Category: language

The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute changes its name

April 24, 2023 • 10:10 am

104 years after its founding, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is no longer going to be called that; it’s changed its name to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Africa & North Africa (ISAC).  Founded in 1919 with the approval (and funding) of John D. Rockefeller, it has a venerable history of research, and its museum, which I pass every day on my way home, is well worth visiting if you come here. (It’s “donate what you want” to get in.) Here are a few photos I took in 2018, especially of ducks and cats.

This is my favorite: it’s a “Human-Headed Winged Bull (lamassu), Palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721–705 BCE), Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), excavated by ISAC’s Iraq Expedition (A7369). One of approximately 350,000 objects available in the collections search.” It’s HUGE, going from floor to ceiling (this photo is not mine but from the ISAC site). Imagine moving this from Iraq to Chicago (I hope the acquisition was kosher):

It’s a great place, no matter what it’s called, but, as Wikipedia notes, beginning with Edward Said the noun and adjective “Oriental” began to be seen as pejorative: reducing Asians to some exotic, mysterious aspect of their character—in other words, stereotyping them. As Wikipedia notes,

In the 2010s, multiple organizations within the U.S. began reconsidering the use of the word “Oriental,” as some scholars felt the word was alienating and that it had changed in popular meaning. In March 2023, University of Chicago administrators announced they would be changing the name of the Oriental Institute. Interim director Theo van den Hout said, “Our current name has caused confusion, often contributing to the perception that our work is focused on East Asia, rather than West Asia and North Africa. Additionally, the word “oriental” has developed a pejorative connotation in modern English.” In April 2023, the organization’s name changed to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa, abbreviated as ISAC. The institute’s new logo features a lotus flower, which is found in ancient Assyrian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian art, as well as being a decorative motif on the ISAC building.

Well, I guess the confusion lasted over a hundred years, but we all know that the name was changed because “Oriental” began to be seen as either racist or “othering”.  In reality, I think, the Institute was named simply because “Oriental” meant “east of the Mediterranean”, which pretty much reflected the work going on there. It surely did NOT refer to people, but to an area.  So I’m a bit sad to see that concise and venerable name changed to something that’s a big mouthful. On the other hand, I can’t get too worked up about it because the connotation of words changes. I’ll just refer you to three articles on the Museum, and recommend that you come see it if you’re on campus. It’s well worth it, and right across the street from the main Quad.

From the University of Chicago News site:

From the Hyde Park Herald (local paper):

 

The Chicago Maroon (student paper):

Here’s the new lotus-flower symbol that the institution has adopted, and they’re busy now effacing “Oriental institute” from the building and its signs.

Man loses job after using the word “ladies”, deemed by DEI experts to be a microaggression

April 7, 2023 • 10:45 am

This article from the Boston Globe reports how the top candidate for the job of superintendent of Easthampton Public Schools (he’d been offered the job) had his offer withdrawn when it was discovered—horrors!—that he’d used the word “ladies” in an email to two women.  In the article, various DEI experts weigh in, all explaining why the term “ladies” (as often used in the salutation “ladies and gentlemen”) is offensive and even racist. First, though, see how the public defended him, which shows that they’re more sensible than DEI experts:

After the leading candidate for superintendent of Easthampton Public Schools claimed he lost his job offer for using the word “ladies” in an e-mail, he said he was “shocked” because he “grew up in a time when ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ was a sign of respect.”

He wasn’t the only one; more than 150 people showed up to protest the school committee’s decision to revoke Vito Perrone’s offer, and the Globe’s initial story racked up more than 750 comments, with plenty of readers supporting the salutation.

Vito Perrone, leading candidate for superintendent of the Easthampton Public Schools, said his job offer was abruptly rescinded after he wrote an e-mail to the School Committee chairwoman and another female colleague, addressing them as “ladies.”

Click the article to read; if it’s paywalled, a judicious inquiry might yield you a pdf:

Now all the experts trot onstage, and without exception they say that the word “ladies” shouldn’t be used:

While not everyone will be offended, several diversity and inclusion experts told the Globe, the word has a long and complicated history, and can hold negative connotations when used in inappropriate settings, such as in contract negotiations in Perrone’s case. Instead, it’s best to ask people how they want to be addressed to avoid alienating or upsetting anyone, they said.

Here we go:

Elisa van Dam, vice president of allyship and inclusion at the Institute for Inclusive Leadership at Simmons University, said the word “ladies” can be infantilizing in a professional setting. Perrone had used the term to address two women in leadership positions, School Committee Chair Cynthia Kwiecinski and the committee’s executive assistant, Suzanne Colby.

The idea of lady does not correlate or does not lead you to a woman who is in charge and in power and has her work really under control,” Dam said. “It’s none of the things that you want to be thought of as a woman in business or in any kind of hiring situation.”

She said a candidate addressing women as “ladies” at any stage of the hiring process can raise questions about the candidate’s judgment.

“It’s tone deaf. It seems that he hasn’t been paying attention to the way language use has been evolving and how we are talking about diversity and equity and inclusion and belonging,” Dam said. “He’s operating on a very old paradigm.”

Infantilizing! Tone deaf! Diversity and equity and inclusing and belonging, oh my! (The phrase “tone deaf”, like “stakeholder” is nearly always a red flag, and “tone deaf” is not an argument but a slur.) And so, because a “man of age” is operating on an old paradigm (one that Christopher Hitchens often used), he can’t get the job.

Here comes another DEI expert:

It might be common, and feel natural, to address a group of women as ladies, but Karl Reid, chief inclusion officer at Northeastern University, said it is still important to ask people how to refer to them, as a sign of respect.

“No one group is a monolith, everyone is individual,” Reid said. “And understanding what is acceptable to that individual, then we are a step towards welcoming a more inclusive environment.”

If you’re writing someone an email whom you haven’t written before, do you call them up and ask how they want to be addressed? Or do you just use “hello” as a salutation?

. . . . And another Pecksniff who finds the word racist and patronizing:

While some people may appreciate being addressed as “ladies,” it can be an informal and inappropriate word to use when negotiating contract stipulations and in the workplace, said Jen Manion, a professor of history and sexuality, women’s and gender studies at Amherst College. And if someone referred to them in such a way at work, Manion said they would “flip.”

“Nobody ever calls me a lady at work,” Manion said. “It’s one thing to say while speaking to friends.” The word has “historic baggage,” Manion said, as it was often associated with women-only spaces, such as passenger cars and public bathrooms, that were created for “keeping women separate and keeping women of color out of those spaces.” The term represented a group of women who fit a certain race or class, Manion said, and it also evokes a time when women weren’t allowed to work, and were expected to be soft spoken and demure.

But this is no longer true, and who on Earth even KNOWS about that outmoded usage? (Only the Pecksniffs who do the historical digging. Which reminds me of a story about Dr. Johnson and his dictionary. . . . ) Now “ladies” is simply a polite way to address women.

Manion goes on at length:

Because of that context, Manion said “ladies” can come off as patronizing and demeaning.

“It is a phrase people throw around widely without thinking,” Manion said. “How would [Perrone] have phrased the e-mail if it was two men?”

He would have said “gentlemen,” as I often do when writing to a group of men!  But Manion can’t shut up about how demeaning “ladies” is. She (if that’s her pronoun) even calls the use of the word “an accident”:

Manion said better ways to address a group of people could include “y’all,” “everyone,” “folks,” “friends,” and “people.”

Reid said it’s important for those involved in situations like these to learn from what happened and how the meaning behind certain words could be seen as offensive.

“When these accidents occur, there is an expectation that we should have meaningful discourse about what is acceptable … to create a more inclusive institution,” Reid said. “It’s an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation.”

Y’all??? That’s far more racist than “ladies”, and is used not only by black people, but by the southern descendants of enslavers.

So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve.

h/t: Anna

Change the language of ecology and evolutionary biology! An example from sickle-cell anemia.

March 8, 2023 • 9:00 am

I may have mentioned this article from Trends in Ecology & Evolution before, as it outlines all the possible harms that the language of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) can cause. Click to read:

Here’s one bit:

In recent years, events such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and waves of anti-Black violence have highlighted the need for leaders in EEB to adopt inclusive and equitable practices in research, collaboration, teaching, and mentoring.

As we plan for a more inclusive future, we must also grapple with the exclusionary history of EEB. Much of Western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture.

Here, we discuss one crucial way to address this history and make EEB more inclusive for marginalized communities: our choice of scientific terminology.

By now you should be familiar with this kind of writing, which can be simply copied from one scientific field practicum to another. Chemistry and physics have their own papers calling for a new inclusive terminology, too.

And once again we see the unproven assertion that the “colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal” nature of EEB has excluded minorities, and also that the language of the field practicum has been partly responsible for that exclusion.

This is doubly fallacious. It is neither the nature nor the language of science that has kept minorities out of the EEB pipeline, but racism in the past, bigotry whose effects have never been repaired, creating a longstanding underclass. It is change in the nature of society, not in the nature of science, that will create the equal opportunity allowing oppressed people access to careers in science.

And frankly, I consider the claim that the language of our field has contributed to that exclusion a risible proposition. “Field”, for example, which refers to an area of study, has been deemed racist because it harkens back to the days of the plantation. The folks at Stanford have decreed that it’s to be replaced by “practicum.” Thus the age-old ecological tradition of “fieldwork” is now supposed to be “my practicum of studying ecology in the outdoors.” That suggestion would be hilarious if it weren’t true.

Further, the journal American Naturalist has suggested that EEB is ridden with ableist terms, including the population-genetic concept of “fitness”. (By the way, that is my most-viewed post of all time, with nearly 150,000 views.) If any disabled person has been kept out of EEB by this term, or any others, I’d like to know about it, for of course this article gives no such instances.

The article above links to a fill-in form in which you can suggest your own inclusive or innocuous term to replace harmful ones.  Go to this page by clicking on the screenshot:

This is part of “The EEB Language Project,”  which aims to increase equity in the field practicum by changing words. You are invited to note your own “harmful term”, suggest a more inclusive replacement term, and then give comments. In this way the language of EEB will be Newspeaked into equity.

Now despite the patronizing nature of this project, much less its futility, it’s amusing for those of us in EEB to think of such terms. A colleague and I came up with half a dozen in just five minutes. Here’s one that, I’m sure, has stifled diversity in the field greatly. But to explain it, I must give a biology lesson.

Harmful term:  “Heterozyote advantage”.

What it means: This is an example of where the genetic constitution at a single locus (chromosome site) is such that the heterozygote, containing two different gene forms, has a “fitness advantage” (substitute your own less ableist language) over either of the two homozygotes.  The classic example (and one of the few we know of) involves the genetic disease sickle-cell anemia.

There are two forms at this gene, which produces the beta chain of hemoglobin: “S“, the so-called “normal allele” (substitute more inclusive language), and the mutant form (you can say “alternative allele”) s, responsible for causing the debilitating disease sickle-cell anemia.

The “s” allele arose when a mutation in the DNA coding for the beta chain (in the genetic code, GAG—>GTG), changed the amino acid in position six of the Hb β chain from glutamic acid to valine. That changes the charge of the hemoglobin molecule, affecting its behavior in the presence of the parasite. If you have only one copy of the mutant form (allele), ergo are a heterozygote with the genetic constitution Ss, you produce half normal and half abnormal hemoglobin, but half is good enough to allow you good health. And if you have two copies of the normal allele (SS), you’re of course also fine.

But if you have two copies of the sickle-cell allele (ss); you get sickle-cell disease, and will have a painful illness and in all probability die young.

The twist in this story is that if you are a heterozygote in West Africa, where malaria is prevalent and often fatal, the heterozygote has both good health and protection against malaria compared to the normal and abnormal “homozygotes”, SS and ss. We’re not sure why this is, but the presence of the single sickle-cell allele in a carrier makes its blood cells break open prematurely when infected by the malarial parasite. This impedes reproduction of the sporozoan parasite that causes malaria so Ss “carriers” gain some protection against the infectious disease. Normal homozygotes (SS) have blood cells that rupture on schedule, so if you’re SS, you can get malaria and die.

Thus we have a situation, but only in areas with malaria, where the normal homozygote is healthy but prone to malaria, the sickle-cell homozygote (ss) gets the genetic disease and dies young, but the heterozygote (Ss) is protected from both malaria and from sickle-cell disease. This is the classic case of heterozygote advantage (also called “heterosis”, “balanced polymorphism,” or “overdominance”).

If you measure the relative reproductive output of the three genotypes, giving the fittest one (Ss) a fitness of 1.0, you get these figures

SS = 0.85 (they produce 15% fewer offspring than Ss genotypes because of malaria)

Ss = 1.0. (genotype with highest production of offspring)

ss = about 0 (they don’t survive to produce any offspring).

Geneticists love this case because when the heterozygotes have the highest fitness, it actually maintains both alleles at stable frequencies in the population. Heterozygote advantage is a way to keep genetic variation in a malaria-ridden population. You can show that this fitness scheme will result in stable equilibrium allele frequencies of S = 0.87 and s = 0.13. As I said, this is a stable frequency, and if the gene frequencies deviate from it, they will return to the equilibrium.

In west Africa, the frequencies of the two alleles in fact match these predicted frequencies very well, supporting the value of mathematical population genetics. The frequency of homozygous ss individuals is the square of the frequency of the s allele, or about 1.7%.  It is a sad but ineluctable result of population genetics that because heterozygotes are the fittest genotypes, roughly 2% of the offspring will be born with a fatal disease, and this is simply because the individual with two different alleles has the highest fitness. There is no single allele whose homozygote has the highest fitness, and so, generation after generation, this fitness scheme above produces a large number of doomed infants. (One could take the absence of such an allele as evidence against God, who could have created one. Apparently the death of genetically diseased infants serves some purpose in the deity’s scheme.)

In the U.S., where malaria is almost unknown, the fitness scheme above reverts to one in which the SS genotype has the highest fitness, Ss is a tiny bit lower (Ss individuals can have occasional sickling “crises”), and that of ss remains zero. Eventually, in areas lacking malaria, every individual will become SS and the “s” allele will be eliminated.

It is because of the ancestry of many American blacks from West Africa that one sees sickle-cell anemia almost exclusively in the offspring of two individuals descended from that area (Ss X Ss, one-quarter of whose offspring will have the disease). But in the U.S., lacking malaria, natural selection will eventually eliminate the “s” allele. It will, however, be very slow.

One last note: sickle-cell anemia was the first “molecular disease” ever discovered: a disease caused by a mutation in a single gene that alters the protein it produces. And it was discovered by none other than Linus Pauling and his colleagues, who published this famous paper in Science in 1949 (click screenshot to read, or go here if you’re paywalled).

Now, on to the language issue:

Why the term “heterozygote advantage” is harmful. You notice in the above discussion I’ve used several verboten terms in EEB, including “normal allele”, “mutant allele”, and “fitness.”

To that I will add the term “heterozygote advantage” itself, which is harmful in two ways. First, the term “hetero” privileges heterosexual individuals over other LGBTQ+ individuals. And the idea that Ss individuals have a “fitness advantage” is doubly harmful, for it not only incorporates the ableist term “fitness,” but suggests that one genotype has an “advantage” over the other two. In reality, the SS and ss individuals are to be seen as “differently abled”, although I can’t manage to find a way that ss individuals with sickle-cell disease are “abled”. Some deep thought may suggest a way.

What the term should be replaced with.  This is dead obvious: “diversity advantage“.  The Ss genotype is best because it has the most diverse allelic constitution, possessing two alleles instead of one.  It privileges diversity over boring homogeneity, a result that is also a bonus.

From now on I suggest that my new term, which is mine, replace “balanced polymorphism,” “heterozygote advantage” (ableist), “overdominance” (that’s wholly offensive, conjuring up eugenics and superiority), and “heterosis” (again with the offensive “hetero”).

This is my contribution to inclusive language in EEB, which is mine. Lest you think the suggestion is dumb, remember that it’s no dumber than the notions of “relative fitness” and “fieldwork”, all slated for erasure in the new woke dictionary of EEB.

The Atlantic unpacks (and criticizes) woke language

March 3, 2023 • 9:30 am

I don’t keep up with the politics of The Atlantic much: even though I have a subscription, I rarely get time to read it. But reader David sent me a link to the piece below, which turns out to be a trenchant critique of the verbiage of the woke, which is called “equity language”, why it keeps constantly changing, and why there’s so much concentration by “progressives” on the ideologically proper use of words. It turns out, as we all knew on some level, that the usage and constant turnover is simply a way to demonstrate one’s belief in the need to change society without actually having to do so. In other words, the obsession with language is performative. You can read the many posts on ideology and language on this site by clicking here.

Click the screenshot below to read the piece (free); it’s by George Packer, a staff writer at the magazine.

While some changes in language are clearly salubrious, most seem either unnecessary, even ludicrous.  Most of the language changes are meant to elevate “the minoritized” (that’s one of the improved words), and so the names of groups keep changing.  “Latino” has given way to “Latinx”, and that to “Latine”, while in the meantime most Hispanics don’t even know about this and never use those “progressive” terms. “Field”, as in “fieldwork,” was eliminated because of its imagined connection with enslaved persons (another neologism) working on the plantation, along with “brown bag lunch” (racist), “stand up for your rights” (it’s abelist!), “felon” (now “justice-involved person”) and yesterday I discovered that even the notion of “gun control” was considered racist.

Packer’s article gives a list of these words, shows how they change frequently, and discusses how the changes are promulgated by elite organizations and academics:

The liturgy changes without public discussion, and with a suddenness and frequency that keep the novitiate off-balance, forever trying to catch up, and feeling vaguely impious. A ban that seemed ludicrous yesterday will be unquestionable by tomorrow. The guides themselves can’t always stay current. People of color becomes standard usage until the day it is demoted, by the American Heart Association and others, for being too general. The American Cancer Society prefers marginalized to the more “victimizing” underresourced or underserved—but in the National Recreation and Park Association’s guide, marginalized now acquires “negative connotations when used in a broad way. However, it may be necessary and appropriate in context. If you do use it, avoid ‘the marginalized,’ and don’t use marginalized as an adjective.” Historically marginalized is sometimes okay; marginalized people is not. The most devoted student of the National Recreation and Park Association guide can’t possibly know when and when not to say marginalized; the instructions seem designed to make users so anxious that they can barely speak. But this confused guidance is inevitable, because with repeated use, the taint of negative meaning rubs off on even the most anodyne language, until it has to be scrubbed clean. The erasures will continue indefinitely, because the thing itself—injustice—will always exist.

Orwell would have a field day with this: in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language“,he discussed the use of euphemisms to soften hard truths:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

Modern euphemisms in equity language are less violent, but nevertheless, according to Packer, serve the same purpose:

The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. The second is rudely blunt and bitter, and it might make someone angry or sad. Imprecise language is less likely to offend. Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.

Clearly Packer has read Orwell, whose essay said this:

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.

If you have time this weekend, do read Orwell’s essay, a classic piece that still resonates today.

One part of Packer’s essay that I like is that he translated a bit of Katherine Boo’s book Behind the Beautiful Forevers—a factual account of her three years spent living in the Mumbai slums—into equity language, just as Orwell translated plain language into Newspeak above. Packer argues that Boo’s book, which he sees as a “masterpiece,” could never be published today.

For this bit. . .

The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runt leg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single offer they got: poor, unattractive, hard-working, Muslim, old—“half-dead, but who else wanted her,” as her mother had once said with a frown.

. . . would, translated into today’s equity language, go like this:

Sita was a person living with a disability. Because she lived in a system that centered whiteness while producing inequities among racial and ethnic groups, her physical appearance conferred an unearned set of privileges and benefits, but her disability lowered her status to potential partners. Her parents, who were Hindu persons, accepted a marriage proposal from a member of a community with limited financial resources, a person whose physical appearance was defined as being different from the traits of the dominant group and resulted in his being set apart for unequal treatment, a person who was considered in the dominant discourse to be “hardworking,” a Muslim person, an older person. In referring to him, Sita’s mother used language that is considered harmful by representatives of historically marginalized communities.

That’s a bit overdone, but the point is that equity language is meant to soften the hard facts by putting a more empathic face on them. The change of “slave” to “enslaved person,” for instance, is meant to emphasize that slaves were people, not chattel. Does the change improve our understanding of or empathy for these people? I don’t know, and I’m not going to die on that hill, but it certainly makes language uglier, harder to use, and, most of all, intimidates nearly all writers and speakers into using ideologically approved language.

What hill I will die on is the contention that using such language, and the concentration of effort going into not just changing it constantly but policing others into using it does nothing to improve society. Yet these very changes supposedly are aimed at changing society.

The virus has struck biology, too: one example is the drive to change the common terms for species named after “bad” people, like Audubon, to more neutral names (see here and here). “Black holes” has been termed racist language, and evolutionary biology seen as ableist. Will all this linguistic Pecksniffery create social justice and improve the lot of the disadvantaged? You’d be hard pressed to make that case. But science, like everyday language, is constantly being trawled by the Purity Police.

Packer concludes, correctly, that the name changing reflects a desire for social justice. But it winds up as a displacement behavior, like that seen in animals. A bird who is pecked at by another, for instance, may in turn peck at a leaf in frustration. It doesn’t create avian equity, but at least the victimized bird can do something. Likewise, “progressives” displace their realization that society can’t be materially changed in an easy way into language-policing, which can change something (my emphasis). Packer’s conclusion:

This huge expense of energy to purify language reveals a weakened belief in more material forms of progress. If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change. Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system. Obesity isn’t any healthier for people with high weight. It’s hard to know who is likely to be harmed by a phrase like native New Yorker or under fire; I doubt that even the writers of the guides are truly offended. But the people in Behind the Beautiful Forevers know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.

The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. What I’ve described is not just a problem of the progressive left. The far right has a different vocabulary, but it, too, relies on authoritarian shibboleths to enforce orthodoxy. It will be a sign of political renewal if Americans can say maddening things to one another in a common language that doesn’t require any guide.

This is a good essay that makes a point that we’ve all known in our hearts, but makes that point as clear as water. Few of the changes suggested by the woke really eliminate offense to people (were “Latinos” offended by that term?), and almost none of them mitigate “harm.” They are there for one reason: to show the ideology and purity of the Enforcers.

I thought the Atlantic was generally pro-woke, but once in a while they publish something ideologically sensible, and this is one example.

 

h/t: David

Richard Dawkins sticks up for the “bad” old biology words

February 16, 2023 • 12:15 pm

Just look at this headline in the Torygraph! Isn’t that guaranteed to get nearly everyone to look, woke or not? The short newpaper article may well be paywalled for you (see by clicking on the headline), but you can see it archived here on the Wayback Machine.

What appears to have happened is that Richard read the article below from a recent issue of Trends in Ecology & Evolution, an article I posted about on February 8. You can access that article below (for free, I think) by clicking on the screenshot.

As I noted, that article, like several others that have recently appeared, argued that we should purge scientific language of words that are “harmful.” There were two problems. First, the authors hardly gave any examples of harmful language: really just three: “superpredator”, “gypsy moth” and “invasive species”/”alien species”, though I’m sure more words will come pouring out when the Pecksniffs start combing our argot like a chimp looking for lice. Second, the authors give absolutely no evidence—save one person who said they were tired of hearing about “invasive species” as an undergraduate—that this language harms people, drives people out of ecology and evolution, or keeps people from going into ecology and evolution. Those claims are in fact risible. Yes, there may be some terminology that could do these things, but I haven’t seen any.

Oh, I forgot one potentially demonized term: “citizen science.” The article below says this about that:

Relatedly, the academic research community is also discussing the implications of using the term ‘citizen science’, a practice whereby members of the public collect or process data, because ‘citizen’ can frame science in terms of national belonging. While ‘community science’ has been adopted by some as a replacement, others have noted that this replacement co-opts an existing term, highlighting potential unintended consequences of language revision and the importance of engaged and reflective processes. These examples teach an important lesson: community-centered work provides critical insight and momentum for long-lasting, disciplinary reflection about scientific language that is too often considered neutral, normal, or fixed.

The only rational response to that is, “Give me a break!”

My summary of the new attempt at changing scientific terminology was this:

I doubt that this mass bowdlerization will make ecology and evolution more welcoming. Nor will there ever be a test of that: what we see are people making clams about what words are offensive, and I wonder why they should have the power to dictate what words we should or should not use. (This is similar to Hitchens’s question about who would you trust to decide what books you can and cannot read.) If there were palpable evidence of people running for the STEM egress because of ecological and evolutionary language, I’d change my tune, but that’s just not happening.

The authors beefed as well that English is the lingua franca of science, and presumably that’s not inclusive.  My response was to jokingly suggest that we all write our papers in Esperanto. Otherwise, there’s no beef in that beef.

Back to Dr. Dawkins, who’s vowed to use every word singled out (remember, only three words or phrases were mentioned). This is what the Torygraph says:

Richard Dawkins has vowed to ‘use every one of the prohibited words’ that scientists have called to be phased out because they are no longer inclusive.

On Tuesday, academics working in ecology and evolutionary biology called for the avoidance of using words such as male, female, man, woman, mother, father, alien, invasive, exotic and race.

Instead, they encouraged the use of terms such as ‘sperm-producing’ or egg producing’ or ‘XY/XX individual’ to avoid ‘emphasising hetero-normative views’.

But Professor Dawkins, the eminent evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene and the God Delusion branded the suggestions ridiculous.

“The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule,” he told The Telegraph. “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language.

“I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use.”

That’s pretty funny, though I have no idea who Mrs. Grundy is.

Others weighed in:

Other experts also branded the alternatives ‘absurd’ and argued it could cause confusion in scientific fields.

They also pointed out that the terms ‘egg producing’ and ‘sperm producing’ were simply synonyms for male and female, and continued to confirm that sex is binary.

Cancer expert Professor Karol Sikora said: “I certainly do not agree and such language will not be appearing in any of my scientific work.”

Commenting on the research on GB News, Francis Foster the comedian said: “As always with these things it’s completely meaningless, it’s going to obfuscate what we are actually talking about and it’s laughable, it’s beyond parody.”

Now I can’t find the suggested substitutes for “male and female” in the TREE article; perhaps they were discussed elsewhere as words to be banned.  But I agree with using “male” and “female” when you are talking about biological sex because, in virtually all animals and vascular plants, sex really is binary.

It’s clear that Richard is pushing back hard here. He’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it any more.  As for the words he mentions, or the ones in the TREE article above, I’m pretty much on his side. When I do see a word that genuinely offends someone who’s not looking to be offended, or if I find a word to be bigoted or stigmatizing a group, I won’t use it. But there are precious few of these, and I note that several of my colleagues are still saying “Gypsy moth.” (Some readers noted in the comments to my earlier article that the word “gypsy” is not offensive to some groups of Roma people.)

The Torygraph article mentions two more phrases that I will continue to use. It’s simply ludicrous to try to change these as they are not offensive except to a few people whose plaints deserve to be ignored. These terms aren’t mentioned in the TREE article (the Torygraph is a bit confused on this), but come from other places:

Even the phrase ‘double-blind’ which is often used to describe trials in which neither the participants nor scientists know if they are on a drug or placebo – has been deemed potentially offensive to those with disabilities, as has Darwin’s phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.”

Believe me, there will be more of these articles, and the list of demonized terms will grow ever longer. As ever, we might scan them to see if some are genuinely offensive to many people of good will, and, if so, stop using them. But such phrases, I’ve found, are precious few—almost nonexistent.

On the harm, violence, and danger of wrongspeak in ecology and evolution

February 8, 2023 • 12:00 pm

Let me begin by trying to note what’s good about this new article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, for Dan Dennett suggests, properly, that one should credit one’s opponents with the good and correct things they say before taking issue with the other stuff.

First, the article below is motivated by good sentiments: the desire to weed out bigotry from the disciplines of ecology and evolution and make them less off-putting to people. Second, although thepaper suggest deep-sixing some words and phrases in those fields(which they call “hateful terminology”, some of which perpetuates “violence”)—and I disagree with language-purging in general—it is good to pay some attention when you’re suggesting new terms or naming things.

But in general I think the desire to purge scientific language is not only Pecksniffian, usually carried on by well-motivated people who are simply looking to find offense, or even create offense, but also performative: a way to tout one’s ability to be virtuous and find terms that are potentially offensive.

But especially in science, which is driven by data, if you’re going to change terminology on political or ideological grounds, you should have data that that terminology really is harmful (i.e., driving people out of the field or discouraging people from entering), and that changing terminology will actually work, breeding a feeling of greater inclusion and, above all, creating more equality in the field. This paper, like all the other science papers that make the same point, is notably short of data. It rests on claims that terminology might be offensive (or has offended one or two people), and gives no post facto data showing that the terms could promote or have promoted inclusivity.  Further, the paper says nothing new: every suggestion here (except for digging up a few new words that might bother people) has been made before: changing the name of the Gypsy moth (now the “spongy moth”, changing the common names of birds named for people who did bad things in the past, and so on.

One of the main reasons I object to this language combing is that it actually makes terms offensive for people weren’t previously aware of their offense.  Who would have objected to the name “Townsend’s warbler,” for instance, until the Pecksniffs plowed through Townsend’s biography and found that he dug up Native American remains and sequestered their skulls so that others could study cranial capacity? Granted, that’s a bad thing to do, but until you’re told about it, you have no reason to become offended. Was this initiative started because lots of birders independently became offended at having to say “Townsend’s warbler”? I doubt it; it seems more likely that, given the ideological climate, a group of entitled people decided that they could find names that could be seen to be offensive and get them purged. Whether or not that happens decides on how people judge the “offensiveness” of the name or word.

In other words, the people who engage in these projects seem to be looking to find words that would offend people who weren’t offended before. Is that a good thing? I don’t see how: what kind of endeavor would try to find bd things about words and people—things that weren’t generally known—and then use them to sensitize people so that they now become offended when they weren’t? One could say that it’s simply to increase our knowledge of the history of science, but that’s doesn’t seem to be the goal, either. The goal, I think, is ultimately to achieve power: power to foist your ideology upon others by controlling language, and the power to determine what’s good or bad.

Here’s the introductory paragraph, which I swear bears a strong similarity to many other pieces of its ilk:

In recent years, events such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and waves of anti-Black violence have highlighted the need for leaders in EEB to adopt inclusive and equitable practices in research, collaboration, teaching, and mentoring [1., 2., 3.]. As we plan for a more inclusive future, we must also grapple with the exclusionary history of EEB. Much of Western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture [1,4,5]. Here, we discuss one crucial way to address this history and make EEB more inclusive for marginalized communities: our choice of scientific terminology.

This is not only the claim that ecology and evolution are “rooted” in horrible bigotry, but that these fields are still permeated with it. I reject that claim, nor do the three proffered references support it; check for yourself.

You can read the paper by clicking below, and you can find the pdf here. 

 

Here is the sole evidence that a term was offensive: one student got tired of hearing it:

For example, one of our authors trained in the USA recalls ‘how tired I was as an undergrad hearing how invasive species from other countries decimate pristine US ecosystems. It reminds me of when people tell me or other people of color to “go back to where we came from”. Why would I want to be in a field that exoticizes immigrants or reinforces narratives that immigrants are a plague?’

In fact, that author still is in the field, which shows that, in the end, these words don’t force people out of the field, and therefore changing them will not increase diversity.  I have to say that the use of “invasive” species is not meant to apply to immigrants, and I don’t find it offensive or recommend that it be abandoned. For I see no widespread sentiment that the word is offensive or “non-inclusive”. Again, the badness is a badness of intent, and those people who say “go back to where we came from” are the bad ones. Those who use “invasive” species are guilty of nothing except triggering people who should not be triggered. (As an aside, the cure for being triggered, so I hear from psychologists, is not avoidance but exposure, which gets you inured to what used to disturb you.)

And this makes the point that a word can have multiple meanings, some of them perfectly innocuous. Do you abandon a word because some of its meanings can be offensive and others not. “Abe”, for example, was a pejorative term for “Jew”. Should we not use it in any names? Likewise, “shine” was a quite offensive term for black person. We can eliminate its use as a racial slur (and have), but we needn’t omit the word in other contexts, as in “shoeshine”. When a word or a name has neutral and bad construals (like “shine”), or a name has good and bad associations (like “Audubon”), do we accept only the bad ones and get rid of the word completely?

Here are some of the few examples they use; the paper is more about the harm and violence of ecological and evolutionary language than about exactly how people have been damaged by its use.

 

“Superpredator” refers to how humans act as, well, super predators”that can wipe out any individual or species they want.  Why is it offensive? I have no idea. UPDATE: Now I do, and depending on whether the ecological or pejorative legal-system use of the term came first, I could see how the word might be deemed offensive.

The renaming of the Gypsy moth to “spongy moth” is the only example I can find that might be a salubrious change, as “Gypsy” is now considered a pejorative to be replaced with “Roma.”  I don’t mind the change, but nor do i see it making the study of lepidoptera more inclusive. But the field is not loaded with terms like that: we don’t, for example, see “Hitler’s beetle” or the “n-word moth”, and if we did I’d say that people should stop using those.

But I see nothing wrong with “invasive species” or “alien species” so long as they’re used as they have been: to describe nonhuman species entering into areas where they’re not native or endemic.  One wouldn’t find that term offensive until people tell them it’s offensive because it has been used to refer to human immigrants.  Used in the proper context, though, it’s not offensive. Words like that do not, used in these contexts, promote xenophobia against human beings, as the authors claim. Has anybody become more xenophobic when hearing that the spongy moth is invasive? I doubt it.  But if you do find one or a few people who maintain that, I would tell them that that construal is their problem, for it’s not what’s intended, and people can learn to control how they react to words.  As always, intent matters.

There are no more words to be expunged that I can see in this paper, nor data supporting the claim that changing terminology will make the field more inclusive. You can find other claims in the several papers that argue for changing the common names of birds, but I’m not going to go into them, as I have before.  I doubt that this mass bowdlerization will make ecology and evolution more welcoming. Nor will there ever be a test of that: what we see are people making clams about what words are offensive, and I wonder why they should have the power to dictate what words we should or should not use. (This is similar to Hitchens’s question about who would you trust to decide what books you can and cannot read.) If there were palpable evidence of people running for the STEM egress because of ecological and evolutionary language, I’d change my tune, but that’s just not happening.

Finally, the authors have one more plaint: the ubiquity of English as the language of science:

Mitigating the institutional problems in EEB will take significant effort and resources, and examining the role of language in these problems must go beyond attention to scientific terms. It must also include consideration of how language is used among scientists more broadly, and how English is often treated as the dominant language for scientific work.

. . . The use of English as the dominant vehicle for communicating science in publishing and public engagement also limits participation in, and recognition of, scientific contributions to EEB [1,10,11]

I can’t control what language scientists use, and what are we supposed to do about the use of English? Write in Esperanto? English developed as the common language of science, just as Latin used to be the common language of scholars and scientists, because it is the language that is most used. If science really is supposed to be a worldwide enterprise that includes everyone, then there must be one language in which all scientists can be conversant. Right now that happens to be English, and yes, it excludes those who can’t speak or write the language. For that I apologize on behalf of all Anglophones. But really, what are we supposed to do about it? The authors give no suggestions.

Pamela Paul’s funny (and trenchant) op-ed on campus free speech (trigger warning: many harmful words!)

February 3, 2023 • 9:30 am

Although the word “woke” and its derivatives seem to trigger some readers, I still can’t find a good substitute. I just read Andrew Doyle’s new book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and I see that that Doyle doesn’t much like “woke” either. (His book is a good complement to John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism.) At any rate, I tried to find a replacement in Doyle’s critique, but the best replacement I could come up with for the pejorative “woke” is “illiberal Left”, which is a mouthful. And it becomes “anti-illiberal Left” (a bigger mouthful) when characterizing people like Doyle or McWhorter. So I’ll perhaps use both terms. (Remember that Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, who hasn’t been tweeting much lately.)

But I digress. Pamela Paul, who used to be the Sunday Book Review editor for the New York Times, now writes a weekly column for the paper. Not only is she a good and clever writer, but she appears to be anti-woke anti-illiberal Left. That makes at least two good NYT columnists of that ideological stripe: Paul and McWhorter.

Her piece this week (click below to read, and I see it’s been archived here) is about the woke Language Police at Stanford, and about the chilling of speech in general on American campuses.  The amusing bit is that her piece uses over a quarter of the words that the Stanford University IT group recommended be changed, and she’s put them in bold. Her intro (I added the link to the list, now archived):

The following is a celebration of the cancellation of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, an attempt by a committee of IT leaders at Stanford University to ban 161 common words and phrases. Of those 161 phrases, I have taken pains to use 45 of them here. Read at your own risk.

Click to read, but you may incur much harm. Her message, though, has hopeful bits.

Note that even “Hip Hip Hooray!”  in the title was deemed harmful by the guide:

Paul uses 20 “harmful” words in the first three paragraphs alone:

Is the media addicted to bad news? It’s not a dumb question, nor are you crazy to ask. After all, we follow tragedy like hounds on the chase, whether it’s stories about teenagers who commit suicide, victims of domestic violence or survivors of accidents in which someone winds up quadriplegic, crippled for life or confined to a wheelchair.We report on the hurdles former convicts face after incarceration, hostile attitudes toward immigrants and the plight of prostitutes and the homeless. Given the perilous state of the planet, you might consider this barrage of ill tidings to be tone-deaf.

Well, I’m happy to report good news for a change. You might call it a corrective, or a sanity check, but whatever you call it — and what you can call things here is key — there have been several positive developments on American campuses. The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

Matters looked especially grim in December, when the internet discovered the 13-page dystopicallly titled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. A kind of white paper on contemporary illiberalism, it listed 161 verboten expressions, divided into categories of transgression, including “person-first,” “institutionalized racism” and the blissfully unironic “imprecise language.” The document offered preferred substitutions, many of which required feats of linguistic limbo to avoid simple terms like “insane,” “mentally ill” and — not to beat a dead horse,but I’ll add one more — “rule of thumb.” Naturally, it tore its way across the internet to widespread mockery despite a “content warning” in bold type: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

By using those words, Paul of course emphasizes the inanity of claiming that they’re “harmful.”  She does add that the Stanford list has been taken down (the link above is to a WSJ copy), and considers this good news—part of a salubrious trend that she sees in American education. But she can’t resist using perhaps the dumbest “harmful word” on the list (save “American”):

Could this be a seminal moment for academic freedom? Consider other bright spots: Harvard recently went ahead with its fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, which was earlier rejected, allegedly owing to his critical views on Israel. M.I.T.’s faculty voted to embrace a “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.” At Yale Law School, which has been roiled by repeated attempts to suppress speech, a conservative lawyer was allowed to appear on a panel with a former president of the A.C.L.U. after protests disrupted her visit the year before. And Hamline University, which had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive, walked back its characterization of her as “Islamophobic.”

Finally, when an office within the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California banned the terms “fieldwork” and “in the field” to describe research projects because their “anti-Black” associations might offend some descendants of American slavery, U.S.C.’s interim provost issued a statement that “The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words.”

And here is a form of linguistic conflict that I hadn’t noticed:

The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

From the guide (not the column):

She continues, causing a lot more harm but making a point at the same time:

But we do know two things: First, college students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues more than ever before, and second, fewer feel comfortable expressing disagreement lest their peers go on the warpath. It would be a ballsy move to risk being denounced, expelled from their tribe, become a black sheep. No one can blame any teenager who has been under a social media pile-on for feeling like a basket case. Why take the chance.

Yet when in life is it more appropriate for people to take risks than in college — to test out ideas and encounter other points of view? College students should be encouraged to use their voices and colleges to let them be heard. It’s nearly impossible to do this while mastering speech codes, especially when the master lists employ a kind of tribal knowledge known only to their guru creators. A normal person of any age may have trouble submitting, let alone remembering that “African American” is not just discouraged but verboten, that he or she can’t refer to a professor’s “walk-in” hours or call for a brown bag lunch, powwow or stand-up meeting with their peers.

Now that you know woke language guidelines, you’ll be able to figure out why the Puritans see all the words in bold as harmful. (Having trouble with “African American? Go here.)

Paul then gives the worrying statistics about the drop over time in the proportion of students who think that free speech rights are secure and notes the frightening 2/3 of students who think that college climates prevent people from expressing views that could be seen as offensive.

In the last two paragraphs she drops the use of “harmful words” and makes her serious point:

It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will not likely be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.

Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world.

And this type of bowdlerization is performative. In the end, it accomplishes nothing. The people who promulgate these changes are the Entitled Woke, and the tut-tutting directed at people who will continue to use the old argot. The changes are made for one reason: to flaunt one’s virtue.