Douche — Long-lasting?

December 6, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A couple of years ago, I heard a thirty-ish professor evaluate something as “douchy.” The douchy item might have been a song, or a band, or maybe it was an article. I don’t remember, and it’s not important. But it did make me realize that this word was not in my active vocabulary. I was reminded of that again when a Facebook friend linked to this picture posted on the Facebook page of Kicking Ass for the Middle Class.

Sean Hannity in among the other douches.

I have never called anyone a douche. Not even Sean Hannity. I must be too old; my lexicon of epithets must have solidified before douche and douchy came on the scene. But when was that?  Surely, there are linguists who can tell us. And what was the path of diffusion?*

I also wonder whether douches are here to stay.  I have the impression that negative epithets are relatively durable.  Popular phrases come, and then they go. In a few years, will events still result from perfect storms?  Will ingrates be throwing people under buses, while creative folk push envelopes and think outside boxes? These phrases are swell, but I suspect their time is limited.  Ditto, I hope, for “my bad.”  Happy campers are fading away like old soldiers, and all the superstars have been replaced by icons. 

But shitheads and assholes have been around a long time and show no signs of leaving. Is it their location on the other side of respectability that gives them long life?  Douche has its origins in body parts and actions usually kept out of sight, but the word itself isn’t quite over the line. In this way, it’s like suck, as in “this post sucks.”  And maybe it does. But I did want to reprint that drugstore photo of all the douches.

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* UPDATE:  The Language Log was no help in this matter.  A search for douche turned up mostly references to douchebag, and most of these were in the comments.  One post does have a link to a 2009 New York Times article about words you can say on television.  It quotes the creator of “Community”:  “This is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years — a thing that sounds like a thing you can’t say.”  He he’s got the history right (it’s only the last couple of years).  The Parents Television council counted 76 douches on 26 prime-time network series in 2009 (and the year still had seven weeks to go, though the year-end Christmas specials would probably be pulling down the average). That 76 compares with thirty in 2007 and a mere six in 2005.




(HT:  Jamie Fader)

Economics and Ethos

December 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)


The equation of wealth and virtue seems to come almost naturally, at least among the wealthy.  The logic is simple: Virtue leads to success, therefore wealth is evidence of one’s virtue. Virtue, in this case, means the Protestant Ethic – hard work and a willingness to forgo or postpone pleasures.  It follows then that those who are not wealthy must have turned their back on virtue. 

David Brooks, in his Friday column (here),  applies this explanation to the wealth of nations.

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? . . . It's because many people in these countries believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not.

The US, Germany, and the Netherlands are Brooks’s exemplars of these virtues (Brooks uses the word ethos). The bad countries, the ones whose economies are teetering on the brink, are the grasshoppers to our ant. There they were – Brooks points his finger at Greece, Italy, and Spain – fiddling and dancing the summer away, refusing to live within their means or “reinforce good values.” 

This seems accurate, doesn’t it – the dolce far niente Italians and other Mediterraneans, taking hours at midday for meals and siestas while the industrious Americans, Germans, and Dutch are working away, wolfing down a sandwich at their desks. 

Just to be sure I downloaded some OECD data  from 2007 – the last year before the big crash – on the number of hours people in different countries work. (Brooks’s three “ant” countries are red, the “grasshoppers” dark blue.)

This is puzzling.  The US is slightly above the OECD average, but workers in Greece and Italy spend more hours at work than do Americans, while the Dutch and Germans are down at the low end of the scale.  (I do not know why the OECD still gives data for West Germany as well as Germany.)

I noticed that the OECD also had a measure of “employment protection,” which is basically how hard it is to fire someone.  I figured that workers in non-virtuous countries would be highly protected.  Since it’s nearly impossible for them to be fired, they know they can slack off on the job.  By contrast, virtuous countries would foster Brook’s ethos of “effort, productivity and self-discipline”  in workers, rewarding the industrious, firing the lazy and self-indulgent.  

I wasn’t surprised that the US anchored the low end of the scale. US laws do far less than laws of other countries to protect workers.  And Greece and Spain are above the average.  But so are Germany and the Netherlands, though only slightly, while Italy is slightly below the average.  There’s really not much difference between these three.  And if you look at the array of countries, there seems to be no strong connection between job protection and how well the country is weathering the current long recession.  I’m not sure what the best measure of the overall economy is, but the OECD has composite figure made up from ten main economic indicators.*

 

The US ranks above only one of the profligate “grasshopper” countries, Spain.  Why, if the US shares the work ethos of the Netherlands and Germany, does it rank so far below them?  I just wish we had better measure of Brooks’s “ethos.”

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*  “The Labour Force Survey (MEI) dataset itself covers countries that compile labour statistics from sample household surveys on a monthly or quarterly basis. It is widely accepted that household surveys are the best source for labour market key statistics. In such surveys, information is collected from people living in households through a representative sample. Surveys are based on standard methodology and procedures used all over the world. The 10 subjects available cover labour force, employment, unemployment (including harmonised unemployment), and employees.”

Reliable Tests, Unreliable Test-takers

December 2, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Great Neck is the epicenter of the cheating scandal – SATs, ACTs, fake IDs, hefty fees.  High schoolers, or their families, paid the smart ringers as much as $3600 to take the exam for them. 

The Times front page story today (here) notes that Great Neck, using the fake ID of West Egg, was the setting for The Great Gatsby, and the stories – fiction set in 1922, reality set in 2011 – are rich territory for comparison.  Success, ambition, wealth, opulence, envy.

One student

was offered cash to take the test by a more popular student. Eager to impress, and perhaps get closer to the other student’s friends, he agreed, officials said; later, he scored a 31 on the ACT under the same student’s name.

Could that name have been Tom Buchanan?

Maybe there’s even an unrequited love story that didn’t make the papers.

But for the statistically minded, there’s this:

Samuel Eshaghoff, a 2010 Great Neck North graduate, scored in the 2,100 range (out of 2,400) on his own SATs; he is accused of taking tests for at least 15 people over three years, and the people briefed on the inquiry said he obtained scores for them between 2,170 and 2,220 on the SAT.

Those numbers, though they might be barely remarked by most Times readers, are probably the lede in the ETS edit of the story.  The testing company might be faulted on security (“two of the people for whom [Mr. Eshagoff] is accused of taking the tests after showing a fake ID were girls”).

But fifteen takes with scores no more than 50 (of 2400) points apart – how’s that for reliability, old sport?

American Exceptionalism - The Cover Story

December 2, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of these covers is not like the others, though all are the Dec. 5 edition of Time.  (Hat tip to my colleague Sangeeta Parashar who found this image the OWS Facebook page.)

It reminded my of my third ever post to this blog in September 2006, showing covers of different editions Newsweek.

(Several other Websites and bloggers at the time – e.g., Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber  – had the same images.)

The covers illustrate one aspect of “American Exceptionalism.”  We are exceptionally uninterested in events outside our borders. Given a choice between hard news in some foreign land and lifestyle stories here in the US, gives happy young women, give us happy families, give us stories about how anxiety is good for us.

UPDATE: An off-blog comment noted that magazine covers affect mostly newsstand sales, not subscriptions.  So the comparison “is not between all Americans and all people in other parts of the world, but between those people who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in the U.S.  and those people in other countries who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in Europe, Asia, or Latin America.”

According to Wikipedia, Newsweek sells only about 40,000 newsstand copies compared with 1.5 million subscriptions.  (Both figures are substantially lower than they were a decade ago.)  The figures for Time are about double those of Newsweek, but the ratio of newsstand sales to subscriptions is about the same.