I was out running some errands today and there were a handful of protesters at a busy intersection waving home-made signs like “honk for peace” and “no war for oil.” I laugh at the naieve banality of such idealists. First, that waving signs makes any difference, and second the sheer amount of hypocrisy it takes to bring about such a half-assed roadside protest.

Every component of that sign is made from oil. The foam core, the plastic handle, the paints, the glues: all petroleum based products. The price of any one of those doubles and you won’t see too many out of work “students” waving those signs.

The fact that the protesters’ umbrella awning was made from oil, their ice chest was made from oil, the ice in the ice chest was created using refrigerants made from oil, the plastic bottles holding the water in the ice chest were made from oil, and all the filters, hoses, gaskets, and pumps required to get the water into the bottles are made from oil.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Some of the protesters decided to have their quarterly bath on the day of the protest so their fellow wack-jobs wouldn’t gag from rancid body oil and human stink. So throw in these necessary oil derived products: shampoo, glycerin soap, hair comb, hair curlers, hair dryer, hair dye, cosmetics and lip stick, deodorant, garden hose with plastic faucet washer, hand lotion, shaving cream, toothpaste and tooth brush.

A fresh change of clothes would require the following oil derived products: man-made fibers in the cloth, dye, detergents, acid wash, politically charged silk screening, and oil saturated Birkenstock shoes with oil tanned leather glued to oil derived rubber soles. The artistically knotted ankle bracelet is also made from oil derived yarns.

Accessorize with posh mylar layered plastic housed sunglasses, plastic cell phone, plastic tongue stud, elastic wrist band and a nature tattoo, all derived from oil.

Most protesters actually choose to wear clothing during their demonstrations of stupidity, but for those who don’t, you’ll also need: sunscreen, cortisone cream for that nasty rash, four colors of body paint, solvent to wash the paint off, insect repellent, and a petroleum encapsulated Extenz dietary supplement so you don’t embarrass yourself any more than you have to.

Your retard friend will need an oil derived bicycle (the rubber tube, the rubber tire, the plastic encased wires, the greased up chain, and the entirely oil made grad student helmet) and an oil derived camera to capture the moment forever.

Oh, and don’t forget the antihistamines for your patchouli allergy, and a molded plastic first aid kit with antiseptic, aspirin, anesthetic, and rubbing alcohol for when the police rough you up…. all made from oil.

And for the socialist love-fest after-party, be sure to bring some condoms, dental dams, and personal lubricant, all brought to you through the magic of oil. After all, protest chicks put out.

The Ancient, Modern, and Future Language of “Dog.”

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

I ran across a border war today while reading up on an article I will discuss in the third part of this series. Like many of the conflicts that pique my curiosity, this one has a dog at its center. You can tell that an issue is likely a border war when you search for a topic (in this case “global etymologies”) on google and the first page is filled with rants against the fundamental idea instead of links to the original content.

Anthropologists study the history of human groups and migrations by examining the common genetic elements of those groups, searching for the most recent common ancestors (hypothetical ‘Eve’s). Interdisciplinary historical linguists study the history, migration, and interaction of language (and thus people) by comparing common sounds and word meanings between languages, and in doing so classify language families and construct proto-languages. The mother of all such languages is called the Proto-World Language.

I suspect that the Proto-World Language is like the Holy Grail for historical linguists. It’s more of a guiding concept than a reality. Many don’t believe it can be found, others don’t believe that it ever existed in the first place, and anyone who turns up a clue or a possible path is resoundingly attacked by everyone else. Some attack because they are atheistic to the idea, others because they too are on the hunt and another’s success is their failure.

Like many border wars, this one seems to fall in the “techie vs. fuzzy” mold, although to an outsider the differences between the two groups seem trivial, making the narcissism of minor differences a distinct possibility. The fuzzy linguists want to tell a good story, bask in romantic histories, ask how the languages feel about each other, and do it this way because they’ve always done it this way; this is the comparative method.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
– Sir William Jones 1786; Quoted by Lehman 1967 and Szemerenyi 1996:4

The techie linguists aren’t scared of letting numbers tell the story, of using new techniques to inform old debates, using old techniques with new tools, or of looking at data before they reach conclusions instead of telling a story and then looking for “data.” Their method of choice is called multilateral or mass lexical comparison. The obvious criticism from the fuzzies is that numbers can confuse coincidence for correlation, but any techies know that correlation does not imply causation. The fuzzies say that random coincidence is “quite high” although without doing an analysis of the expected random coincidence vs. the observed random coincidence (decidedly techie), I don’t know what basis the fuzzies have to state that such coincidence is tainting the techie’s results. The mass lexical comparison method seems pretty straight forward and sound to me:

If then, we find a mass of resemblances between different languages, resemblances that are not onomatopoetic in nature and do not appear to be borrowings, we must conclude that the similarities are the result of a common origin, followed by a descent with modification in the daughter languages.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 43.

In my usual interdisciplinary stance, I figure there is room for both methods and perhaps the two methods can inform each other. Not too many people agree.

Needless to say, the fuzzy linguists have launched a full scale border war on the techie linguists (numbers lie and are scary, scientific fan-fiction makes you feel good and what feels good must be true). Consistent with my Confederacy of Dunces theory, where the sound and fury from the establishment against a new and provocative idea is entirely inconsistent with the weight of the idea, this border war features a preemptive strike by the comparative f
uzzies. The old school linguists actually published an anti-global etymologies paper (Joseph Salmons, 92) two years before the original global etymologies paper (Bengtson & Ruhlen, 94) was even published.

The essential argument in the Language Log article is research that the group-think fuzzies don’t agree with shouldn’t even be published, because that’s the purpose of “peer-review:” to enforce group think. I especially like the hypocrisy where the author complains that because the referees are anonymous, there can’t be a “public debate” (read: mob lynching) to force them to censor unpopular views (read: antithesis of public debate). The author’s criticism that peer reviewers are unqualified to judge outside of their specialty is code speak for ‘they haven’t been indoctrinated into enforcing the group-think.’

Doctor Merritt Ruhlen and Linguistic expert John Bengtson fall in the techie group and are the target of the above article because they used technical analysis to discern a list of 27 “global etymologies.” These etymologies, also known as cognates, are similar words in different languages that are likely to have a common origin. Critics (read: confederacy of dunces) incorrectly classify these global etymologies as “reconstructions” of the Proto-World Language, and thus they have doubly attacked Ruhlen and Bengtson and any other linguists or anthropologists who use their work. But Ruhlen and Bengtson don’t make that claim and explicitly state so:

For each etymology…we present a phonetic and semantic gloss, followed by examples from different language families. …We do not deal here with reconstruction, and these glosses are intended merely to characterize the most general meaning and phonological shape of each root. Future work on reconstruction will no doubt discover cases where the most widespread meaning or shape was not original.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 14 note 3.

You’ll notice that Dr. William Poser uses “reconstruct*” no less than 25 times in his criticism. Too bad he didn’t make it to 27, it would have provided some nice symmetry to the 27 cognates Bengtson and Ruhlen unearthed. One linguist injected 25 mistaken words into his analysis because he wanted them there, two linguists arrived at 27 words because their technique spat them out. The problem with Dr. Poser is that he doesn’t have an excuse to fall so firmly into the fuzzy mindset, he studied Electrical Engineering along with Classics and Linguistics.

That’s the difference I see here: Bengtson and Ruhlen developed a method (the black box), and then took data and ran it through the box and waited to see what came out the bottom. Criticize the box all you want, substitute your own, but what drops out the bottom is governed only by the rules in the box and those rules are clear and explicit and easy to construct without bias. The fuzzy linguists don’t develop a method and then run data through it, they massage the method until the results make “sense” and tell a story. They don’t let an unbiased method put words together, they find a reason that two words they select make sense together. Untold degrees of intentional and unintentional bias infects the input data and the results when you try and make them say something you understand instead of trying to understand what they are really saying.

And what are those 27 threatening words? The source of the bitter bickering and posturing? The results of the black box and possible links to the holy grail of all languages?

You can tell one hell of a (R rated) story with those 27 words, and perhaps that’s why they are so interesting. They aren’t from a fuzzy story telling method, but a techie method. And before you think all of us techies still live in our Aja‘s basement, have tsuma on our backs and puti on the brain, jealous of prehistoric mano running around kamaing a large dinosaur kata, trying to get to pal base with kunas by bashing them on the head and dragging them back to our k’olo by their tsaku, we’re not. Some of us do shave our backs.

Now Dr. Poser isn’t all bad. He gives a very nice explanation of the ancient words for dog:

Although sound change is the main way in which words change over time, it is also possible for a word to be replaced by an entirely different word. For example, the Proto-Indo-European word for “dog” was something like *kuon. (The star indicates that this is a hypothetical form.) We reconstruct this form from attested (actually recorded) forms like Greek kuon, Sanskrit shvan, and German hund by asking what proto-form would yield the attested forms after undergoing the sound changes observed in the various languages, and also taking into account changes in word-formation. The direct descendant of this word in English is hound. But at some point the common Germanic word for “dog” took on a more specialized meaning and was replaced, as the general term, by dog, a word whose origin we do not know.

This fits nicely with the attention Ruhlen and Bengtson gave to dog in their work:

9. *KUAN—’dog’ — canine; cynic; hound; !Kung /gwi ‘hyena’; Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k(y)n ‘dog, wolf’; Proto-Indo-European *kwon- ‘dog’ > Sanskrit s’van, Phrygian kan, Latin canis, Greek kuon, Germanic hund; Proto-Uralic *küinä ‘wolf’; Old Turkish qanchiq ‘bitch’; Monglian qani ‘wild dog’; Proto-Tungus-Manchu *khina ‘dog’; Korean ka ‘dog’ (< kani); Gilyak kan ‘dog’; Chinese kou ‘dog’ (kh^jwen); Tibetan khyi ‘dog’; Proto-Oceanic *nkaun ‘dog’; Taos kwiane-, Tewa tukhwana ‘fox, coyote’

If we really could assign dates to the mutations in DNA and the changes in our language, we just might find that dogs became biologically distinguished from wolves at about the same time man used one word to describe a wolf and another to describe a domesticated dog.

Every component of that sign is made from oil. The foam core, the plastic handle, the paints, the glues: all petroleum based products. The price of any one of those doubles and you won’t see too many out of work “students” waving those signs.

The fact that the protesters’ umbrella awning was made from oil, their ice chest was made from oil, the ice in the ice chest was created using refrigerants made from oil, the plastic bottles holding the water in the ice chest were made from oil, and all the filters, hoses, gaskets, and pumps required to get the water into the bottles are made from oil.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Some of the protesters decided to have their quarterly bath on the day of the protest so their fellow wack-jobs wouldn’t gag from rancid body oil and human stink. So throw in these necessary oil derived products: shampoo, glycerin soap, hair comb, hair curlers, hair dryer, hair dye, cosmetics and lip stick, deodorant, garden hose with plastic faucet washer, hand lotion, shaving cream, toothpaste and tooth brush.

A fresh change of clothes would require the following oil derived products: man-made fibers in the cloth, dye, detergents, acid wash, politically charged silk screening, and oil saturated Birkenstock shoes with oil tanned leather glued to oil derived rubber soles. The artistically knotted ankle bracelet is also made from oil derived yarns.

Accessorize with posh mylar layered plastic housed sunglasses, plastic cell phone, plastic tongue stud, elastic wrist band and a nature tattoo, all derived from oil.

Most protesters actually choose to wear clothing during their demonstrations of stupidity, but for those who don’t, you’ll also need: sunscreen, cortisone cream for that nasty rash, four colors of body paint, solvent to wash the paint off, insect repellent, and a petroleum encapsulated Extenz dietary supplement so you don’t embarrass yourself any more than you have to.

Your retard friend will need an oil derived bicycle (the rubber tube, the rubber tire, the plastic encased wires, the greased up chain, and the entirely oil made grad student helmet) and an oil derived camera to capture the moment forever.

Oh, and don’t forget the antihistamines for your patchouli allergy, and a molded plastic first aid kit with antiseptic, aspirin, anesthetic, and rubbing alcohol for when the police rough you up…. all made from oil.

And for the socialist love-fest after-party, be sure to bring some condoms, dental dams, and personal lubricant, all brought to you through the magic of oil. After all, protest chicks put out.

In a day and age where the ROTC and the Minutemen are invited to speak by a student group at Columbia, then banned by a callow and effete administration kowtowing to another student group of fascist pinkos, it’s little surprise that a dictator and terrorist like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is welcomed with open arms even after severe backlash from the Country. Idiot college students (like the girl they interviewed on TV) who think we need “greater dialog” with monsters like Mahmoud should be allowed their wish and given first class tickets to Tehran via Baghdad. Let them “dialog” all they want from the front lines.

The terrorist Ahmadinejad was given a pulpit to preach hatred, rebuffed only by the tepid insult of “you must be either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” PROVOCATIVE or UNEDUCATED!! Oh please! God forbid we call the World’s #1 sponsor of terror “uneducated” and “provocative!”

I really need to teach a class on vicious personal attacks and deeply cutting insults and give Columbia’s President Bollinger a scholarship to attend. His pathetic insult wouldn’t get him slapped in a singles bar, let alone make an impression against the likes of Ahmadinejad. What a toad.

Since Columbia is proving that you shouldn’t bother to listen to college professors (let alone bankrupt your parents and burden yourself with decades of debt to do so), here are some words that are worth reading and taking to heart. You won’t find such insight and elloquence coming out of Columbia, the UN, or Iran any time soon.

Hat tip to ThrowTheScoundrelsOut at Townhall.com:

This letter was written by Charles Grennel and his comrades, veterans of the Global War On Terror. Grennel is an Army Reservist who spent two years in Iraq and was a principal in putting together the first Iraq elections in January 2005. It was written to Jill Edwards, student at the University of Washington , who did not want to honor Medal of Honor winner USMC Colonel Greg “Pappy” Boyington.

Ms. Edwards and other students and faculty do not think those who serve in the U.S. Armed Services are worthy as good role models.

To: Jill Edwards, Student, c/o University of Washington

Subject: Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs

Miss Edwards, I read of your student activity regarding the proposed memorial to Colonel Greg Boyington, USMC and a Medal of Honor winner. I suspect you will receive many angry emails from conservative people like me. You may be too young to appreciate fully the sacrifices of generations of servicemen and servicewomen, on whose shoulders you and your fellow students stand. I forgive you for the untutored ways of youth and your naiveté. It may be that you are simply a sheep. There’s no dishonor in being a sheep, as long as you know and accept what you are.

William J. Bennett, in a lecture to the United States Naval Academy November 24, 1997 said “Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident. We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people, not capable of hurting each other except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

Then there are the wolves who feed on the sheep without mercy. Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

Then there are sheepdogs and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf. If you have no capacity for violence and you are a healthy productive citizen, you are a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the uncharted path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

We know that the sheep live in denial, which is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kid’s schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are thousands of times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by school violence than fire, but the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their child is just too hard. So they choose the path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog that intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours. Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn’t tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports, in camouflage fatigues, holding an M-16. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go Baa. That is, until the wolf shows up, and then the entire flock try desperately to hide behind one lonely sheepdog.

The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough, know-it-all high school students, and under ordinary circumstances would not have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad kids; they just had nothing to say to a cop. When the school was under attack, however, and SWAT teams were clearing the rooms and hallways, the officers had to physically peel those clinging, sobbing kids off of them.

This is how the little lambs feel about their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door. Look at what happened after September 11, 2001 when the wolf pounded hard on the door. Remember how America , more than ever before, felt differently about their law enforcement officers and military personnel? Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be.

Also understand that a sheepdog is a funny critter. He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night and yearning for a righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns when needed, right along with the young ones. Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day.

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said “Thank God I wasn’t on one of those planes.” The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, “Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference.” You want to be able to make a difference. There is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, but he does have one real advantage. Only one. And that is that he is able to survive and thrive in an environment that would destroy 98 percent of the population.

Research was conducted a few years ago with individuals convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious, predatory crimes of violence: assaults, murders and killing law enforcement officers. The vast majority said they specifically targeted victims by body language: Slumped walk, passive behavior and lack of awareness. They chose their victims like big cats do in Africa , when they select one out of the herd that is least able to protect itself.

Some people may be destined to be sheep and others might be genetically primed to be wolves or sheepdogs. But I believe that most people can choose which one they want to be, and I’m proud to say that more and more Americans are choosing to become sheepdogs. Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was honored in his hometown of Cranbury , New Jersey . Todd, as you recall, was the man on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his cell phone to alert an operator from United Airlines about the hijacking. When they learned of the other three passenger planes that had been used as weapons, Todd and the other passengers confronted the terrorist hijackers. In one hour, a transformation occurred among the passengers – athletes, business people and parents – from sheep to sheepdogs and together they fought the wolves, ultimately saving an unknown number of lives on the ground.

Edmund Burke said “There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.” Here is the point I want to emphasize, especially to the thousands of police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the sheep, real sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that way, and so are wolves. They don’t have a choice. But you are not a critter. As a human being, you can be whatever you want to be. It is a conscious, moral decision. If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay, but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you.

If you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are going to hunt you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust or love. But if you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior’s path, then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.

This business of being a sheep or a sheepdog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-sand-sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people exist completely on one end or the other. Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in America took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep took a few steps toward accepting and appreciating their warriors and the warriors started taking their job more seriously.

It’s OK to be a sheep, but do not kick the sheepdog. Indeed, the sheepdog may just run a little harder, strive to protect a little better and be fully prepared to pay an ultimate price in battle and spirit with the sheep moving from “baa” to “thanks”.

We do not call for gifts or freedoms beyond our lot. Just like the sheepdog, we in the military just need a small pat on the head, a smile and a thank you to fill the emotional tank which is drained protecting the sheep.

And, when our number is called by The Almighty, and day retreats into night, a small prayer before the heavens just may be in order to say thanks for letting you continue to be a sheep. And be grateful for the millions of American sheepdogs who permit you the freedom to express even bad ideas.

It’s a shame that so many pinko idiots spit upon the men and women of our armed services because they have some tofu+marijuana+patchouli induced idiocy and complete disregard for what it really takes to defend freedom. These people promote the Nanny state because they wish to remain forever-children. Why grow up when you can suck the tit of the government and complain about it the entire time?

Such stupidity disgusts me, and such keen insight by men like Grennel inspires me.

I really have only one thing to critique about the letter. I was a senior in high school in 1999, at a school not too far from Columbine. I had met the first victim, Rachel Scott, as well as the first survivor–that fame seeking buffoon Brooks Brown–prior to the shootings at school events like Speech and Debate meets. Many people use Columbine to “prove” many points, and the impact of the event has grown well beyond the basic cause and effect of what happened that day, much like the OJ Simpson case a few years before exploded beyond the act of OJ brutally killing his ex-wife and Mr. Goldman.

The thing that disturbs me most about Columbine is the fact that the sheepdogs didn’t do their job. Although over 1,000 law enforcement personnel were on scene by the end of the day, not a single one of them did anything that prevented anyone from being hurt by the wolves. Not one. Not one thing. Nothing. The sheriff’s deputy at the school was stuffing his face and harassing the smokers and he didn’t even get out of his car except to fire FOUR! rounds from 60 some yards away at one of the gunmen who was inside the building. That’s it. Four rounds fired at one gunman from about as far away as you could have gotten. The hack didn’t even empty his magazine.

Not one of those 1,000 sheepdogs even entered the building until the shooters were already dead, and it took three hours before the SWAT team finally made it into the Library. P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C dereliction of duty all around.
The writer of the letter made a poor choice in evoking the images of Columbine to make a point about the “sheepdogs” of society. They failed miserably that day. Miserably.

– Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting

As a general observation, when the hatred and ranting against an idea is wholly disproportionate to the weight of the idea, the idea is probably right or at least dangerous to the mob. Ideas that are patently false or baseless garner little vitriol from the mob because they are not a threat and are unlikely to sway opinion. But when an idea emerges that threatens to dethrone the self anointed elite and their bureaucracy of yes-men, the fangs and claws come out and suspiciously the rules often change to favor the incumbents.

In examining new situations and schools of thought where I am mostly inexperienced and largely ignorant of the local culture, I gravitate toward the touchy subjects and see who is talking a lot and saying little. These people tend to be the dunces and they are usually the “old guard” who are complacent and resting on their laurels. It’s then pretty easy to see what idea or person is their favorite target or greatest fear. More often than not, the the dunces are throwing tantrums because the new ideas are evocative, provocative, and convincing. The proponents of those ideas have followed the rules, been logical, and made a strong case that unsettles the establishment who have grown lazy and complacent with assumed consensus.

Few people have power. Those that do have power rarely have as much as they want. This turns them into despots, looking to exert their will where they can, because they can’t exert their will where they want. Men beat their wives because they can’t beat their bosses and cowards kick dogs because they are afraid to hit the bullies.

When powerless people gain a little bit of power they abuse it, because abusing a little bit of power makes it seem like they have a little bit more power. I find that the closer low power people have to work with high power people, the more likely they are to abuse their low power, probably because they’re sick of being low man on the totem poll.

Meter maids, DMV employees, traffic cops, receptionists at law firms and doctors’ offices, middle school teachers, internet forum administrators, hobby club founders, committee chairmen, low level bureaucrats, customer support operators, insurance adjusters, volunteer community leaders like boy scout masters and church event organizers, and anyone involved in the home owners association.

It’s not uncommon for these people to turn the soap box we afford them for their job into a political rostrum to spew their dogma that is either mostly or entirely irrelevant to their position. The media makes a strong case that a good number of tenured college professors use their pulpits to preach instead of teach, but the numerous other people in our daily lives who hijack our attention and abuse their power aren’t as easy or as sexy to write articles about.

But they are out there hallucinating competence; dunces who can’t earn the attention and respect that they want. Fully aware of the fraud they are perpetrating, they will lash out at any attempt to remind them that they are overstepping their bounds. They are perfectly satisfied to use what leverage they do have to drive out competition and pretend that sensible criticism is actually jealousy and backstabbing. Such delusions of grandeur usually stem from the inflated self worth these frauds have due to the endless and shameless self promotion they carry out from their pulpit. It’s not helped by the lackeys and sycophants that are stupid enough to buy into the hype.

And thus forms the confederacy of dunces.

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

Anthropologists study the history of human groups and migrations by examining the common genetic elements of those groups, searching for the most recent common ancestors (hypothetical ‘Eve’s). Interdisciplinary historical linguists study the history, migration, and interaction of language (and thus people) by comparing common sounds and word meanings between languages, and in doing so classify language families and construct proto-languages. The mother of all such languages is called the Proto-World Language.

I suspect that the Proto-World Language is like the Holy Grail for historical linguists. It’s more of a guiding concept than a reality. Many don’t believe it can be found, others don’t believe that it ever existed in the first place, and anyone who turns up a clue or a possible path is resoundingly attacked by everyone else. Some attack because they are atheistic to the idea, others because they too are on the hunt and another’s success is their failure.

Like many border wars, this one seems to fall in the “techie vs. fuzzy” mold, although to an outsider the differences between the two groups seem trivial, making the narcissism of minor differences a distinct possibility. The fuzzy linguists want to tell a good story, bask in romantic histories, ask how the languages feel about each other, and do it this way because they’ve always done it this way; this is the comparative method.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
– Sir William Jones 1786; Quoted by Lehman 1967 and Szemerenyi 1996:4

The techie linguists aren’t scared of letting numbers tell the story, of using new techniques to inform old debates, using old techniques with new tools, or of looking at data before they reach conclusions instead of telling a story and then looking for “data.” Their method of choice is called multilateral or mass lexical comparison. The obvious criticism from the fuzzies is that numbers can confuse coincidence for correlation, but any techies know that correlation does not imply causation. The fuzzies say that random coincidence is “quite high” although without doing an analysis of the expected random coincidence vs. the observed random coincidence (decidedly techie), I don’t know what basis the fuzzies have to state that such coincidence is tainting the techie’s results. The mass lexical comparison method seems pretty straight forward and sound to me:

If then, we find a mass of resemblances between different languages, resemblances that are not onomatopoetic in nature and do not appear to be borrowings, we must conclude that the similarities are the result of a common origin, followed by a descent with modification in the daughter languages.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 43.

In my usual interdisciplinary stance, I figure there is room for both methods and perhaps the two methods can inform each other. Not too many people agree.

Needless to say, the fuzzy linguists have launched a full scale border war on the techie linguists (numbers lie and are scary, scientific fan-fiction makes you feel good and what feels good must be true). Consistent with my Confederacy of Dunces theory, where the sound and fury from the establishment against a new and provocative idea is entirely inconsistent with the weight of the idea, this border war features a preemptive strike by the comparative fuzzies. The old school linguists actually published an anti-global etymologies paper (Joseph Salmons, 92) two years before the original global etymologies paper (Bengtson & Ruhlen, 94) was even published.

The essential argument in the Language Log article is research that the group-think fuzzies don’t agree with shouldn’t even be published, because that’s the purpose of “peer-review:” to enforce group think. I especially like the hypocrisy where the author complains that because the referees are anonymous, there can’t be a “public debate” (read: mob lynching) to force them to censor unpopular views (read: antithesis of public debate). The author’s criticism that peer reviewers are unqualified to judge outside of their specialty is code speak for ‘they haven’t been indoctrinated into enforcing the group-think.’

Doctor Merritt Ruhlen and Linguistic expert John Bengtson fall in the techie group and are the target of the above article because they used technical analysis to discern a list of 27 “global etymologies.” These etymologies, also known as cognates, are similar words in different languages that are likely to have a common origin. Critics (read: confederacy of dunces) incorrectly classify these global etymologies as “reconstructions” of the Proto-World Language, and thus they have doubly attacked Ruhlen and Bengtson and any other linguists or anthropologists who use their work. But Ruhlen and Bengtson don’t make that claim and explicitly state so:

For each etymology…we present a phonetic and semantic gloss, followed by examples from different language families. …We do not deal here with reconstruction, and these glosses are intended merely to characterize the most general meaning and phonological shape of each root. Future work on reconstruction will no doubt discover cases where the most widespread meaning or shape was not original.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 14 note 3.

You’ll notice that Dr. William Poser uses “reconstruct*” no less than 25 times in his criticism. Too bad he didn’t make it to 27, it would have provided some nice symmetry to the 27 cognates Bengtson and Ruhlen unearthed. One linguist injected 25 mistaken words into his analysis because he wanted them there, two linguists arrived at 27 words because their technique spat them out. The problem with Dr. Poser is that he doesn’t have an excuse to fall so firmly into the fuzzy mindset, he studied Electrical Engineering along with Classics and Linguistics.

That’s the difference I see here: Bengtson and Ruhlen developed a method (the black box), and then took data and ran it through the box and waited to see what came out the bottom. Criticize the box all you want, substitute your own, but what drops out the bottom is governed only by the rules in the box and those rules are clear and explicit and easy to construct without bias. The fuzzy linguists don’t develop a method and then run data through it, they massage the method until the results make “sense” and tell a story. They don’t let an unbiased method put words together, they find a reason that two words they select make sense together. Untold degrees of intentional and unintentional bias infects the input data and the results when you try and make them say something you understand instead of trying to understand what they are really saying.

And what are those 27 threatening words? The source of the bitter bickering and posturing? The results of the black box and possible links to the holy grail of all languages?

You can tell one hell of a (R rated) story with those 27 words, and perhaps that’s why they are so interesting. They aren’t from a fuzzy story telling method, but a techie method. And before you think all of us techies still live in our Aja‘s basement, have tsuma on our backs and puti on the brain, jealous of prehistoric mano running around kamaing a large dinosaur kata, trying to get to pal base with kunas by bashing them on the head and dragging them back to our k’olo by their tsaku, we’re not. Some of us do shave our backs.

Now Dr. Poser isn’t all bad. He gives a very nice explanation of the ancient words for dog:

Although sound change is the main way in which words change over time, it is also possible for a word to be replaced by an entirely different word. For example, the Proto-Indo-European
word for “dog” was something like *kuon. (The star indicates that this is a hypothetical form.) We reconstruct this form from attested (actually recorded) forms like Greek kuon, Sanskrit shvan, and German hund by asking what proto-form would yield the attested forms after undergoing the sound changes observed in the various languages, and also taking into account changes in word-formation. The direct descendant of this word in English is hound. But at some point the common Germanic word for “dog” took on a more specialized meaning and was replaced, as the general term, by dog, a word whose origin we do not know.

This fits nicely with the attention Ruhlen and Bengtson gave to dog in their work:

9. *KUAN—’dog’ — canine; cynic; hound; !Kung /gwi ‘hyena’; Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k(y)n ‘dog, wolf’; Proto-Indo-European *kwon- ‘dog’ > Sanskrit s’van, Phrygian kan, Latin canis, Greek kuon, Germanic hund; Proto-Uralic *küinä ‘wolf’; Old Turkish qanchiq ‘bitch’; Monglian qani ‘wild dog’; Proto-Tungus-Manchu *khina ‘dog’; Korean ka ‘dog’ (< kani); Gilyak kan ‘dog’; Chinese kou ‘dog’ (kh^jwen); Tibetan khyi ‘dog’; Proto-Oceanic *nkaun ‘dog’; Taos kwiane-, Tewa tukhwana ‘fox, coyote’

If we really could assign dates to the mutations in DNA and the changes in our language, we just might find that dogs became biologically distinguished from wolves at about the same time man used one word to describe a wolf and another to describe a domesticated dog.