SEC. RUMSFELD: The problem is the word “it.”

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As a creative exercise in history and language, let me plagiarize what the New York Times said about President Clinton in 1998:

Has the Defense Secretary read too much French literary theory? Is he our first postmodernist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist leader, averring that objectivity is impossible, meaning self-contradictory, and reality socially constructed through language?

No. Mr. Rumsfeld has long realized that language does have a systematic though complex relation to reality. His semantic arguments, if ultimately unsuccessful, have shown an acute understanding of the logic and psychology of language.

The world is analog; language is digital. A tape measure shows that people’s heights vary continuously, but when we talk about them, we face a choice between ”tall” and ”short.” People who describe themselves as ”middle-aged,” ”gray” and ”wise” cannot pinpoint the instant they became so. Words are anchored to endpoints, but the continuum between them may be up for grabs.

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Posted in: Language, War, Writing

An Object Lesson for the Credulous

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I admit it. When I was a younger boy, uh, man, I used to believe all sorts of things that I don’t particularly believe now. Let’s not get into details. (Monday I talked about one example.)

Now, I pride myself on my skepticism. Still, some things are just difficult to explain or maybe just weird. Stonehenge is a classic case. Those images that appear on the occasional tortilla are another.

How did those Druids move those giant stones hundreds of miles? How did they pick them up and set them upright? Could they levitate? Did aliens help? No, as it turns out it probably was just some clever people. I hate it when that happens.

Does that mean Ezekiel did not see a UFO?

This video is cool, but if you really want to do some thinkin’ and figurin’ go to Richard Dawkins’s site and watch the video on the creation of his “Foundation for Reason and Science.” “The enlightenment is under threat,” writes Dawkins. “So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.”

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Online Places

Norway is Number One!

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Here’s some sobering news on the “we’re number one” front. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that ever since I was a child I heard or thought or was told that the United States was the richest country in the world. As you get older, of course, things get more complicated.

I earn my living by piecing together on line teaching jobs, none of which provide either a pension or health care. Those are things every other industrial or post industrial country provides its citizens as a matter of course.

In Europe, the work week has been getting shorter and most people have four week vacations. Here we all work an increasingly longer week and if you are a professional, and feel secure, you might take two weeks off.

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Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous

Cloud Your Text and Your Class Will Follow!

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A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

From Wikipedia

Tag generating software is slightly different than tags as traditionally defined. As Wikipedia notes, the original Tag Cloud on the photo sharing site Flikr cleverly represented community interests. Each of the tags is a link to a page of relevant images. The larger the font, the more people there are who share the tag and, presumably, the interests.

Tag generating software, on the other hand, is a way of representing the key terms in a particular text. The larger the word the more often it occurs. Tag Clouds become a quick way to begin the analysis of a text by visually representing its most common terms. Like my example above, it need not have links at all.

The Cloud Tag was generated from my health plan’s page on “Member Rights and Responsibilities.” I think the rhetorical strategies of the text become remarkably obvious. This could be useful for writing as well as analysis.

Here‘s an interesting two-part article on Tag Clouds, by Joe Lamantia. Among other things, Lamantia argues that Clouds are not this year’s “Mullet” but a useful navigation aid likely to become more common. Who else misses the mullet?

I generated my Tag Cloud at Tag Crowd. Tag Crowd’s page also offers the .htm code. And you can try out a Cloud of your own by pasting any text into the box below and pushing the button. Your Cloud will appear below.

This version creates links that look up words in OneLook Dictionary Search. The Graph It button creates a frequency list and a bar graph. Thanks to Karen Schwalm and friends at Glendale Community College for the code.




     

     

Posted in: Language, Online Places, Writing