A very good question

Edward Lozansky, president of the American University in Moscow and professor of world politics at Moscow State University, asked a good question in last week's Moscow Times:

How can we expect cooperation from Putin on Syria, Iran, Edward Snowden or a variety of other issues when we are openly trying to undermine him both politically and economically?

Read the whole column here.

O, really?

So, the New York Times had an obituary today headlined: Bruce C. Murray, Who Helped Earth Learn of Mars, Dies at 81.

Surely Earth learned of Mars a long time ago?

Snicker Snap

In this month's Q&A at CMOS:

Q. How often should a good copyeditor consult his or her style manual or handbook? I work on a team of copyeditors whose client projects use CMOS or the AP Stylebook. On any given day, an editor might switch between editorial style guides four or five times. However, alarmingly, I have noticed that few of my fellow editors consult their style manuals and handbooks frequently. This concerns me. What are your thoughts?

A. Good copyeditors consult a style manual when they run into something they don’t know. The frequency is unpredictable, depending on the content being edited and the skill of the editor. The right answer might be “rarely,” if an experienced editor is marking the same kind of texts day after day and running into the same kinds of issues. As for your concern, if you are a supervisor and you’re concerned that your workers aren’t editing to style, the way to determine it is to look at their editing, rather than count the number of times they look at a manual. If you’re not their supervisor, you’ll be happy to know that this need not concern you at all.

Nine Old Men

In 1964, the book Gideon's Trumpet - about the 1963 Supreme Court decision that made it the law of the land that every defendant had the right to an attorney, whether or not they could afford one - was published. And as I read it, one thing stands out to me very vividly: the author's utter and absolute conviction that not only would there never be a woman Supreme Court Justice, there wouldn't even be women law clerks or even, probably, lawyers. I'm in Chapter 11 now, and every single time the author (Anthony Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist) refers to these worthies, even in the abstract, they are men.

And I don't mean the old "the masculine embraces the feminine" leading to "an American ... he" or "someone ... he". I mean men.

For instance, when talking in the abstract about the law clerks and how they're chosen and what they do, he writes:

"The law clerks ... are bright young men"

"As a practical matter, a young man who is there only briefly is unlikely to make any significant change (in the actual votes of a Justice)"

In describing the way the Court functions (not in this specific case, but in general) he writes:

"Genuine intellectual exchange among men of strong views is not always easy..."

"Because there are so many men involved..."

"Men who know their own fallibility may find it hard to bear the burden of final decision... Other men may not be bothered by judicial power..."

"Is it consistent with democracy to let nine men...make ultimate decisions...?"

All of these could easily have had "people"; the third would even read nicely with no noun at all (Those who ...Others...).

Then, when talking about how Fortas prepared for the case, he says

"There immediately got underway the extraordinary process by which a law firm digests a legal problem. Bright young men break it down into tiny components..."

And while, certainly, everybody at Arnold, Fortas and Porter in 1962 was a man, here he wasn't describing that firm in that year. He was describing the general process by which "a" law firm works. And he didn't say "bright young interns" or "bright young clerks" or "bright young legal students" or "bright young people" or "bright young legal minds" or even "bright youngsters". Bright young men.

And yet, when talking about people in general, such as petitioners to the court or the average American, he can write

A person with a federal claim...

Most thoughtful persons have concluded that there should be no such publication [of memoirs] at least until all participants in the events described have left the Court.

To even the best-informed person unfamiliar with the law...

As he entered the Supreme Court building that Monday morning ... [he] experienced the confusing change of emotions that any sensitive person feels in that curious place.

So it's not even as if "man" was his default, or only, choice.

No, it's clear to me - really quite startlingly clear - that it never crossed his mind that justices, lawyers, and law clerks were or could be other than men.

And that's only fifty years ago.

Close but ... no actually, not close

Once again, a vulture shows up in the comics. Well, kinda sorta. Here is the vulture in Barney and Clyde today:

But here is a real (New World, anyway) vulture:



Note the lack of a ruff and bare neck. The beak isn't yellow, either.

Now, here is an Andean condor.

How the heck did that get to be the icon?

New Mexico heading out on their own

Via TPM, a story about a civil law that's heading in a direction that those who wrote it might not have wanted.

“Marriage is contemplated by the law as a civil contract, for which the consent of the contracting parties, capable in law of contracting, is essential.”

This is the law, and it neither permits nor bans same-sex marriage - not explicitly. As a result, three counties have begun issuing licenses - and they account for about half the state's population. By the time this hits the state's Supreme Court, there could be hundreds of marriages in existence.

That's the kind of thing that makes a ban harder to sell.

So, one more in the win column? Could well be. New Mexico did go blue, after all.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Most of Season 5 of The Murdoch Mysteries, which remains clever and solidly entertaining. Murdoch in the Yukon was amusing, so out of his element and yet in a way he's always there.

TV: Two episodes of Perception leading to the season finale. I must say I really hated the way Moretti kept going on about how the suspect "raped a war hero!" I'm sure it wasn't meant to, but it really sounded like if the victim hadn't had a silver star Moretti wouldn't have cared that she was raped. Also caught up on Broadchurch, still good. I was pretty sure the husband/father's big secret was that he was cheating, not that he was the killer; it was too early for that. But his character definitely rings true, his anger that "everything's about this now." One thought about the sergeant's son: erase all your texts, kid, not just the ones from the dead boy. Also caught Sense and Sensibility again; I do like that movie.

Read: The rest of the Phryne Fisher novels, which are incredibly addicting. Also Marvel 1602, a graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman set in 1602 with characters from the Marvel universe. Fascinating and a lot of fun. Artifact, the first in a projected series about an historian involved in - well, in this one it was a missing Mughal treasure. Very enjoyable. And another first, The Ambitious Card, about a magician suspected of the murder of several psychics, also very enjoyable. Started The Great Dissent, Oliver Wendell Holmes and free speech.

Of course it is!

From TPM, this gem (The headline reads Russia Defends Anti-Gay Law: It’s Not Discrimination, It Applies Equally To Everyone):

The IOC received a letter Thursday from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak giving assurances the host country will comply with the Olympic Charter’s provision against discrimination of any kind.

However, Kozak didn’t back down on the issue of the new law, which penalizes anyone who distributes information aimed at persuading minors that “nontraditional” relationships are normal or attractive.

Kozak says the law applies equally to everyone and “cannot be regarded as discrimination based on sexual orientation.”

And you know he's right. I mean, straight people can't say it's okay to be gay, either, so there.

There's funny ha-ha, and funny peculiar

Two comics from today:

First up, Zits does something funny with the "literally meaning figuratively" flap:

And then Fort Knox manages to screw up its core "strength", as it were. Seriously, what? Did he forget to flip his clip art? How could anybody - him, his editors, anybody - look at that and wonder why the uniforms aren't, you know, uniform?

Two observations about the Kindle

Or maybe three, because number one is I love it and wouldn't be without it. That said ... it's perilously easy to buy books for it. That One-Click can add up. And second, once you have bought them, they aren't a stack on the coffee table, which means that the virtual stack can tower very high, and you'll probably never actually get around to reading them all.

But at least you bought them - so the author gets paid.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: The rest of Season 4 of the Murdoch Mysteries, very good (and now his and Dr Ogden's lives are truly messed up).

Read: About a half dozen of the Phryne Fisher novels (my father recommended them) - I enjoyed them very much and will get the others. The flavor is much the same in the tv series, but the books are richer in many ways and some of the characters are somewhat different - and but they're both excellent.

"Double" Negatives

Last week at work someone remarked that something was possible "only if you're the kind of person who thinks a double negative is a positive."

This drew a response of:

But it often is! What about things like, "I can't not follow her wishes"; or the common dialogue tag, "he said, not unkindly"; or a dialogue like, Q: "Are you not looking forward to it?" A: "I'm not not looking forward to it, it's just that I could use some more time."

Or do you mean the type of person who believes a double negative is always a positive?

Original Poster responded to that:

Wow, talk about illustrating the point. Yes, exactly; I meant "always a positive." Specifically, I mean the type of person who insists "You ain't seen nothin' yet" means "you have seen Something already."

I'd like to address those (and one more) so-called "double negatives".

They aren't the same thing. In fact, there are three types of constructions in English where you are likely to find more than one negative particle.

The first is a genuine double negative - the kind cited by the responder. "Not follow" is being negated: can't not follow = must follow. "unkindly" is being negated: not unkindly = somewhat kindly. Another example: "I don't never go to chuch, I go every week", where "never go to church" is being negated. Many of these are rhetorical devices (today's Comics Curmudgeon title is another example: Do I want to see Gil terribly injured? Let’s say I don’t not want to see it) and none of them are simply the positive: "I can follow" isn't quite the same as "can't not follow", and saying something "not unkindly" isn't saying it kindly. Others are contradictions - the rejection of "you never go to church" rather than an assertion of attendance. But they are all examples of the oft-cited "two negatives make a positive" rule. (Rhetorically, this is called litotes.)

The second set of examples, however, are different. In a sentence like "You ain't seen nothin' yet" the "not" of "ain't" is not negating the "nothing"; it's not the same construction as "you haven't not seen". Some languages, such as Russian, the primary negation in such a sentence is a different particle (ne) than the others (ni), but in Romance languages they're the same one. This is called, not double negation, but "negative concord". The negatives reinforce each other, and in many languages they are in fact required.

Modern Standard English doesn't use negative concord (though many non-Standard dialects do). Instead, it uses "negative polarity" - that is, forms of pronouns or adverbs that are not used with positive verbs but which are not overtly negative themselves. (These forms are also triggered by non-overtly negative verbs such as "doubt" or "stop", and adverbs such as "hardly (ever)". That is, you say "You haven't seen anything yet", or "he hardly ever says anything mean to anyone" or "don't say anything" or "they don't have any money". The positive forms of those sentences is not "You have seen anything" or "he says anything mean to anyone" or "say anything" or "they have any money", because those words must be in negative constructions.

Note, however, that here the "two negatives make a positive" rule can't be held to apply. If it did, then Prissy's "I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies!" or "I ain't never seen nothing like that" would have to be acceptable: two negatives make a positive, but three are still negative. (Please note: I am not saying these sentences are acceptable, well-formed Standard English; I am saying the so-called reason that "double negatives" are bad has no actual application to the case. And if there actually does exist a person who really believes these are positive statements, all I can say is that they must be in perpetual state of annoyed confusion...)

There is a third construction in English that can support more than one negative. That's one which I have only rarely heard stigmatized, but here are two examples. The first refers to an op-ed written by Dick Cavett on April 5, 2007, for the NY Times, in which he said:

And then there's, "If we announce a departure date, the enemy will just hunker down until we leave." Isn’t that what most of Iraq’s "army" also will do? (They're referred to by our troops as the "Keystone Kops." Except the Kops showed up for work.)

Doesn't never announcing a date allow them to return to their hammocks and let G.I. Joe continue to absorb the bullets?

One of the commenters acerbically took Cavett to task:

For one so usually careful about English usage, I am surprised to see Mr. Cavett using the double negative in the third paragraph of the press conference/gutsy reporter portion of his article.

Shouldn't it have read "Never announcing a date allows them to return . ." rather than the awkward "Doesn't never announcing . . .", equivalent to saying "Does not never"?

Can Cavett really defend using "Doesn’t never"?

Cavett could, I'm sure, though I don't know if he did. Another such example was in a book I read last week, where a reporter told the narrator, "Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about." "Does your editor know you use double negatives?" is the response, and I might have thought she was just dodging the question if she hadn't brought it up several times, concluding that the reporter might be smart despite the bad grammar.

That second one is an egregious misidentification. The Cavett quote at least strings the negatives together (doesn't never). But in both cases the two negatives not only don't interact, they aren't even in the same clause.

The Cavett question is in the form "Doesn't X allow Y?" It so happens that in his question X is negative, but the "doesn't" has no control over that, nor any interaction with it. It could be paraphrased to "X allows Y, doesn't it?" and I'm guessing that this wording wouldn't have drawn the commenter's attention. And the distinctive intonation of such a question would be very different from a "doesn't never allow it, does it?" question.

The book example is just bizarre. The narrator didn't correct the reporter, as the commenter tried to do, though offering a much weaker fomula than Cavett's rhetorical question. And I can't even imagine what alternative could be used - only a disguised negative like "Stop pretending" wouldn't distort the meaning. I hesitate to call either of these any kind of "double" negative at all.

It's a severe problem

Lower-level translators (those who can cope with ILR 2 or 2+ texts) have a serious problem with Russian grammatical endings. They ignore them.

What do I mean, and why is this a problem?

First, Russian has a fairly rich system of grammatical endings - six cases by anybody's definition and three genders. (I say "six by anybody's definition" because there's a special locative which is different from the prepositional, a remnant of a time when they were separate, and also a partitive genitive with different endings.)  This rich system permits Russian a highly flexible word order. Sentences beginning with predicates and ending with subjects are very common; they express emotion and focus, as well as serving the ends of information structuring.


For instance, the sentence обоих мог убить один и тот же киллер. This is a quite ordinary sentence, but it does have an emphatic word order, leading into speculation about the killer's identity and previous actions - and it leads with the direct object:

обоих (both/masculine/accusative) мог (can/masculine/past tense) убить (kill/infinitive) один (one/masculine/singular/nominative) и (and) тот же (lit: this indeed (the same)/masculine/nominative) киллер (killer/masculine/nominative)

Thus, this sentence could be translated in a number of ways, the simplest of which ignores all the information conveyed by the word order: one and the same killer might have killed both men. Or, using an English focusing device: it might have been one and the same killer who killed both men. Or, using the English passive to mirror the sentence most closely: both men might have been killed by one and the same killer.

But this is how it was translated by three of my students today: "both could kill one and the same killer".

The endings were just totally ignored, and the sentence was translated linearly. The words are in the same order, but the meaning is completely reversed.

Now, at level 2, Russian prose is pretty much Subject-Verb-Object. Thus, people who deal primarily with that level of prose become used to that structure, and are lulled into thinking that Russian's grammatical morphology is probably a baroque frill. After all, English gets by without it.

The trouble comes when they venture beyond newspaper and other reporting, into the world of writers who use every tool at the disposal to craft sentences which convey as much by nuance and implication as by direct statement. At this level, the endings of Russian carry critical information, crucial to understanding. Junior translators cannot accurately translate what they do not understand.

Remedial training in Russian grammar is often resisted by people who've been working for several years, but it's all too necessary.

An observation

Yesterday morning I went to Alexandria. I got off the Green Line train at Mt Vernon Sq and 40 seconds later I was getting on a Yellow Line train. I mention this rather ordinary occurrence because once again I stood at Linthicum in the 25-minute wait the MTA seems to think is a reasonable schedule. 

And yes I know the Metro runs much more frequently than the Light Rail, but honestly it would be simple to schedule a connection at Linthicum instead of a miss. All it would take is a minute change to the trains in both directions, and a lot of people's lives would be a lot simpler.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Some of The Murdoch Mysteries. It's still cute how Murdoch almost invents things, and George almost names them (a "simile machine", or "paint by numerical values") and you have to laugh when things like this happen: Brackinread: "I still can't believe such a detailed model was built by an imbecile." George (gasps): "Oo, sir, I believe people such as Lydia are no longer referred to as 'imbecile'. It's felt to be demeaning. The correct term nowadays is 'moron.'"

TV: Watched what was on my DVR of the new season of Perception. I'm not crazy about how the FBI agent sneaks around on people's civil rights - it's the whole "we're putting a bad guy away" rationale that's used to justify warrantless wiretaps and (what she does) threatening to "pin it on" a woman's son to make her agree not to get a lawyer (and since both woman and son were innocent and proved so, we're supposed to just laugh it off). I do like Eric McCormack's performance, though, though he can annoy me (fat people should just eat less!). And I'm glad his ex-shrink called off the romance because it wasn't good for either of them. My biggest quibble with the premise remains, though: he too often gets one of his psych(o) visions/episodes before he should (the biker telling him that people don't change was the clue to why the brother acted the way he did - but why was the biker there before Daniel even knew the biker was dead?) Futurama - these were better - especially "Assie Come Home". The last Endeavour, maintaining the level. I loved the way Shaun Evans delivered the line "Hast seen the white whale?", and even more the way he handled Thursday's obviously never having heard it. Also, the first episode of Broadchurch, which opens very strong. David Tennant, of course, but also Arthur Darville!

Read: The Hen of the Baskervilles, which (except for the strained set-up for the title) was another solid, very entertaining entry. Aberystwyth, Mon Amour and the sequel Last Tango in Aberystwyth, which are funny noir-take-offs that have me waiting for the next ones to arrive from the UK with eager anticipation. Their close-but-not-quite alternate Wales is great; I particularly like the Patagonian War and the way the druids run things; also, that our hero's main enemy is his old gym (games) teacher is priceless. Codex Born, in the Magic ex Libris series, which is pretty good - I like the exploration of Lina's nature.

Oh yes there is doubt

Obama, yesterday:

"And there’s no doubt that Mr. Snowden’s leaks triggered a much more rapid and passionate response than would have been the case if I had simply appointed this review board to go through, and I had sat down with Congress and we had worked this thing through. It would have been less exciting. It would not have generated as much press. I actually think we would have gotten to the same place, and we would have done so without putting at risk our national security and some very vital ways that we are able to get intelligence that we need to secure the country."

Sure, maybe so ... if one buys that he was actually planning to appoint that review board in the first place. Which he wasn't. The only reason we're having this discussion, this review board, this anything is Snowden.

So, yeah, Mr. President. This is a much more rapid and passionate response than otherwise - but it's also a much more tepid response, and a much more urgent one, and a much more lackadaisical one, and a much more insert-adjective-of-your-choice one - because frankly there wouldn't have been one otherwise. And after your first term we all know it.

You claim to welcome the discussion, but you're after the blood of the man who's the only reason we're having it. Don't pretend otherwise.

Aswan?

Lawrence of Arabia is a World War I story. The Aswan Dam was built in the 60s. In fact, the dam wouldn't have been there to be in the movie, had it been filmed in Egypt (instead of Jordan, Morocco, and Spain(!)).

So, basically, WTF? Even if the Aswan Dam counted as a "man-made waterway", it's absolutely wrong for being featured in the movie Lawrence of Arabia.

Plus - what? $11,000 got someone into the semi-finals? The freaking J bus has been late every day this week, and I totally missed three days, but there must have been some either low-scoring games or total routs.

Drop that Roget's

Today's Herb and Jamaal irritates me.

Dammit, Herb. I am so sick of people “us[ing] a thesaurus” and plugging one word into the space of another with no regard for register (the thugs threw him off the riparian bank) or worse for syntactic constraints (“They assisted him do it.” "She desired him for help". "They aided the resistance to upgrade weapons.")

Can “mover, engenderer, originator, producer, begetter, author” be used interchangeably with “creator”? Or “architect, deviser, shaper”? Or – the ones he’ll get under its first listing – “artist, artiste, maker, master, dauber, copyist, craftsman, artisan”? It would serve you right if he put “a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world” [Santayana] where he’d had “creator” to start with (you know, something like "The "dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world" [Santayan] of the radio was not Marconi."). Too many people use thesauruses, dammit.

Welcome to post-Constitutional America

Over at Tom Dispatch, an article by Peter van Buren (author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People), himself a federal whistle-blower who was forced out of the State Department after he published his book, writes about what the Bradley Manning trial means for us:

On July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower protection law, stating “that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

Two hundred thirty-five years later, on July 30, 2013, Bradley Manning was found guilty on 20 of the 22 charges for which he was prosecuted, specifically for “espionage” and for videos of war atrocities he released, but not for “aiding the enemy.”

Days after the verdict, with sentencing hearings in which Manning could receive 136 years of prison time ongoing, the pundits have had their say. The problem is that they missed the most chilling aspect of the Manning case: the way it ushered us, almost unnoticed, into post-Constitutional America.

Read it all. You won't enjoy it, but it'll be good for you.

Weeks of Entertainment

What happened to July??? The vacation was one thing, but I came back to a heavy workload! Woof... So there's quite a few back installments in this.

Film: The new Star Trek movie, which I quite enjoyed. The new Lone Ranger which I enjoyed, too: though I realize it's a problematic film in many ways that final train-fight sequence is brilliant. Monsters University which was very amusing (though I do think you need to have seen the first one, and you need to see them in release order). Still Mine, an amazingly wonderful film. James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold give brilliant, restrained, achingly beautiful performances.

DVD: Miss Fisher's Mysteries, an Australian tv series based on Kerry Greenwood's novels (which I have not read) about a 1920s "lady detective" in Melbourne. The show is very well-done, consistently entertaining. The last of Scarecrow and Mrs King, still holding up well. Men in Black 3 which, though I'm not prepared to say it was better than the first one, was consistently good. An old Charlie Chan (Dark Alibi), which had a tricky solution but one of those painful-to-watch turns by Mantan Moreland as Birmingham Brown, Charlie's chauffeur. His incomplete sentences routine was funny, but you (I) spend half the movie cringing, half thinking 'at least he had a pretty good job', and half contemplating the state of black characters in 30s and 40s movies...

TV: Endeavour - I like it. I like it a lot. Shaun Evans is fantastic as the young Morse, and I really enjoy the relationship he has with his boss. Futurama - this season is weak, but weak Futurama is better than strong lots of other shows.

Read: A bunch of cozies over vacation - the Books by the Bay series, which get progressively better; the Nina Quinn series, which was quite entertaining even though the protagonist was sometimes very annoying; the same author's Lucy Valentine books, which are very slight but amusing; and the same author's River of Dreams trilogy, of which the second two books weren't worth reading - they were essentially the first one over again with a different sister; Beginning with a Bash, a complicated little mystery indeed; Poison, Perennials, and a Poltergeist which was harmless if not captivating;  Grace Takes Off, the latest Manor House mystery and a good entry in the series; Duck the Halls, the next-to-latest Meg Landon, which maintains the series' high standards; and Foal Play, which has no excuse for the name and which stars the dumbest protagonist I've run across in a long time. Also some non-cozies, starting with several books in the Wool universe, the Greatfall trilogy, which is damned good.  The Cuckoo's Calling, which I had actually bought before finding out it was by JK Rowling (though that made me move it up the list), and which I enjoyed very much indeed; Neil deGrasse Tyson's memoir The Sky is Not the Limit, which is excellent; and another Kindle serial, Indexing, which has me very impatiently waiting for the next chapter. I began the well-reviewed Last Summer of the Camperdowns and quit around a third of the way through; it's just not working for me.

The Chapel of Love is Open

Gorgeous photos from Minnesota's first day of marriage equality.