Friday, March 17, 2023
Good morning.
I want to add a footnote to my story about our house and how emotional it might be for me to leave it. What's ironic is that I've never really *liked* the house! The galley kitchen is too small and there isn't enough counter or cupboard space; the rooms are small and the interior space is too chopped up (by modern standards, anyway). It started out as a small bungalow and even after we pushed out the back by 15 feet and added a second story, it still has the characteristics of a small bungalow. There would be significant gains in moving in terms of space allocation! Maybe my emotional reaction to moving would be short-lived.
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A few people who hadn't seen or hadn't reacted to the proposed substitute phrases to eliminate references to violence sent me comments. All of them come from people who are politically liberal. These later reactions were sharp.
"I detest taboos. I did not respond to your list of language/word taboos. But I tend to disregard them, especially some of the more ridiculous ones. I do try to avoid offending people, but that is situational. And people have a responsibility to not take offense in friendly discourse. It seems many people dig for a reason to find some word or phrase offensive, even when as used there is nothing offensive. Performative behavior is no substitute for action to improve people's lives." (private sector)
"The language thing that you sent is so ridiculous. We can clean up our language, but still be cruel and condescending to one another--it just becomes more classism and a way for people to show their condescension. Word usage should be a matter of personal choice, and it's slowly being taken away from us. I have never used "bite the bullet" or "deadline" and partnered it with violence, and I resent people trying to imply that my use of it has a violent meaning when one wasn't intended. What next--we can't use the word "playground" because a child in a wheelchair cannot physically play on the ground? Just the fact that people have free time to police words and dictate new usage to others shows how entitled they are, and proves that they are not up to their elbows in working class stress or trying to keep food on the table." (education)
A response from a long-time academic friend (not from the U of Minnesota):
I'm going to take a stab at responding to the portion of your email concerning phrases containing "violent" language. I was blown away by the comments from your erudite and learned friends whose general opinion appears to be that "less violent" language is appropriate. As a straight shooter, I'm going to take a shot in the dark and respectfully disagree with your buddies for three reasons: 1) The so-called "violence" in the offending words is being taken out of context. All the phrases listed are idioms, which, as we all know, are a group of words whose meaning is not deducible by those of the individual words. "Over the moon", "see the light", "don't give up your day job", and "don't give up the ghost" to name but a few all have quite different meanings from their individual words. Let's bite the bullet and agree that the English language would be much poorer and less expressive without idioms to brighten it up. 2) Let's not jump the gun and banish words because someone, somewhere was offended. "Hysterical", "ghetto", "mumbo-jumbo", "peanut gallery", 'uppity", and "long time no see" have all been inappropriately exiled to language prison because someone decided their feelings were hurt. To me that's serious overkill. Should we let the hyper-sensitive, self-appointed language police dictate the boundaries of normal discourse? Why do we have to soften an imaginary blow instead of telling those who feel miffed to chill and roll with the fictitious punches? 3) Are we too afraid to push back on these invented slights because of possibly of being "cancelled"? I won't pursue this line of thinking further because I don't want to beat a dead horse.
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I learned about a new syndrome.
The Semmelweis reflex is a habit of mind — specifically, the tendency for a person to reject new knowledge when it contradicts something that the person already believes. It is named after Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands between patients. Other doctors took offence, refusing to believe that they could themselves bring disease. Semmelweis was condemned to a mental institution, where he soon died.
There's a lot of that going around these days. In combination with Dunning-Kruger, it's deadly.
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This graph appeared on my Facebook page (I can't remember why; from one of my news feeds). The graph, as you can see at the bottom, was compiled by USA Today drawing on Census Bureau data.
I sent the graph to my son Elliott. He wrote back: "Just out of curiosity I threw the list in an excel sheet and then looked up the last three presidential elections. [He later added three more.] Might be one or two I got wrong because I was eyeballing the map and not looking at a list but I'd say your correlation is a lot higher than .6" He sent a chart back to me (below), with the states as rank-ordered by education and with their votes in the Electoral College for the last six elections. (The green blocks are for the two states that allow their Electoral College votes to be split, which they were in the years marked in green.) I don't remember how to calculate the correlation, but it's surely quite high. And of course correlation does not mean causation, and how a state votes in presidential elections is affected by a multitude of factors. That said, the relationship between levels of education and voting is remarkable.
This showed up in The Browser a day after I composed the preceding paragraph:
Afterthought:
"Every single person who confuses correlation and causation ends up dying."
— Hannah Fry
To which my response was "we all die whether or not we confuse them."
The outliers are New Mexico and Nevada (going blue) and Utah and (sort of) Kansas (red). Utah is certainly no surprise. One interesting question is which of those red and blue lines might change after Messrs. Biden and Trump disappear from the scene.
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Perhaps you have read the reports on the research about the importance of relationships for a healthy life, especially as we get older. (You can find any number of articles if you google "relationships among elderly.") I was recently contacted, through Facebook, by a guy I have not seen in at least 53 years. When I was growing up in south Minneapolis, there was a group of kids who were born 1951-55 who played outside all summer long. Steve Sorenson was one of those kids, a year younger than I am. He went the same K-12 schools I did, but I do not remember interacting with him outside the neighborhood games, so it's probably actually been about 60 years. Steve is friends with a couple of my high school classmates, all of whom were involved in music performance in some fashion, and when he saw comments from me, he sent me a message about getting together. So we're having lunch in mid-April. It will be an interesting experience, I'm sure. He could become a good friend. Or not.
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It is St. Patrick's day today and it marks the beginning of our last two weeks in Florida. Unlike the previous two years, this time I have no longing to get home early. Last year, we actually left about three days before our lease was up because "it was time to go home"; we won't be doing that this year because (1) we're flying rather than driving, and it would cost almost full fare to change our flights now, and (2) the weather in Minneapolis has been so wintery that I have no desire to rush back to it. Here the daily temperature floats around 80 degrees most days and it's typically sunny. So we'll happily fly home on April 1, as planned. (That may overstate the case. If it's still snowing in Minneapolis on March 31 and April 1, it won't be "happily.")
In the meantime, we walk around our little lake most every day. A couple of days ago I thought I saw a big dead palm frond floating on the water. Then the "palm frond" opened its mouth and I realized I was looking at a good-sized alligator. I've never wanted to go in the water anyway.
With warm regards—
Gary
