. Is having four kids the self-indulgence that comes with privilege, or is it sacrifice?)

The idea, neatly summed up in the tag line of the original ads is, “different values make the world a richer place.” OK, let’s forget about the intentional double meaning of richer. And maybe we should temporarily ignore the hypocrisy of HSBC, having gobbled up local banks, now coming out as the promoter of local values.

What the ad illustrates – and this is how I’ll use them in class next week when we start talking about culture – is the idea of culture as a “meaning system.” What something means depends on the culture of the people interpreting it – as in the shaved head ad.
Those interpretations are based in experience, and the experiences we have depend on where we are in the society – as in the computer/baby ad.


Or the carpet ad.


(Can we still call them “Oriental” rugs? I guess it depends on our culture. But if we can’t call them Oriental rugs, what are they?)

UPDATE. A few hours after I posted this yesterday, I went to Brooklyn for dinner with friends. Getting out of the subway, I glanced back at the skyline of Manhattan, the island much glorified (by some), much vilified (by others), and much gentrified. Then I started up Montague St., and one of the first things I passed was an HSBC bank with this ad inside.