George Lakoff’s Expansive Lecture: How Linguistics Relates to Everything Else.

This talk by George Lakoff has got to be one of the most ambitious 40-minute talks I’ve ever watched. Lakoff is a linguist who has spent his life studying language, but not merely language. He has also drilled down into the brain using neuroscience, connecting our use of language to such things as neural binding and mirror neurons. He has also looked upward from conceptual metaphors to point out their personal and cultural ramifications.

Metaphors begin taking root in three-year old children based on physical activities. As adults, we employ these metaphors ever-so-easily in order to understand complex social phenomena such as romantic relationships, art, teaching and politics. Whenever we employ these metaphors (and we are always doing this) we are thinking with our bodies. Further, without these metaphors we would have an impoverished understanding of essentially everything that is important to us. If you don’t want to invest in the entire 40-minute talk, I would urge you to go to the 24-minute mark to hear Lakoff’s story how the explosion of research on conceptual metaphors began with a tearful graduate student’s comment, “I’ve got a metaphor problem with my boyfriend.” After hearing this story and watching the short audience participation segment where Lakoff connects up romantic love with the physical act of traveling, the field of conceptual metaphor will likely become vivid and compelling for you. Conceptual metaphors are invisible to most of us, but once you see how they work, you will see them everywhere.  You might even feel that you have new superpowers for seeing how people talk, think and attempt to persuade each other.

Lakoff is probably best known for his work on metaphors (with philosopher Mark Johnson), beginning (but by no means ending) with the book, “Metaphors We Live By.” I’ve written on the importance of metaphors in many other places, including here, here and here.  Conceptual metaphors are critical to my own profession, the legal profession. I’ve published my own analysis on the critical connection between metaphors and the legal doctrine of stare decisis here: "The Exaggerated Importance of Stare Decisis." 

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What to Say When You Notice Someone Sneezing in the Age of COVID-19

The traditional response to noticing another person sneeze has never worked well for me. Why would I invoke the name of a deity in such a situation?

Even if a such deity actually existed, why would he/she/it/they care about someone sneezing? Path dependance explains a lot of things we do and the "God Bless You" people often say (often with a concerned look) is one of those many things we do merely because we've always done it that way. 

COVID-19 has made our concerns about sneezing much more legitimate. I noticed this yesterday while I was outside in my backyard (alone) eating pretzels. I had a mouthful of pretzel when I had a strong urge to sneeze came upon me. Maybe God made me do it. I didn't hold back, even with my mouth filled with mostly-chewed pretzel. It was a world class sneeze, I can proudly say, but it was also a science experiment. I watched as the pretzel particles sprayed several feet from me. If I were contagious, that would have been pretzels AND COVID-19 micro-particles and I assume that the virus would have sprayed even much farther than the pretzel dust. This was a visual reminder that it is good advice to sneeze into your elbow these days, if you can't hold back your sneeze while with others.

I've had long been puzzled about the traditional sneeze response ("God bless you"). A bit of research today showed me that the phrase might have first been uttered around 600 A.D. to try to protect people from the plague.  For many years, however, we've used that same expression when there was no fear of any plague.  

In modern pre-COVID times, however, the phrase has been an overly-quaint response to a perfectly natural and harmless bodily action, especially around allergy season. Sneezing is one of those fascinating complex series of coordinated actions that our bodies do (along with swallowing, vomiting, and orgasms) where our animal bodies seem to take on a life of their own for a short period, independent of our control once they reach the point of no return.

But what, exactly, is it that a God would supposedly do by "blessing" me following a sneeze? The obvious answer (it would seem) is to help me to stop sneezing in the future. Armed with this speculative conclusion a few years ago, I asked my nephew Dan whether he could help me with a new logical yet pretentious thing to say to a person who just sneezed. Dan had recently majored in Latin as well as computer science. His suggestion was to say: "Consiste sternuere!" He assured me that this phrase is Latin for "Stop sneezing!"  If you say this phrase with a stern face, carefully pronouncing each syllable, it might appear (to certain credulous people) that you are saying something useful and that you might even be wielding other-worldly powers.

If you are interested in joining me to help to make this new cutting edge expression viral, simply utter "Consiste sternuere!" instead of "God bless you." It is pronounced. ConSIStay stern-you-AIR-eh.

Thank you, Nephew Dan.

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The Wish Power of “Have a Good Day”

As I left the YMCA tonight, Rachel, the pleasant woman at the entry desk waved to me and said, "Have a good evening!"

I jokingly replied, "Have a good rest of your life!"

She frowned and even looked insulted.

I said, "Since we are trading wishes and hopes, I decided to give you the biggest one I could think of."

It is funny how, in the expression, "Have a good [X]," the X signals approximately how long it might be until you think that you will see each other again. Thus, the BIG wish that I uttered, which ostensibly seems more generous, suggested that I would never see Rachel again (or maybe even that I didn't want to ever see her again). Conversely, "Have a good afternoon" often signals that the speaker hopes to contact the other person that same evening (or at least, soon).

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Expiration Dates for Claims That Things Are Good Things or Bad Things?

It’s rather amazing that we continue to use the words “good” and “bad.” Can you think of any words that are less precise than these? Do these words even have valid or reliable meanings? “Good” and “bad” often seem to serve only as hazy placeholders for shots in the dark or ineffable emotions. Philosophers have struggled to define good and bad things for millennia with very little of practical use to show for all of their labor. Except for such fundamental things as having food and shelter and avoiding unwanted physical pain and death, people constantly disagree about what is good and bad. The subjects of these disagreements are everywhere. They include such things as good and bad food, cities, politicians, cars, jobs, art, children, pets, technology, habits, websites, books, moral choices, friends and romantic partners.

But let’s set aside our ubiquitous disagreements for a moment. Let’s assume that within our own particular comfy community we can somehow find a general consensus that something is a “good” thing. If that were possible, it would reveal an equally big problem that is the focus of this article: Good things often only seem good only until they play out in real in the real world. To our dismay, good things often turn out to be bad things with the passage of time. And things that seem bad today often turn out to be good.

• You got fired from your job (bad), which opened up a better opportunity (good).

• You got that job you always wanted (good), but two months after beginning that job, you hated it (bad).

• WWII caused terrible suffering for millions of people (bad), but that hellacious war inspired countless acts of heroism and resulted in the defeat of tyranny (good things).

• You were late to the airport and missed the plane (bad), but the plane crashed (good for you that you weren’t on it).

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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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