it is right to boldly split this infinitve

I couple of weeks ago, in a meeting where a colleague confessed to splitting an infinitive as if it were a bad thing, I quietly pointed out that not only was it perfectly good English to do so  but that sometimes an infinitive had to be split.

In defence of the former assertion, I'd simply and provocatively suggest that what people often talk about as 'the infinitive' in English probably can't be sustained as such under closer scrutiny. For the moment I will simply mention that modal verbs' "infinitive" construction has no 'to' in front of the verb. I'd further suggest that the way that most English speakers untainted by the idea of an infinitive in theory demonstrate the psychological reality of the 'to' actually being analysed as belonging to the preceding word or phrase, not the verb. The way that the phrase 'how to' can be used as a unit on it's own attests to this. Hence ...

How To Always Get A Seat at a Crowded Coffee Shop

That is a split infinitive. And for those who are uninitiated into syntactic mysteries, suffice to say that the 'Always' in that article title is splitting the alleged infinitive 'To Get'. Way back in the day, some prescriptive Victorian grammarians seem to have been over-influenced by Latin's supposed perfections and probably their own aesthetic sensibilities decided that putting an adverb between the 'to' and the verb was a no-no and then tried to make it stick by making other people think it was a social gaffe and intellectually inferior to commit this supposed syntactic crime they had invented. Fortunately most of the English speaking world has ignored this blatant piece of social elitism, but that hasn't stopped misinformed and misguided editors and teachers from making people feel bad about their stylistic choices in use of English.

But the truth is sometimes the so-called split infinitive is the best way to say it. The phrase above is an example. Try it: what are the alternatives?
How always to get a seat ...
How to get always a seat ...
Neither of them really sound right, do they? The infinitive must be split or you'll sound stilted.

Vonnegut: how to get a degree

Apropos of checking out Kurt Vonnegut's use of science and anthropology in his science fiction, I found this amusing wee story. Vonnegut is the writer:

 I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat’s Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree

Now this got my attention because I recently suggested to  a colleague that a possible assessment task relating to church history might be to rewrite the endings to a couple of short stories I read. They are alternative timeline stories where the writers manage to rewrite Christianity out of the picture. The task I would set would be to take the story on a bit further, take on the 'what if' of the story but develop the story in such a way that Christian faith endures in the timeline. The assessment criteria would be historical plausibility (which would rest on a good understanding of the actual history) and theological integrity in relation to the context.


The book is below and the particular stories to think on (though there are at least two others worth considering) The Wandering Christian and A Letter from the Pope.


Of course the other interesting thing is that people want to write Christianity out of history.

The care and keeping of experts

Some highlights from this video:

When  people are told that an expert is dealing with it, their brain scans show a flatlining of the decision-making parts of the brain. Experts often get things wrong in areas where, actually, people know their own situations better. The mistakes the experts make cited here are quite frightening: they (we!) are influenced by confirmation bias and pre-judice. We have a right to be spoken to in ways we understand: informed consent means we are informed not blinded by science (literally or metaphorically). Expert ideas need to prove their worth; survive against other viwes: dissent can produce better ideas than the received wisdom (which is what experts are often expert in). We need to use experts, but we should be aware of limitations

Part of my interest is is noticing that the 'expert effect' is to turn of people's decision-making. This is presumably related to the basic mechanism of being led and of submerging ourselves in the group. This would be a basic mechanism for social co-ordination either by a distinct leader or by our reading of the 'group mind' (cued by all sorts of non-verbal signals as well as other cultural and sometimes linguistic clues). It may be why a mob can be more stupid than individual members -in some conditions. -This video actually mentions conditions that can be created to actually crowd-source knowledge and judgement in ways that can be more intelligent than the experts (and The Wisdom of Crowds would be a good book to find out more about the conditions for the crowd to be cleverer than any individual).

  

Hell is other people

I was talking with my parents the other day and we got to talking about the way that people behave in city centres. We started with the difficulties of multiple queues (more later perhaps) and then onto the more free-flowing vexation which is trying to walk somewhere in a crowd of people who are all intent on shopping and sauntering with friends or hurrying their kids along, or holding an over-loud conversation remotely via their mobile phone, or avoiding the Big Issue seller or the chuggers ...

Now before I go of on the one that I'm intending to write up shortly, a couple or three things to say. The first is that I'm considering a new label for posts on this topic: "hell-is-others" but I do think that it should be taken along with this article which puts a positive side to the phenomena of human sociality.

Another thing to say is about human sociality is the observation that we humans manage to be fairly hyper social without reducing our individual members to the status of mere organelles in a superorganism (cf ants, termites or social bees). If you compare us with the great apes, like chimpanzees, our ability to co-operate without agression and violence is quite remarkable. Chimpanzees rarely manage to sustain groups of more than about 20 and even those groups have horrific levels of violence in them. By comparison we can manage to sustain high density living for millions with relatively low levels of violence.

And the other thing to say is that I quite often find myself in a city centre at a peak crowd time and realise that I do just the same things that I find challenging about other people in crowds, so in what I'm about to say there is a degree of 'You are the man' reflected back on me.

Anyhow the fact is that I find myself every so often repeating in my mind Sartre's most famous quotation, l'enfer, c'est les autres ('Hell is other people')". The reason is usually something like this: I'm walking along at my usual pace. My usual pace is, admittedly, quite quick: most people have a little trouble keeping up; I'm long-legged and not afraid to use it! However, this means that it is challenging for me to avoid people who unlookingly change course or suddenly stop and it is irritatingly demanding to maintain a steady pace and course. The scene is set for a degree of frustration as I have to change, pace, direction, or even stop suddenly for people who seem to have forgotten that they are NOT the only people using the space. My irritation finds expression in the 'Hell is other people' phrase (though I'll often also say to myself in French too).

Of course there are two main types of offenders: the heedless and the arrogant. The heedless are those who simply are intent on other things and forget or don't notice that their sudden course change or stop is likely to create and obstacle for others. It's a good thing that the max speed being achieved is around 4 kph or there could be some serious collisions: it's almost as if we've evolved a walking speed and reaction times to match each other (!!). The heedless (of whom I am dispiritingly often one) merely fail to assign attention to their surroundings, probably because we tend to assume that most of us are going the same way and that the general lack of collisions means that we can continue much as we always do. I remind myself that most people's heedfulness quotient is not constructed with the high speed walker such as myself in view.

But then we have the seemingly arrogant: these are the people who seem to think that others should move for them and be mindful of them but not the other way round. These seem to include certain young men, often in groups for whom territorial display seems to be the name of the game, and some people using wheeled aids to travel -I say some; there are a good many thoughtful people out there too. However, there are some who seem to think that their mobility issues entitle them to be careless of others, and they often get away with it because others, not wanting to suffer injury or insult, co-operate by getting out of the way. This category of people can include some motability scooter-users, some wheelchair users and some pushchair pushers.

My appeal is for us all to try to recall in public, crowded spaces that it may be well to look around whenever we change course or speed to make sure that we are not about to bump someone else, and if we fail to do so to apologise.

On that latter point: a few times lately I have found myself uttering that automatic British "sorry" on nearly bumping into someone and then my analysis of what has happened kicks in: actually it wasn't my fault; it's not me who should be saying sorry. If the other person has said 'sorry', all well and good. If they have not: well, that's annoying; that they have not had their selfish or heedless behaviour challenged but may have been confirmed in their sense of entitlement to un-co-operative pedestrian behaviour.

No Exit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
I think that this article on the idea (referred to above) is definitely worth reading.
 

Language: a living thing escaping the cage of over-definition

From time to time I get reminded of the over-prescriptive approach to language. On Friday, a colleague worried about split infinitives -I said I thought some infinitives should be split -you only have to see how ugly some attempts to avoid them can be to realised that. (Oh, and that is assuming that there is an English infinitive in the way presupposed by such grammars).
So I loved this article which alerts us to the 'political' function of these prescriptive grammars and dictionaries.

In those far-off days, linguistic authority was in the hands of a hieratic elite of lexicographers and grammarians whose sacred texts were the Oxford English Dictionary and handbooks of English style and usage. If my definition of "simplistic" was not in the dictionary, it did not exist. (In fact, the OED states that the modern meaning of the word dates back to the 19th century, but at the time of the incident the Concise version did not record this.)

That last parenthetical comment blows the lid off: quite often, the prescription falls foul of the actuality because it is merely the intuition or sense of Latinisation of the writer backed up by the usage of their particular group of language users and as such is a power ploy: an attempt to make their usage 'normal' for others or to make participation for others harder (to put a really negative spin on it). As the writer states earlier: the experience of that kind of red ink had a result in "undermining my faith in my own linguistic judgment.". There's the nub: a native speaker already knows their language; any native speaker has a perfect right to use the language as they wish: the battle is over which dialects get to be considered 'prestigious' or 'normal' for educated or powerful elites. The split infinitive is emblematic of an earlier -Victorian, I suspect, attempt to impose norms.

But language isn't something you legislate for: it is an ongoing negotiation ('conversation' if you will) between all those who speak it: words, usages, syntactic devices come and go in fashion, adoption by various groups, rejection by various groups etc. Language changes as a result. That's why we don't speak like Chaucer or Shakespeare any more. Get used to it people. By all means be aware of social and stylistic nuances and usages, select them appropriately according to context; but please do not say that anything a native speaker says is wrong: it may not be your dialect or stylistic preference, it may be inapppropriate to the context or it may disadvantage the speaker because of the prejudicial views of certain other, linguistically ill-founded prescriptivist, speakers. But it is not "wrong".

And if you are one of those people who is tempted to call some other native speaker of English's usage 'wrong', then may I invite you to reconsider? By all means talk about the way that a usage 'sounds' to you and what associations it has for you. But be prepared to hear things back about your usage. We all make social judgements on the basis of accent and dialect and usages: we could do with defusing some of the prejudices not stoking them up by trying to exert linguistic power plays.

I've noted before how Shakespeare and Jane Austen have split infinitives. ..

The intelligence of the senses

Ever since, 26 years ago I was told I couldn't submit a report on a placement at a radio station in the form of a radio programme, I have felt that there are times and topics where we need to be able to let academic discourse out a bit. It sometimes needs to get a life. Instead of reduce everything the the one dimension of written discourse: "Academia often excludes non-linguistic media such as film, photography, or sound on the grounds that they are not recognized academic formats in and of themselves; they do not adhere to strict rules of grammar nor do they necessarily employ the approved tools of study that yield accountable data, such as surveys of customs and kinship systems. But as the significance of embodied knowledge and lived experience increases in the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences, perhaps the academic world can make a little more room for media that best represent this data, encouraging alternative methods of communication to join language with equal credibility."

Of course, all is not bleak; the arts (as in performance, plastic and visual) have been 'doing academic' for a long time. But perhaps it is time to learn from them. I think that there are areas of practical theology which could probably usefully engage with this. And I note that one of the possibilities I wrote into the Engaging Culture course was that the assessment could be done in the form of some other cultural artefact than the essay...

The McGill Daily � The intelligence of the senses

Pronouncing Biblical names and obsolete exonyms

This morning in chapel the OT reading was one of those which many readers dread: there were loads and lots of Hebrew names, which the reader gamely did well with and even managed to win our affection with a good humour and helpful intonation.

And some of the pronunciation got me thinking and put me in mind of this post from: John Wells’s phonetic blog: obsolete exonyms. In it we learn things about how things used to be pronounced: did you know that once upon a Victorian Time, Prague was pronounced 'Prayg', Rome 'Room' and Milan 'Millan'. The evidence is is past editions of dictionaries and things like the rhymes of Edward Lear. As John Wells points out: "Lear, like other early Victorians, would also have rhymed Rome with loom and tomb, Milan with Dillon, and Calais with Alice. Again, the latter persists right up to the 1963 EPD, where it is characterized as no more than “old-fashioned”.

So what does that have to do with the Reading this morning? Well, I noticed that the reader exhibited the difficulty which many readers in church nowadays have to struggle with (though sometimes it is the hearers who struggle for reasons that should become evident): how are those Hebrew names pronounced?

There are two competing and mutually exclusive approaches. One is illustrated by a little manual I saw being sold second hand last summer: a pronouncing dictionary of OT names. In this the pronunciation principle was based on the spelling conventions of English since the great vowel shift. The other approach seems to be an awareness that these are foreign words and not English and so should perhaps be treated accordingly, so a tendency to give vowels what some might call their 'continental' values.

A quick reminder, the great vowel shift took place roughly between Chaucer's time and around Shakespeare's (though it is still going on in local dialects: eg in Newcastle the shift of 'ow' from an 'oo' sound to something that rhymes with the final vowel of Bilbao is still taking place: 'broon coo' can still be heard for 'brown cow'). Anyway this meant that long vowels tended to shift meaning that, for example, 'I' shifted from sounding like the sound in French 'vive' to what most of us say today. This was applied to biblical names like any other words in English. So the post-vowel-shift-traditional soundings would pronounce an 'a' in a stressed position as like the sound in 'hay' (Asa - 'Aysa' instead of 'Ahsah'), 'e' as 'ee' (so Eve = 'eev' rather than 'ayv'), 'i' as above (so Dinah is 'Diner' rather than as previously 'Deena') and so on.

I have noticed in various churches over the last 20 years that there is a tendency with the less well known biblical names, to give them pronunciations which sound more like they would have been pre-vowel shift. I think that this may be because we have far more people reading who have not really heard the texts said out loud very often and so haven't got a sense of the formerly standard English approach. This may be because they have come in from non-Bible-reading backgrounds or non-churchgoing backgrounds. I suspect.

So it is interesting to find a similar sort of phenomenon in the way that foreign names are handled in wider culture.

What do I advise? Well, I quite like keeping names close in pronunciation to how native speakers would say them. So I wouldn't normally anglicise someone's name beyond the minor adjustments needed to keep it within the bounds of normal English phonology. This would mean that 'Eva' from Poland should be 'Ayva' though her English namesake would be 'Eeva', for example. This is about respect and courtesy.

However, I have no problems with the biblical Hebrew names being pronounced in an approximation to the Hebrew or Greek come to that. I feel that this is appropriate.

The only difficulty comes with names that are commonly pronounced in the 'modern' English style. Perhaps Elijah needs to remain 'ill-eye-dje(r)' rather than 'eh lee ya' in order to keep his 'brand' recognition (twinkle in eye). The area of interest to watch is where the border line of judgement lies between what is presumed to be a frequently used name which needs to be pronounced in the modern English style, and what is taken to be a relatively uncommon name and suitable to remain Hebrew-y or Greek-y.

So, if asked, I usually lay out both alternatives and my perception of what people may or may not expect and tell them to take their choice. I usually point out that saying it confidently is more important that which pronunciation: most people have no idea so a confident sounding out will be acceptable and even convincing to most.

Barack Obama affirms his Christian faith

It's interesting to see that Obama has decided to be fairly explicit about owning up to a Christian faith. No doubt that will please some, perplex others and enrage others. Pleased will be those, like myself, who think that Christian faith has a somewhat 'progressive' agenda in wanting to be pro-active in helping people. Perplexed will be those who really thought he was Muslim -hopefully this may help them to reappraise the sources of their information for accuracy. Enraged will be the right who will see an obstacle to their attempted hijacking of Christian values and language to serve the agenda of Empire.#

But I'm even more interested in this:

"It was Obama's involvement as a community organiser, 'working with pastors and laypeople, trying to heal the wounds of hurting neighbourhoods', that had first led him to see himself as a Christian."

Not least because it seems to affirm a way of disciple-making that coheres with Raymond Fung's Isaiah Vision and Anne Morisy's Beyond the Good Samaritan: that as we go about trying to make a difference for Good, people want to be a part of it. That's very like calling attention to God's desire for love, peace justice which is under construction in lives near you and inviting people to join in. Ie. "Repent for the Kingdom of God is near". Yes, it is near in works of service and generous empowerment, in lives making Good flow into the bloodstream of life among those least able to grasp it from the System.

Barack Obama affirms his Christianity | World news | The Guardian

Starting to think about Lent? Go on, go on, go on, go on ...

Here are some websites which may help you to think more or offer further resources. Comments below for any further useful resources you may find. Please ...

This one gives some of the history, from a RC point of view.
http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Lent

This one gives a really helpful Lenten journey guide:
http://msainfo.org/articles/a-journey-into-wholeness-lenten-reflection-guide

Here's a few perspectives that relate to the spirituality session:
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2009/02/lent-for-justice-peace-and-integrity-of.html

And here's a guide relating to a justice and creation agenda.
www.tearfund.org/carbonfast

Love Life Live Lent:
http://www.saosilvero.com/work/lovelifelivelent3

Beware evolutionary 'just-so' stories about religious belief

The presence of a brain mechanism for something neither necessarily proves nor disproves the reality of a corresponding extra-cerebral referent: there is a double-think in some anti-theist circles which seems to be saying that if there is a disposition to believe in God then that proves God is an illusion produced by the brain. Yet if there is a disposition to imagine things, that doesn't 'prove' there is nothing really to see?
Okay that's crude, but some of what I'm seeing does seem to operate at that kind of level. More sophisticated, but no less trenchant is this article in the Guardian which says:
"...babies display basic numeracy, but this is a long way from quantum mechanics, which is hard work to grasp and counter-intuitive, but both appear to be grounded in an external reality 'outside the head'. The innate cognitive ability to count compared with quantum mechanics is as the innate childhood bias to theism is to adult theology. There is a big difference between non-reflective and reflective beliefs. The reflective ability to grapple with quantum mechanics does not thereby nullify the baby's non-reflective ability to count, any more than does an adult's reflective belief in God nullify childhood theism. And evolutionary biology will be of little help in 'explaining' human beliefs in either quantum mechanics or the finer points of theology. Evolution may have delivered tendencies to believe certain things and to disbelieve others. But that in itself does not tell us whether those beliefs are true or not."
Quite so.
Beware evolutionary 'just-so' stories about religious belief | Denis Alexander | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

"You are not stuck in traffic You are traffic."

I noted this down from a bus a few weeks back meaning to post it. Well, I finally got round to it
The reason it struck me was first the astute observation which exposes a persistent problem we have as humans -or at least the post-Enlightenment version of us: we tend to think of ourselves over-against other things. We forget that we are part of the systems we 'observe'; we objectify them and then cannot deal with the problems or issues that arise because we fail to notice that we are actually part of the problem. We are always trying to fix 'out there' -rarely 'in here'. Interestingly, Boulton's God against Religion' notes (following Karl Barth) that this kind of 'disengagement' seems to be the characteristic move, with regard to God, of the Fall.

The other reason I 'liked' the advert was that there seemed a hint of irony about it: 'you are traffic -go and be traffic somewhere else'; the phrase might actually be read to be rather more a call to get out of the traffic participation 'game' in the first place.
"You are not stuck in traffic You are traffic." Spo... on Twitpic