Vocabulary to know

One of my esteemed colleagues in the English department has taken the opportunity to use recent events as a teachable moment. Pinned to the corkboard is the Daily Californian's write-up of the most recent Wheeler Hall protest and Chancellor Birgeneau's afore-quoted message citing concern for the "health and safety" of the protesters, viz.

from: Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
to: "Staff, All Academic Titles, Academic Senate Faculty, Students,"
date: Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 4:06 PM
subject: Wheeler Hall closed

The campus is dealing with a health and safety issue in Wheeler Hall and the building is closed. All classes and events scheduled in Wheeler Hall for this afternoon/evening are cancelled until further notice.

Appended is an entry from the OED:

euphemism, n. 1.Rhetoric. That figure of speech which consists in the substitution of a word or expression of comparatively favourable implication or less unpleasant associations, instead of the harsher or more offensive one that would more precisely designate what is intended.

Im in ur university. Teaching ur students rhetoric.

Both images lovingly shot in institutional fluorescent lighting using a crappy Samsung cell phone.

I couldn't help being pleased to notice that one of the OED's usage examples came from nineteenth-century naturalist, beard-sporter, opinionated guy, and erstwhile theosophist/psychic Elliott Coues:

1877    E. Coues Fur-bearing Animals vii. 216 The Skunk yields a handsome fur, lately become fashionable, under the euphemism of ‘Alaska Sable’.

Boom. Proven with statistics.

I couldn't help noticing this image, tiny as it is. It's a graph showing changes in the number of U.S. jobs over time. Even though the graph depicts job losses almost exclusively, it's a graph that makes President Obama look fairly good, compared to his predecessor.

What does it mean to make a graph into a Twitter icon?

There's something terribly Harper's Indexy about it: look at the [visual representation of the] numbers; the numbers don't lie. Boom. Proven with statistics.

The Harper's Index is interesting because it is aware of its own comical aspect. Its writers think nothing of contorting a sentence or an idea in order to fit the formula of label: number. This is in part the source of the comedy. There's a certain playful pettiness involved in the Harper's Index. It's a pettiness that meshes perfectly with the Index's particular kind of authority. An index only claims to indicate.

Here, in the Twitter icon, is the same gesture. It's an appeal to statistics as an authority -- here, an authority that stands in for the President of the United States, a discursive authority that serves now as the visual marker for an authority's discourse, the President's Twitter account (managed, of course, by a staffer).

As a Twitter icon, the graph is too small to read; it only makes sense if you already know what it represents (which you may, since it's been used widely in news media). Here, too, the thought has been crammed into a small and rigid space, the conventional formula of the Twitter icon.

It's the very cramming that makes it possible to say: Boom. Proven with statistics.

Part of our DNA

UCB Professor Emeritus Oliver Williamson just won a Nobel prize in economics. Chancellor Birgeneau's email to the campus community on the topic ended thus:

Earlier this morning, at a press conference, Professor Williamson was asked what this prize meant for Berkeley, given the difficult budgetary challenges that we are facing. Commenting on Berkeley's commitment to excellence across the length and breadth of the campus and its palpable energy for creating a richly collaborative intellectual environment, Professor Williamson replied that our campus is incredibly resilient, that it has faced many challenges in the last 50 years, and that with all the good will and resources on our campus, he was confident that we would survive this crisis. He emphasized that it was the duty of all of us to work together and of our legislature in Sacramento to support the university and not to squander this precious resource. In a tribute to his colleagues and to the many graduate students whom he has taught and mentored, Professor Williamson modestly indicated that "some wonderful people are coming along and there are more prospects for Nobels ahead."

I thank Professor Williamson for his insightful remarks and for reminding us not to become too discouraged by short-term challenges. Today's Nobel Prize is clear evidence that Berkeley's excellence is recognized around the world. It is a part of our DNA that will not be changed and will be preserved for future generations.

Part of our DNA?

It's a metaphor, of course, but a metaphor for what? Our material constitution?

We've cut both teaching and hiring, so I'm going to guess that's not it.

Teaching "grammar" versus teaching rhetoric

It always makes me nervous to say that I agree with Stanley Fish, but he makes some good points in his recent column on teaching composition. (Standard Fish-related disclaimer: I deeply disagree with some things he's said previously on the subject.)

“If we teach standardized, handbook grammar as if it is the only ‘correct’ form of grammar, we are teaching in cooperation with a discriminatory power system” (Patricia A. Dunn and Kenneth Lindblom, English Journal, January, 2003).

Statements like this one issue from the mistake of importing a sociological/political analysis of a craft into the teaching of it. It may be true that the standard language is an instrument of power and a device for protecting the status quo, but that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students who are being prepared for entry into the world as it now is rather than the world as it might be in some utopian imagination — all dialects equal, all habit of speech and writing equally rewarded.

Of course, Dunn and Lindblom are completely correct when it comes to imputing moral value to different sociolects. You'll get no argument from me there.

But Fish is right to point out the problem with importing the concerns of one discipline wholesale into another. That's what happens when linguists (or, on occasion, people who took one linguistics class in undergrad) make it a personal crusade to eradicate "prescriptivism" not only within their discipline, where that label is meaningful, but in the entire wide world, where it is less so. (Please note: this is not a description of all linguists by any means.)

Fish's point is related to one of my fundamental convictions about teaching writing, which is that it's not about teaching morals (good grief) or about language-as-it-exists-in-the-world (as in linguistics, where "prescriptivism" versus "descriptivism" is a meaningful matter of methodology). Rather, it's about teaching rhetoric. And rhetoric means manipulating language in all its plasticity, not observing it like a creature in the wild. That involves mastering particular stylized linguistic patterns, sometimes informally known by the name of "grammar," no Chomskian implications intended.

I also quite like the exercises Fish proposes:

I have devised a number of exercises designed to reinforce and extend the basic insight. These include (1) asking students to make a sentence out of a random list of words, and then explain what they did; (2) asking students to turn a three-word sentence like “Jane likes cake” into a 100-word sentence without losing control of the basic structure and then explain, word-by-word, clause-by-clause, what they did; (3) asking students to replace the nonsense words in the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” with ordinary English words in a way that makes coherent (if silly) sense, and then explain what they did, and how they knew what kind of word to put into each “slot.” (The answer is that even in the absence of sense or content, the stanza’s formal structure tells them what to do and what not to do.)

Notice that the exercises always come in two parts. In the first part students are asked to do something they can do easily. In the second part they are asked to analyze their own performance. The second part is the hard one; it requires students to raise to a level of analytical conscience the operations they must perform if they are to write sentences that hang together.

"Jabberwocky," by the way, is God's gift to teaching. I used it in a History of the English Language lecture last year. I can't tell you how my heart swelled with delight when a student proposed, based on the stem vowel, that "outgrabe" was a past-tense strong verb.

Listen up, NYT! More smart discussions of humanities pedagogy, please! Maybe someday if you work at it you'll even make it to humanities research...