Here a smack, there a smack
Disregarding the simplistic and unevidenced class-based pronouncement by David Lammy that a lack of parental self-confidence in disciplining children could be partly responsible for so profound a social problem as last year's riots, the debate over smacking has only brought to the surface the absolute lack of regard our society has for its young.
To justify their lamentable attitude towards a person who is perhaps half your height and a quarter of your weight, those supporting Lammy's call for parental sovereignty have insistently used the word 'smack' and contested any attempt to use synonyms, such as hit or beat. They reject any attempt to label corporal punishment with more emotive language.
To make the truth less unpleasant, they deny its nature by disguising it with palatable words and ambiguity.
The euphemism treadmill
The euphemism has a rich tradition dating back to ancient Greece, where it meant 'to keep a holy silence', or 'speaking well by not speaking at all'. The eupheme was originally used in place of a religious word or phrase that should not be spoken out loud and etymologically is the opposite of blaspheme – or evil-speaking.
Oxford Dictionaries online describes the euphemism as 'the use of a milder or vaguer word or phrase in place of one that might seem too harsh or direct in a particular context'; a substitute for 'something unpleasant or embarrassing'.
Linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker coins the term 'euphemisim treadmill' in his popular books The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought to describe a process identified by philosopher WVO Quine in which a euphemistic word undergoes a semantic shift and evolves into a taboo word itself as it loses its euphemistic value and acquires its own pejorative overtones. The most easily recognisable example Quine cites is the word vulgar, which simply meant 'of the people'.
All language is essentially public, as Wittgenstein might have said, and as a society we have become complicit in this doublespeak about child rearing. The acceptability of the word smack influences the way some people seem to happily endorse the prohibition of physical harm and abuse meted out by one adult to another, and readily recognise it as illegally violent, while thinking that the parenting of defenceless children is off limits for the state. If I examine the relativist stance of those saying you choose your morals and I choose mine, I can quite easily see that the logic is simply implausible.
Some of Kevin Meagher's reasoning about smacking seems to lack logic as an argument for corporal punishment inasmuch as it is less about the child's well-being and more about 'ground down' parents who know exactly how 'draining the experience can be'. A polite smack seems to be in order if you're unable to think of an alternative.
It's not that I don't sympathise with poor families in difficult circumstances, nor even the well-off ones like Lammy's, who admit to smacking their kids. Looking after someone else's needs every waking minute, and those they steal from your much-needed sleep, is the hardest work I've ever done. The demands are physical, emotional, intellectual and moral. There are the rewards, of course, but kids are egotistical and ungrateful. In the 80s, I brought up two children alone, while studying and working part time. I was dirt broke and often, in fact usually, exhausted and at the end of my frayed tether. I smacked my children occasionally. But I regard every single instance as a failure of good parenting on my part and a lack of respect for their dignity as individual human beings.
The oft-cited examples of kids putting themselves in danger of both an oncoming car/electric shock and a 'necessary' whack from mom or dad represent the path of least resistance to the thought-out hard work and planning that parenting requires. But even when I used the word smack to pacify my conscience, if either of my children had ever run into the road or put a finger into an electric socket, I'd have blamed myself for not being vigilant to their safety needs, not smacked them for being unaware that cars and electricity can kill.
Another tortured example is that of a child hitting another child. How can hitting a child to prevent it from hitting a child ever be right, let alone logical? Children learn respect and responsibility by example, not by a so-called 'benign' dictatorship of threatened pain. I suspect they're not actually that different from the rest of us in recognising this affront to their intelligence.
So, do we refrain from hitting adults because the law says we can't? Or because they might hit us back? Can we hit our kids because we know that generally, despite what Mr Lammy might have us believe, the law won't interfere and they can't hit us back? Or because we have made the act acceptable by defining it through a euphemism?
Perhaps it won't be until the euphemism 'smack' acquires its own degree of negative connotation that we finally realise that sparing the rod is not what spoils the child.
Sic! The illiterati are out in force
Waterstones has outraged the grammar police by dropping the apostrophe from its logo. The Twittersphere is ablaze with the defence of a punctuation mark that Boots, Morrisons, and Debenhams seem never to have bothered with.
A controversial decision by the bastion of the book lover's world spelt out with a neologism, a sentence ending with a preposition, and a serial comma.
The proofreader's world is a tricky one. Grammar and punctuation, unlike spelling, are very definitely a set of fluid guidelines designed to aid our understanding of written communications, not constrict us all into a pedantic apoplexy. Did you know, for instance, that the ampersand used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet and is a contraction of the phrase 'and per se and'?
Making its announcement, Waterstones said, "It also reflects an altogether truer picture of our business today which, while created by one, is now built on the continued contribution of thousands of individual booksellers.” That raises for me the question of whether I should in future refer to Waterstones' books. The apostrophe question is undoubtedly not going to end today. Did you know that the beleaguered squiggle has a protection society all of its own?
On the paradox of fools and wise men - or the Dunning–Kruger effect
Waterstones are actually leading the way in defying a community of editorial and proofreading unbelievers, but some of the commentary surrounding their cutting-edge decision reminds me that it is often those less qualified to judge who are the most vociferous. Ignorance is never bliss, but it sure is funny. Consider the 'student of the english language', the woman whose life, no less, has been ruined by the 'barbaric' nature of the affront, the constant positive references to Sainsbury's and MacDonald's as arbiters of the English punctuation system, or the, hopefully ironic, use of the term 'it's apostrophe'.
There is an apparently paradoxical phenomenon whereby people tend to hold 'overly favourable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains' that was posited by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. Pretty late in the history of mankind for the naming of an effect recognised by Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell.
Russell famously said: "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision", and Darwin's The Descent of Man includes the lament: "but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
The Dunning and Kruger paper Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments opens: "not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realise it." In other words, they make self-reflective errors of cognition about their own cognition; or they are unknowing about their unknowing.
The authors, then at Cornell University, found across four studies that, regardless of gender, participants who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of humour, grammar and logic grossly overestimated their performance and ability. They estimated their scores to be in the 62nd percentile, while reality put them in the 12th.
Several Dunning-Kruger analyses linked these mistakes to a lack of capacity to distinguish between accuracy and error. Paradoxically, they say, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognise the limitations of their abilities.
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Dunning and Kruger conclude: "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
So, next time I'm reading a poorly phrased speech, an inarticulate article, or a badly punctuated story, I'm going to try to remember to be humble. After all, it could be me.
(Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for their report.)
From swanky New York to Birmingham balti
Say 'Birmingham' to a New Yorker and they'll be thinking Sweet Home, Alabama, not Brum's inner-city Balti Triangle. But, America's popular newspaper The New York Times has ranked England's second city 19th in a list of 45 must-see places for 2012.
Coming one place ahead of 'space', the home of Aston Villa, the Bullring and Cadbury's chocolate factory also beat exotic and luxurious destinations Vienna, Montpelier and Antarctica, places any jet-setting traveller would be more likely to expect to find on a list of the places to visit this year.
The NYT's suggestion that England's second city could be a foodie's heaven is intriguing the UK: "Birmingham is famous in Britain for its Balti Triangle, an area of town that is home to a beloved Pakistani-Kashmiri curry dish invented here; it is also birthplace to such classically British food items as Typhoo Tea, Bird’s Custard and HP Sauce."
While London, Glasgow and Wales also appear on the list, it is Birmingham's inclusion that has excited the UK media's attention, given the city's grim industrial image that persists across the country in spite of 20 years of investment and regeneration.
Jerry Blackett, chief executive of Birmingham Chamber of Commerce Group, told the BBC: "The rise in popularity of Birmingham as a leisure and tourist destination has been rapid. Birmingham's cultural, entertainment and gastronomic attractions do now indeed compete with the very best - it's official."
Birmingham's inclusion on NYT's list draws on Birmingham's eclectic food heritage that includes the award given during last October's annual Birmingham Food Fest to the UK's 'foodiest town' by olive, the BBC's food magazine.
The newspaper adds a list of three Michelin-starred chefs, local talent and up-and-comers building on an already rich dining scene and provides click-throughs for other attractions and places to stay.
Pay packets worth up to 9% less than four years ago
Following last year's revelation that 97% of the 200,000 new jobs in the UK were part time, official figures show that full-time workers in 277 of 322 occupational groups have suffered a drop in living standards since April 2007.
Trade union GMB has analysed official data from the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Nov 2011) to reveal that the real value of average gross earnings for full-time workers in all occupational groups fell by 5.9% between April 2007 and November 2011. GMB say that this is due to the ‘bankers recession’ and stalled recovery.
%age fall in real value of earnings April 2007 to November 2011
Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary, said: "These figures show that the Government’s strategy for an economic recovery is in tatters as living standards in the UK drop by 5.9%.
"Two thirds of the economy is consumer-driven and Osborne must be the only person who does not get it. Squeezing wages, pay freezes and cutting jobs will not restart the economy. Using the IMF measures, his cuts will reduce real private consumption by 4% and GDP by 3.4% over the next few years.
"When the ‘same old Tories’ were returned to power they brought with them the same old philosophy that 'if it’s not, hurting it’s not working.'"
There are 11 occupations where the fall has been more than 25%, 10 occupations where the fall has been between 20% and 25%, and 16 occupations where the fall has been between 15% and 20%.
In the analysis, GMB compares annual average gross earnings data for April 2007 (before the recession began) with the annual average gross earnings for the same occupation for April 2011, plus an uprating for wage increases to September 2011. The changes are measured against inflation over the same four-year period to calculate the real change in the value of these earnings.
Between April 2007 and November 2011, inflation was 16.1%, half of which (7.65%) has been since April 2010.
Affect or effect
If you search for the words affect and effect on the web, you’ll find, generally speaking, that the advice to help you differentiate between the two words is to remember that the one beginning with ‘a’ is a verb that means to make a difference to and the one beginning with an ‘e’ is a noun that means the change that results. My teachers told me much the same thing.
So, I might say that this knowledge has affected my ability to distinguish between the two words so I don’t suffer the embarrassing effects of a mistake.
But, the word effect can also be a verb. The Oxford Dictionaries online gives the meaning as ‘to cause (something) to happen’ or ‘to bring about’. So, for example, I might say I have effected a new plan for 2012.
See the usage note here for more.
