Mad Prime: Tag language

Passive Aggressive

Madeleine Ball — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:39:00 +0100

Genetics was on the front page of Wikipedia yesterday as Featured Article of the Day! This was pretty cool, but this of course attracted a crop of editors and comments that wanted to improve on the article -- some wonderful and knowledgeable, some newbies, some with an ax to grind.

The one that really got to me was the guy who got really upset with usage of the passive voice:

"With all due respect, I find the drenching of this article in passive voice to be sophomoric and cumbersome. I intend to re-edit the entire article and make it readable to a literate audience, as I believe that Wikipedia articles should be written in a dynamic manner. Should you chose to remove all of my edits, I will seek redress."

My reply:

"Please don't get too passive aggressive with me: [1]." .... "I was concerned that your attempt to remove the passive voice made the article harder to read by introducing unnecessary vocabulary. If you can do it in a cleaner manner then you are welcome to it." .... "While it is hardly arduous for me to comprehend your verbiage, I would importune you to contemplate first the lucidity of your emendations before foisting them upon a somewhat less literate audience."

That link I made there is worth reading, it's to a Language Log post "Passive Aggression" that illustrates the fallacy of an absolute injunction against the passive voice.

And so I tend to ignore the injunction, although I do appreciate that it can generally improve readability. But if removing the passive voice from a sentence requires introducing more complicated vocabulary, I think it is actually reducing the clarity of the sentence. Some examples of changes this editor made...

"For genes that are closer together" was replaced with "For genes located in closer proximity"
"DNA (rather than protein) was the genetic material of the viruses" was replaced with "DNA (rather than protein) comprised the genetic material of the viruses"
"A popular theory during Mendel's time was the concept of blending inheritance" was replaced with "A popular theory during Mendel's time pertained to the concept of blending inheritance" (the theory was only related to the concept? This one isn't even correct. I'm not even sure it's passive??)

I'm really not a writing expert, but I think the article needs to be as accessible as possible -- in these cases, the passive voice is preferable to doing some grammatical backflips over fancy vocabulary. Make sure to read that Language Log post, it's very funny!

Bios and Zoe

Madeleine Ball — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 03:44:00 +0000

I was listening to the Long Now lectures again, this one by Michael West on the subject of human life extension. I can't say much of it stuck with me, but there was one topic that really caught my attention. And that was this: Ancient Greek had two words for life -- "bios" for the life of an individual, finite and mortal, and "zoe" for the infinite and general phenomenon of life.

He applies this language to the contrast between the somatic tissue of our bodies and the germ line tissue of our gametes. The gametes are immortal, an unbroken line that extends back to the first life from which we all descended. They've never died. But every time they move through a new generation a set of cells is created to house and protect this royal lineage -- our bodies. Thus, the body is the "bios", the somatic mortal tissue of finite span. And that cycle of embryonic stem, germ stem, and gamete cells is the "zoe", the immortal life that is unbroken.

After hearing that, of course, I thought Zoe was pretty much the best name ever to give one's daughter. There she is, made from your immortal fragment, the part that can live on.

To my dismay, Chris pointed out that there's already someone named Zoe Ball, a somewhat famous person. I was crushed. (I even whined about changing our last name.) Anyway, I'm passing along the name to you guys, in case you get any daughters and don't know what to call them.

Lost Languages

Madeleine Ball — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 22:51:00 +0000

I transcribed this because I thought it was an interesting story:

Going back to Roosevelt, the environmental movement -- the most powerful part of it -- really did arise from the upper class. There's no question about it. But people in that class like (George) Perkins Marshall and so forth really made a separation between society and human beings, and nature itself.

But Native Americans and, if you look at the native languages from all the Americas -- Northwest America and South America -- what you find is a very, very different set of perceptions that inform their relationship to the environment.

I was reminded of this when I was in Patagonia several years ago, climbing with some friends, and there was a very tawdry little museum there of an extirpated tribe called the Yaghan or the Yamana people. These are the people that Magellan spotted when he came around Tierra del Fuego and he called them beasts. He called them beasts because when he looked at them, they were bathing in the winter at the seashore, they'd taken off their furs, they were rubbing themselves down with salt water, and steam was coming off their bodies. And he called them beasts.

When the Czechs and Germans came and created the great estancias in Chile and Argentina for wool, for the Hobbesian "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution, these natives were bountied at twenty-five dollars a head and they were rounded up until they were finally in one mission, an Anglican mission, and this mission was headed by a priest who was an amateur lexicographer. He loved words. His father, however, was involved with an earlier massacre of the same people. So even though they were there and there was only a few hundred of them left, they didn't trust him, because of his father's involvement with this massacre. So they wouldn't talk to him, just the tribal chief started to tell him their language and give him the definition of the words. He wouldn't talk about women's issues, cosmology, ritual initiation, you know, certain things that were taboo, because those weren't to be given to just anybody, but he would talk about everything else. He got to 30,000 words and the Anglican lexicographer died.

Now that dictionary is in the British Museum. Just to give you some sense, there's 40,000 words in Japanese. This dictionary's 30,000 words, one person, all memory, and no written language. This language has more verbs than English. And this language, when you read the dictionary is, in a sense, "local science". This is a language, when you read it, where the sacred, survival, hunting, gathering, and psychology, are not integrated, they were never dis-integrated.

And so, the terms for spiritual states and the terms for psychological states are all poetically metaphorical of the science of place. So "i-ka" is a verb, and means: "lying in your canoe in the morning before dawn, listening to the rushes brush against the bark". "What were you doing this morning?" "Oh, I-kan..." Their word for depression is a crab who is molting its shell and hasn't dropped it yet, it hasn't lost the old shell yet. The language is exquisite. Now if you take seven people here who are college-educated, and lock them up for a week, they'll come up with 12-15,000 words.

This is the beast that Magellan saw. These were the people who were bountied. This is a language that we don't understand, because what we're trying to do is bring this together (society and the environment) and these are people that never separated. So, in a sense, the framing of environmentalism arose -- and this is what I think -- from a great love of nature, but also came from a sense of alienation and separation.

Paul Hawken, "The Long Green". Oct 2004, Long Now Seminars http://www.longnow.org/shop/free-downloads/seminars/