Qualitative and Quantitative

Qualitative and Quantitative

In 1971 the UK changed its coinage system, from a system where twelve pennies make a shilling, and twenty shillings make a pound (I know very little about it, but they tell me also of tanners - not tenners - ha'pennies, half-crowns, farthings, thrupenny bit, and more), to a more sensible decimal system, like the US system, which has always been decimal (and of course the Euro).  Just as one hundred cents make a dollar, one hundred pence make a pound, and the shilling was retired. 

The people were not invariably pleased, I hear.  Among other things, this has always struck me as symptomatic of a more general phenomenon of people disliking brute numbers as a means of thinking, especially when evaluating things.  One prefers to have a remnant of barter, where your units were a pound of apples, a healthy cow at 2 years age, and so on.  As if you don't really know how much you're getting until translated into things of real value--apples, cows, or indeed, somewhat ironically, gold or silver (and this is in a sense true).  Not only does it seem colder to speak of 100 units rather than twelve or twenty etc., it's as if a pound just happened to be equivalent to twenty schillings, but it is not equal to twenty schillings, it's not the same thing; maybe tomorrow it will be worth twenty-one!

The same thing happened with the shift from the Imperial system of weights and measures--stones, pounds, inches, feet, miles--to the more orderly Metric System; fourteen pounds make a stone; twelve inches make a foot, 5280 feet make a mile, and things get very complicated when speaking of ounces, pints, quarts, gallons, etc., a complexity which is exacerbated with differences between US vs UK systems.  Although for some purposes (such as the distances on road signs), people still use the old system (in any event I don't see that there is anything psychological going on here).

In music, the British speak of semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers, and semi-quavers.  In the US, it's a more rational, and easier to learn and memorize 'decimal' system, with whole notes, half-notes, quarter-notes, and eighth-notes (and sixteenth-notes and so on).  Again, it's as if the crotchet has an intrinsic quality that is not to be compared with that of the quaver.    

This is somehow similar to weather forecasting terminology in Britain as opposed to the US.  In the US, the forecasts convey the predictions in a scientific style; they'll speak dryly of  'an 80% chance of precipitation', 'humidity over 90%', 'Low temperature overnight of 40 degrees' (although in the relatively folksy degrees Fahrenheit).  In the UK it is more subjective and homespun in style: they'll say 'It's going to be wet out there! Galoshes all round! Rain, or even snow very likely!'; the 'Beast from the East!'; 'It will feel cold; a chilling wind lies in store for us!'; 'The sun is trying come out but I don't think it'll succeed!'; 'Bit and bobs of mist are still hanging round!' 'We're in for a stiff dose of the wet stuff!'. 'And that's your weather, Helen!'. (I could go on). 

I also hear some echo of the difference, with respect to the qualitative-quantitative distinction, in the sale of medicines.  In the US, names (and the character of the packaging) encourage you to think that you're trusting science, the latest hi-tech; in the UK, to think of your auntie, your tried and trusted home remedies.  'Corocidin', 'Nyquil' , 'Mucinex' vs 'Lemsip', 'Night Nurse' or 'Beecham's'.  The difference is however lessening, I believe.

Hypotheses?  I don't think it's that the people in the UK more likely to cling to primitive ways of thinking, or let alone that they're not mathematically as advanced as the Yanks. The 1950's and especially the 1960's made science -- the realm of mathematics -- very much the thing in the US.  Americans got very puffed up about the atom bomb, B-52s and Doomsday, lasers, scanners, sonar, radar, going to the the Moon, transistors, computers.  All, at least one was led to believe, American inventions.  It was partly genuine American pride which survived from the end of Second World War until it began to fizzle out in say the 1980's, that perhaps explains the points about Medicines and the Weather.  And the other points can perhaps be explained independently, perhaps just as accidents of history.  But maybe one needs to remark the forest here, not just the trees.  Taken together, maybe these do suggest a difference between the British and the American Character. 

Prosecute/Persecute; Invidious 

The difference between the verbs to prosecute and to persecute is showing signs of being lost.  A recent story about none other than Donald Trump, speaking of the riots in Washington DC, 6th of January 2021: 

Trump also complained that law enforcement was now “persecuting” the Capitol rioters, hundreds of whom have been arrested, while “nothing happens” to left-wing protesters.

I predict that the adjective 'invidious'--so very good in suitable spots, expressing a complicated meaning, of a distinction which will cause undue division -- will go the way of 'begging the question' or 'refute'.  It will come to mean, when said of a person such as Trump, 'too individual' or 'unduly selfish'.  Just you watch.   

In Future, Exponential

 In Future, and Exponential

I've long thought that speaking of 'in future', rather than 'in the future', was a mark -- in Britain -- of not quite having had the best education (or not benefiting from it).  I mean goodness, no one speaks of 'in past', rather than 'in the past' (do they?).  But lo and behold, Robin Collingwood, in his Intellectual Autobiography, speaks in that way--'in future'.  Collingwood was no slouch. 

In another case of fine distinctions being lost -- this can be laid at the door of the Coronavirus pandemic, I mean if correlation is causation (:  -- 'exponential', which has traditionally had its precise mathematical meaning, is, if recent speech is a sign, in danger of meaning 'rapid and scary!'.  

The Ethics of Use and Mention

Most everyone recognises the difference between using words--as when I began this sentence by using 'Everyone'--and mentioning words, as when that word appears the second time in this sentence, enclosed by quotation marks.  I use the word 'fat' when I say 'Boris is fat'; I mention the word 'fat' when I say "Keir said 'Boris is fat'". 

It might seem persnickety to bring the point up, but this distinction is sometimes important--Frege, Godel and Quine took Russell to task on the distinction--and sometimes it is ethically important.  Vitally so. It takes front and centre when the words are slur-words, especially racial ones. To wit: 

A BBC journalist used the N-word in a TV news report

By Amy Woodyatt, CNN Business

(Updated 1558 GMT (2358 HKT) July 29, 2020)

As Lamdin described how a healthcare worker was hit by a car, she warned viewers that they were about to hear "highly offensive language." She then said assailants had called the healthcare worker "a n***er."

 Bristol-based Social Affairs Correspondent Fiona Lamdin did not use the N-word, as in the headline.  She mentioned it.  It does not completely erase the slurriness of the word--this is evinced by the practice of writing 'n***er'--but Lamdin should not be charged with using the word, and indeed there is nothing newsworthy in Woodyatt's story, as far as I can see.  Especially not when Lamdin issued a warning of the coming mention of the word. 

Based off

We say for example that a tune is based on the twelve-bar blues; that a recipe is based on Grandmother's recipe for green enchiladas.  No doubt this expression is figurative: The picture is that you start a product or activity in a certain way, and introduce departures from that base. The base is a foundation, a rock-solid starting-point.  But lately I've seen or heard the following variation:

So I began testing based off of Smith's suggestions in the other thread. 

It does make sense: Starting with Smith's suggestions as a base, the writer speaks of going off in another direction, going 'off-piste'.  I'm sure that this was again borne of confusion or ignorance of the relevant expression, but in this case there is no loss of meaning, as there was in the case of 'egregious' or 'beg the question'.  

Flouted and Flaunted

From The Hill, which I thought observed minimum standards of literacy:

Sean Hannity ripped partygoers who flaunted social distancing guidelines at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks over Memorial Day weekend, The Hill reports.

Of course the writer meant the partygoers flouted the guidelines.  Many lexical confusions start this way: One somewhat unusual word sounds like another unusual word that is not too far away in meaning, so it's an easy mistake to make.  We'll see if the bug takes hold. 

Egregious

Until a few years ago, 'egregious' meant 'an X to an outlandish, or notorious, or too-obvious degree'. 'He was an egregious interloper', or 'He was an egregious fraudster'.  Normally although not exclusively it modified nouns.  Lately it's used on its own, as an adjective, meaning 'outrageous!', or 'really bad!' ('egregious' does sound like 'outrageous', so there is mitigation, of a sort). Another example of a word with a somewhat rarefied meaning that has been stripped of its subtlety, used as a shiny new way to express simple old meanings. 

A similar though decidedly less significant phenomenon afflicts the use of 'forensic'. It used to have a precise meaning:  of an investigation of a crime, death, accident or similar, that the investigation into the causes of the event involves the use of sophisticated scientific methods - fingerprints, chemical analysis, DNA and so on.  Now it often just means that the investigation with be 'really thorough!', 'painstaking!', 'no stone left unturned!'.  The excuse is simply that one wants to convey a mantle of high seriousness and no mistake, perhaps of teams of specialists arriving in unmarked cars.

Questions and Exclamations

Questions and Exclamations. 

1,  The exclamation mark.  It is now used for anything positive or nice, or as an indication that the sentence is meant as positive or nice, leading to whole paragraphs where each sentence ends with one, often diminishing the effect.  As well as for factitious emphasis! 

2. The question mark.  Certain uses of them, in what are not, grammatically speaking, questions, have always been allowed; as in 'You don't approve?'.  But they are now used in declarative sentences as a way of avoiding the implications of the declarative form, of not asserting the content of the sentence but merely suggesting it.  And we already have devices for that. We can write, 'I suggest ...', 'Perhaps ...', or 'Maybe ..', 'I'm tempted to say ... '; 'I suppose ...'.  I don't know what to think of sentences like 'Maybe we should outlaw it?'.  As far as I can see, the sentence should just be: 'Maybe we should outlaw it'.  

Perfect real world example, from a chatroom: 

I see trump as unqualified to run because of his words and actions.

But millions of others see it differently.

I think we must walk on the safe side on this issue?

I know that these uses of the exclamation mark and the question mark can be defended.  The question mark in the above example has an air of asking the reader for his or her opinion, or at least to think about it; it's like the New Zealander who ends every sentence with 'Eh?' or the Ned who says at the end of many sentences 'Do you know what I mean?'.  The sentence doesn't just announce the writer's train of thought as my proposed replacement does.  The above use of the exclamation mark is harder to defend; but wanting to come off as friendly and supportive is perhaps not a bad thing.  The bottom line however is that the more that bug spreads, the more the present particular effect of the exclamation mark will be lost.

The dystopian horror would be a language in which one would come off as cold and unfriendly for lacking exclamation marks, and worse, which comes to lack a recognizably declarative mood, ie, in which it is impossible to say P, but at most 'Maybe P', or 'P?'.  I take a little solace from that outcome's being impossible. 

In both cases, the effect can be accomplished the old-fashioned way, with words. Or maybe in a new fangled way, with icons.  I do like me some simple icons: ;)  :) -- for those, there is no equivalent.  And I do use, and approve of the practice theoretically, of sentence fragments.  For example the first paragraph above ends with "As well as for factitious emphasis!". It's fine, so long as the preceding full-stop (period) can be changed mentally to a comma or a semi-colon.