The troll primary

For some reason I've been having the following fantasy lately:

Donald J. Trump sweeps the Republican primaries, easily collecting enough delegates to nab the nomination. The mainstream GOP press starts to panic. After a few stray comments by a couple of pundits and operatives hinting at the idea that the convention should ignore the results and pick a more conventional candidate, the right goes berserk. Erick Erickson accuses the RINO establishment of attempting a coup d'etat, and Michelle Bachmann says they're working in cahoots with ACORN and the IRS. After a few days of this, most mainstream Republicans start to make peace with the idea of a Trump nomination. They note that it's really not so bad: they won't have to worry about turning out "the base," and they're relieved to see that some polls show Trump trailing Hillary by only 10 percentage points, well within striking distance. The convention is set up in Cleveland. A slot of speakers is introduced including Rubio, Kasich, Jindal, and a host of other figures who had once bashed and ridiculed Trump, but who now tout Trump's business acumen and talk about how he's going to bring back greatness and to save America from the horrors of the Obama years and "the Clinton machine." Several days pass until finally Trump is introduced to speak. He walks triumphantly across the aisle, chin set, bird's nest on head, and he steps up to the podium. After a lengthy pause, he opens his mouth and speaks, in front of America and in front of the entire world:

"Fooled ya! This whole candidacy has been a joke, and you fell for it! I just did this to prove once and for all how dumb Republican voters are, and to destroy their chances of winning. Which I just have, ha ha ha! Of course Mexicans aren't rapists and Muslims didn't cheer on 9/11, but by giving me your support you just proved beyond any doubt you're all a bunch of racist, backwards lunatics who are so moronically predictable you'll believe someone who's totally faking it! What a sad, pathetic bunch of assholes you all are, and don't blame me: you brought this on yourself. And oh, one more thing: God bless America."

He steps to the side of the podium and makes an up-yours sign straight at the camera. He then turns around and walks back down the aisle, leaving everyone in stunned silence.

**********

Is this really as far-fetched as it sounds? Well, for the record, I don't think Trump is going to win the nomination--I don't even think he wants it--and in the unlikely event that he does win it, I doubt he'd have the balls to pull off something like the above scenario. But I do seriously believe there's a decent chance this hypothetical speech represents what he truly thinks about the GOP.

After all, his public persona as an unreconstructed wingnut basically goes back to 2011, the first time he flirted with a run for the Republican nomination--there's no record of him ever holding such views prior to that year. Some of this has already gotten a lot of press, such as his defense of single-payer health care or his donations to Democrats. Other past statements of his have been surprisingly overlooked, as when he praised President Obama to high heaven in 2009. Now, I'm well aware there are people who soured on Obama in the course of his first term. Still, it's really hard to reconcile these statements with the birther stuff he got into in 2011. Not only did Trump never sound this right-wing, he simply has no history of embracing lunatic conspiracy theories of any sort, and it's not as if the stuff he complains about now weren't part of Obama's agenda from the start.

I'm not saying his candidacy is necessarily some Borat-like social experiment to expose the GOP base's stupidity and bigotry. But I do strongly believe it's an act of some kind. I agree with those (like Nate Silver) who have described Trump as basically an Internet troll. (That's actually one of the reasons I think it's quite likely he will go third party in the end; it will enable him to milk this thing for as long as he can without having to worry about actually winning.)

Truth be told, I've had similar feelings about other figures on the right--Ann Coulter especially, though it's a style that goes back at least to Rush Limbaugh. I'm not saying any of those people are closet liberals, but they do very often give the impression that they’re engaged in some bizarre type of trolling. When Coulter says that women should be denied the right to vote, does she really mean it? Or is she simply reveling in the reaction this statement provokes among liberals and the media? Whatever the reason, I've never been able to bring myself to be actually outraged by anything Coulter says, because I get the sneaky feeling I'd be reacting exactly the way she wants me to. I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert once wrote about a Monty Python film: "This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended." So whenever I hear someone react to a Coulter remark by exclaiming "That's terrible!" I'm almost tempted to roll my eyes and say, "Whatever." Coulter has another thing in common with Trump: she has never publicly apologized for anything, ever. Their consistent response to criticism is to double down on their controversial remarks.

This places him in a different category from demagogues of the past he's often been compared with, such as Charles Coughlin or George Wallace. If you've ever read any of Coughlin's monologues (I have), he sounds almost intellectual. And while Wallace was somewhat of an opportunist ("I will never be outniggered again"), I wouldn't describe him as trollish. True believers or not, these men were either extremists or pandering to extremists for political gain. People who think that's all what Trump is about are missing something, in my view.

The point isn't to make excuses for Trump, whose rhetoric is deeply dangerous regardless of his motives for engaging in it. The real lesson of his candidacy is what it says about a large segment of the Republican Party. It's like an experiment I read about years ago in which scientists designed a robotic honeybee that real honeybees ended up accepting as one of their own. The fact that it was fake didn't take away from the fact that it did a good enough impression of the real thing.

In (partial) defense of nonliteral literally

Gene Weingarten has written a piece decrying the Oxford English Dictionary's recent decision to include in its definitions the use of literally for nonliteral expressions (as in "I literally died of laughter"). While I share some of Weingarten's distaste for this usage and find it to be a fun topic, I cannot agree with his complaint. It has to do with what you consider a dictionary's purpose. Weingarten apparently believes it is to serve as an authority on how people ought to speak and write. This school of thought, known as prescriptivism, once dominated lexicography. But over the past century most dictionaries moved toward descriptivism, the idea that their purpose is simply to describe the language as it is currently used by its speakers. According to this view, if enough people use a word in a certain way, it deserves inclusion in a dictionary. Weingarten thinks this is simply "rewarding vapidity."

Weingarten's harangue is typical of prescriptivists, who in my experience tend to be scarcely aware they're even advocating a philosophy, let alone one widely rejected by lexicographers and linguists. They present their criticisms of the way people speak and write as nothing more than commonsense conclusions that they remember better than others because they stayed awake during third-grade English. Rarely do prescriptivists question any of the traditional rules they were taught in school, many of which do not hold up to scrutiny. They are discussed at length by the linguist John McWhorter in his 2001 book Word on the Street, which presents a wealth of evidence that many of the so-called "rules," from avoidance of split infinitives to the prohibition on using they with a singular antecedent (as in "everyone returned to their seat"), are rooted in the basically arbitrary decisions of a group of 18th- and 19th-century writers who often had a poor understanding of how English worked. But because these rules have been taught to generations of schoolchildren as ironclad truths, educated people have come to think of them as being on par with the laws of thermodynamics.

That's why no evidence from history or literature or any other field can possibly sway the fervent prescriptivist. Consider how Weingarten addresses the fact that many classic writers such as Jane Austen adopted the nonliteral literally on occasion: "That no more makes it right or acceptable than it makes it right for you to annihilate 100,000 people with a bomb just because Harry Truman once did it."

With this statement, Weingarten joins the honorable company of the critic John Simon, who wrote in 1980 that "The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled the merchandise in their slave ships, or as the inmates of concentration camps were dealt with by their Nazi jailers." Most language scolds I've encountered aren't quite this colorful in their choice of analogies. A professor of mine made the point more simply when confronted by evidence that a usage he disapproved of appeared in the works of great writers: "It's still wrong."

The real problem with this argument is that it assumes a word's proper definition is some immutable law of nature, like gravity, that can never be shaped by the people who use the language, not even by the people who use it best. This view is positively blinkered. There's no reason why the English of Shakespeare is different from that of Chaucer, or from that of Weingarten, other than that human beings of every generation have spoken and written differently than their predecessors. And if there is one thing linguistic history absolutely makes clear, it is that today's error is tomorrow's rule. For example, nice once meant "foolish." It evolved to its present state because people kept using a "wrong" definition, but it's hard to see how English suffered as a result.

Of course, literally isn't just any evolving word. Its traditional definition is a useful concept to have a word for, and it would be a shame to see it go obsolete, which may happen if more and more people say things like "He literally puts his money where his mouth is." In that sense I'm with Weingarten that the looser definition should be avoided (though not excluded from dictionaries). What's striking is that he never makes this argument. His point is simply that it's the law, and we must obey. His indifference to judging word usages based on their utility is revealed in his offhand comment, "although I may cringe at 'blogosphere' and 'webinar' and, sigh, 'whatevs,' I do not protest their appearance in dictionaries." Now, why would anyone cringe at a coinage like blogosphere? (Least of all a blogger?!) Only someone who believes that language should remain literally frozen in time, and that all change is bad, would find anything wrong with that type of innovation.

Weingarten doesn't even accurately explain the loose definition of literally. He claims it is being used to denote its opposite, the word figuratively. It is not. As the OED notes, it is being used as an intensifier. It's basically a synonym for really or actually, except that those words have been blunted from overuse, so when you want to express that you really, truly mean something, literally sometimes gets the point across with more force.

Hence, "the coach literally hates my guts" is meant to convey that you aren't exaggerating the coach's hatred. In a way this is a form of traditional literally; it's just being applied selectively, to the level of the coach's hatred rather than to the metaphor used to describe it. What this example shows is that a statement can have multiple layers of presumptive nonliteralism, and literally may be intended to unpack one layer while leaving the next alone.

My point here is not that I approve of the loose definition of literally, but that it isn't necessarily based on ignorance of the traditional definition. Rather, it's a reflection of the fact that our language is littered with dead metaphors that are all but invisible to us. (The mixed metaphor I just used is further evidence of that fact.) This helps explain why the traditional definition hasn't disappeared from the language, despite centuries of being disregarded. Annoying as it is, the loose sense has come to coexist alongside the traditional one instead of replacing it outright. Weingarten misses this point when he quotes Ambrose Bierce's supposedly accurate prediction that "within a few years the word 'literally' will mean 'figuratively.'" In fact most people today use literally in exactly the way it was originally intended. We just pay closer attention to the loose sense because of the way it literally sticks in our craw--suggesting the danger it poses to our ability to communicate may be overstated.

That's actually true of most gripes about language usage. Some are completely groundless (the most famous being the split-infinitive "rule"), while others, such as this one, at best point to bothersome trends that detract from our language's vitality. In neither case is any large-scale damage on the horizon. As McWhorter explains in his book:

What we must realize...is that during these changes, because renewal always complements erosion, all languages are eternally self-sustaining, just as while our present mountains are slowly eroding, new ones are gradually being thrown up by the movement of geological plates. Thus at any given time, a language is coherent and complex, suitable for the expression of all human needs, thoughts, and emotions. Just as linguists have encountered no languages that do not change, they have also not encountered any languages whose changes compromised their basic coherency and complexity. We have encountered no society hampered by a dialect that was slowly simply wearing out like an old car. Anthropologists report no society in which communication is impossible in the dark because the local dialect has become so mush-mouthed and senseless that it can only be spoken with help from hand gestures. In other words, there is no such thing as a language 'going to the dogs'--never in the history of the world has there existed a language that has reached, or even gotten anywhere near, said dogs.

Why liberals became progressives--and why they'll stay that way

One of the most striking changes in political terminology to happen in my lifetime was the adoption of progressive as a substitute for liberal. What's weird about it is that most of the time people talk as though they've always used the word progressive this way, yet I can't remember hearing it until the 2000s. (Checking the archives for Google News and Google Books seems to confirm my suspicions.) When the topic is brought up, the commonest explanation (which even I have made) is that it was an attempt to escape the negative connotations of the word liberal, which had suffered from decades of abuse by conservative commentators. But that raises some questions. Since the negative use of liberal goes back at least to the 1970s, what took progressives so long to come up with their new name? Furthermore, why didn't they stick with liberal in a spirit of defiance against those who treat it as a dirty word? Doesn't abandoning it suggest that there really is something wrong with being a liberal, and that so-called progressives are simply doing a linguistic makeover to hide their flaws?

The answer to these questions lies partly in recent political history, partly in the difficulty in consciously making changes to the language. For several decades liberals did in fact try to wear the word liberal proudly, in spite of those who used it disparagingly. Progressive already existed in political parlance, but it had a broader, vaguer meaning than it does today and didn't necessarily imply an affinity for the left. In the 1980s, for example, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council called its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. My guess is that the DLC aimed to evoke something along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt's bipartisan, reform-oriented "progressivism."

The degradation of the word liberal was gradual and, contrary to the oft-heard claim, not entirely due to the right's efforts. I think the process began in the late 1960s in reaction to the disillusionment and shattered dreams of the left. Around that time the term was undergoing a shift in meaning similar to what happened to a word like pious, where a formerly positive adjective comes to be used as a sneering description of those who fall short of the ideals they preach. Look, for instance, how Roger Ebert used it in his 1972 review of Sounder, a movie he defended against charges of liberalism:

It is, I suppose, a "liberal" film, and that has come to be a bad word in these times when liberalism is supposed to stand for compromise--for good intentions but no action. This movie stands for a lot more than that, and we live in such illiberal times that Sounder comes as a reminder of former dreams.

By the 1970s, liberal was starting to be treated less like a political orientation than like a character type, describing an overzealous do-gooder who may even be a hypocrite and patronizing snob--someone much like the character of Meathead from All in the Family. When the right began using the word pejoratively, they were in part seizing on that stereotype. Of course there is a difference between the trait of "good intentions but no action" and the right's more malevolent view of liberals. But the image of the excessive do-gooder--and above all the connotation of weakness--prevailed.

For a long time, Democratic politicians were unsure whether to embrace the liberal label or run away from it. In 1988 Dukakis resisted it before finally admitting, late in his campaign, that "I'm a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy." This comment was practically an apology, seeming to imply that liberalism had fallen from its lofty position in the ensuing decades. It was as if he was assuring the public, "I'm a liberal, but one of the good ones."

Indeed, when it came to presidential elections in the post-Vietnam era, it often seemed that the Democrats' victories rested on how successfully their candidates escaped the liberal label. This perception was probably delusional (Mondale and Dukakis were running against a popular administration, whereas Carter and Clinton were running against unpopular ones, and so their ideological character was probably not the determining factor in the outcome of those races), but it was a lesson the Democratic establishment took to heart.

The moderate, Third Way politics of the Clinton years disappointed many liberals at the time, but this was overshadowed somewhat by their disgust at the GOP's scandal-mongering against the president. By the end of the decade, when Clinton enjoyed sky-high approval ratings while the GOP ended up defeated and humiliated in its attempts to bring him down, there was a triumphant feeling among Democrats which, I believe, made many of them willing to forget (if not forgive) his policy betrayals.

This truce ended with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an event that drove a wedge between the Democratic establishment and the left unlike anything seen in over a generation. As the left's antiwar position, dismissed at first as radical, eventually became the consensus not just within the Democratic Party but in the country as a whole, it damaged the establishment's credibility and made the left's early criticisms of the invasion seem prescient. I personally believe (but have rarely seen it expressed) that this factor was a large part of the reason for the DLC's demise. And of course it led to the rise of Obama, whose early opposition to the war may have been singlehandedly responsible for his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Despite GOP talking points about how he was the "most liberal Senator," the L-word commanded surprisingly little attention in the 2008 election, when compared with past races. Obama did, however, eagerly identify as "progressive," the first modern Democratic nominee to do so.

This new use of progressive arose during the boom in Internet political culture that came to be called the "netroots," dominated by activists who now had the tools to make their voice heard in a way that wasn't possible in earlier times. That was the main setting from which today's progressive movement emerged. Though they rarely explained why they preferred the term progressive, I believe there were two primary reasons: they associated liberal with compromise and moderation in the hated establishment, and they wanted to free themselves from the influence of conservative frames they felt had governed mainstream political discourse for too long. Creating a new word for themselves (or, rather, refashioning an old, nearly forgotten one) was a way of achieving that goal.

Naturally, the new progressives tended to be fairly young--people in their twenties when the millennium rolled around (basically my generation). Older figures who have come to be associated with the movement have had to adapt their language to the times. When I searched Paul Krugman's columns and books for the word progressive, all I found were some references to progressive taxation--until his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, where he explains the difference between liberals and progressives:

The real distinction between the terms, at least as I and many others use them, is between philosophy and action. Liberals are those who believe in institutions that limit inequality and injustice. Progressives are those who participate, explicitly or implicitly, in a political coalition that defends and tries to enlarge those institutions. You're a liberal, whether you know it or not, if you believe that the United States should have universal health care. You're a progressive if you participate in the effort to bring universal health care into being. (p. 268)

Although Krugman isn't defining the two terms as mutually exclusive, there is an echo of Ebert's association of liberalism with "good intentions but no action." Progressives, Krugman maintains, are liberals who put their beliefs into action. While that's an inspiring thought, I'm not sure it fits the way most people use these words. I assume Krugman bases his definition on the activist roots of the progressive movement, but by now (at least in my experience) there are plenty of self-identifying progressives not actively involved in the fight for liberal causes.

The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg rounds up various pundit theories on the progressive/liberal distinction before observing, "none of them has much to do with with how the labels are actually used." One problem I have with most of these theories is that they treat the categories as fixed and static. In reality, these words have had greatly varied meanings over time, and even within the same time have meant different things to different people. The fact that TR referred to himself as a Progressive while FDR considered himself a liberal doesn't shed much light on the differences between Clinton and Obama. With these caveats in mind, Nunberg offers his thoughts on what the progressive label is intended to signal today:

Far more than liberals, progressives see themselves in the line of the historical left. Not that America has much of a left to speak of anymore, at least by the standards of the leftists of the Vietnam era, who were a lot less eager than most modern-day progressives to identify themselves with the Democratic Party. But if modern progressives haven't inherited the radicalism or ferocity of the movement left of the 60's, they're doing what they can to keep its tone and attitude alive.

I tend to agree. I just wonder how long this situation will last. As the new progressives grow older and the word progressive becomes more ingrained, its anti-establishment overtones may well fade. Eventually it may come to be a simple descriptor of the average left-leaning Democrat, occupying more or less the same place that liberal used to--before it was turned into an epithet.

Perhaps sensing this possibility, some conservatives in recent years have been trying to do to progressive what they once did to liberal. Glenn Beck attempted something of the sort in his 2010 speech to CPAC, where he linked today's progressives with the alleged evils of the early-20th century Progressive Movement. I doubt this strategy will work. These conservatives have grown too insulated from the mainstream to reach beyond their narrow audience (somehow I don't think most Americans would share Beck's outrage at TR's support for universal health care or Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Federal Reserve), and in any case the word progressive just doesn't carry the negative connotations that helped the right tarnish liberal. Whether conservatives or older liberals like it or not, progressive as a self-respecting term is here to stay.

The headrooming of society

From my childhood to the present, I watched the world grow increasingly science fictiony. But it happened differently than most science fiction stories imagined. Intelligent androids and intergalactic space travel are, at the very least, a long way off, regardless of how many computerized Jeopardy contestants and Mars colonization plans we encounter. Yet the rise of the Internet and cellphones has made our society much more tech-centered than before. I enjoy looking back at old sci-fi that takes place now and seeing what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it didn't even consider.

I kept all this in mind as I viewed the DVD of Max Headroom, the 1987 TV show. Given my vivid memories of the show and its frequent references in popular culture at the time (remember Doonesbury's Reagan parody, Ron Headrest?), I was surprised to learn it ran for barely two seasons of just 14 episodes. The pilot, based on a 1985 British telefilm I still haven't seen, concerns a muckraking TV journalist named Edison Carter who gets into a motorcycle accident after uncovering a scandal at his own network. A young hacker named Bryce, hoping to find out what Edison knows, unloads Edison's mind into a computer, resulting in an artificial version of the reporter. The program's first words, "max headroom," the last words Edison saw before his head collided with a parking garage barrier, become the program's name.

After Edison regains consciousness, Max develops as an independent mind who can travel anywhere on the network at will and can even jump to other networks if given the opportunity. Both he and Edison are played by Matt Frewer, a tall skinny actor with a voice like Kermit the Frog. In his dual role he gives the sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde performance that later made Jim Carrey a star, playing both a withdrawn nerd and a manic, uninhibited personality. Watching the show as an adult, I discovered that I found Max's loud talk-show-host shtick rather grating. As a kid, I think I enjoyed the series mostly for its techno-thriller plots and paid little attention to its not-too-subtle anticorporate satire.

What is the show's vision of the early 21st century? (The time frame is never identified directly, but the pilot gives one big clue, when Bryce, played by an actor of about 16, is said to have been born in 1988--suggesting it takes place around 2004 or so.) It depicts a society literally run by TV networks. In place of an apparently absent government, the networks have their own politicians elected through online voting. Money is measured in "creds" rather than dollars. A subculture of "blanks," people who have escaped registration on the central database, has emerged.

As a single-minded pursuer of truth in a society buried under propaganda, Edison traverses the city carrying around a large wireless camera connected directly to his network, allowing him two-way conversations with operators who can tell him instantly about the dimensions of whatever building he's in and where people in it are located. When conventional technology fails, his electronic alter-ego pops up on computer screens around the city, ready to help out.


I'm always amused at how futuristic speculations turn out to overestimate technological advancement in certain areas and underestimate it in others. In 1989's Back to the Future Part II, for example, we learn that by 2015 we will have flying cars, hoverboards, self-fitting clothes, convincing holograms, etc., etc.--yet the characters still use fax machines. I've come across two early-'90s novels about advanced VR games--Piers Anthony's Killobyte and Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly--in which the gamers still use telephone modems. There's a tendency for futurists to be overconfident about the most exciting developments while failing to predict the obsolescence of everyday objects.

Max Headroom has some of those qualities. The title character is an intelligent, sentient being whose creation depends on advances in A.I. and mind-reading way beyond anything we have today. Yet most of the computer technology on the show looks hopelessly primitive to any real resident of the 21st century. The characters still use floppy disks--no CD-ROMs or flash drives in sight. There are no computer mice and there's no Windows, despite the fact that both existed, if obscurely, in 1987. The hackers communicate with the computers using just a keyboard, hooked to a TV screen displaying block print on a black background. There are lots of vidphones but no cellphones.

Looking at the big picture, though, the series was pretty ahead of its time. Without ever using the word "Internet," it envisioned a society that has gone almost entirely online, with signals transported through air rather than just through wires, with instant communication over long distances even while outdoors, and with a total integration of TV, video, and computers. Topics covered on the show include identity theft, cyberterrorism, video editing, and medically harmful commercials--among other things. Then there is the aforementioned GPS-like navigation tool in buildings, and, perhaps most eerily, bar graphs that get updated in real time.


In its social vision, the show follows the cyberpunk tradition of extreme paranoia about loss of individual rights in a future dominated by big corporations. In one episode, a blank faces execution for a nonlethal computer prank, and he's linked to the crime based on statistical analysis without any direct evidence of his guilt. Another episode has one of the network "politicians" placing blanks in detention camps. Privacy in this universe is almost nonexistent because there are cameras everywhere, even inside people's homes. This all looks a tad less fantastical in today's world of satellite cams, increased surveillance, and "unlawful combatants."

For all its hyperbole, Max Headroom is one of the more realistic projections of the future I've seen. Part of its secret, I believe, is that it starts from a base of real knowledge about computing. I had the sense that the writers understood the subject and weren't faking it with meaningless technobabble. Even when the show dips into outlandish territory (as in one episode in which a network is literally stealing people's dreams), it stays grounded in a way that many other sci-fi productions do not. Its most important insight was that the talking-head approach to TV journalism, with its concern for ratings over truth, would naturally worsen as the technology grew more centralized.

What the series most failed to anticipate was how the Internet would begin to replace traditional media. The fact that I'm writing all this on a blog, making my thoughts available to just about anyone on the planet, even though I'm not a journalist or politician or celebrity, illustrates how regular citizens today have the power to make their voice heard in ways that weren't possible twenty years ago. While the image of corporate takeover in Max Headroom and similar sci-fi works seems prescient in many ways, what they didn't foresee is the tool we'd have for exerting our personal identity against those who aim to suppress it.

With friends like these

cross-posted at DovBear's blog

It appears that John Boehner is planning to campaign for Rich Iott, the Nazi-impersonating congressional candidate.

It's important to understand how offensive this is: the problem is not that Iott participated in historical reenactments, which are perfectly legitimate, or even that he dressed as a bad guy. The problem is that the whole reenactment is invested with significant historical revisionism that views these SS officers admiringly and makes only the vaguest references to the crimes they committed. The website contains a disclaimer disavowing support for either neo-Nazis or the original Nazis and condemning "the atrocities which made them infamous." What it does not do is make any mention of the Holocaust, Jews, or even genocide.

This approach to the war is Holocaust minimization, a soft form of denial that doesn't engage in any outright conspiracy-mongering about a Holocaust "hoax," but nonetheless describes World War II in a way that greatly downplays the crimes of the Nazis in an effort to make the two sides seem somehow equivalent. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Iott argued that we shouldn't judge these officers because they were doing what they thought was right, that the SS unit he was reenacting had never been charged with war crimes (in fact, one member was recently charged with the murder of 58 Jews), and that "Horrible things...happened on both sides." If you think Iott makes a single mention of the Holocaust during this interview (other than a bare statement that he doesn't deny it), I've got a tea-bag to sell you.

After the refreshing disavowal of Iott by Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, I find Boehner's decision to stick by this guy pretty sickening. It brings to mind another story recently about the Emergency Committee for Israel, a lobbying organization that is supposedly devoted to getting pro-Israel candidates elected ("pro-Israel" in the most hawkish, right-wing sense) but in practice seems more interested simply in getting Republicans elected:

If ECI genuinely cared about electing pro-Israel members of Congress, it would launch big money campaigns against Tea Party candidates, such as Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the source said.

Toomey, for instance, has twice voted against foreign aid packages, which are widely viewed as principal pro-Israel litmus tests, as they include large amounts of financial assistance for the Jewish state. (According to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, Toomey said that he "feels Israel no longer needs economic aid, and should simply receive military assistance.")

Pollak, however, defended Toomey, noting that he voted against foreign aid not out of hostility toward Israel, but "as a matter of larger fiscal principles. He has never shown a particular animosity toward Israel -- far from it."

In short, vote Republican because the Republicans are better for Israel, but vote Republican even when they aren't better for Israel. If that confuses you, don't worry about it, just vote Republican.

What we need to understand is that a lot of the Israel talk by Republicans is not done for the sake of Jews. It is for the consumption of Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber their Jewish counterparts and who aren't necessarily even "pro-Jewish," as can be seen from Pat Robertson's bizarre views.

Or, to paraphrase James Baker, we don't vote for Republicans anyway, so we might as well go be fruitful and multiply.

A compendium of politically incorrect views

People talk about political correctness so often you'd think there'd be a simple, consistent definition of the concept. All we know for certain is that it's bad for something to be PC, and that individuals who violate PC standards are being unjustly persecuted. Or at least that's what everyone who invokes this phrase seems to think. But what does the phrase mean?

That's what I've set out to determine. I'm not looking in any dictionaries or on Wikipedia. Instead, I've collected a sampling of quotes from various sources that use this expression, and from them I've attempted to discern its larger meaning.

Let's start with Regnery's Politically Incorrect Guide series. Among the many PI truths you will learn from these books is that the Civil War was not about slavery, that the robber barons benefited the U.S. more than any government program ever did, that the medieval Islamic world didn't contribute greatly to science, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and that hunters are "America's real environmentalists."

Having been written by different people, the guides do not always jibe with one another. In a rare moment of factual correctness, Clint Johnson's Politically Incorrect Guide to the South lists rock 'n' roll as one of the great products of that region. But Jonathan Leaf's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties (whose author seems to have drifted into the PC debate a few decades too late) describes rock music as an artistic void with little talent.

In the view of some conservatives, PC is the cause of all our problems. According to Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams, "Political correctness is going to kill us. Political correctness led to 9/11, political correctness led to Barack Hussein Obama. Political correctness is a societal HIV." No one is immune to infection, not even, apparently, his own supporters. He wrote, in reply to one of several commenters at his site who criticized his controversial Lincoln letter, "you are crippled--mentally and emotionally--by political correctness."

Still, I suspect even Williams would be surprised at how the phrase has been used outside the United States. "It would be sad," wrote British journalist Peter Millar on the doomed libel suit of Holocaust "revisionist" David Irving, "if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable."

So now Holocaust denial is merely "not PC." It therefore shouldn't surprise us that other unsavory views have found their way into this category. Consider a notorious moment from Robert Novak's 1995 interview with Sen. Jesse Helms:

CALLER: Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I just think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you've done to help keep down the niggers.

NOVAK: Oh, dear.

HELMS: Whoops. [looks at camera] Well, thank you, I think.

[both laugh nervously]

NOVAK: That was the bad word. That was politically incorrect. Can you--we really don't condone that kind of language, do we?

HELMS: No, no, no.

NOVAK: Absolutely.

HELMS: No. My father didn't condone it. When I was a little boy, one of the worst spankings I ever got is when I used that word, and I don't think I've used it ever since.

NOVAK: And you had--

HELMS: Mark Twain used it.

NOVAK: And you had--you had--you had African Americans on your staff a long time ago, didn't you? As I remember.

HELMS: Oh yes. I hired several.

Notice that neither Novak nor Helms addressed the caller's stated views. Only his language seemed to put them on edge, his use of a "politically incorrect" word. Somehow I get the sense that young Helms would not have been spanked for wishing to "keep down the blacks."

But it isn't just conservatives who talk about PC. In his unflattering review of the live-action version of Mr. Magoo, Roger Ebert wrote:

There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film "is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight."

Though I haven't seen the movie, I agree that trying to avoid offending the nearsighted in a Mr. Magoo film is indeed an example of PC run amok. But I wasn't sure I followed Ebert's reasoning in another instance of his use of the phrase:

The beat goes on with Ron Howard's The Missing, a clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

This is interesting. In an age of revisionist Westerns like Dances with Wolves that paint a sympathetic portrait of Indians, Ebert thinks one in which they boil white men alive and sell white girls into slavery is PC because they don't behave quite as savagely as we might expect. Got it.

Then there is the 1991 New York Times review of the Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases, a handbook which the reviewer attributes to "the disease of political correctness." While some of the book's advice is arguably a little excessive--it instructs journalists to say homemaker instead of housewife, to avoid the noun Jew in favor of Jewish person, and never to describe a black person as "articulate"--it also includes things we take for granted now, such as the term Asian to replace Oriental. I even once saw a documentary in which a young skinhead was bashing a race he called Asians. When you have neo-Nazis nonchalantly saying Asian, I think it's safe to say it has advanced from PC terminology to common speech.

That's actually the case with a lot of the terms that were once derided as PC. Few people today blink at Native American, Latino, diversity, homophobia, substance abuse, and vegan--all of which appear as entries in 1992's tongue-in-cheek Official Politically Correct Dictionary alongside such items as sobriety-deprived for "drunk" and terminally inconvenienced for "dead."

The most striking use of the phrase "PC" I can remember came in a blog discussion I was reading some years ago. A commenter referred to a particular author as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the commenter's criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." The discussion had nothing to do with politics. To the commenter, "PC" simply meant being polite to avoid offending someone.

Based on all these examples, I am forced to draw the following conclusions about the phrase "PC":

1. It is absolutely meaningless.

The amount of things the "PC" label has been mockingly applied to is truly diverse. It can mean the often amusing excesses of the academic left, in particular the weird coinages. Or it can mean perfectly mainstream ideas such as the notion that the Civil War had something to do with slavery or that the Holocaust did in fact occur. It can mean trying to avoid offending the nearsighted, or it can mean neglecting to call someone you disagree with an idiot. Since there's no set standard for when sensitivity goes too far, the phrase is a free-for-all that usually says more about the person using it than it does about whatever the person is talking about.

2. It fosters the idea that sensitivity is a sin.

In practice, the phrase has become an excuse for boorish, inconsiderate behavior. People invoke it as a lazy way of trying to imply that no one has a right to be offended, without having to justify their position. It fosters the idea that words don't matter, that they can't harm anyone, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a joyless schoolmarm out to control everyone's speech.

3. It blurs the line between taboo language and taboo opinions.

Being un-PC sometimes refers to a questionable choice of words, even when no one objects to the point of view being expressed. At other times it refers to just the reverse--a controversial viewpoint expressed without any objectionable language. As a consequence of this ambiguity, the phrase distracts attention from the content of people's speech and makes all offending statements sound like mere violations of decorum. You can see that clearly in Helms and Novak's inadequate response to the racist caller.

4. Anyone who uses the phrase is, by definition, a hypocrite.

When people label a statement PC, they are effectively trying to shut down debate and eject the statement from the conversation by making it sound unworthy of serious discussion. Thus, the term does exactly what it is allegedly fighting against. This becomes particularly noticeable when those who claim to be battling PC propaganda are in fact promoting right-wing propaganda, but it is inherent in the phrase itself.

5. It is sometimes hard to resist using.

I've used it myself on occasion, and I no doubt will use it again. Let's face it, we live in a culture where lots of people take umbrage at things they shouldn't. The pushback against racism, sexism, and all the other isms has had a stifling effect on our discourse, down to the jokes we tell. But I realize that's a biased statement, and I can offer no precise standard for when it is or isn't justified to be offended. I just know it when I see it, whether or not that's okay with any of you cerebrally challenged hunks of processed animal carcasses.

Why ethnic labels matter

One time as I was waiting in the hall for a class, I began a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, and when she asked me what I was taking, I said, "Hebrew." She then inquired, without a hint of irony, "Why do you need to take Hebrew if you are a Hebrew?"

I was struck dumb. It wasn't just her ignorance of the fact that most American Jews are less than fluent in the Hebrew language, it was her referring to me as a "Hebrew." I hadn't encountered that nomenclature before, and if I'd ever expected to, it would have been from a small-town dweller in Alabama or some such place, not from a fellow student at U. of Maryland!

Was I offended? Not really. While I'm suspicious about the sorts of ideas that might accompany her terminological illiteracy, this use of the word "Hebrew" was once considered perfectly respectable--like, oh, back in the nineteenth century. As British historian Paul Johnson notes:

From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, 'Hebrew' was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

A quick search on Google News, which has a mammoth historical archive of newspaper articles, turns up numerous instances of this usage between 1875 and 1915. For example, one 1913 article from The New York Times reports, "More than 500 Hebrews crowded Clinton Hall last night and took part in an enthusiastic meeting...in honor of Nahum Sokelew, the Zionist, and editor of the best-known Jewish newspaper in Russia." To this day there are statutes on the book that refer to things like "Orthodox Hebrew religious requirements." But in the common language this sort of phraseology sounds ignorant, if not anti-Semitic, to most people. That it once was standard usage has been all but forgotten.

If you keep up with current events, you may already have suspected where this post was leading. Two apparently coincidental news items recently have sparked a debate in the media and blogosphere about the use of outdated racial/ethnic terminology. In one, the census forms for 2010 included "Negro" as an option for racial identification, because some older blacks still prefer the term. In another, a 2008 quote by Sen. Harry Reid was uncovered in which he had stated that the country was ready for a black president, especially one who was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

If Reid had said "black" instead of "Negro," would his statement still be objectionable? Depends who you ask. (I personally think no.) But most commentators agree that there's something exceedingly strange about hearing the word "Negro" used in earnest, and not in a historical context, by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Unlike "Hebrew," which few if any individuals alive today remember as an accepted term for a Jewish person, "Negro" fell out of fashion only about 40 years ago. Martin Luther King used the word several times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Bobby Kennedy used it when he suggested--with considerable foresight, as it turns out--that the U.S. would elect a black president in the next 40 years. People of Reid's generation (b. 1939) had to expunge the word from their vocabulary when they were well into adulthood. Can younger people like me (b. 1977) understand what that's like? Why, yes we can. That's exactly what happened with the word "Oriental" when I was growing up.

Anyone should be able to understand why terms like these persist in the margins of society for decades after having been purged from mainstream discourse. Apart from the fact that old speech habits die hard, the changes usually seem a little arbitrary on the surface. Why is "Hebrew" more demeaning than "Jew"? Why is the Spanish word for "black" worse than the English word? Partly it may be their closeness to a slur ("Hebe," "nigger," etc.), but the real reason is probably that it is just a way of marking a shift in public attitude. Therefore, any person who continues using a linguistic casualty of this type gives the impression of not having fully absorbed the social developments that left it behind.

All wired up

Sarah Palin has taken no shortage of abuse for her inarticulate remarks last year when she first rose to national prominence as McCain's running mate. Everyone who followed the campaign remembers the notorious moments from the Couric interviews, particularly when she tried to explain why being governor of Alaska enhanced her foreign policy credentials:

Well, it certainly does because our -- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia ... We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Contrary to popular belief, Palin never said "I can see Russia from my house." That was SNL's parody of a remark she made during an interview with Charlie Gibson for ABC News, when she said, "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The whole argument about her state's proximity to Russia giving her foreign policy experience started as a bit of campaign bluster by McCain, and she unwisely stuck with it through several interviews.

I believe that ultimately candidates should be judged by the smartest things they have said, not the dumbest things. Our political culture obsesses on these gotcha moments, which can happen to anyone. I know I've made stupid remarks in my life, and been in situations where I've done nothing but sputter. I was just lucky never to be in front of a news camera when it happened.

That's why I decided to ask around the Internet for Palin fans to show me smart, eloquent things she has said on public policy. As it turns out, several users were kind enough to provide me with a series of quotes they believe reveal her penetrating insight. Here is one example, from a November interview with Greta Van Susteren:

Fundamentally, America's economy was built on free market enterprise. It was built on these principles that allowed the private sector to grow and to thrive and prosper and for our families to keep more of what we earn. Where we are right now in America in about the last 11 months is seeing this reversal of those principles that were applied to build up our economy.

All of a sudden, we're thinking it's OK to grow debt in our country. It's OK to borrow money from countries that we will soon be so beholden to. It's OK to print money out of thin air and think, again, that everything's just going to magically work out.

Fundamentally, everybody is equal in America. Everyone has equal opportunity to earn and produce and build. And the fundamentals of a strong economy have got to be applied again, as they were, like I just said, back in the '80s, when Reagan faced a worse recession than what we're facing today. Let's learn from that piece of American history and apply the same solutions.

Okay, where do I begin? Her premise--that the U.S. was a bastion of fiscal restraint until the day Obama took office--is quite sensible to anyone with the political literacy of a third-grade hall monitor, but to few else. Reagan added more money to the national debt than any other president in history, until Dubya shattered the record. (See here for the details.) Furthermore, economists of all political stripes agree that the government should spend during a recession.

As for the claim that everyone in America has equal opportunities for success--well, let's just say if I took the time to refute that assertion with data, it would put me in mind of the proverbial machine gun for killing a fly. Instead, I'll go back to the words of Mr. Reagan himself, in a 1985 address on tax reform:

My goal is an America bursting with opportunity, an America that celebrates freedom every day by giving every citizen an equal chance, an America that is once again the youngest nation on Earth--her spirit unleashed and breaking free.

Notice that he identifies equal opportunity as a goal, not a reality. And he argues that limiting government and stimulating business will help us move toward that goal. That's conservatism in a nutshell. Palin, in contrast, is saying everyone already has equal opportunity. If that's the case, why bother changing anything? Her rhetoric may aim for Ronald Reagan, but it ends up at Stephen Colbert.

But let's put all that aside for the moment and consider her verbal abilities. At least she's worlds more coherent than she was during the Couric interview. Whether she's more eloquent, more facile, more persuasive than the average college term paper is another matter. If I had to grade her, I'd give her a C on style and a D on content. And this is supposedly one of her better moments.

On a similar note, consider the following gem:

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being part of this quest in working with us to restore the American dream. The commonsense Republican proposals are the first step in restoring the American dream because Republicans care about America. But there is no greater dream than the dreams parents have for their children to be happy and to share God's blessings.

That last sentence, I must admit, rings nice on the ears. Unfortunately, I was being a little tricky in leading you to think this was a Sarah Palin quote. It's a real quote, but it wasn't uttered by Sarah Palin. It wasn't even uttered by a human being.

Rather, it came from a computer program that produces automatic summaries of text. In 1996, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg punched in the combined texts of the speeches from the first two nights of the Republican Convention, and the quote above is part of what the program returned. He then tried the same thing with the Democratic Convention. "In this case, though," he reports, "the summarizer software returned pure word salad--maybe because Democrats have more trouble staying on message than Republicans do, maybe because they just go on longer." (This anecdote comes from Nunberg's book The Way We Talk Now and is recounted later in his Talking Right.)

Palin is that summarizer software. At her worst, she speaks "word salad." At her best, she speaks at about the level of that last quote, a comfortable summation of stump-speech rhetoric. If this is the model of a rising political star in our age, we seriously ought to rethink our notions of what it takes to reach that position. All you need is the face of Tina Fey and the syntax of a Pentium, and you're good to go. Bill Gates's influence reaches yet new heights.

The sushi myth

Often when I mention sushi to someone who has never eaten it, I get a response like, "Well, raw fish ain't my cup of tea." It seems that every American who hasn't directly encountered sushi believes it is just another word for raw fish. They hold this belief firmly, like it's a simple fact.

I don't know where this misconception got started, but it's widespread. I myself held it at one time. Snopes even has an entry debunking it. But it takes on an added irony when it comes from people (and Jews in particular) who don't realize they have been eating a type of uncooked fish for years, called lox.

"What?!" they exclaim. "How can lox be raw? Everybody knows it's smoked salmon. Even the dictionary says so."

Okay, now wait a second: do you know what smoking means in this context? It refers to cold smoking, a preservation process that does not expose the fish to heat. Furthermore, not all lox is smoked; it is mainly preserved through curing--soaking in brine (hence the salty flavor).

Like sushi, it is an acquired taste. It's a little weird, actually: eaten by itself, it's borderline unpalatable. Add cream cheese, and it becomes delicious. The raw fish that is found in some sushi has a similar quality.

In the last ten years or so, kosher markets have begun selling sushi. To remain kosher, it must forgo traditional ingredients such as crab. The first sushi I ever ate, I made myself. I was guided through its creation while sitting in a Sukkah, in a program hosted by my college's Hillel during the holiday.

If sushi isn't raw fish, what is it? Usually it consists of rice wrapped in seaweed, with a middle that can contain just about anything--fish generally, but there is also vegetable sushi and fruit sushi. I even once tried chicken sushi, though I didn't think the combination worked.

Snopes defines it as "vinegared rice that can (but need not) be paired with raw seafood." That's also the definition offered by Wikipedia, which then links to the Snopes page. But does it really need to have rice? I once ordered something from a sushi menu, and was given simply a slab of raw tuna on a plate. I say "tuna" because that's what the menu called it, but it didn't look or taste anything like the sort of food you find in a Chicken of the Sea can. It was dark red, with a jello-like consistency, and was about as appetizing as baking soda toothpaste.

But if it doesn't need to have rice, and doesn't need to have fish, what makes sushi sushi? I tried asking this once to a sushi chef, but he didn't know enough English to explain it to me, or even to understand my question.

I made some a few weeks ago using a kit, the first time I've done it without supervision. The kit provided the seaweed and rice, and I added lox, carrots, cucumbers, and celery. The people I served it to liked it, but it was far from perfect. I put in too much rice, making it hard for me to keep the pieces together. I've asked for tips on Internet forums, and watched what the chefs at local restaurants do. The latest technique I learned is to wet the knife before cutting the rolls.

Let's face it. Sushi is just more fun to make--or to watch being made--than it is to eat. The chefs always remind me of artists, their products more visually dazzling than gustatorily appealing. But you should try it some time, just to say you've had it.

A nerdy examination of nerdiness

What, exactly, is a nerd? Roger Ebert once attempted to answer that question, in his review of one of the Revenge of the Nerds flicks:

These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with [this film].... A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

I must confess that I find Ebert's definition rather strange, especially his contention that the protagonists of this film couldn't be nerds because they were "a bunch of interesting guys." I've always thought nerds were the interesting guys. It was the popular kids who were the bores, who went on to boring, regular jobs, while their nerdy classmates went on to become the inventors, the rocket scientists, the CEOs, the movie stars. (If you don't believe me about that last one, go read an interview with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck about their high school days.) I presume Ebert doesn't include in his definition a tubby, bespectacled guy who analyzes movies for a living. He doesn't because he seems to define nerds as dysfunctional human beings rather than the people you learn to respect when you grow up.

Ebert is afflicted with a condition I like to call lexicitis, which is the desire to provide precise definitions for words that defy any. The word nerd is little more than a loose collection of stereotypes, rooted in the superficial world of teen cliques and in-crowds, but applied to adults without any consistent, universally accepted meaning.

I wouldn't even call it a character type, for it can encompass many character types. Rick Moranis's mad scientist in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is nerdier than Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future, but then Moranis made a career out of putting a nerdy spin on characters who might not seem nerdy if played by other actors. In Parenthood he played a perfectionistic snob, but a nerdy perfectionistic snob.

Like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know 'em when you see 'em. I think of nerds as social oddballs, but not all social oddballs are nerds. Nerds are often thought to be intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are nerds, and not all nerds are intellectual.

Above all, the word evokes particular images: a guy who wears glasses with a piece of tape in the middle, a guy with pens in his shirt pockets, a guy who reads comic books and plays video games and likes science fiction movies and memorizes UNIX manuals.

Nerds are traditionally pictured as male. Girls and women have been described as nerds, but nobody's sure what that means. Women nerds defy a sexual stereotype almost as much as women football players do.

Nerds are, also, usually pictured as Caucasian. Of course blacks can be nerds too (think Urkel), and in black youth culture, nerdiness blends with the idea of "acting white." As for Asians, according to Hollywood in recent years, all Asian guys are nerds (this has apparently replaced the older stereotype that they all know martial arts). And all Jewish men are nerds, except for Israelis.

The commonest explanation for the word's origin is that it came from the name of a creature in a 1950 book by Dr. Seuss. How it acquired its current sense is unknown, but by the 1960s it was being used by teenagers to describe those they considered uncool.

The twin word geek has a different history, originally referring to a performer at a carnival sideshow who bit the head off a chicken. It later evolved into a synonym for nerd, a fact that hasn't stopped people from coming up with a distinction between the two. The filmmaker John Hughes once explained it in the following way: "A geek is a guy who has everything going for him, but he's just too young. By contrast, a nerd will be a nerd all his life."

Personally, I've never heard anyone else use that definition. But I agree that the two words are not always identical. It's one of those pairs like morality and ethics that seem interchangeable but upon closer inspection turn out to have a subtle difference in connotation. Geekiness usually suggests an element of the grotesque, whereas nerdiness is something you can find endearing. The heroes of most teenage comedies are nerds, not geeks, despite what John Hughes may think.

Still, it seems like both words don't mean quite what they used to. Early in the 2000s, Comedy Central had a game show called Beat the Geeks, in which contestants would try to match their knowledge against Star Wars geeks, horror geeks, James Bond geeks, Simpsons geeks, Playboy geeks, hip-hop geeks, wrestling geeks, and so on. What was striking was how many of these so-called geeks were immersed in pop culture, something you would not associate with the geeks of old.

Nerds were once thought to make up the computer-literate population, but now that we've entered an age of iPhones, Blackberrys, webcams, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, you're considered uncool if you aren't caught up on the latest computer or Internet development. It's not surprising that I haven't heard the phrase "computer nerd" in a long time.

This is what happens when you take a term invented by adolescent boys and try to apply it to adults, most of whom have long lost their sense of what's cool and what's nerdy. The word may shed light on some of the qualities of today's culture, but let's not take it too seriously, lest we become a living example of the word in its negative sense.

The line between cranks and scholars

What is it with some linguists and claiming a mysterious relationship between English and Hebrew? First there's Isaac Mozeson, the literature professor (I hesitate to use the term "linguist") who maintains that all English words can be traced to Hebrew. Then there's Ernest Klein, a rabbi/linguist who saw Semitic origins where other scholars didn't. I never expected John McWhorter of all people to enter the fray. But he does, in a recent book that features an eccentric theory about early Semitic influence on the language that would become English.

Superficial relationships
Even in my early childhood, I noticed resemblances between certain Hebrew words and their English counterparts: camel is gamal, wine is yayin, and earth is eretz. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Animal names often come from languages spoken in the region where the animal is found. Hence, moose comes from a Native American tongue, and camel comes from a Middle Eastern Semitic tongue that may or may not have been Hebrew, but was certainly related. Similarly, the ancients would have referred to wine using the term from the culture that first disseminated the drink, just as we today adopted the Japanese word sushi instead of inventing our own term using pure-English roots (e.g. "seafood roll"). As for eretz and "earth," that's probably just a coincidence.

That last statement, in my experience, often provokes the response, "I don't believe in coincidence." But it has nothing to do with coincidence in a cosmic sense. The Hawaiian word kahuna meaning "priest" sounds remarkably similar to the Hebrew word for priest, but unless you can devise a story about an ancient encounter between Semitic tribes and Polynesians, it is likely that the two languages just happened to hit upon the same combination of sound and meaning in this one instant. These things happen from time to time.

Isaac Mozeson
In his 1988 book The Word, Mozeson maintains not only that the English language (as well as all other languages) comes directly from Hebrew, "the language of Eden," but that this fact can be discerned by examining the roots of English words. According to Mozeson, "Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than to Latin, Greek, or French."

As for the Indo-European theory of modern linguistics, Mozeson argues that it is nothing more than a racist plot by white Gentiles to segregate their languages from other cultures and undermine the eternal truth of the Torah. As Mozeson puts it, "The third son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence of a related Hamito-Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains lily white." It never seems to occur to him what the "Indo" part of the theory signifies.

The book is filled with his unorthodox etymologies. "Sparrow," he claims, comes from the Hebrew tzipor ("bird"). The English word "lad" derives from the Hebrew yeled ("boy"). "Direction" comes from derekh ("path, way"). He even traces "samurai" to the Hebrew shomer ("guardian")--via Japanese, of course.

This is all quite clever. But I can't help thinking of the father in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that if you give him any English word, he can explain how it is derived from Greek. He shows how it's done with some easy examples, like arachnophobia. Then one of the kids says "kimono!" The father is stopped short for a moment, then he explains that it comes from the Greek word for winter, himona, and in winter you stay warm by wearing a robe--kimono!

If Mozeson considered other theories, he'd find his own wanting. For example, mainstream linguists trace the word direction to the Latin directus, which is the past participle of the verb dirigere, "to set straight." That word comes from a combination of dis- ("apart") and regere ("to guide"). Not exactly a plausible candidate for connecting with the Hebrew derekh. But Mozeson disregards the mass of historical and literary evidence, as well as the theories of systematic sound change between languages, used by mainstream linguists to establish cognates. Ironically, Mozeson's picture of language evolution makes the process seem far more random and haphazard than in mainstream linguistics.

Of course, his method could be used to "prove" that any language came from any other language. John McWhorter demonstrated this in his 2003 book Power of Babel. Not specifically in reference to Mozeson or any other crank linguist, McWhorter "proves" that Japanese comes from English, based on the following words:

sagaru: hang down (i.e. "sag")
namae: name
mono: thing, single entity
nai: not
mo: more
miru: see (hence, "mirror")
taberu: eat (hence, "table," where one eats)
atsui (ott-SOO-ee): hot
hito: man (i.e. "he")
yo: emphatic particle (i.e. "Yo!")
kuu: feed your face (i.e. "chew")
inki: dark-spirited or glum (hence, "inky")

I actually think Japanese shows a close relationship to Hebrew. In Hebrew, karati means "I read." And what people are more in need of learning self-defense than the guys with their noses in books?

Ernest Klein
Klein was a linguist and Orthodox rabbi best known for two works: an etymological dictionary of English, and one of Hebrew. He had a tendency to suggest Semitic origins for English words more often than other scholars did. Unlike Mozeson, however, he worked entirely within the framework of mainstream linguistics, and in fact his dictionaries are widely respected works of scholarship. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which has had considerable influence across the Internet, relies a great deal on Klein's research. One time I was reading a word-origin blog that traced the word traffic to the Arabic tafriq meaning "distribution." I immediately suspected--and quickly confirmed--that the blogger had gotten his information from the Online Etymology Dictionary and ultimately from Klein.

John McWhorter
In his earlier books on linguistics, McWhorter mainly attempted to explain the views of professional linguists before the general public. He does some of that in his latest book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, talking about the flaws in conventional conceptions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as well as debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that a language's grammatical properties affect its speakers' thought processes). But he also proposes some theories he admits few linguists accept.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I will mention just one of the theories: He thinks that the Phoenicians, who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew, made their way to the area that is now Germany and Denmark and had such a profound effect on the languages spoken there that the entire Germanic subfamily (which includes modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages) was the result of Semitic-speaking adults struggling to learn an Indo-European tongue.

Linguists have long believed that Proto-Germanic underwent strong non-IE influence. For one thing, one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary cannot be traced to IE roots. McWhorter discusses several lines of evidence, including Proto-Germanic's substitution of fricatives for stop consonants (compare English's father with Latin's pater), its tendency to put verbs into the past tense by simply changing the vowel (e.g. drink/drank), and its extreme simplification of the IE case system.

McWhorter speculates on a possible connection between certain Germanic and Semitic roots, such as the English word fright compared with the Semitic root p-r-kh meaning "to fear." Particularly interesting is his attempt to connect the names of two Germanic deities, Phol and Balder, with the Phoenician god Baal. Also, an archeologist allegedly found the remains of a Phoenician cooking pot in the shallows of the North Sea.

McWhorter is quick to admit that none of this comes close to proving his case; he simply argues that his hypothesis is an intriguing possibility worthy of further investigation.

Final thought: the line between cranks and scholars
Etymology is far from an exact science. Look in any dictionary, and you will find scores of words with unknown origins. In those situations, even the professionals end up resorting to guesswork, some of it as crude and far-fetched as anything Isaac Mozeson could have dreamed up. The difference, I suppose, is that legitimate researchers try to gather up as many facts as they can, and acknowledge when the limits have been reached. Usually.

Trusting the enemy

Linked to at DovBear's blog

After hearing some of my friends repeating the rumor that Barack Obama had a Muslim upbringing which he has concealed, I checked and found it was flatly untrue. But that was several months ago. Only recently did I discover a fact that puts an ironic twist on the whole matter: the man who initiated the rumor, designed to make Obama look frightening to Jews, is himself a rabid anti-Semite.

The Washington Post traces the rumor to a 2004 article by Andy Martin, a politician who had run that year for the same Senate seat Obama ultimately won. The article wasn't as extreme as some of the later forms the rumor took--Martin didn't attempt to tie Obama to "radical" Islam, and he acknowledged that Obama was currently a practicing Christian--but it was the beginning. Nobody knows who started the anonymous chain emails, but Martin does take credit for being the first to argue publicly that Obama was raised Muslim.

As Wikipedia reveals, Martin is quite a character. (What's printed on Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate, but in this case it provides a range of credible sources, including official court transcripts.) Numerous federal and state courts have dubbed him a "vexatious litigant" due to his having filed hundreds of mostly frivolous lawsuits. He was denied a license to practice law in the state of Illinois because of his unprofessional behavior on various occasions. But I haven't gotten to the most interesting part. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune (reprinted on an Illinois Republican Party website):

In his past, Martin also has expressed anti-Semitic views. When he ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the name of his congressional campaign committee included the phrase "to exterminate Jew power in America," Federal Election Commission records show.

In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he referred to a federal bankruptcy judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." In a related court filing in the case, he also expressed sympathy to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Though he denies having made those remarks, despite what the public records show, he is still pretty open about his views on Israel. A columnist for a Florida newspaper summed it up (the embedded links are my own, pointing to more recent articles where Martin said these or similar things):

While he touts a two-state solution for the Middle East in his "Andy Martin Peace Plan," says he's close to the peace movement in Israel, and has proposed increased compensation for Holocaust victims, the candidate also called for the Bush administration to attack Israel instead of Iraq. He has compared Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler and has written in defense of Hamas suicide bombers.

Here are some highlights from his rambling 1983 affidavit which makes Mel Gibson's drunken rant seem mild by comparison. (I got the text from Justia.com, a legal site with thousands of court records.)

Although I was not a Jew hater when these cases began, any love for the Jews I may have had has been dissipated by barbaric tortures inflicted on me by the Jews. I can see now that anti-semitism has a real root in the ageless manipulation, chicanery and murder by the Jews.... Jews killed the son of God, and seek to deny the fact, and seek to murder and loot and steal from anyone who opposes their efforts at world domination.... I do not believe I can receive Justice from a pack of Jew thives [sic], judges and lawyers.... "Judge" Krechevsky is not neutral or detached. He is part of a Jew conspiracy to steal my property.... I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property.

There's something sadly ironic about the fact that Jews concerned about Obama's relationship with the Jewish community have accepted the words of a real anti-Semite. It may seem strange that he would appeal to a fear of anti-Semitism. My guess is that he enjoys manipulating what he perceives as Jewish power. What's sad is how many of us have taken the bait.

Suffixism

Ferris Bueller says, "A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself." But nobody can totally escape -isms, not even Bueller (who is basically preaching individualism). Still, many people find something ugly about the suffix, which is why they keep adding it to words to make existing ideologies sound more ideological.

Take Islamism. It's supposed to suggest the politicized, theocratic version of Islam that has taken hold in places like Iran. Journalists have been using the term for a while now, though I'm unaware of anyone who self-identifies as an Islamist. More recently, some bloggers have begun using the term Christianist to denote the politicized Christianity of some of the more extreme evangelicals in this country. Daily Kos defines Christianism as having the following goals:

1. The establishment of a state religion. This state religion, of course, is not to promote Christianity, but rather to consolidate power in order to achieve their second goal.

2. Legislation of their repressive moral agenda. The Christianists plan to destroy the system of checks and balances in the Constitution, and they plan to do this in the name of Christianity.

A definition like that isn't likely to go very far. It shows too much contempt for what it's supposed to be defining. (What person would ever admit to promoting a "repressive moral agenda"?) You can't expect the term to catch on without at least a pretense of neutrality. Other commentators, like Andrew Sullivan, have made more eloquent attempts to define the concept. Sullivan identifies Christianism with the Christian Right and argues that the proper response is not the Christian Left but a separation between religion and politics altogether.

So far there's no comparable term to describe a politicized Judaism. Partly this is an accident of semantics, since Judaism, unlike Christianity and Islam, already ends in -ism. "Judaismism" would never work, and neither would "Jewism" or "Jewishism." One blogger proposes "Judaicism," but even he seems to realize that it probably sounds too academic to catch on. He doesn't think it's necessary, anyway, because he thinks the term Zionism already fills that slot.

The problem is that Zionism is not in any way the Jewish equivalent of Islamism or Christianism. It began as a secular movement, primarily the work of activists who didn't believe in the Torah. Even the religious variety of Zionism, far more prominent today than it was in the past, is not inherently theocratic, and some of the most theocratic Jews today don't consider themselves Zionists and are hostile to the State of Israel, at least in its current form.

Zionism, in any case, isn't a politicized form of Judaism but a political movement aimed at advancing the Jewish people. That's why you don't even have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, any more than you have to be a woman to be a feminist. Islamism and Christianism are, in contrast, intrinsically forms of the religions that precede their -isms.

In the end, our language won't allow us to create a single word to describe Judaism's more theocratic sector. Maybe that's a good thing. It prevents people from lumping together different groups, one of the more unfortunate consequences of terms like Islamism and Christianism. The real problem with -isms is not that people believe in them, but that they make separate factions seem more unified than they actually are.

Musical rorschach

One of the paradoxes of contemporary popular music is that lyrics are both necessary and irrelevant. I can't remember the last time an instrumental piece made the charts, and yet most listeners pay little attention to a song's lyrics. It's no wonder that when they do, they usually get it wrong. I'm not talking about "mondegreens" or misheard lyrics--a fun topic in itself. I'm talking about misunderstanding a song's message.

Somebody on a lyrics discussion page suggested that Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was about Freddie Mercury contracting AIDS. The person seemed unaware that the song came out in 1975, long before anyone knew what AIDS was. I suspect the person first heard the song through Wayne's World in 1992 and assumed it was brand-new. Another person suggested the song was about Mercury's bisexuality. That interpretation is harder to disprove, but it still doesn't fit.

Why assume this mock opera is autobiographical? The opening lines could hardly be clearer: "Mama, I just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead." The song is about a man who killed someone and is pleading for mercy. I guess some people are just so attuned to interpreting songs metaphorically they don't even consider the plain meaning.

One thing I've noticed on these lyrics sites is that for every song, there is at least one person who thinks it's about drugs. And why not? If people can interpret an innocent children's ditty like "Puff the Magic Dragon" as a pothead anthem, they can do it with any song. On the other hand, I found people denying that Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is about smoking pot. (That's the one where he sings, "Everybody must get stoned." If you think he means death by stoning, you're on crack.)

Some interpretations are so obviously wrong you wonder if the people who came up with them were paying the slightest attention. One example that comes to mind concerns one of Nirvana's strangest songs, "Rape Me." According to Songfacts.com (where all the information is user-submitted), "Kurt Cobain wanted to make a strong statement in support of women and against violence toward them.... A guy rapes a girl. He ends up in jail and is raped there."

I've seen this explanation going around the Internet for years, even though it doesn't make the least bit of sense. While I'm not sure what the song is about, the lyrics make no mention of women or jails or really any context to the "rape" being described. Frankly, I don't think the song is even about rape. It sounds more like some kind of sadomasochistic desire, assuming it's to be taken literally at all.

Curiously enough, there is a song from around the same period that is clearly about a man who rapes a woman then ends up getting raped in prison. The song, Sublime's "Date Rape," uses straightforward storytelling, leaving no doubt what's happening. Maybe somebody mixed the two songs up.

I have heard people claim that Cobain himself gave the rape-as-poetic-justice explanation for his own song, but that could be an urban legend on par with the one about Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight." The latter has many variations, but the commonest is that Collins was singing about a brother who drowned. Rolling Stone has listed this belief as one of the top 25 urban legends of rock music, alongside "Paul is dead" and "Mama Cass died eating a ham sandwich." It's so widespread it even made its way into Eminem's song "Stan."

According to Collins, who had no brother who drowned, the song expressed his feelings after a divorce. The source of the urban legend is the line, "If you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand." The funny thing is, even if you ignore the rest of the lyrics, that line doesn't sound like it's talking about literal drowning. I'm amazed how many people accepted the false interpretation when the evidence against it was staring them in the face.

In some cases, the feel of the music can mislead. That may help explain why so many people incorrectly thought "Born in the USA" was a patriotic anthem rather than a bitter criticism of our country. The song has such an upbeat, energetic groove it's easy to gloss over what the verses are saying. But really, what did people think Springsteen meant with lines like "Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man"? Did anyone seriously believe he was celebrating the slaughter of Asian people?

I often suspect that a large portion of the public is unable to understand irony. I was shocked when I learned that Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" was widely perceived as anti-Catholic. Sure, the song's narrator, a young man trying to seduce a nice Catholic girl, complains about her religion's restrictions. But I never assumed that Joel himself was endorsing that attitude. Part of the song's humor stems from the narrator's failure to veil his true intentions, which we realize are cruder than he wants to reveal. It is a song about sexual frustration, not a critique of Catholicism or any other religion.

Still, I can understand why listeners tend to assume that a song speaks in the songwriter's voice. That is the standard convention in popular music. Making a distinction between the songwriter and the narrator isn't always convincing.

Take the controversial 1992 record "Cop Killer." In a widely circulated essay, the sociologists Mark Hamm and Jeff Ferrell defended the song by asking why no one ever complained about the Bob Marley/Eric Clapton hit "I Shot the Sheriff." Well, I would think the answer should be obvious to anyone who knows the difference between swearing you acted in self-defense and boasting about committing premeditated murder. Nevertheless, defenders of "Cop Killer" argue that if you think the song is advocating what the narrator is boasting about, you simply don't get it. My response is, guilty as charged.

I've observed that many people who fall back on the "irony" defense don't understand what the word means. You can't even depend on Alanis Morrissette, who thinks irony is what happens when it rains on your wedding day. (As the comedian Ed Byrne put it, that would be ironic only if you were marrying a weatherman and he set the wedding date.) If a songwriter as gifted as Morrissette can't get the concept straight, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I'll tell you what's ironic. When people think a song is about drugs, it isn't, and when they don't think it's about drugs, it is. When people interpret a song metaphorically, it is literal, and when they interpret it literally, it is ironic, and when a song is titled "Ironic," it is anything but.