Where’s the Swear?

July 22, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

1.  “Asshole is a wonderful word,” said Mike Pesca in his podcast, The Gist, last Friday. His former colleagues at NPR had wanted to call someone an asshole, and even though it was for a podcast, not broadcast, and even though the person in question was a certified asshole, the NPR censor said no. Pesca disagreed.

Pesca is from Long Island and, except for his college years in Atlanta, he has spent most of his time in the Northeast. Had he hailed from Atlanta – or Denver or Houston or even San Francisco – “asshole” might not have sprung so readily to his mind as le mot juste, even to denote Donald Trump. The choice of swear words is regional.

Linguist Jack Grieve has been analyzing tweets – billions of words – and recently he posted maps showing the relative popularity of different expletives.


Every county in the Northeast tweets “asshole” at a rate at least two standard deviations above the national mean. To my knowledge, Grieve has offered no explanation for this distribution, and I don’t have much to add. I assume that as with regional accents, historical factors are more important than the literal meanings of the words. It’s not that tweeters in the Northeast are generally more willing to use foul language, nor is this about anal imagery since the Northeast looks nearly prudish compared to other regions when it comes to “shit.”



2. Less surprising are the maps of toned-down expletives. People in the heartland are just so gosh darned polite in their speech. When Donald Trump spoke at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, what got all the attention was his dissing of John McCain ( “He’s not a war hero. ... He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”)

But there was also this paragraph in the New York Times’s coverage:

Mr. Trump raised eyebrows with language rarely heard before an evangelical audience — saying “damn” and “hell” when discussing education and the economy.

“Well, I was turned off at the very start because I didn’t like his language,” Becky Kruse, of Lovilia, Iowa, said. . . .  Noting Mr. Trump’s comment about not seeking God’s forgiveness. “He sounds like he isn’t really a born-again Christian.”

Aside from the insight about Trump’s religious views, Ms. Kruse reflects the linguistic preferences of her region, where “damn” gets softened to “darn.”


Unfortunately, Grieve did not post a map for “heck.” (I remember when “damn” and “hell” were off limits on television, though a newspaper columnist, usually in the sports section, might dare to write something like “It was a helluva fight.”)

You can find maps for all your favorite words at Grieve’s Website (here), where you can also find out what words are trending (as we now say) on Twitter. (“Unbothered” is spreading from the South, and “fuckboy” is rising). Other words are on the way down (untrending?).  If you’re holding  “YOLO” futures, sell them now before it’s too late.

The Ferguson Effect and Cop-Killing – Update

July 14, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

On May 29, Heather MacDonald wrote in the Wall Street Journal (here): 

A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest . . .have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

I don’t know why MacDonald was apparently so eager primed to see an increase in cop-killing following protests and some rioting about cops killing unarmed people. In a post three days later (here), I offered some numbers showing that there was no Ferguson effect in the deaths of police officers.

Yesterday, criminologist and former cop Peter Moskos blogged (here):

July 13, 2015
Headline you won't see:

Police officer line-of-duty deaths are down 15 percent this year.  Gunfire deaths are down 38 percent.

Odd, because a lot of reporters were calling me last year when the numbers were up.

“Is it Ferguson?!” “Is it Obama?!” “Are criminals less brazen?!” “Has training gotten better?!” “Are criminals worse shots?!”

Those imagined questions aren’t so different from the questions reporters were asking about the 2014 increase. Reporters work on deadline. They want an explanation – any explanation will do – and they want it before 3 p.m. Maybe criminologists at the Manhattan Institute writing for the WSJ are under similar pressure.

Peter’s answer would, I assume, be that these are fairly small numbers, so short-run percentage increases can look misleadingly huge, and those increases can be created by a few isolated events that have nothing to do with long-term trends. As plain-spoken Peter puts it, “For the record, just like I said last year, I don't think it’s a big deal.

Microaggresions and Cultures of Social Control

July 13, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why these calls for trigger warnings? Why all this magnifying of microaggressions?


Most of the time, it’s more useful to save the “why” for last and to start with the other “reporter’s” questions – who, when, where. In a post two months ago (here), I speculated that the loudest voices making these demands are those people in categories that have gained in power but are still not dominant, notably women at elite universities.  What they’re saying in part is, “We don’t have to take this shit anymore.” Or as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning put it in a recently in The Chronicle, “offenses against historically disadvantaged social groups have become more taboo precisely because different groups are now more equal than in the past.” (The Chronicle article is a lite version of the authors’ 2014 article in Comparative Sociology, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures.” It’s nice to have one’s hunches seconded by scholars who have given the issue much more thought.)

Campbell and Manning make the context even broader. The new “plague of hypersensitivity” (as Todd Gitlin called it, here) indicates a cultural transformation – from a “culture of dignity” to a “culture of victimhood.” More specifically, the aspect of culture they are talking about is social control. How do you get other people to stop doing things you don’t want them to do – or not do them in the first place?

In a “culture of honor,” you take direct action against the offender.  Where you stand in society – the rights and privileges that others accord you – is all about personal reputation (at least for men). “One must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor.” The culture of honor arises where the state is weak or is concerned with justice only for some (the elite). So the person whose reputation and honor are at stake must rely on his own devices (devices like duelling pistols).  Or in his pursuit of personal justice, he may enlist the aid of kin or a personalized state-substitute like Don Corleone.
                                   
In more evolved societies with a more extensive state, honor gives way to “dignity.”

The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others. Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor.

The new “culture of victimhood” has a different goal – cultural change. Culture is, after all, a set of ideas that is shared, usually so widely shared as to be taken for granted. The microaggression debate is about insult, and one of the crucial cultural ideas at stake is how the insulted person should react. In the culture of honor, he must seek personal retribution. In doing so, of course, he is admitting that the insult did in fact sting. The culture of dignity also focuses on the character of offended people, but here they must pretend that the insult had no personal impact. They must maintain a Jackie-Robinson-like stoicism even in the face of gross insults and hope that others will rise to their defense. For smaller insults, say Campbell and Manning, the dignity culture “would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue,” which still keeps things at a personal level, “or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.”

In the culture of victimhood, the victim’s goal is to make the personal political.  “It’s not just about me. . . .”  Victims and their supporters are moral entrepreneurs. They want to change the norms so that insults and injustices once deemed minor are now seen as deviant. They want to  to define deviance up.  They pose with signs illustrating the remarks they find offensive in hopes that others will think so too. Some may even contrive hate-crime hoaxes – more serious versions of the genre of insult – in order to call attention to the more general problem.  In other cultures of social control, this tactic that would be useless or worse.


It’s not clear how the conflict between dignity and victimhood will develop. I would expect that those who enjoy the benefits of the status quo and none of its drawbacks will be most likely to resist change. Don Corleone and similar justice brokers probably resented the state encroaching on their deal, coming in with some depersonalized, universalistic system of laws and enforcement. So too in the current cultural conflict, people like Campbell and Manning (and me) will be more sympathetic to the culture of dignity, though perhaps not so strongly as some. Campbell and Manning quote UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, for example, who wrote “Well, I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing,” as though insulting people were a virtue to be bragged about.

Amazing

July 7, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

As we all know, President Obama, at the end of his eulogy for Rev. Pinckney, sang “Amazing Grace.” It was something of a last-minute decision.  The Times yesterday (here) referred to an account by Valerie Jarrett, family friend and White House senior advisor.

“When I get to the second part of referring to ‘Amazing Grace,’ I think I might sing,” he told them, by Ms. Jarrett’s account.

“Hmm,” Ms. Jarrett recalled responding.

Mrs. Obama was a little more pointed. “Why on earth would that fit in?” she asked.

But sing he did.

Much has been written about that speech, but what struck me were two things that few people mentioned. First, the discovery that the leader of the free world has a somewhat uncertain relationship to pitch. Maybe that’s what the First Lady had in mind (“Why on earth . . . ?”)

Many who watched him that day noted that he paused a long time before beginning to sing.

“So later I said to him, ‘Were you thinking about whether or not to sing?’” Ms. Jarrett recalled at Aspen. “He said, ‘Oh no, I knew I was going to sing. I was just trying to figure out which key to sing it.’”

It took the musicians even longer to figure out what key that was.  If you watch the video (here), you can hear that after Obama’s first few bars a capella, they try to come in with some accompaniment, and there seems to be some tacit negotiation between them and the president over whether they can pull him to E-flat, the key he seems closest to.

The other thing “Amazing Grace” reminded me of was the amazing power of the pentatonic scale. Five notes, most easily visualized as the five black keys on a piano. You could play “Amazing Grace” without using your fingers just by rolling an orange over the keys.

You could also play the melody of all these other songs. And note the variety. Some are folk songs (other Scottish and Appalachian tunes, less well known, might be included), but there are also spirituals, pop, and rock:

Amazing Grace
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Coming Through the Rye
Auld Lang Syne
A la Claire Fontaine
Wayfaring Stranger
Camptown Races (Stephen Foster)
If I Had a Hammer (Pete Seeger, Lee Hays)
Use Somebody (Kings of Leon)
4 Real (Avril Lavigne)
We Didn’t Start the Fire (Billy Joel)
My Girl (The Temptations)
Stay ft. Mikky Ekko (Rihanna)
Bad, Bad Leroy Brown (Jim Croce)

I’m sure there are many others.*

Watch Bobby McFerrin lead an audience in the pentatonic scale completely impromptu. He gives no direct instructions, and yet the audience intuitively gets it. So do McFerrin’s audiences all over the world. As he says, “The pentatonic scale for some reason . . . .”




I nearly forgot – one other pentatonic song: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

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* Several songs are pentatonic except for the bridge, i.e., for 24 out of 32 bars – the theme song from “All in the Family,” for example,which adds one more tone, or “Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Louise”. I have omitted them.