Alumn. . .us / a / i / ae / x?

December 9, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Welsey Yang, a writer by trade, must have been browsing messages from his alma mater, Rutgers, when this caught his attention. He posted it to Twitter.

(Click on an image for a larger view. I have added the blue oval for emphasis.)

English has a problem with words that are imported from Latin and Romance languages. What do we do about the gender and number that require Latin to have four different forms of the word? Alumnus, alumna, alumni, alumnae. It’s just too many to keep track of, especially since the plurals, masculine and feminine, sound alike.

The simple solution is to use a single form of the word to cover everyone, and that’s what many people have done. For that single form, there are two choices. One is alum, plural alums, which conveniently gets rid of those gendered endings in the Latin versions.

The other is the all-purpose alumni, which many Engish speakers now use indiscriminately for either gender and for singular or plural. It must drive Latin scholars up the ivy-covered wall. Both of these have been getting more popular lately. I searched for them on Nexis-Uni’s database of news sources.

(Some of the increase in these numbers may be attributable to the increased size of the Nexis database. But I doubt that it has grown by the multiple of 20-30 since the 1990s that we see for an alum and an alumni.)

A Google search for “she is an alumni of” gets 177,000 results, slightly less than the 191,000 for “she is an alumna of.” For men, “an alumnus” still outscores “an alumi” by a factor of 10, but that includes a lot of old sources. I would bet that the ratio decreases with time.

Personally, I would avoid the problem completely and go with graduates or, in less formal settings, grads.

The Rutgers Linguistic department has a different solution to the problem of gender: the very recent coinage alumnx, the word that inspired Yang to tweet. It’s a different sort of solution. The ungendered alum and the all-purpose alumni seem to have cropped up unplanned and without any ax to grind. But alumnx is a deliberate effort to change the language. What’s interesting here, as one of the Yang’s commenters points out, is that as linguists the department members are descriptivists, more interested in describing how people actually use language than in telling people which words to use. But here they are prescribing alumnx as the correct way avoid the less woke Latin forms.

My guess is that these x-words will have a short life. Most people don’t care much about the politics of speech and have little interest in changing. Remember “Freedom Fries”? Worse, alumnx and Latinx don’t resemble real words in English or in any other language.* It’s one thing to replace the “man” in policeman or fireman. “Police officer” and “fire fighter” were already part of the language well before the feminists of the 1960s called our attention to the sexism of the more frequently used terms.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these x-words will become as much a part of the language as Ms. In any case, I expect that the members of the department will, as descriptivist language researchers, monitor how well they are doing as prescriptivist language changers. (Or is it changerx?)

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* Latinx has similar problems. It’s not very popular among the people it is meant to designate, probably because neither English nor Spanish has words in this form. Terry Blas suggests (here) that a better gender-neutral solution would be an “e” rather than an “x” — Latine and Latines.

My So-Called War Crimes

December 3, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I first saw this item in my Google News feed, I thought it must be from The Onion or Andy Borowitz.

 But no, it was real, from the Daily Beast not a parody site. “If Donald Trump gets his wish, he’ll soon take the three convicted or accused war criminals he spared from consequence on the road as special guests in his re-election campaign.”

Why would war criminals be an asset for Trump? Trump’s base. of course, will not abandon him no matter what he does. But what is the gain? What virtues do these men embody that will pump up the enthusiasm and perhaps attract others.

First, let’s meet the war criminal who Trump has supported most strongly.

Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher and other Navy SEALs gave the young captive medical aid that day in Iraq in 2017, sedating him and cutting an airway in his throat to help him breathe. Then, without warning, according to colleagues, Chief Gallagher pulled a small hunting knife from a sheath and stabbed the sedated captive in the neck. A week later, Chief Gallagher sent a friend in California a text with a photo of himself with a knife in one hand, holding the captive up by the hair with the other. “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife,” he wrote. [NYT ]

Gallagher was acquitted of murder when another SEAL claimed to have killed the victim first, cutting off his breathing tube as an act of mercy. But apparently Trump and those who share his views think there’s something noble about knifing a dead man in the neck. Certainly Chief Gallagher thinks it’s something to brag about.

One SEAL sniper told investigators he heard a shot from Chief Gallagher’s position, then saw a schoolgirl in a flower-print hijab crumple to the ground. Another sniper reported hearing a shot from Chief Gallagher’s position, then seeing a man carrying a water jug fall, a red blotch spreading on his back. Neither episode was investigated and the fate of the civilians remains unknown.

The Times is being extremely careful here, saying that the fate of the civilians Gallagher shot “remains unknown.” But take a wild guess.

At trial, the SEALs were found not guilty.* But while the evidence may not have been sufficient for the military jury to convict the men, it was enough for the Navy to seek their removal from the SEALs. Trump intervened and forced the Secretary of the Navy to resign, effectively allowing Gallagher and the others to remain as SEALs.

What makes Gallagher so appealing to Trump, his followers, and Fox News? They deny the accusations, of course, but even if the men had been convicted, the case elicits ideas and emotions that are essential elements of much conservative world view in the US these days.

To begin with, supporting the SEALs requires a strong sense of tribalism. This tribalism goes far beyond the “loyalty” Jonathan Haidt sees as a “moral foundation” of conservative thinking. Tribalism sees the world as Them against Us. We are under constant threat from Them. This view obviously pervades domestic politics, where Trump’s go-to strategy has been to claim that Democrats are out to get him.** In foreign policy, it means that anything We do to Them is justified. Anything. Trump has voiced his preferences for torture, cages for border-crossing children, alligator-filled moats, and nuclear bombs, all on the grounds that these protect America from its various enemies. The willful killing of civilians easily fits into the list.

Therefore, We must defend the actual people who carry out these actions — the protectors of the country (the military, border guards, ICE) and the protectors of the social order (police). In practice, this means that there are no restraints on what they can do to people who are not Us or to people who dissent from or threaten the social order. So long as soldiers and cops are ostensibly doing their job, anything goes.

This defense of those who protect our tribe has an obvious corollary: American autonomy, an innocuous term for the idea that we should not be involved in any relationship of mutual regulation or obligation with other countries. “World government” has long been a trigger for the right, and they remain suspicious of the UN and other international pacts. What are “war crimes” after all except the product of international law, a concept which to US conservatives is illegitimate. So on Fox News, the shooting of a little girl or the knifing a wounded prisoner in the neck are “so-called war crimes.” The law that criminalizes these actions, in the America-first view, is not legitimate and is therefore null and void. No law, no crime.

Finally, the Trumpists see Gallagher as an example of the conservative ideal of masculinity. I have gone on too long already, and this really needs no further explanation. It’s enough to note that Trump refers to him admiringly as a “warrior.”
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*For most of the charges, the prosecution had no hard evidence, only the testimony of other SEALs.  The court convicted Gallagher on one count — the taking of a picture of the dead ISIS fighter. Kind of hard to ignore that photo he sent around. As for sniping at civilians, when Gallagher was shooting at the young girl, he didn’t take any selfies.

** This “out to get us” strategy was also part of Gallagher’s defense. His lawyers argued that the men who testified against him were motivated by a desire to get rid of him.

Cred — Authorship and Authenticity

November 25, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marjoe Gortner was a child prodigy Evangelical preacher. The 1972 documentary “Marjoe” includes home movies of him preaching at age four. The film, made when he was in his late twenties, shows him still at it, preaching to large crowds.  The spiritual and religious uplift he gives is palpable. But the film also shows Marjoe offstage saying to the filmmakers, “I can’t remember a time when I actually believed in God.” 

If a man does not practice what he preaches, must we ignore the content of the sermon? It might be a very good sermon. It might do what a sermon is supposed to do — cause many in the congregation to become more religious and more virtuous. Should we tell them to instead cover their ears?

Yesterday, I saw this tweet.

I recently peer reviewed a feminist article that cited Michael Kimmel’s work on how to be a “good man.” To state the obvious, this man has lost all credibility as an expert on this topic. Stop citing him. #MeToo  #MeTooPhD #MeTooSociology #AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter

Advice on how to be a good man, much like a sermon, is prescriptive. Once we learn that the preacher is an atheist, we probably won’t go to the next revival meeting. But what about works that are descriptive rather than prescriptive? Does the author’s behavior invalidate his expertise and  accuracy?

Not that long ago, Jack-Alain Léger, a White Frenchman, wrote books under the Arab-sounding name Paul Smaïl.

The first Smaïl novel, “Vivre Me Tue” (“Living Kills Me”), was published in 1997, and its author was received as a genuine voice of the Beur community. [Beur is a slang term for North Africans living in France.] North Africa specialists were as fooled as anyone else. Sales were strong; a successful movie adaptation was produced; subsequent Smaïl novels were published; and people wrote dissertations on the work of Paul Smaïl. [Christopher L. Miller, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity]

When the hoax was revealed, many people were outraged. The book was derided as inauthentic, incompetent, and racist. But as Miller says, “Léger was delighted to point out that until he emerged as the real author the books had seemed Beur enough to everybody.” In the same way, until the accusations against Kimmel became public, his writings seemed feminist enough to everybody.

But Kimmel is a social scientist. Smaïl’s novels were fiction. Are the rules stricter for social science? Should we require a higher level of authenticity, of congruence between the qualities and character of the writer and the content of the publications?
 
In a recent blog post (here) Andrew Gelman asks this question, putting it the same way we might ask it of fiction: “Does authorship matter at all?”*

Gelman blogs frequently about seriously flawed research, including outright fraud, and I expected that his answer would be “No. The data and analysis speak for themselves.” I was wrong.

Information about the authors can give a paper some street-cred. For example, remember that paper claiming that single women were 20 percentage points more likely to support Barack Obama during certain times of the month? That paper had both male and female authors. If all the authors were male, I wonder if it would’ve been considered too silly or too offensive to publish or to promote. [emphasis added]

Gelman writes mostly about quantitative research, so he is concerned with “any misrepresentation of data and metadata, which includes authorship as well as details of how an experiment was carried out, what steps were done in data processing and analysis, and so on.” So if we learn that the authors were not who they claimed to be, we should look very carefully at the details.

The accusations against Kimmel have cost him whatever street cred he might have had as a feminist and perhaps as a sociologist. I imagine he is now having a hard time getting his work published.

But read “Raise Your Son to Be a Good Man, Not a ‘Real’ Man” (here) published just a few months before the accusations became public, and see if you think that its advice should be cancelled.

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* It was Gelman’s post that led me to Léger/Smaïl. Gelman had been reading Louis Menand’s New Yorker article, which was based largely on Miller’s Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity.

Brought to You by the Number 九十二

November 23, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

We were at 79th and Broadway, and I wanted to tell the French couple that they had to go up to 98th St. I had overheard them looking at their phone and puzzling about directions. I don’t get much chance to speak French, so I asked, in French, if I could help them.

“Il faut aller jusqu’au . . .” I started, but it took me an extra moment to remember how to say “98" in French. “Au quatre-vingt dix huitième.”

I remember that my brother, a statistician by trade, once commented that France has had a disproportionate number of noted mathematicians, and he wondered if the difference might have something to do with how kids learn to count. Compared with English, counting in French involves more sophisticated mathematical operations. Once you get past 69, you can no longer use the base-10 template that worked for numbers in the 20s, 30s, and so on. Seventy is soixante-dix (sixty-ten); seventy-nine is soixante-dix neuf (sixty ten nine).*

After that you have to throw in some multiplication. Eighty is quatre-vingt (four twenty), and ninety-eight is quatre-vingt dix huit (four twenty ten eight) — 4 x 20 +10 +8.

In a recent BBC article (here), Anand Jagatia discusses the idea that how we count affects our ability in math. English, French, Dutch, Welsh all have slightly different ways of naming numbers. The biggest contrast is between Western systems and those of East Asia. 
 

In Mandarin, 92 is written ji shí èr, which translates as “nine ten two”. Japanese and Korean also use similar conventions. . . . Psychologists call systems like these “transparent”, where there is an obvious and consistent link between numbers and their names. There’s growing evidence that the transparency of a counting system can affect the way we process numbers.

The point is clearer if you use numbers rather than words — not “nine ten two” but “9 10 2.” To translate the Western “92” into math, you have to know about the tens place and the ones place. The Asian “9 10 2” shows more simply how the larger number is constructed from the smaller ones.

Does it make a difference?

Children who count in East Asian languages may have a better understanding of the base-10 system. In one study, first-grade children were asked to represent numbers like 42 using blocks of tens and units. Those from the US, France or Sweden were more likely to use 42 individual unit blocks, while those from Japan or Korea were more likely to use four blocks of ten and two single-unit blocks, which suggests that the children’s early mental representation of numbers may have been shaped by their language. [emphasis added]

I’m not sure what the evidence is on the stereotype notion that Asian students do better in math than do Western students. But if there is any factual basis, maybe the language of numbers accounts for some of the difference.

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* Belgians speak French, but they have simplified the numbers. Seventy and ninety are, respectively, septante and novante --- yet another reason for the French to look down on les belges. For some reason, eighty remains quatre-vingt.