Say what?

So, just awhile ago on The Diane Rehm Show some numbnut was claiming that Arizona's "religious freedom" law was good because it would have allowed businesses to refuse service to skinheads and white supremacists and such. Right. Like being gay or Black or Hispanic is exactly like being a klansperson or Nazi. Are we really this bad at teaching critical thinking skills?

Stewart on the Coca-cola Superbowl ad

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart tackles the brouhaha over Coca-cola's multilingual Superbowl ad.

Post-debate analysis: Bill Nye on The Last Word

Lawrence O'Donnell discusses the Nye-Ham debate with Bill Nye on "The Last Word":

Ken Ham was there, but Bill Nye brought home the bacon

The "debate" last night between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis ended with a sigh of relief from many of us who worried that Ham's skill at lying about the nature of science and tossing out incoherent and unanswerable bits of nonsense like broken bottles onto a road would trip up Nye.

No such thing happened. Nye was relatively cool and collected, and in command of a nice array of facts, while Ham spent most of his time asserting that creationism is true because The Bible. Whenever Nye asked him to provide some evidence for the assertion that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old, Ham simply repeated: The Bible. Evidence for just one all-encompassing catastrophic flood: The Bible. And so on. He was unable to respond at all to Nye pointing out several times that "The Bible" which Ham depends on is a translation into "American English" of a very old book that was originally written in several different languages.

 One of Ham's themes, from the beginning, was to draw a bizarre distinction between what he called "observational" science, the kind he trusts, and "historical" or "origins" science, which he does not. Observational science is OK because it deals with the here and now, and we are witnesses; historical science is invalid, because we cannot witness the things we are talking about. And, The Bible. This strange paradigm was overthrown in the 19th century by Charles Lyell, a contemporary of Darwin, who showed that the understanding of current processes can be used to reconstruct the past history of the earth, based on the not unreasonable hypothesis that the same gradual processes of erosion and uplift that change the earth’s surface today had also been at work in the past. How could Ham miss this? And again, what evidence does he hand over that this is not the case? None. So when Ham asserts that "we cannot observe the age of the Earth," he is wrong. We can bring material into lab, date it in a variety of ways. We can observe the age of the earth in the observations we make during the dating process. Ham is just plain wrong, but, you know, the Bible.

Quick take: The Smothers Brothers

The Smothers Brothers sing the "anthropologist" verse of the song "My Old Man."


 

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Bill Moyers

I hope they don't ban "linguistics nazi"

In today's online version of The New York Times, there is an essay by Etgar Keret titled "Sometimes 'Nazi' is the Right Word."  Keret explores the pros and cons of officially banning a word like "Nazi" from public usage in Israel.  I have opinions about that, but I don't live in Israel, and in any case that's not what I want to talk about right now.

The very first sentence in the essay is:

“NAZI” is a short word. It has only two syllables, like “rac-ist” or “kill-er.” 

I love it when people do things like this, because it lets me be a linguistics nazi by pointing out where someone has mistaken the folk model of language for the scientific model.  This is not the way linguists would divide these words into syllables. The correct way would be "ra-cist"  and "ki-ller."  Or, more properly, using phonetic symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (the little line ˈ is placed in front the stressed syllable):

[ˈre.səst]   [ˈkɪ.lər]

Notice that we can use a period, rather than a hyphen, to separate syllables.  Notice also that there's only one "l" in the phonetic rendition of "killer"; that's because there's only one "l" sound in that word, and in linguistics we don't put two sounds in there unless they really belong in there. 

Now, I don't expect Keret to write like a linguist in The New York Times.  But, then again, maybe I should.  This kind of thing perpetuates misconceptions about language that I have to correct every semester in my classes.

UPDATE (Jan 19).  A friend reminds me that Keret's division of "rac-ist" and "kill-er" does reflect the morphological divisions in these words.  So, "racist" is race + -ist, and "killer" is kill + -er.  These are derivational suffixes, as opposed to inflectional suffixes like the -s in cats and dogs. 

Perhaps taking divisions between morphemes to reflect syllable divisions is further evidence of the lack of phonological awareness among many otherwise educated people, especially English speakers.