Le Comité de salut public, then and now

During the French Revolution, it was the Comité de salut public that administered La Terreur, to the happy satisfaction of les tricoteuses.  Chez l’Etat islamique, a similar service is provided by the Hisbah (حسبة).  Chez nous, analogous informal entities have developed spores.

Thus anyone who, within CONUS today, would make so bold as to utter… anything at all, must reckon with reconnaissance by an army of thin-skinned, gimlet-eyed, flinty-spirited Robespierres, tirelesssly scanning all human output both visual and verbal, written or oral, for any hint -- any whiff -- any least scintilla  of aught that might possibly be construed (if you twiddle your tunings of reception just so, and set your head at an angle) as distaff-distancing, or melanistically invidious, non-recevable par la pensée unique.

And what of our past?  This American sketch from the last century but one  provides an example, with an apparent Erstbeleg to boot:

As we swept from the shore, I cast back a wistful eye upon the moss-grow roofs and ancient elms of the village, and prayed that the inhabitants might long retain their happy ignorance, their absence of all enterprise and improvement, their respect for the fiddle, and their contempt for the almighty dollar.

-- Washington Irving, “A Sketch from a Steamboat” (1837)

The now-banal epithet “almighty dollar” has passed into cliché, and would in no quarter raise an objection or an eyebrow.  But the unsuspecting author (and wordsmith) was apparently reviled, by the speech-police of his day;  and when the piece was later collected, he defended himself in a footnote:

This phrase, used for the first time in this sketch, has since passed into current circulation, and by some has been questioned for savoring of irreverence.   The author, therefore, owes it to his orthodoxy  to declare that no irreverence was intended, even to the dollar iself, which he is aware is daily becoming more and more an object of worship. -- W.I.

Thumbnails of mathematical terms

The following essay treats of the art of mathematical definition:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-is-mathematics-expanded.html

Here are some recent additions:

Ergodicity means, roughly, that … very long sample paths … end up resembling each other.

-- Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004), p. 59

Ergodicity, … that time will eliminate the annoying effects of randomness.

-- Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004), p. 144

Holonomy is a measure of how tangent vectors on a particular surface  get twisted up as you attempt to parallel-transport them on a loop.

-- Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. 129

The Lie Bracket of X and Y … informally … represents the net direction of motion if one first moves an infinitesimal amount in the X direction, then in the Y direction, then back in the XS direction and back in the Y direction, in that order.

-- Mark Ronan, “Lie Theory”, in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 231

Logic

… [C. S.] Pierce’s last papers on logic, a subject which he defined rather surprisingly as ‘the stable establishment of beliefs’.

-- I. Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870 - 1940 (2000), p. 174

Logic is the infancy of mathematics, or conversely, mathematics is the maturity of logic.

-- Bertrand Russell, 1957, quoted in I. Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870 - 1940 (2000), p. 315

Spinors are analogues of tangent vectors.

-- Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. 131

Adventures in Juvenile Lexicography

Katherine Nelson, in Keith Nelson, ed., Children’s Language (1978), p. 66,  offered the following glimpse into the orismological instincts of budding lexicographers.  Asked a “What is it?” question about the word tiger (“a large, fierce, flesh-eating animal (Panthera tigris)…” to you and me), the tots responded:

(1) “at the zoo”
(2) “animal”

(3) “it’s like a lion:

(4) “lives in the jungle and runs a lot”

(5) “animal with stripes and it eats a lot of things”

(6) “to run”

(7) “someone growls”

(8) “hair on its head”

I then polled our son (aet. su. 4 years,  3 months), who offered this:

   “It’s something that is big, and it eats people, and it runs around in the jungle.”

His assessment of her other examples:

apple: “it’s juicy; it’s big; it’s round”

car:  “Something that’s big, and not so tall -- it’s this tall [shows with his arms];  it can kill someone that stays in front of it, if it’s moving.”

coat: “It’s something that keeps you warm, is big and sort of smooth, and has little furry stuff”  [Note:  Our family was at that time facing an Edmonton winter]

bed:  “It has legs, or doesn’t, and it has a pillow, and it stands up on its posts”.
[Note: That first idea in the definiens, at once oddly precise and maddeningly vague, probably meant:  “Prototypically a bed has legs (the ones you see in books), but ours doesn’t” -- the family, indeed, then in exile and furniture-poor, slept on a mattress on the floor.]

Striking  is this repeated note of ‘big’, present in every definition except the last:  extending even to the humble apple -- even a baby is bigger than an apple, let alone a robust four-year-old.   But in light of the lad’s subsequent specialization in differential geometry, an explanatory hypothesis presents itself.  What may well have struck him was the apple’s unabashed convexity -- round, not like a thin dime, but round all around:  having everywhere positive and (roughly) constant Riemannian curvature, as he would no doubt rephrase the definition upon more mature reflection.  Such an apperception of an apple was indeed the Eureka moment of the founder of differential geometry, Carl Friedrich Gauss, as depicted in the movie “Die Vermessung der Welt”.

Word of the Day: ”polygynopaedium”

In the initial, throat-clearing run-up to his massive 1975 masterwork, Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, in the section “The Kinds and Degrees of Sociality”, the author mentions W.M. Wheeler’s 1930 stab at classification, consisting of five types, rather dismissively, by contrast with the earlier (1918) system of Deegener, “who paid close attention to the fine details”, with 40 categories;  but then adds a linguistic or rather lexicographic caveat:

Unfortunately, Deegener felt compelled to provide a full terminology for his classification.  One form of concunnubium, he noted, is the amphoterosynhesmia, a swarm of both sexes  gathered for reproductive purposes … or the polygynopaedium,  an association of mother and daughters  each of which is reproducing parthenogenetically.

-- op. cit., p. 16)

Note:  However sesquipedalian those coinages may be, they are at least more self-explanatory [provided you are familiar with Greek and Latin roots] than e.g “Class II(a) and Class IV(b)”.  They are no more inherently outlandish than  deoxyribonucleic acid; successful such mouthfuls live on as acronyms, like DNA.

In any case, these categories are not nearly as obscure as their polysyllabicity might suggest -- both being exemplified  even within human societies, without so much as a nod  to baboon troops or termite hives.    An amphoterosynhesmia (I was personally familiar with several of these, in and around Berkeley) was precisely a hippie crash pad (the attention being however directed to reproductive preliminaries, rather than actually getting knocked up) or a Weatherman collective  during their period of obligate panmixia (for which see Susan Stern’s moving memoir).  And a polygynopaedium is the stated aim of The Rodwoman ©  and her coven of androphobic maenads.

Note:  Wilson himself seldom shies at the lexical rara avis or hapax legomenon.  A few pages after clucking his tongue at polygynopaedium, he writes of efforts “to define a niche as a Hutchinsonian hyperspace”  -- neither of those terms having been defined.  Your lexicographer might find that definition  a case of obscurum per obscurius.

Like a duck in thunder (II)

Recently I had occasion to seek the origin and meaning of the phrase (in full) “like a dying duck in a thunderstorm”.   If you google that phrase, you’ll find plenty -- mostly pages and pages of ill-informed and inconclusive forum-discussion;  even if an authoritative answer lies buried there somewhere, it is not worth one’s while to sift through the debris.

So here is the entry from a standard reference-work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge (first edition 1937; many subsequent updates), in its entirety:

To have a ludicrously forlorn, hopeless, and helpless appearance :  coll., orig. rural:  from ca. 1850 (Ware).

Now, as it happens, we can antedate that date;  and this, in a lexicographically most interesting way:  not with a simple antecedent Erstbeleg, but something more powerful though more roundabout.

~

Back when I was an editor at Merriam-Webster dictionaries, I had full responsibility for the two technical disciplines of Etymology and of Pronunciation, but none at all for the company’s meat and drink, which was defining;  let alone for deciding which new words were to be entered in the flagship Collegiate ™ dictionary, which was lightly revised each year, and wholly reedited each decade.  That privilege fell to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Mish -- an intelligent and well-educated man, and not without a certain wry humor;  but as regards the humors, he rather took after his atrabilious and phlegmatic predecessor, Doctor Johnson, whose sour frowning portrait hung over his desk, exactly matching the successor’s habitual mood.  I used to despair at the chef-rédacteur’s obstinate sluggishness against admitting culturally key new words -- they’d make it in eventually, but only after the kairos had long passed -- and occasionally would champion some one particular word for inclusion, loading the files with attestations for the definer to refer to next time around.

One such, at the height of Gorbachev, was glasnost.   Many were the citations I supplied, to no avail.  However (one might argue) you can always pile up stats for some particular term, no matter how specialized, by drawing from specialized sources:  which would prove nothing.  The Collegiate is not for the specialist, but for the general educated public;  and glasnost is, after all, in origin  Russian:  the Collegiate is quite rightly chary of letting in too many foreign terms (like Erstbeleg -- common in the lexicographic literature, but unknown outside it).  So, how to show that the word had passed into English common currency?

In support of the suggestion that glasnost be included, I submitted slips attesting such derivata as glasnostic, with fully English morphology (and phonology:  the stress shifts to another vowel, which additionally is detensed).  Now, that was a nonce form, unworthy of inclusion on its own;  but it did witness the fact that, by then, glasnost had already passed into the everyday Wortschatz of American English, for a confection like “glasnostic” presupposes the antecedent currency of the base.

~

And so, back to our duck.

Consider the following passage from Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit:

‘What,’ he asked of Mr Pecksniff, happening to catch his eye in its descent;  for until now  it had been piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm …

Now,  this circumlocuitous, scarcely lapidary, obscure expression, is (as the annotator notes, in the Penguin edition) nothing more nor less than a winking allusion to the set expression (alliterative, assonant, and striking in its imagery) a dying duck in a thunderstorm.  Moreover, the allusion could not possibly work unless that expression were antecedently quite familiar to the reader, since -- much more than the morphological presupposition of glasnost by glasnostic-- there is a significant gap (lexical, though not semantic) between the original and the pastiche.   The case is often to be met with in literature -- more usually in a droll setting, as here, though we do find  “like the cat in the adage” in MacBeth, an allusion  (one requiring rather a lot of the groundlings, one should have thought) to the Latin catus amat piscis, sed non vult tingere plantas (a cat likes fish, but doesn’t like to get its paws wet).

The key point here is that the first half of Martin Chuzzlewit  (where our passage appears) was initially serialized  in 1843,  thus antedating the Ware/Partridge date.  And if the proverb had occurred literatim, it would antedate matters no further.  But as it stands, we can deduce that the adage was already in wide circulation among Dickens’ anticipated readership, well before 1843:  else he could not have counted on them to get the reference:  and without that, the passage falls flat.

[Psychostylistic footnote]  It is the very paradoxical absurdity of the original adage, that tempts Dickens to toy with it.  For after all, ducks do just fine in thunderstorms, much better than do squirrels (or the proverbial “drowned rat”) -- rain being, as the expression has it, “nice weather for ducks”.   In just such a fashion does Wodehouse (through his character Bertie Wooster) play, in novel after novel, with the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that ends “like quills upon the fretful porpentine”.  Or, at a humbler level, such dimestore wit as hasta la pasta (for hasta la vista).

(For our own discourse upon said porpentine, click here.)

For final proof, if proof be needed, this witness from Washington Irving’s fine finger-exercise of a story of 1824, “The Stout Gentleman”:

Rain pattered against the casements.  … There were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable cristfallen cock … Everything was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

-- Washington Irving, from Tales of a Traveller

.

Metrization, Mensuration, Measurement

We earlier treated the matter of a metric on a topological space, in a series of essays beginning here:

The Urysohn Metrization Theorem:  for real this time

Now, as lagniappe, we offer a pair of Metrization Epigrams, which the budding mathematician, stuck for an opener with that leotard-clad vision at the espresso bar, can use for a pick-up line:

 A discrete space is like the autistic atomism of the Tractatus, or Leibnizian monads.

An indiscrete space is (as one writer charmingly put it), “really quite crowded:  each point is an accumulation point of every other set.”  (One pictures the Jellyby children in Bleak House, ever tripping over one another’s legs.)

(Believe me, chicks go wild over such things.  Or at least, if you are like most gangly Adam's-apple-challenged graduate-students in math, it’s your last best shot.)

~

It is by no means only topological spaces that one might wish to subject to a metric: all kinds of things, really:    Which species lie how close to which others (and different metrics -- phenotypic, cladistic, etc. -- yield different results);  which languages are neighbors in linguistic space (again there is a phenotypic/cladistic distinction:  descent vs. Sprachbund); which people have a natural affinity with which other (seating-plans at dinner-parties; blind dates; etc.)  And more generally, what is the curvature tensor of the noösphere?

As (from a philosopher of science):

One sometimes wants to say that a theory has much more testable content than some other statement:  for instance, the Newtonian theory has much more testable content than ‘The moon orbits the earth’.  But our apparatus, as it stands, does not entitle us to say this.  We have no metric for testable content.

--John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p.  185

Compare Keynes’ critique of relative subjective probabilities.

Here a noted philologian on the notion as applied to languages:

Was nun die Sache selbst anlangt, so meine ich  daß immer Sprache und Sprache, mögen sie auch noch so weit auseinander liegen, in wissenschaftlichem Sinn  enger zusammengehören  als Sprache und Literature, seien es auch die  desselben Volkes.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, “Über die Lautgesetze”  (1885), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 85

And here, indeed, he polemicizes against the nominalist treatment or ‘indiscrete toplogy” of diachronic linguistics:

Ist es denn nun nicht an sich ganz gleichgültig, ob rom. andare von adnare oder addare oder ambulare oder einem keltischen Verbalstamm herkommt;  ob in diesem Dialecte  l zu r  und in jenem  r zu l  wird usw.?   Welchen Sinn haben alle die Tausende etymologischer und morphologischer Korrespondenzen, die Tausende von Lautgesetzen, solange sie isoliert bleiben, solange sie nicht in höhere Ordnungen aufgelöst werden?

-- Hugo Schuchardt, “Über die Lautgesetze”  (1885), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 84

~

This metaphor of ‘metrization’, outside the exact sciences, is very loose, as it is not strictly needed -- for taxonomic purposes, a more approximate neighborhood-system will suffice (a “Uniformity”) so to speak -- and still less is to be obtained.

As, a pair of British linguists comments:

One recent attempt by French researchers  has given us the term dialectometry, which describes a formula for indexing the dialect ‘distance’ of any two speakers in a survey.  So far, the utility of the index has not been demonstrated.

--J.K. Chambers & Peter Trudgill, Dialectology (1980), p. 112

This, in the synchronic arena, is reminiscent of the glottochronology of Morris Swadesh, who attempted a sort of carbon-dating of linguistic evolution, based on an assumed universal rate of lexical decay, in the absence of direct evidence.

[Update 17 January 2016]  Another cautionary tale about the fetishization of metrics:

Two of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/how-measurement-fails-doctors-and-teachers.html?ref=international

Philologisches:

Whether, in that opening paragraph, the author wrote “metrics and measurements” intending to refer to two distinct though related concepts, or whether it was just an idle bit of synonymic accumulation like “bequeath and bestow” for those who might be unfamiliar with the somewhat technical word metric, is there unclear.  But it does raise a linguistic point.

The word metric, and its close kin meter, metrical, metrization, derive from Greek.

Mensuration and commensurable  go back to Latin mensura.

Measure comes ultimately from that Latin word as well, but via the phonetics of medieval French.

The same Indo-European root  is said to lie at the base of all of them.

English, an etymological patchwork, has some tendency to layer its vocabulary by origin, Greek roots being reserved for the most technical, followed by Latin,  with the Saxon vocabulary as jack of all work.  In this, it contrasts with German:  to Graeco-English oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen  correspond homely-sounding Germanic compounds Sauerstoff (‘sour-stuff’), Wasserstoff, Stickstoff.   And Freud’s German originals for the English ego and id, were nothing but nominalizations of the ordinary pronouns, das Ich & das Es.

Roughly such tiering is at work in our Wortfeld of ‘measure’. 

Measure sounds reasonably English (though partly just because it chimes with pleasure and leisure, which are likewise French words in disguise), and is in everyday use for all purposes (though it also has technical specializations, as in mathematical measure theory).

Latinate mensuration (little used) is scarcely more than a stuffy synonym for ‘measuring’;  commensurate has everyday though businesslike uses (“a salary commensurate with the job responsibilities”); while commensurable is mostly technical, whether in its mathematical sense, or its more recent philosophic sense (“commensurable discourses”).

Metric is kind of a green-eyeshade/clipboard sort of word at best.  It becomes fully technical in mathematical uses like metric space and semi-metric,  finally soaring off into the intellectual empyrean with metrizable.

~

Still wearing our lexicographer’s hat, here is an attestation for a word with which I had previously been unfamiliar, used by a philosopher of science.  After a rather confusing Gedankenexperiment judging the verifiability of a physical geometric hypothesis, involving all sorts of skulduggery with measuring rods, and “tampering with the semantic anchorage of the word congruent”  (that’ll get you two weeks in the clinky  without the option), and in which Albert Einstein (from beyond the grave) plays a role like that of Fantomas, battling the equally post-mortem shade of Pierre Duhem,  our professor writes:

The required resort to the introduction of a spatial dependence of the thermal coefficients  might well not be open to Einstein.  Hence, in order to retain Euclideanism, it would then be necessary to remetrize the space.  ….  Einstein’s geometric articulation of that thesis  does not leave room for saving it by resorting to a remetrization in the sense of making the length of the rod vary with position or orientation  even after it has been corrected for idiosyncratic distortions.  But why saddle the Duhemian thesis as such  with a restriction peculiar to Einstein’s particular version of it?  And thus why not allow Duhem to save his thesis by countenancing those alterations in the congruence definition which are remetrizations?

-- “The Falsifiability of Theories”, in: Adolf Grünbaum, Collected Works, vol. I (2013), p. 72-3

As indicated, I couldn’t really follow the dialectical taffy-pull in that conterfactual-strewn discussion, but simply cite the passage as though on one of those “citation slips” we used to rely on at Merriam-Webster.

~

I just now happened upon a passage which we quoted earlier in another context (here):  a use, by a mathematician (or if you prefer, a logician) of the in-itself-not-expressly-mathematical term measurement,  not in a technical mathematical sense such as measure zero or measure theory,  but sliding mathwards towards concepts very far from any plain man’s conception of “measurement” (as: wholly non-numerical, non-quantitative   fundamental group):

Mathematics is, as it has always been, largely the science of measurement.  But “measurement” must here be understood as referring to more than the meter stick.  The genus of a topological figure  measures one of its aspects;  objects of genus zero  are in a sense simpler than those of higher genus. 

There are many dimensions of measurement ….:  characteristic, transcendence degree, cardinality, fundamental group … Occasionally we are so successful in the science of measurement  that we can completely characterize an object … by giving, as it were, its latitude and longitude:  its measurements in the relevant dimensions.

-- Herbert Enderton, “Elements of Recursion Theory”, in:  Jon Barwise, ed. Handbook of Mathematical Logic (1977), p. 554

I originally cited that as a not-especially-successful attempt (in its first sentence) at a one-line characterization of What Mathematics Is.    Measurement, in the usual sense, is common to a great many studious activities, from chemistry to engineering to dressmaking.   He only manages, in what follows, to make that characterization  more or less work, by moving the goalposts  and re-defining measurement in his own Pickwickian sense.
 

~

A philosophically alert historian of physics  calls attention to a linguistico-philosophical subtlety in the word measurement as it is used in quantum theory:

In all cases, an observation is accompanied by a measurement.  The converse is not true, however, for we may quite well perform a measurement and yet fail to observe the result.  [ndlr:  That much is true but trifling, but then he goes on to make his point.]  Now in considering the disturbance generated by an observation, we must make clear that the disturbance is caused by the physical measurement, and not by the cognitive act whereby the result of the measurement is comprehended by the percipient. … The observation is rendered possible by the collision of the photon with the particle, and hence it is this collision which constitutes the measurement.

-- A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics (1939), vol. II, p. 667

Here he is not making an actio/actum distinction in the term measurement (though one exists; for the actum, “Her measurements are 36, 28, 36”), for we are still dealing with actio here:  but he is at pains to remove the connotation of a (human) action -- a human act, which one foggy school of thought has deemed central and essential  to all of quantum physics.  Observation, D’Abro is saying, is a human action;  measurement is whatever triggers the collapse of the wave-function.

~

This whole question of measurement  is, for the man meditating over brandy, frankly pretty annoying.    We want to know the scheme of things -- if equations be at the base of it, well and good, the more general the better.  (As:  Hamiltonian dynamics;  Set Theory; Topology.)  Beholding Saint Peter’s or the Taj Mahal, we wish to savor the whole, and perhaps to penetrate to the aesthetic and formal ideas behind them;  but we do not wish to know the length or this or that member in centimenters, nor how much the materials cost, etc. Such matters are distinctly hypo-ouranian.

In latterday musings upon quantum theory, measurement has been lifted to a role rather like that of (in earlier days) action, or conservation of energy -- or rather, like that of the Demiurge, bringing entities (or the values of their parameters) into existence.  Yet in practice, they don’t always even tell you much about what you are trying to measure.

Measurements on the force of attraction between two electric charges  will not  in general  verify Coulomb’s law.  We observe that the force depends  in some peculiar way  upon the position of external charges, which suggests to us that the measured effects  are not entirely due to the system in question, namely, the two test charges.

-- Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 524

A (non)Definition of Depth

We’ve posted a number of reflections about the idea of “depth” in (especially) mathematics and related science (for the complete list of these, click here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/depth ), without ever really defining the term.  And this, for a reason:

Two interrelated ideas that have been widely assumed to be unanalysable  are those of one scientific theory being deeper and more unified than another.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. xiii

The idea of theoretical depth has considerable importance in Popper’s philosophy of science.  “If at all possible, we are after deep theories.”  But he was pessimistic about the possibility of any sharp characterisation of the idea.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 188

And that, not necessarily for any ‘deep’ reason -- not correlating intimately with the intricacies of physics, say -- but much as it is hard to characterize sharply such multifaceted (or blobby) concepts as beauty or game.    And here, I must sympathize with the archetypal philistine of a hundred New Yorker cartoons,  genially conceding, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”   A mathematician or physicist may not be able to define depth in a way that would satisfy the notoriously finicky tribe of philosophers:  but he knows it when he sees it.  And smiles.

So, sorry, no necessary-and-sufficient conditions, nor even a rough-and-ready dictionary definition;  but anyhow, an epigram:

Whewell’s requirment that a deep hypothesis, one that gets hold of nature’s ‘alphabet’ as he put it, must enable us ‘to explain … cases of a kind  different from those which we contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 190

(A similar metaphor, more popular since Whewell’s day:  a good theory must “cut Nature at the joints”.)

~

Hmm, now I’ve piqued my own curiosity.  How does a practicing lexicographer go about characterizing the term deep in the sense(s) of interest here?

Okay, for starter’s, a British one -- Collins English Dictionary (1979):

deep:  … (6) difficult to understand or penetrate; abstruse

(7)  learned or intellectually demanding: a deep discussion

Sense (6) is of no interest.  We went to some effort in this post (“A Dive to theDepths”) to distinguish depth from difficulty.  (For the list of posts re difficulty: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/difficulty .)   Sense (6) would be used by a lazy man, giving up -- “Too deep for me.”   Here he is not even using the word with its native literal resonance -- he could quite as well speak with poor Mr Tulliver, who often confessed that the world was “too many” for him.   Indeed, sense (6) might deserve one of those non-semantic/non-grammatical, sociolinguistic labels like “ -- Not in polite use”:  here,  “-- Not used in this sense by serious thinkers.”

Actually, by a twist of pragmatics, the phrase does get used by serious thinkers -- but typically as an ironic put-down.  Thus:

The towering 19^th-century mathematician Hamilton  labored hard on his “Law of Hodographic Isochronism”,

but when he sent it to John Herschel (whom Hankins calls “the best-known and best-regarded British scientist of his time” [p. 134]), he got the reply:  “You are fairly got out of my depth”.  (This was Herschel’s regular response when he did not have the time or inclination to follow Hamilton’s long analytical excursions.)

-- Thomas Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1980), p.

And again, roughly a century later:  After presenting a rather absurd and convoluted, goalpost-moving series of proposals from Lakatos and Morrall:

I am out of my depth with a claim of this kind.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 334

Here he is being disengenuously self-deprecating;  and his reply is all the more biting.

~

A more general thought, though, on depth versus difficulty.   I almost wrote that the latter was “much less interesting” -- though really, that depends on your day-job.  If you teach primary school, you need not (ex cathedra) worry your head one bit about depth in our sense;  whereas you must ever be alert to the perils of difficulty.  To epigrammatize into a dichotomy:  Depth (again, in our privileged sense) inheres in the subject itself;  Difficulty is relative to the practical limitations of some species (be it human, chimp, or the poor fly stuck in the fly-bottle) when grappling with the problems in that subject.   Since the philosophy of this blog is Platonist, we have little interest in the latter (no intellectual interest;  though some emotional interest, maudlin or morbid, as here).

From that perspective, sense (7) is also disappointing.   A subject itself (such as algebraic geometry or M-theory) cannot be called “learned” (i.e., learnèd):  that epithet might only be applied to whoever is gassing on about it.  “Intellectually demanding” could be applied either to a subject or a particular discussion or presentation thereof.  And that quality might be due to anything from the intellectual limitations of the audience (“The concept of evidence is too intellectually demanding for Trump voters”)  -- thus, back to sense (6) -- to an (overly) condensed presentation on the part of the lecturer, to actual depth inherent to the subject (and which would still be apparent to an angel, who understood the subject perfectly well).   Thus, neither sense goes far towards elucidating what mathematicians mean when they refer to a “deep result”.

~

Curious now whether my old alma-mater Merriam-Webster  did any better, I looked it up in their Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition),  I found something quite different.

First, their treatment of the geospatial, ‘literal’ sense of the term, from which all others ultimately derive, is unexpectedly rich and reticulated (I almost wrote:  “deep”), containing sub-subsenses like

deep  1 b (1) : extending well inward from an outer surface <a ~ gash>

(That is the sort of distinction you come up with when you are working from a generous deskful of carefully chosen citation-slips, rather than copying other dictionaries  or pulling the definition out of your butt.)

But then things sort of fall apart.  The sense “difficult” is not treated as a top-level numbered sense, as in the Collins, but as a subsense of a sense not defined save as the sum of its (rather disparate) subsenses:

deep  3 a : difficult to penetrate or comprehend : recondite < ~ mathematical problems>

3 b : mysterious, obscure <a ~ dark secret >

3 c : grave in nature or effect <in  ~est disgrace>

3 d :  of penetrating intellect : wise <a ~ deep thinker >

along with several more lying well off our axis of interest.   And oddly, despite all the careful hair-splitting, nothing really corresponding to Collins’ (7).

Thus, we still have come no further towards our goal.

~

The subject of depth, unlike that of mathematics, or Christianity (or oahspe),  tends not to attract disquisitions of the “What  is ….?”  sort.   We tried our hand at one for math (here), basically coming up with little more than a florilegium of blind-men-and-the-elephant stabs at it, for the overly general definiendum mathematics itself;  more fruitful was the task of characterizing topics within mathematics, like affine connection or topology, since here (at least for the former example) the definer’s intention is more in the nature of targeted enlightenment  than an after-dinner speech :  the result was a nice bouquet of epigrams.

~

Back to Depth vs Difficulty.    

(1) A deep remark or insight  is associated, not with presenting difficulties (as in Collins sense (6) ), but -- quite the contrary -- with resolving them.

A humble but poignant case  has been recounted here (Induction/Recursion), where a problem that had seemed difficult (to New Jersey third-graders, back in the complacent days before the impact of Sputnik  had filtered down to elementary school) -- that of multiplying multi-digit numbers -- suddenly became transparent, under the impact of an insight which (relative to what we had learned so far, most of it from the Mickey Mouse Club) might qualify as (qualifiedly) deep. 

(2) Above, we made something akin to an actio/actum distinction between difficulty and depth (human activity vs. the subject itself);   yet now we may make an additional distinction, on the same -- human -- side of the Platonic/psychological divide.  You might call it horizontal/vertical,  syntagmatic/paradigmatic :  judging words (concepts) by the company they keep.

~

Let us recur to that subsense in Webster’s Colleagiate,  “3 b : mysterious, obscure”, and consider the idea of  deep as it appears in company with that of being hidden:

The mind is in a sad state, when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affighting this actual life, with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark”

(I.e., a deeper, hidden something, that somehow itself  amounts to a “life”.)

And from a mathematical physicist:

It is indeed true that we can prove, from this kind of Euclidean argument,  that squares, made up of right angles, actually do exist.  But there is a deep issue hiding here.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 28

Namely (tying in with cosmology):

His fourth postulate asserts the equality of all right angles.  … In effect, the fourth postulate is asserting the isotropy and homogeneity of space.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 29

~

.

Verb of the Day: “schlong”

Suddenly that term is in the headlines, thanks to the latest outburst from The Donald (whom, by now, out of due respect, we should rather designate:  The Trump).

I worked for a while at Merriam-Webster, based in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Our dictionaries were rather good as regards the vocabulary of Roman Catholicism (and this, based largely on the makeup of the local workforce), not so good on Yiddishisms in English (“Yinglish”).  For that, you were better off with Random House.

I grew up near New York, and was sometimes surprised at the absence, from the M-W Collegiate, of terms derived from Yiddish, which to me were quite familiar -- though merely by osmosis;  I did not grow up in an especially Jewish environment.  Whereas Trump -- a New York macher -- would definitely know these things.

Anyhow:  schlong  (noun) ‘penis’  looks to derive (via Yiddish) from German Schlange ‘snake’ (via geometric resemblance -- though only in the flaccid state).  From that, to its use as a verb, is (as Bertie Wooster would say) “but the work of an instant”.  When Der Trumpmeister said that Obama “schlonged” Hillary, he meant (literally) that he defeated her, but (metaphorically) that he … shtupped her.  (Pardon my Yiddish.)

Today’s Washington Post has a commendable article “Donald Trump’s ‘schlonged': A linguistic investigation”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/22/donald-trumps-schlonged-a-linguistic-investigation/

Kudos in particular that they consulted Steven Pinker (whom, in these pages, we have often had occasion to praise) before posting.  Only … here, the professor is not at his best:  suggesting that the verbal use was a mere “malaprop” (i.e., malapropism), stemming from ignorance.   Whereas:  even had no-one ever before used the noun as a verb in this way, that use still lay ready to hand, for any competent native speaker.  Moreover, the whole shtick the Post appends, re verbing nouns, is quite périmé; it had a certain (erroneous) point, fifty years ago, but not now. And indeed, the very article adduces attestations, prior to the cause célèbre in question, that antedate the use.  Trump's offense was purely social, not linguistic.

Philological note:   Our (Yinglish) word schmuck, likewise derives  via Yiddish  from German: literally, ‘decoration’; metonymically, ‘membrum virilis’.  Yet thence, the term boogied semantically to designate … well … you know … a schmuck -- anglicè, a ‘dickhead’, a ‘dork’.

As for Schlange, it has no etymological equivalent in English, though it might be related to our word sling.   The word Schlange was coined (replacing earlier words like Natter (compare English adder) or Unke, as a deverbal, by reference to its slithering, looping motion.  English snake is likewise deverbal, being related to an old word meaning 'crawl'.

Finally, shtupp looks likely related to German stopfen ‘to stuff’;  if so, there is a parallel semantic evolution in (British) English, to ‘get stuffed’.

Doubtless it was such considerations as these, rather than mere churlishness, which prompted the glossophilic candidate to avail himself of so colorful a verb.

Herr Doktor Trumpf, pondering Teutonic etymologies

The BBC has an informative article on the matter here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35167332

For further merry musings on word origins, click here.

Deutschland schafft sich ab

Circa twenty years ago, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the two halves of Germany were being painfully reassembled, the New Jersey-based company Franklin Electronic Publishers, where I worked as Editor-in-Chief, hosted two executives in lexicography from the venerable Langenscheidt company.   I picked them up at their hotel near my home in Princeton, and drove them to our headquarters in Mount Holly.   On the way, I asked them about the affect of Reunification on the German language.

To my surprise, they were not especially interested in the question.   More surprising was the reason :  in their estimation, the German language, far from being strengthened by the new political accession of fellow-speakers, would recede more and more from use, and eventually go the way of Danish.   And to my astonishment (particularly coming from German bilingual-lexicographers, for whom their language, and the desires of foreigners to learn it, is meat and drink), this prospect left them curiously indifferent.

By most of the Gutmenschen of today’s Europe, such acedia (misconstrued as sang-froid) in the face of the expected inevitable, would be reckoned admirable.   But I found it strangely troubling.

Nota bene:  The unreferenced expected inheritor of the German-language mantle  was English.  Little did they imagine that, in some now-conceivable scenarios, it could one day be Arabic.

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

With comparable astonishment, the world now beholds Germany’s self-dilution, quite possibly leading to self-dissolution. 

Apart from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this might be the beginnings of the most significant geopolitical (voire, demographic -- which ultimately trumps all else) development in our lifetimes.

To all this, I shall have no comment.

In part, because it’s not principally my battle (though I care about this deeply).

In part, because hardly anyone reads this blog anyway (nor is politics  really its brief; vielmehr, Theologia Mathematika).

But principally, because there is already abundant intelligent and impassioned commentary from Germans, and from all who care about Germany -- nay, Deutschtum überhaupt.  -- Not, however, in the pages of the MainStream Media, which has long been gurgling with Gutmenschenschwärmerei.   Rather, in the lengthy and well-reasoned readers’ comments, on sites like Telepolis or Die Zeit (in the latter case, massively contrary to the bisounours editorial line.)  [Later, I hope to append a selection of these.

Kurz gefasst:

Apart from Thilo Sarrazin’s monster bestseller, from which I have borrowed the title of this post, consult:

Hurra, wir kapitulieren! Von der Lust am Einknicken ist ein 2006 erschienenes Buch von Henryk M. Broder, das einerseits die Haltung der Regierungen Europas gegenüber Islamisten, andererseits die angebliche Zurückhaltung und Selbstzensur der intellektuellen Linken Deutschlands gegenüber dem Islam scharf und auf polemische Weise kritisiert. 

-- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurra,_wir_kapitulieren!

Hurra!  Wir kapitulieren !!!

~

Interlude:    Die Deutsche Sprache schafft sich ab

Using my wife’s tablet, I attempted to bring up DeutscheWelle.  It brought up only the English-language site.  I specifically added “.de”; stubbornly, it changed that to “.com” and re-presented the English site.  So I went to the German Wikipedia and clicked on the link labeled “Offizielle Webpräsenz”:  it too brought me to the English site!

Well, maybe that’s just the tablet.  It has recently introduced a dumbed-down version of news.google.[…];  I was able to revert to the original presentation on the English version, with a few clicks,  but these didn’t work for the French and German.

So I tried it on the MacIntosh:  same deal.

Ultimately I found the real site by having bookmarked an article, back when you could still get to it easily, and from this clicked through to: http://www.dw.com/de/themen/s-9077.  [That is just today’s;  I never was able to pull up a permanent German homepage.]

[Weiteres zum Thema hier.]

~

In Deutschland herrscht  “helpers’ high” (a.k.a. “Sommermärchen”,  “Glückswelle”, & “Willkommenshysterie”).   It is a strange phenomenon.  At the Bahnhofs, ecstatic welcome is extended to Germany’s future (and partly present) gravediggers.    This euphoria is hailed in all of Germany’s mainstream media, and nay-sayers are smacked with the “Nazikeule”.

Our genes stopped working.

Could you replace us please?

(We left the key  under the mat.)

The reasons for all this, surpass my understanding. 

The madness of crowds.   So was ist in Mitteleuropa schon passiert, zur Lebenszeit Freuds und Jungs;  aber weder dieser noch jener  hat das Phänomen  richtig zu bewerten gewusst.

For now, we’ll simply cite a sharp-eyed reader’s comment:

Und wehe es argumentiert jemand dagegen. Er wird zwar nicht als
"Volksschädling" bezeichnet, aber sehr ähnlich behandelt.
Stigmatisiert wird er, ausgeschlossen, erhält Redeverbot und ist
sozial ausgeschlossen vom kollektiven Glücksempfinden.

Und 1933 in Deutschland und 38 in Österreich war es sicher ähnlich.
Diese zermürbenden Parteistreitereien waren plötzlich weg, alle im
Gefühl der glänzenden Zukunft geeint.

Wir erleben ein Massenphänomen.
Wir erleben Politik der Gefühle.
Wir erleben Faschismus in einer ganz unerwartenden Form.

http://www.heise.de/tp/foren/S-es-ist-staatliche-Selbstdestruktion/forum-295835/msg-26943272/read/

~

Superb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_8kc19DL70&app=desktop

[Update 23 Sept 2015]

Swimming in the river of humanity are shady characters, too, admitted criminals, ISIS sympathizers and a couple of guys from Fallujah, one with a fresh bullet wound, who when asked their occupation seemed confused.

“Army,” said one. His friend corrected him. “We’re all drivers,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/migrants-are-disguising-themselves-as-syrians-to-gain-entry-to-europe/2015/09/22/827c6026-5bd8-11e5-8475-781cc9851652_story.html

[Update 8 Oct 2015]  Mum's the word:

http://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/startseite/detail/-/specific/Polizisten-bei-Festnahme-in-Fluechtlingsunterkunft-in-Ohrdruf-angegriffen-793516962

Dieser Artikel kann nicht kommentiert werden.

[Nov 2015] "With Open Gates":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0hD7IffTJs


Allgemeines zum Thema:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/04/autolytic-empathy_30.html

[Update 9 January 2016]

Travelers’ phrasebook

Enjoy your stay in Germany !

[Update Juni 2016]

http://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/bin-laden-leibwaechter-klagt-gegen-abschiebung-100.html

Seit 2006 hat der Verfassungsschutz Sami A. im Visier. Er soll enger Vertrauter von Osama Bin Laden gewesen sein und zu seiner Leibgarde gehört haben. Die Stadt Bochum wollte ihn bereits mehrfach in sein Heimatland zurückschicken. Am Mittwoch (15.06.2016) hat das Verwaltungsgericht Gelsenkirchen entschieden, dass er nicht abgeschoben werden darf.