Interrogatively Declarative

This title references the old grammar, the grammar that arose before a few French intellectuals (Derrida, Foucault, et al) advised us that grammar practices are mostly arbitrary and don't matter because what the speaker/writer is articulating is basically and mostly up for grabs anyway.  And this will not be a spleen venting about how accurate and acceptable punctuation and spelling usage matter because they have to do with the acknowledged acceptance of their semiology within any particular English speaking culture.  In any case, this has more to do with oral communication than written.  And so to the point.

Traditional grammar asserts that English sentences express three fundamental attitudes:  declarative,  imperative and interrogative.  (Some of you older than 50 will be nodding at this point.)  The declarative sentence expresses a thought with no particular intent other than that implied through its choice of words.  In oral verbal communication, the speaker generally utters this with no special inflection (not including radio and TV announcers who spin simple thoughts with great drama).  Such a thought might be:  "The package will be in the foyer."

The imperative or command form expresses urgency or necessity and generally omits the subject of the verb.  The end punctuation can be a period or an exclamation point, depending on the context of the  urgency or necessity.  Such a thought will usually be expressed with an increase in volume and a precise articulation of each word (or in some cases each syllable).  Such a thought might be:  "Get the package in the foyer."

And then we have the interrogative, the form used to ask a question.  The sentence structure is rearranged so that the subject is placed in the middle (usually) of the verb.  The intent, both in structure and in tone and inflection, indicate a request for something, commonly a bit of information.  The important thing to note is that the final word is vocalized with an upward tilt to the voice, signifying the interrogative.  Such a thought might be:  "Did you see the package in the foyer?"  Now, when you read that, you could "hear" the upward tilt of the vocalization.  That is emphasized with the punctuation mark.  Even without the punctuation mark one would "hear" that.

OK. Now to the point of all this.  Somewhere within the evolution of American English speakers a quaint conversion began to emerge.  I'm calling it the interrogatively declarative.  This is the vocalized expression of a declarative construction that ends with an interrogative inflection.  Such a thought looks like this in print:  "The package will be in the foyer?  I'm not actually sure?"  I'm either too lazy or insufficiently provoked to delve into how and why this has occurred (or both), but I have some ideas about it.

I first noticed it mostly among young female speakers (males seem recently to have adopted it, but mostly, and interestingly, only when speaking with females).  This led me to a combination of psychological and social speculations.  Perhaps the speakers are uncertain of the ability of their audience to comprehend their meaning in the declarative and so inflect the declarative interrogatively to be asking "Do you understand?"  Or perhaps the speakers are uncertain of their ability to communicate with this audience and are inflecting the declarative by asking "Do you understand me?"

I would be shocked if some feminist linguists had not combed through this phenomenon.  Such a theory might involve a survey of the psychological forces behind phallo-centric language structures and/or the implicit uncertainty some females have regarding their stature in certain social contexts (on the job, at school, etc.).  I don't know the reason.  But I do know the phenomenon exists.  In fact, I would go so far as to say it is generational.  It doesn't seem to exist among females 40 years old and older.   In addition, as a male, I react to it with a sense that the speaker (male or female, by the way) lacks a certain degree of self-confidence that he or she might not otherwise be expressing.  Of course, that's only my reaction.

So much is revealed about our unconscious selves in how we present our thoughts to others.  You know, like in blog posts.

Living An Orwellian America

This week is becoming a mashup of fears, finger-pointing, authoritarian blather and shrugs.  Consider some relevant quotations while you live in such a mashup.

First, some words from the guy who triggered all this, Edward Snowden:
"living unfreely but comfortably"
"an architecture of oppression...which will not be constrained but will continue to grow."
"the greatest fear is that nothing will change"
[from his Guardian video interview]

Second, some person-on-the street reponses:
• "I don't mean to be cynical, but this is nothing new...If people think the government hasn't been monitoring whatever they want, whenever they want to, they are surely mistaken."
• "It doesn't bother me because the government is going to do what they're going to do regardless of what anyone thinks...There's nothing we can do about it."
• "Anything and everything you say, they could be privy—that's what I assume...If you're dumb enough to put this online, then it's your stupidity."
• "Personally, I have nothing to hide, so it's not really affecting me."
(from the New York Times, p. A12, 6/8/13)

Third, some examples of prescience regarding our current experience, from both Orwell and Huxley via Neil Postman (from Amusing Ourselves to Death)

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”

Snowden's first comment indicates to me that we are living in a state of willful denial.  The cause of such denial probably rests somewhere in the attitude expressed by the person who said, "I don't mean to be cynical" and then went on to express bathetic cynicism.  Most of the public statements indicate a kind of despairing shrug, similar to the famous line in Waiting For Godot "Nothing to be done."  And Postman contends that the exponential expansion of our distractions assures our willful denial.

One of the things that jumps out at me is the idea of trust and the extraordinary level of alienation expressed by these people.  So far people have not been asking themselves the question that led Snowden to do what he did:  What does a citizen do when he or she no longer trusts his or her government?  How does one react when evidence builds that one's government doesn't trust one?  Trust is the profound linchpin of representative democracy.  Without it, one lives in a sham of governance, the very thing that both Orwell and Huxley envisioned.

I started thinking about what my father (a mechanical engineer) explained to me was the function of a machine's governor.  He said it was to make sure the machine ran evenly and did not run out of control and ultimately self-destruct.  Government and governance come from that same root.  The purpose of government is to ensure uniform stability and sustainability.  When it doesn't do that, the society begins to pull apart centrifugally, atomizing its citizenry into self-absorbing parts and losing its sense of general purpose.  Not only does its center not hold, but its center also no longer has relevance.  Sound familiar?

Nations don't always fail in cataclysms.  Sometimes they simply dissipate, and by the time the dissipation has concluded, the people, the demos wonder what happened.  Their willful denial has become a whimpering sigh.

Training And Education

Having an education is one thing, being educated is another — Lee Kuan Yew

On May 20th I proudly attended my son's PhD hooding [an odd combination of words signifying a very auspicious moment].  The ceremony was quite large and quite long [the PhD hoods were preceded by a multitude of MA and MS hoods].  But all of it was worth being there for Michael Laver's convocation speech.  It was about my favorite subject: The difference between training and educating.  Dean Laver has many titles and has worked at virtually every level of academe, but that day he spoke plain and honestly about most peoples' misunderstanding of what learning is all about and about how training is only the beginning of learning or education.

On this blog I've often lamented how all the current so-called education "reformers" think doing education is a quick fix proposition, very similar to finding the right combination of material and human resources to make a widget.  The first thing that Dean Laver pointed out was that when people think of education in these terms, they are actually thinking about training.  

Going through the rudiments of solving mathematical problems, discovering how to combine elements of language to form clear and precise communication, understanding the planet we live on and the people who inhabit it, and, especially, understanding the levels of governance that determine the course of how we live—these are the tools and skills that constitute the training of the individual in our culture.  They do not, in and of themselves, constitute being an educated person.  Incidentally, none of these skills require the interference of standardized testing.  The skill levels can be evaluated locally with professional guidance among peers orally and in writing.

The phrase "an educated person" gets tossed about blithely as though we all agree on its meaning.  For me, someone in the lifelong process of being educated:

• uses training as the tool to solve problems.

• has the capacity and comfort to confront the unfamiliar and see in it particular elements of familiarity that can be connected to solve a problem...i.e., connect the dots.

• continually learns from the experience of problem solving, understands that training is a means not an end, that the phrase "Race To The Top" is absurd on its face, because there is no top in education.

• sees the entire world of ideas as challenges that can provide greater awareness of being human.

The following provides an example from my personal experience of what I mean:
In 1997 during my time in the communication department, I met a person from a small college in Edinburgh, Scotland, a communication instructor, who shared my interest in issues involved in international communication.  The students of both colleges' had similar demographics, middle and working class, having to work part time to make ends meet, and the curricula of each communication department offered very similar training.  The result of our discussions resulted in what we called The Cohort Program in International Communication, involving about 30 students.

Our program sought to discover if students from two different cultures (the Scotland group actually had other nationalities involved), being tasked with the problem of putting together a presentation promoting the city of Edinburgh, could succeed in a professional manner.  The two groups were merged and then broken into four smaller groups, consisting of students from both schools.  My colleague and I placed students primarily in terms of their various communication skills.  The students had one week to familiarize themselves with each other and with the city of Edinburgh.  Week two would involve intensive days (and nights) putting together their presentations and would culminate in a formal presentation to faculty representatives from the host college on the last day.

This probably seems like an experiment in Babel.  And to say that there were institutional, cultural, personal and pedagogical problems would be putting it mildly.  Nevertheless, and this is very important, because the students shared fundamental skills and were left pretty much on their own (faculty intervened only to answer logistical or technological questions), they were able to discover common ground and keep their eye on resolving problems as the clock ticked toward presentation day.  Both host students and visiting students learned enormous amounts about their respective cultures, the differences in their training and especially their skills as trained communicators.  The differences, by the way, were smoothly resolved by the knowing group teaching the details to the unknowing group.

The quality of the presentations was uneven, and some of the students felt chagrined that they hadn't done as well as they knew they could had they had more time, better equipment, etc.  At that point, I pulled my students aside and explained to them that they had just accomplished something that no one in the history of their school had ever even attempted.  And I reminded them of specific things they had learned about their capacities to produce that they never knew they could do.  In short, I explained to them that they had just gone through an exhausting education.

It was accomplished and it can continue to be accomplished.

Cautionary Words to Live By

I came across these word as I began to read an article about the writer Colum McCann.  They seem to me the best advice anyone could give anyone else.

"What is the source of our first suffering?  It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.  It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us."

I have not read anything by Colum McCann.  But I will very soon.

The Wisdom of J. William Fulbright

[The following excerpts from The Arrogance of Power are even  more critical today than when they were first published,  I've posted a few of these on this blog in the past.]

"The question, it should be emphasized, is not whether it is possible to engage in traditional power politics abroad and at the same time to perfect democracy at home, but whether it is possible for us Americans, without particular history and national character, to combine morally incompatible roles.

"They [statistics] do not show how a Congress burdened with war costs and war measures, with emergency briefings and an endless series of dramatic appeals, with anxious constituents and a mounting anxiety of their own, can tend to the workaday business of studying social problems and legislating programs to meet them. Nor do the statistics tell how an anxious and puzzled people, bombarded by press and television with the bad news of American deaths…, the "good news" of enemy deaths-and with vividly horrifying pictures to illustrate them-can be expected to support neighborhood antipoverty projects and national programs for urban renewal, employment and education.

"When he visited America a hundred years ago, Thomas Huxley wrote: "I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?"

"They understand, as our policy makers do not, that when American soldiers are sent, in the name of freedom, to sustain corrupt dictators in a civil war, that when the CIA subverts student organizations to engage in propaganda activities abroad, or when the Export-Import Bank is used by the Pentagon to finance secret arms sales abroad, damage-perhaps irreparable damage-is being done to the very values that are meant to be defended. The critics understand, as our policy makers do not, that, through the undemocratic expedients we have adopted for the defense of American democracy, we are weakening it to a degree that is beyond the resources of our bitterest enemies.

"An unnecessary and immoral war deserves in its own right to be liquidated; when its effect in addition is the aggravation of grave problems and the corrosion of values in our own society, its liquidation under terms of reasonable and honorable compromise is doubly imperative. Our country is being weakened by a grotesque inversion of priorities, the effects of which are becoming clear to more and more Americans-in the Congress, in the press and in the country at large.

On Unilateralism and support from traditional allies:

    The United States is willing to defy allied opinion because of... an excess of pride born of power. Power has a way of undermining judgment, of planting delusions of grandeur in the minds of otherwise sensible people and otherwise sensible nations. As I have said earlier, the idea of being responsible for the whole world seems to have dazzled us, giving rise to what I call the arrogance of power, or what the French, perhaps more aptly, call le vertige de puissance, by which they mean a kind of dizziness or giddiness inspired by the possession of great power. If then, as I suspect, there is a relationship between the self-absorption of some of our allies and the American military involvement in Vietnam, it may have more to do with American vanity than with our friends' complacency.

If America has a service to perform in the world—and I believe it has—it is in large part the service of its own example. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest. This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said! "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." . . .

Most of all, we have the opportunity to serve as an example o f democracy to the world by the way in which we run our own society; America, in the words of John Quincy Adams, should be "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all" but "the champion and vindicator only of her own." . . .If we can bring ourselves so to act, we will have overcome the dangers of the arrogance of power. It will involve, no doubt, the loss of certain glories, but that seems a price worth paying for the probable rewards, which are the happiness of America and the peace of the world.

On U.S. Foreign Policy: "Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily - a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But ...when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism."

On War Fever: "Past experience provides little basis for confidence that reason can prevail in an atmosphere of mounting war fever. In a contest between a hawk and dove the hawk has a great advantage, not because it is a better bird but because it is a bigger bird with lethal talons and a highly developed will to use them."

On the Arrogance of Power: "[P]ower tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations - to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work."

"The more I puzzle over the great wars of history, the more I am inclined to the view that the causes attributed to them - territory, markets, resources, the defense or perpetuation of great principles - were not the root causes at all but rather explanations or excuses for certain unfathomable drives of human nature. For lack of a clear and precise understanding of exactly what these motives are, I refer to them as the 'arrogance of power' - as a psychological need that nations seem to have in order to prove that they are bigger, better, or stronger than other nations. Implicit in this drive is the assumption, even on the part of normally peaceful nations, that force is the ultimate proof of superiority - that when a nation shows that it has the stronger army, it is also proving that it has better people, better institutions, better principles, and, in general, a better civilization."

"[The arrogance of power is defined as] the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission. The dilemmas involved are pre-eminently American dilemmas, not because America has weaknesses that others do not have but because America is powerful as no nation has ever been before, and the discrepancy between her power and the power of others appears to be increasing."

On Imperial Temptations: "Despite its dangerous and unproductive consequences, the idea of being responsible for the whole world seems to be flattering to Americans and I am afraid it is turning our heads, just as the sense of universal responsibility turned the heads of ancient Romans and nineteenth-century British."

"It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission. When a nation is very powerful but lacking self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner dangerous to itself and to others. Feeling the need to prove what is obvious to everyone else, it begins to confuse great power with unlimited power and great responsibility with total responsibility: it can admit of no error; it must win every argument, no matter how trivial. For lack of an appreciation of how truly powerful it is, the nation begins to lose wisdom and perspective and, with them, the strength and understanding that it takes to be magnanimous to smaller and weaker nations.

"Gradually but unmistakably America is showing signs of that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened, and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing, we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world. The measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent."

"If the war goes on and expands, if that fatal process continues to accelerate until America becomes what she is not now and never has been, a seeker after unlimited power and empire, then Vietnam will have had a mighty and tragic fallout indeed."

On the Dangers of Empire: "Having done so much and succeeded so well, America is now at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it. Other great nations, reaching this critical juncture, have aspired to too much, and by overextension of effort have declined and then fallen.

"Lacking an appreciation of the dimensions of our own power, we fail to understand our enormous and disruptive impact on the world; we fail to understand that no matter how good our intentions - and they are, in most cases, decent enough - other nations are alarmed by the very existence of such great power, which, whatever its benevolence, cannot help but remind them of their own helplessness before it."

On Transforming Other Nations: "We all like telling people what to do, which is perfectly all right except that most people do not like being told what to do."

"Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways of life have crumbled under the fatal impact of American wealth and power but they have not been replaced by new institutions and new ways of life, nor has their breakdown ushered in an era of democracy and development."

"Bringing power without understanding, Americans as well as Europeans have had a devastating effect in less advanced areas of the world; without knowing they were doing it, they have shattered traditional societies, disrupted fragile economies and undermined peoples' self-confidence by the invidious example of their own power and efficiency. They have done this in many instances simply by being big and strong, by giving good advice, by intruding on people who have not wanted them but could not resist them."

"What I do question is the ability of the United States or any other Western nation to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life."

Change

My regular visitors know that I'm a bit obsessive about language uses and abuses.  My family has arrived at the place where they wait patiently until my language harangue has subsided, and then they introduce another topic.  But for us, can we agree that we use language in order to communicate thoughts to our audiences as precisely as we can, and don't rely on their "knowing what I mean"?

Actually, I've come to be a somewhat tolerant of some of the more subtle offenses.  For example, the word "fun" has been so contorted syntactically that I've decided no one has time for me to explain the problem with their contortions.  I have decided that the construction "It was so fun." is not worth my grappling with grammatical principles which have not been taught for years.  That is, the construction's gaps are more or less understood (see above on precise communication).  Just recently, however, I heard on the radio an interviewee reply, "It was pretty fun."  My first thought: Can we speak of ugly fun?  And if we can, what unnecessary philological issues might emerge?  Too much trouble, I think.  The better course would be to recast the thought.

And so I come to the word "change", which I encountered in a Times article about what's going on with the economy of Europe, especially regarding its role in tax evasion.  But more on that later.  For now, consider how this simple word teases us.  For example, "Hey man, got any spare change?" communicates a precise noun meaning.  But what happens when the philosophers get tangled in its usage for alteration?

So efforts to be brief and simple in language can lead to otherworldly constructs that go beyond mere malapropisms.  The thought which grew to enormous popularity in the 1950s as the anthem of the existentialists, "plus ça change, plus c’est la même,"says that the modern concept that change elicits progress is delusional.  That contradicts the solidly American concept that the only thing constant is change.

And now let's look at that story about European tax havens for bloated U.S. corporations.  Well, my point is not about that exactly.  My point is about the comment by Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg.  Regarding—I think—the inevitability of change, he said, "Not everything has changed, but lots of things have changed. Other changes are necessary, or everything will change.”  Similar to Donald Rumsfeld's contortions in "We don't know what we don't know and we don't know that we don't know that", this is the kind of phrasing that makes us dog-like cock our heads in wonder.  

By the way, do you recall Barack Obama's famous utterance in 2008?  He proclaimed, "Change is coming to America!"  So how's that working out, Mr. Prez?

When They Don't Fit The Standard

Those of us familiar with the nefarious nature of education leadership, especially as it's practiced by the champions of education "reform"— the Rhees, the Vallases, the Duncans, the Boombergs, all the ilk—are not surprised when we learn what happens to the little kids who don't fit the standardized mold. They use the simple solution: discard them.

We used to think that segregation was not a healthy way for kids to learn how to learn and to get used to living in a pluralistic society.  But that's all changed, especially now that the angels of "reform" have descended on the despairing schools in urban districts.  They have a better idea.  They guarantee better performance of the very few by excluding the different and the less conforming from their charter schools.  Imagine an educational process that uses the words "standard" and "common" as concepts of high achievement.  And in order to cement these into the goals of the "system," remove those elements that might inspire distinction (art, music, etc.).  Take it from one who has seen it many times:  You never know what unique something will be the trigger to initiate learning in someone who is different or less conforming.  But I can tell you that "standard" and  "common" won't do it.

And here's the kicker.  The despairing parents, guardians and extended family members, many of whom are new to our culture and language willingly accept the pitchman's promises,  such things as textbooks for all, computers, all kinds of techy gewgaws, and they assume that this is all cutting edge.  What the pitchman doesn't tell them is that all this stuff comes with contract strings connected to huge corporations.  And the money comes from the state taxes these same despairing people pay each time they buy gas or go to a movie or simply buy anything.  What appears to be a blessing from the haves (Gates, Walton, Broad, etc.) is really a ploy to sap more energy and necessities from the cities that need more than the promise of winning The Race To The Top.

When I first confronted Paul Vallas and his troupe at a board of education meeting, I said they were launching a campaign to make  money off the backs of the school kids in the city of Bridgeport.  With his smarmy smile, he responded (not directly to me) that anyone who thinks you can make money in education doesn't know what he's talking about.  Well, he (making close to a quarter of a million) seems to belie his own statement, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands being paid to his "consultant team."  

This is all bad enough and speaks volumes about the corruption in American education"reform" from DC to your local urban area.  But when they take it out on the little kids, the "behavior problems" and learning disabled, I think they've finally exposed their level of indecency.  To purge the school of 6 year olds in order to keep up a pretense, a show school, is to go truly beyond the pale.