Big words, Trump's a 4th grader, and the Presidential Speechalist

K.I.S.S
I have been trying to tell my students this for years, but we finally have evidence: using big words does not make you look smart. In fact, the opposite is true.

In one experiment, the researchers — including Daniel M. Oppenheimer, of the UCLA Anderson School of Management — took real college admission essays and replaced some of the simpler words used in them with more complicated ones. They then gave these to their study participants, to read and rate the competency and confidence level of the authors. As it turned out, the authors of the essays with complicated language were rated lower than the authors of the essays with simpler language. 

Read more about it here

The reading level of the speech of presidential candidates
While we are on the subject of simple language, check out the grade level of the language of presidential hopefuls 

Based on the above data, we REALLY need to worry about Trump. Read the accompanying article here.

The Presidential Speechalist
All this talk of presidential speeches reminds me of a classic video

Reading Really IS Fundamental

A recent article in The New Yorker, "Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain, added yet another lamentation concerning the decline of reading in western culture, and America in particular.

Even though I am an English teacher, I get tired of these jeremiads by the chicken littles who say the cultural sky is falling. The statistics (and the above article cites many--too many) seem to be irrefutable: people aren't reading as much as they used to read. But the question I always ask myself is, "Why does that matter?" We know that IQs have been rising pretty much all through the 20th century--the proof has been given the name the Flynn Effect (as outlined eloquently in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article).

So people are getting smarter, right? Well, as Gladwell points out, we have become more abstract in our thinking, and the IQ tests examine this type of abstract thinking. So we may not be getting smarter, we may just be getting better at abstract thinking. But as our culture becomes less literate, the Flynn Effect might reverse as we become less able to recognize patterns. This pattern recognition is what has led us to the IQ gains and to our modern, abstract way of thinking--a way of thinking that seems to be, more and more, the only way of thinking that allows for personal success.

Thus, abstract (modern) thinking seems to derive from literacy, so, to answer my question posed earlier, literacy is very important for the habits of mind it creates--the ability to reason. The Crain article cites a great example of the difference between literate and illiterate thinking:

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently[....] But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer: "Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them."

Literacy allows people another way of seeing--the ability to be metacognitive, to think about thinking. This ability is not necessarily a better one, not necessarily a smarter one, but it certainly is an increasingly useful one in our modern world.

More importantly for our society, a literate mindset seems to be the only one that would allow for the debate a democracy requires. As a researcher concluded after synthesizing existing research on the "oral mind-set":

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

It seems that just the widespread ability to read might have been the catalyst that dragged us hominids out of the dark ages. It now seems that the declining ability to read might be what is plunging us back into them.

Read the entire article here.

Merriam-Webster gives me a ginormous headache

Along with 100 other neologisms, the word ginormous has entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

I like new words. I like how elastic our language is, how alive it is, how sensitive to cultural changes it is. I hate the word ginormous.

I hate it because it is absolutely unnecessary. Enormous or gigantic (the two constituent words from which it was derived--making it [one of my favorite words] a portmanteau) would suffice instead of ginormous. Therefore, ginormous isn't necessary for meaning.

Second, it is not shorter or easier to say than either of the words it replaces, so it's not easier to say. In fact, it's an ugly word.

Third, it's only reason for existing seems to be it's cuteness factor. It makes you seem clever or hip when you say it.

Ginormous is similar in its uselessness to a word my students have been using recently: "chillax," a portmanteau combining "chill" and "relax." Again, the three criteria above apply. Chill or relax mean the same thing as chillax. It is no easier to say. It is just another word that is used to be cute.

If I follow the logic of the above words, I could create some stupid words of my own. How about "sleenap," as in, "I'm tired. I'm going to sleenap."

"Workoutercise," as in, "I need to lose some weight, so I'd better start workoutercising."

"Confereneeting," as in, "After lunch, we have a sales confereneeting about third quarter profits."

"Clidy," as in, "We have guests coming over, so I'd better clidy up."

Read the article about ginormous here.

Is Nevaeh actually another word for hell?

To paraphrase David Cross, "The terrorists hate our freedom? I hate our freedom!"

Read this to find out why.

100 Words

The American Heritage Dictionary just published a little books called "100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know." This sounds like a cool little book, one that can teach you all those words you know you should look up but never do.

Yes, some of these words are useful, like, say, numbers 2 and 3. Those are words I see in print a fair amount, and it certainly does help your reading comprehension if you know what they mean. However, some of the words on the list baffled me as to why they were included.

For instance, number 22: euro. Do they mean the monetary unit, or simply the prefix that places an object on the Continent? Either way, I'm not sure that knowing it makes you urbane, or even literate.

How about number 15: deciduous. That word comes in handy in exactly no contexts. Let's say you are reading a story about a disease that is affecting deciduous trees. Do you really need to be sure exactly what kind of tree it is?

Or number 100: ziggurat. I honestly can't tell you if I've ever seen that word in print before. Sure, it might be a cool word to know, but I don't see how it made the top 100.

Anyhow, here's a list for the self-improvement type.

1. abjure
2. abrogate
3. abstemious
4. acumen
5. antebellum
6. auspicious
7. belie
8. bellicose
9. bowdlerize
10. chicanery
11. chromosome
12. churlish
13. circumlocution
14. circumnavigate
15. deciduous
16. deleterious
17. diffident
18. enervate
19. enfranchise
20. epiphany
21. equinox
22. euro
23. evanescent
24. expurgate
25. facetious
26. fatuous
27. feckless
28. fiduciary
29. filibuster
30. gamete
31. gauche
32. gerrymander
33. hegemony
34. hemoglobin
35. homogeneous
36. hubris
37. hypotenuse
38. impeach
39. incognito
40. incontrovertible
41. inculcate
42. infrastructure
43. interpolate
44. irony
45. jejune
46. kinetic
47. kowtow
48. laissez faire
49. lexicon
50. loquacious
51. lugubrious
52. metamorphosis
53. mitosis
54. moiety
55. nanotechnology
56. nihilism
57. nomenclature
58. nonsectarian
59. notarize
60. obsequious
61. oligarchy
62. omnipotent
63. orthography
64. oxidize
65. parabola
66. paradigm
67. parameter
68. pecuniary
69. photosynthesis
70. plagiarize
71. plasma
72. polymer
73. precipitous
74. quasar
75. quotidian
76. recapitulate
77. reciprocal
78. reparation
79. respiration
80. sanguine
81. soliloquy
82. subjugate
83. suffragist
84. supercilious
85. tautology
86. taxonomy
87. tectonic
88. tempestuous
89. thermodynamics
90. totalitarian
91. unctuous
92. usurp
93. vacuous
94. vehement
95. vortex
96. winnow
97. wrought
98. xenophobe
99. yeoman
100. ziggurat

Framing a debate

Slate magazine recently asked why conservatives have been so good at winning divisive debates like the ones concerning gun control and abortion. The theory the article proposed is certainly nothing new--it said they're better at framing debates.

In ideological terms, the conservative movement remains more disciplined and better skilled than the liberal side at framing political debates. It has cast both issues in terms of absolute principle: the right to life on abortion, and to personal liberty in the case of guns. The call to conscience tends to be more compelling than the call to practicality, and the contradiction between these two positions—one libertarian, the other anti-libertarian—bothers very few people.

But what does it really mean to "frame a debate" well? In my opinion, when someone says a group is better at framing the debate, it means that they have found a way to simplify the issue to the point where it is binary--yes or no, good or evil, freedom or bondage.

"Abortion is murder."

"Gun ownership is about personal liberty."

What these types of debates ignore is the fact that no debate that endures is truly binary. If it were truly binary, it wouldn't endure. Do we debate stealing is wrong? No, we don't, because that truly is a binary debate. Stealing is wrong, end of story, no debate necessary. But the fact that we keep debating gun control and abortion seems to point to the fact that neither debate is black and white. Are laws restricting gun ownership unconstitutional, or do most gun laws fall into the gray area of the Second Amendment, the gray area of "well regulated" or "militia"?

I can see, though, the allure of binary-type thinking. It makes life very easy, as it no longer requires you to think. All you need to do, when presented with a new problem, is apply the algorithm of your binary thinking, and all gray areas disappear. This, of course, can be a good thing. The Golden Rule is binary: when presented with a situation, just imagine what kind of treatment you would like, then do it. WWJD is binary. That's a good thing. I'm not religious, but I believe that if Christians read the Gospels and behaved exactly as Jesus did, the world would be transformed into a heaven on earth.

But so many things in the world cannot be reduced to binary thinking. That's why I think Libertarianism is such a flawed "philosophy." In the real world, with everything so interconnected, few debates that matter are binary. Is welfare good or bad? That depends on what kind of welfare, who is getting it and for how long? Are high taxes good or bad? That depends. If you are fighting a war, how the heck else are you going to pay for it? (Come to think of it, how ARE we going to pay for it?) You see, in the real world, binary thinking is reductive and possibly dangerous.

So, it seems the only way to combat this oversimplified thinking is to ask those types of clarifying questions. What about this? Have you thought of that? Sure, it may make our head hurt when we think a lot and the issue gets complex, but this is the only way, really, to find solutions that work. I guess the mantra we should always have in our heads is "It just isn't that simple. Let's find the complexity." That's when the real debate will begin.

Fighting the Fair Tax

I can sometimes understand when the American public gets duped because the truth is so hard to discover. The truth in Iraq is hard to find because it is so far away, and we have few ways of getting the unspun truth. Ditto Gitmo.

But how stupid do you have to be to fail to recognize that the estate tax only affects the super rich? Here's another smoking gun.

Eighteen families, including the owners of Nordstrom Inc., The Seattle Times Co., Mars Inc., Koch Industries Inc. and Wal-Mart Inc., that stand to save $71.6 billion in taxes are financing lobbying efforts to repeal the estate tax, according to a study by two groups.

Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy, which want to see estate tax rates increased to as high as 60 percent, said the families perpetrated a fraud on ordinary Americans by saying the levy constitutes an unfair "death tax." Only about 0.25 percent of Americans who die this year will leave an estate large enough to be taxed, the groups said.

The groups estimated the 18 families have spent as much as $500 million on lobbying efforts since 1994.

Republicans have fought the estate tax by renaming it the death tax. I say we take back the rhetorical upper hand by calling it the Fair Tax.

Read the story here.