I read the original English-language versions of the papers reprinted in this book:
* Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. KI read the original English-language versions of the papers reprinted in this book:
* Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit." Judgment and Decision making 10, no. 6 (2015): 549-563.
* Dalton, Craig. "Bullshit for you; transcendence for me. A commentary on “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit�." Judgment and Decision making 11, no. 1 (2016): 121-122.
* Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. "It’s still bullshit: Reply to Dalton (2016)." Judgment and Decision making 11, no. 1 (2016): 123-125.
The full texts are available online in English under Open Access. The first paper is a bit "dry" in the sense of containing a few pages of numerical data. You may need to refresh your understanding of basic statistics. However, the subject is fascinating (to me, at least): why people vary in their reception and detection of what the authors define as "pseudo-profound bullshit". ...more
Tim Phillips, a journalist with a love for George Orwell and a low tolerance for B.S. (those two things go together), has read a lot of corporate presTim Phillips, a journalist with a love for George Orwell and a low tolerance for B.S. (those two things go together), has read a lot of corporate press releases and endured a lot of meetings. In this book he fights back, with a mix of humor and good advice.
He gives many examples of "business speak," the peculiar communication style satirized in (which he does not cite) and (which he does). If you're the kind of person who gets perverse pleasure from clicking on to yield stunning gems of clarity such as:
seamlessly negotiate high-payoff relationships distinctively aggregate cloud-centric leadership skills holistically evisculate team building strategic theme areas collaboratively benchmark business human capital
then you'll probably like this book. And if you're the kind of person who puts stuff like that in a slide with a straight face, then for the sake of all that's holy read this book. If nothing else, you'll understand why your audience members keep shouting ""
Speaking of , they are a main focus of the book. Phillips cites a pair of manifestoes: by David Meerman Scott, and by Tim Radford. Reading those will give you an idea of where Phillips goes with this book.
As a more substantive source he cites Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers. Presumably most people who might read a book like Talk Normal will also have read traditional books on grammar, usage, and style. If so, then you're golden. If not, then you might not find enough in this book to correct whatever writing flaws you may have, and that you may not even be aware of, (and for everyone it's different)...unless your flaw is a fondness for buzzwords.
Somewhat oddly, Phillips almost seems to disparage the study of grammar. He points out that good grammar isn't sufficient for clarity, which is true, but it's arguably close to being necessary. What native English speaker with poor grammar writes clearly? I can't recall seeing one. While mastering grammar won't make you the next Orwell, it's not a step any aspiring Orwell skips.
Phillips himself enjoyed a practical grammar apprenticeship from a shouty sub-editor named Harold. So whether or not Phillips can explain without looking them up on Wikipedia, I'm guessing he recognizes a problem when he sees one. And I didn't notice that he used any in the book.
Not everyone who writes gets critiqued by their own version of Harold, and that's a big part of why Phillips clenches his teeth while reading all those press releases. Corporations (and academia) churn out reams of writing mostly without the filter of skilled human editors. Perhaps someday Artificial Intelligence will produce artificial Harolds and edit us all into Orwells, but for now most of us are on our own.
Phillips takes a shot at Richard Dawkins' tongue-in-cheek advice to have a trained actor read your writing out loud so you can hear how it sounds to your readers. Phillips points out that few of us are privileged enough to have a trained actor for a spouse. But he was privileged to have his Harold (although Harold doesn't sound nearly as pleasant to be around as Lalla Ward). Many if not most people who struggle to put words on paper or screen have neither a Harold nor a Lalla. We have to get our help from books.
Phillips' writing philosophy is very much in line with the principles of . Strangely, however, he doesn't reference the plain language movement as such. I wouldn't quite say Phillips is re-inventing the wheel, but I'm surprised he either hadn't heard of the movement or thought it worth mentioning. For that I recommend:
Horobin presents a fine overview of the English language - its history and evolution, and right up to the present tensions between language and socialHorobin presents a fine overview of the English language - its history and evolution, and right up to the present tensions between language and social concerns. I found the book both easy to read and informative, but I've read several books on English grammar and style. Thus when Horobin breezes over a complex topic such as the plain language movement, I might have some idea what he's talking about. (For much more about that particular topic, see the Oxford Guide to Plain English.) For someone with less background in language the book will be harder going, but the same is true for every book in the Very Short Introductions series.
As the blurb indicates, Horobin "Reflects on the future of the English language" but with a massive, perhaps inexcusable gap: he makes no mention of the potential impacts of Artificial Intelligence along with artificially augmented human intelligence. Both humans and computers may be on the brink of becoming massively more intelligent, and this may transform the way humans learn and use languages and thus how languages evolve.
Until now, computers have acted mainly as "dumb" conduits for language, like merely more powerful typewriters. Thus as Horobin points out with respect to texting, computers have tended to "degrade" our language use.
However, computers are already starting to listen, talk, read, and write in rudimentary ways. Thanks to the ongoing exponential progress of , we can reasonably expect computers to become steadily more fluent. Athough predicting the future is difficult, we can imagine a possible scenario in which computers force English to become more like Latin. How? Well, as Horobin points out, once Latin stopped being a vernacular language, and became a scholarly language, it stopped evolving. That's because, as Horobin doesn't quite fully explain, scholars are not quite like ordinary speakers of a language. The key difference being that scholars make vastly fewer errors, and are more inclined to think conciously about grammar - they use language with an awareness of language and its rules. Once computers become fluent, they will become as competent with language as the most linguistically competent humans. This could have the effect of augmenting the language ability of less-able humans. Imagine if every human were constantly accompanied by a team of world-class linguists, writers, journalists, grammarians, and editors to polish his or her prose - someday Artificial Intelligence could put all that expertise in everyone's hands. And not just a static representation of it, as with a copy of Fowler's, but the same kind of expertise that human experts bring to the table. Once computers are fixing everybody's language errors, error could be largely removed as a driving force for language evolution.
Humans themselves may become smarter. Richard Haier predicts this in The Neuroscience of Intelligence. And that brings us to another yawning deficiency of this book, which may be a deficiency of the field of linguistics in general: a seeming obliviousness to (the psychology of human differences) and its consequences. Perhaps as a result of the political correctness that afflicts university humanities departments generally, linguists seem reluctant to admit that some individual humans are objectively better at some things than other humans are.
In part this may result from the fact that almost every human is able to learn to speak a native language in early childhood, without being taught. (This is in sharp contrast to writing, which most children cannot learn on their own.) Thus to a linguist, there is no natural privileging of one person's speech over another's. But at the same time that humanities departments strive for inclusivity to the point of self-abasement, they cannot help but recognize that some people are in some sense better with words than others. The writing of Shakespeare, for example, is not merely different than the average person's speech, but better, in a way that can only be described as genius. Although no one can yet (as far as I know) exactly explain what that difference is, and quantify it, maybe someday someone will explain it, and discover how to confer it to everyone. For example, there is probably a for language ability, as there are genomic scores for virtually every other ability or personality trait that scientists have investigated with . What will become of English if science someday gives the average person that same facility with language that the best writers have? Until now, English like all other natural languages has evolved according to the natural distribution of human abilities. But that distribution might be on the brink of massive improvement.
Perhaps the field of linguistics is long overdue for a differential linguistics offshoot - the study of individual differences in language use and competence, and correlations between language use and other behaviors and outcomes. Of course clinicians have long studied and treated a variety of language use disorders, but these exist at the extremes of the distribution of linguistic competence. Everyone's language is disorderly to a degree, with some individuals having much less disorder than others. Differential psychologists study the relation between psychometric measures (such as IQ tests and personality tests) and behaviors and outcomes such as educational attainment, criminality, income, and mortality. (Verbal ability is, of course, a large part of what IQ tests test.) What is the impact, for example, of IQ on language use? Does the individual's use of language announce his or her level of intelligence to the world? And are people therefore justified, at least statistically, to react differently to different language styles?
Horobin describes how linguists try not to judge people based on their their use of language:
"Conventions of correct usage are drummed into us early in our lives, by parents and schoolteachers, and it is very difficult to shake these off in adulthood. Even professional linguists struggle to do so. Deborah Cameron, author of Verbal Hygiene, a study of linguistic prescriptivism, observes that as a professional linguist she has learned to overcome knee-jerk value judgements that are inappropriate in this field of study. But, despite this, she still finds herself sensitive to particular solecisms: ‘I can choose to suppress the irritation I feel when I see, for example, a sign that reads “Potatoe’s�; I cannot choose not to feel it.�"
But where do these knee-jerk value judgements really come from? Lots of things are "drummed into us" by our parents and schoolteachers, but not all of those lessons stick. In particular, we tend not to retain lessons that don't correspond to reality. A differential psychologist might find these linguistic value judgements are groundable in statistics. For example, if people in the bottom quartile of the IQ distribution speak and write on average in different ways than people in the top quartile, then people will learn to recognize that some behaviors and outcomes tend to go with particular ways of writing and speaking. The person who gets well into adulthood believing "Potatoe's" is correct is very likely not the brightest bulb on the tree. (As the strongest correlations in the social sciences are only in the 0.75 range, there will always be individual exceptions to any such generalization. Maybe some person who writes "Potatoe's" today will cure cancer tomorrow - but that is not the way you bet.)
From The Neuroscience of Intelligence: "1.10 Four Kinds of Predictive Validity for Intelligence Tests 1.10.3. Everyday Life The importance of general intelligence in everyday life often is not obvious but it is profound. As Professor Earl Hunt has pointed out, if you are a college-educated person, it is highly likely that most of your friends and acquaintances are as well. When is the last time you invited someone to your home for dinner that was not college-educated? Professor Hunt calls this cognitive segregation and it is powerful in fostering the erroneous belief that everyone has a similar capacity or potential for reasoning about daily problems and issues. Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g. [...] Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low = 75�90; high = 110�125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 10,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147. This may be telling us that people with lower IQ, on average, have a poorer ability to assess risk and may take more chances when driving or performing other activities (Gottfredson, 2002; 2003b)."
Thus when we see a sign that reads “Potatoe’s�, the irritation (anhedonia) we feel may be grounded in our past experience. We each have a lifetime of observing different behaviors and outcomes from different people. Perhaps we have found that a person exhibiting language incompetence is likely to impact us with other kinds of incompetence. That is, if someone who sells you food believes "Potatoe's" is right, what other incorrect beliefs, of perhaps more consequence, do they harbor? The spelling error that you can see may represent the tip of the cognitive deficiency iceberg. You have valid statistical reasons to feel anxious when you place your fate in the hands of a cognitively less capable (i.e. stupid) person. It should be the job of (differential) linguists to collect and publish those statistics, for the benefit of all. ...more
The book shows its age in places. Feyman writes honestly about women and their effects on him in a way that gets a man canceled nowadays. Cultural sensibilities change, but old books do not. It's interesting to pick up one of these cultural fossils to see how different the world becomes in a few decades.
Another odd bit was that Feynman seemed to have no concept of physical exercise, as in something a person might systematically do. He mentions getting tired from climbing up and down pyramids in Mexico, as if this kind of exertion was a break from the norm, as rare as a solar eclipse. As I write in 2023, most people still don't exercise enough, but there has at least been a huge cultural shift of awareness.
Feynman lived out his life just before science knew much about man-made climate change. He frequently mentions burning fossil fuels to drive across the country or fly across oceans, with no inkling that he was helping to destroy civilization perhaps a few decades from now. Sadly, most people remain just as oblivious as Feynman was to the consequences of their fossil fuel habits, with the difference that ignorance must be willful now. Oh well, humanity had a pretty good run.
"Is Electricity Fire?" recounts Feyman bringing his common-sense approach to the circumlocutions of the humanities. In this excerpt he learns to translate the flowery writing of a sociologist into . Feynman amusingly recounts the stenotypist at an interdisciplinary conference telling him that he was the only academic present who the stenotypist could understand.
Plain language has since become a distinct discipline, with its own proponents and books. See for example: * Oxford Guide to Plain English (2004) by Martin Cutts * Writing in Plain English (1996) by Baden Eunson Feynman seems to have grasped intuitively the writing and speaking style detailed in such books. That's impressive, because Feynman spent years in academia, a place where plain language often goes to die.
Also in that chapter Feyman, himself a non-observant Jew, muses briefly on the disproportionate intellectual attainments of Jews. For a later, more detailed, and more biological take, see Steven Pinker's (2006). That article again needs an update, since Pinker wrote at the dawn of our current genomics age. It has since become possible (via tools such as ) to study human variation as never before - quantitatively as opposed to just speculatively. For more on that, see: * Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2019) by Robert Plomin...more
Loading...
