Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Epistemic Closure

Epistemic closure: In US political debate, a reference to closed systems of deduction that are unaffected by empirical evidence. The term was borrowed from epistemology (the study of knowledge), where it’s sometimes called “deductive closure” and means, roughly, “we know all of the consequences of those things that we know.” The political sense may imply “echo chamber,” “groupthink,” “information bubble,” “false consensus,” “willful ignorance,” or “denial.”

Bertrand Russell by JIMBO 105 on Flickr.

The first political use of “epistemic closure” is usually credited to Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. In a March 2010 blog post, Sanchez wrote:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

The term caught on quickly. In April, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote in his Plain Blog About Politics: “Sanchez's point is that if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves … one will have a closed mind (not his phrase, by the way) regardless of what one does with that information.” (In a comment on another blog, The Philosopher’s Eye, Sanchez explained why he didn’t go with “closed-mindedness”: “I wanted to distinguish the collective/media phenomenon from any kind of individual disposition. The problem … is not that conservatives happen to be individually closed-minded people; the lockdown is at the group level.”)

Later in April, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times provided a summary of the fledgling epistemic-closure debate that quoted, among others, Bruce Bartlett, Jonah Goldberg, and Ross Douthat. Meanwhile, in his Times blog about economics and politics, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman noted that epistemic closure is also prevalent in his own field: “And like the political version of epistemic closure, it’s not a ‘both sides do it’ issue. It’s a fresh-water phenomenon; salt-water macro isn’t subject to the same problem.” (Fresh-water and salt-water economics explained here.)

There’s epistemic closure in discussions of climate change, too. And it’s a pitfall to be avoided in branding – a topic I hope to explore in a future post.

“Epistemic closure” got a boost after President Obama’s reelection last week, which appeared to catch many of Mitt Romney’s supporters – including professional pundits – by surprise. In his column for the conservative British magazine The Spectator, Alex Massie rounded up the “howling and wailing and gnashing of teeth” from US conservatives; the headline was “The View from the Cocoon of Denial and Epistemic Closure.” On this side of the Atlantic, David Brooks, the conservative-ish opinion writer for the New York Times, chimed in during a November 9 chat with NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Epistemic closure, Brooks said, “is a very useful phrase these days, believe me.”

BROOKS: Epistemology is the study of what we know, and epistemic closure is being in an information cocoon where you just believe what you want to believe. Confirmation bias is another phrase. And there’s a lot of that going around, not only on Fox News but apparently with Mitt Romney, who we now know was totally shocked. Well, doesn’t he read the newspaper?

For a corrective to epistemic closure of all stripes, I recommend The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. It’s about the moral “matrices” that bind us and blind us, liberals and conservatives alike: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. It certainly challenged my own assumptions. Read a review of the book here. To discover your own degree of epistemic closure, answer the questionnaire at MoralFoundations.org, a group created by Haidt and his colleagues to test theories about morality and social psychology.

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Update: Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow envisions wearable epistemic closure: information-containment suits that are impervious to unwanted facts and ideas. Hat tip: ArmaVirumque.

Names in the News

Four new names that caught my attention:

Mansion is the unapologetically 1 percent-ish name of the Wall Street Journal’s new weekly section devoted to “high-end property.” In a letter to WSJ subscribers, managing editor Robert Thomson said Mansion would be “the home of both aspiration and real-estate realization.” I look forward to the quarterly spin-off, Car Elevator.

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What the fut was Alaska Telecom thinking when it renamed itself Futaris? This, apparently: “Based on the word future, Futaris represents limitless possibilities and progress.” Funny, because when I look at this sad excuse for a logo, I see “futility.”

(Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

UPDATE: Reader Dan Freiberg suggests that “this variation helps with pronunciation, and works better with the symbol.”

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Juniper is a new subscription service for women who don’t own calendars. Oh, sorry: it’s “a monthly care package” consisting of tampons (five brands are offered) and a collection of “gourmet sweets and artisan savory treats.” (Yes, it’s that word!) “Never panic shop again,” says the home-page copy. The price, however, may cause cramping: $28 a month. I couldn’t find a story behind the name—which is lovely in its nondescriptive way—but I’m wondering whether founder Lynn Tao, young as she appears to be, is a Donovan fan. Remember “Jennifer Juniper,” who “longs for what she lacks”?

UPDATE: Mystery solved (although I’m still fond of my own theory):

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I’m even more mystified by Tassafaronga Village, a mixed-income residential development in East Oakland that I learned about this week via a New York Times story. There’s no explanation of the name in the story or on the website of the architect, David Baker, so I tried to dig deeper. I learned that Tassafaronga Point, on Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), was the site of several naval engagements between US and Japanese forces during World War II. But that wasn’t very helpful: the housing project is meant to heal a troubled neighborhood, so why name it after a bloody, 70-year-old series of battles? And why the Melanesian reference in Oakland, where Pacific Islanders make up less than 1 percent of the population?

It’s certainly a distinctive name, fun to say if a little challenging to spell. Here’s hoping someone who knows the whole story reads this post and leaves a comment that clears up the mystery.

UPDATE: It took less than half an hour to get an answer to my question about Tassafaronga. See comments below from Gene, proprietor of the excellent Our Oakland blog.

Word of the Week: Civility

Civility: Behavior or speech appropriate to civil interactions. Adopted from Middle French civilité in the late 14th century, but with a different sense: “civil order” or “citizenship.” Something closer to the current sense came into currency in the 16th century, but later fell out of favor for several centuries. A 19th- or even mid-20th-century speaker of English probably would be puzzled by the way “civility” is used, for example, by Allegheny College, which last week closed nominations for its second annual Prize for Civility in Public Life. The prize

seeks to honor elected officials who showed authentic, courageous civility in an important moment and/or those who have demonstrated steadfast respect for opposing points of view throughout their career. Each year, two awards will be given – one to a proud Republican and one to a proud Democrat. The award will be used to shine a bright light on passionate partisans, on both sides of the aisle, who have shown that meaningful civility is not incompatible with strongly held beliefs.

Last year’s winners were the columnists Mark Shields and David Brooks.

The Allegeny College sense of “civility” is surprisingly recent, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. In his new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, Nunberg writes that  to Victorians “incivility suggested merely an impertinent coachman or a stall-keeper who addressed one as ‘boss’ rather than ‘sir’.” In the early 20th century “civility was merely a genteel term for a formally correct courtesy” — a sense we retain in the admonition to “keep a civil tongue in your head.” As late as the 1950s, says Nunberg, “critics writing about serious social concerns like juvenile delinquency spoke about a ‘breakdown of manners and morals’; incivility didn’t come into the picture.” The definition of civility as “respectful debate in a democratic society” had become, Nunberg writes, “effectively obsolete.”

So what brought civility back to life? Nunberg says the word was “disinterred” in the 1960s for a specific political purpose:

[To critics], the social upheavals personified by the hippies, anti-war protesters, and campus radicals offered provocations that transcended mere breaches of decorum or anything that could be conveyed by pallid old words like impolite, rude, and discourteous. With its musty connection to citizen and civic, a resuscitated incivility implied that the demonstrators’ dress and rude comportment was of a piece with their attacks on the political order.

In an editorial published just before the 1968 presidential elections, Nunberg writes, the Wall Street Journal “inveighed against what it called the New Incivility” of student protestors and “enraged Negro spokesmen.” In 1969 alone, civility and incivility appeared in more New York Times editorials than they had in the previous half-century, “nearly all of them dealing with campus turbulence. … By the Clinton years, the words were fifteen times as frequent in the press as they had been during Eisenhower’s presidency.”

Nunberg notes dryly that it’s no coincidence “that the new sense of incivility emerged at the same time that asshole came of age as a reproach for social misconduct.” He goes on:

For all that people invariably speak of civility as an abiding virtue, in its new guise it’s actually a sharp break with the past. To evoke civility is to presuppose that old-fashioned manners and politeness aren’t morally compelling by themselves… An age in which even moralists can speak of “mere manners” and “mere courtesy” is very different from the one that preceded it, despite the specious continuity of values that “civility” is supposed to provide.

See also Steve Baird’s post on trademark civility.

For more on asshole (and bad-ass in brand language), see my September 18 post.

 

Naming Notes

The ready-to-wear division of 50-year-old fashion house Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) has been renamed Saint Laurent Paris (SLP). Hedi Slimane, who became the company’s creative director in March, said through a spokesperson that “he was drawing inspiration from 1966, when the ready-to-wear line was launched as Saint Laurent Rive Gauche.” (Daily Mail / UK)

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Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch told CNBC that he’s considering renaming the Wall Street Journal “WSJ.” (Poynter.) The Guardian(UK) was less equivocal, reporting that a rebranded WSJ will be at the center of Murdoch’s new publishing company. The Journal has been published continuously since July 8, 1889; it is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation.

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In almost all cases you want a name to be easy to pronounce. But not if you’re targeting wine snobs, who will pay more for a wine whose name is hard to pronounce. (NPR)

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The all-caps, no-vowels naming trend continues with BNDWGN(pronounced “bandwagon”), a social-media aggregator that also permits private conversations. BNDWGN was developed by the free texting serviceHeyWire, whose name is a homophone for “haywire,” which means “mentally confused or erratic; crazy; not functioning properly; broken.” (TechCrunch)

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I learned this week that two well-known culinary creations were named for popular stage plays. Green Goddess salad dressing, invented at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in the 1920s, takes its name from The Green Goddess, a 1921 play by William Archer that was also made into two films (silent and talkie) and a radio drama directed by Orson Welles. (Via Simply Recipes.) And Lobster Thermidor, invented in Paris in 1894, honorsThermidor, a controversial 1891 play by Victorien Sardou. Thermidor (“summer heat”) was a month in the French Republican calendar, which was used continuously between 1793 and 1805 and for 18 days in 1871. (Via@ennuisansfin.)

 

Word of the Week: Hunker

Hunker: To crouch or squat; to sit on one’s heels; to take shelter; to take a defensive posture. Usually in combination with down: “hunker down to avoid the icy wind.” Possibly from Old Norse hokra, to crouch; may be related to haunch (upper hip and thigh). The OED traces hunker to a 1720 Scottish usage; Etymology Online says hunker down is American Southern dialect popularized circa 1965.

There was a lot of hunkering down in the headlines during the days preceding Hurricane Irene’s landfall on the East Coast of the United States. “Quinnipiac University is preparing to hunker down for Hurricane Irene and the aftermath of the storm” read the lede of an August 26 story in The Quad News, the Connecticut college’s student newspaper.  “Find a safe place to hunker down,” Delaware Governor Jack Markell advised residents of his state on August 27.

Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, tweeted this on August 28:

And this headline appeared in the Washington Post on August 26:

 

Hunker also has a history as a noun. “Originally, a nickname for a member of the conservative section of the Democratic party in New York; hence, one opposed to progress in general; a fogy” is one definition at Wordnik. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia goes into greater detail:

In American politics, a conservative; one who opposes innovation or change; a fogy: first applied in the State of New York as a name to the conservative section of the Democratic party who opposed the Barnburners or radical section, about 1845. Also used adjectively.

Although hunker is no longer used as a nominative political epithet, the sense of “opposes innovation or change” still lingers in some usages. “Holds stubbornly to a position” is another Wordnik definition, with this sentence example: “As the White House hunkered down, G.O.P. congressional unity started crumbling” (Time).

Word of the Week: Ring Fencing

Ring fencing: The legal walling off of certain assets or liabilities within a corporation. (Source: Wall Street Words.)  “It is usually legal, but there are limitations, such as maximum amounts that may be protected.” (Source: Farlex Financial Dictionary.) This metaphorical sense, which the OED traces back to 1870 (“I would not be sold, nor rounded off, nor ring-fenced”), was preceded by the literal sense of “surrounding (ringing) a piece of property with a fence to keep stock from escaping,” a usage that goes back in the UK to the 18th century. According to The Phrase Finder, which focuses on British usage, ring fencing “has been in use since the 1980s to denote the funds that are set aside for a project and cannot be spent on anything else.”

A more general sense of ring fencing, meaning “protection,” came up last week during the testimony of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, before the British Parliament. Brooks is quoted at 23:03 in this live blog by The FirstPost, an online British news daily:

Brooks said that she was “ring-fenced” from any investigation after her own voicemail was accessed in 2006. She did add, “I was on the editor, and it happened on my watch.”

Co., Meet Co:

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to Co:, the “brand innovation studio” that recently set up shop in New York. Yes, the colon is part of the name.

Now comes news (to me, anyway) of Co.Design, the design agency launched in June by Fast Company magazine. Yes, the period is part of the name.

Nice logo, but…

 

Editor Noah Robischon explains Co.’s mission:

Every day this Web site will showcase the people, products and projects that bring design and business into direct contact. Controversies will be front and center here, alongside great designers speaking their minds in blog posts and comments, and plenty of eye candy. Design is a big word, but all are welcome here.

(“Design is a big word”? In which dictionary? Perhaps Noah meant “world.”)

Co. is in New York, too. I think its people should get together with Co:’s people for a friendly exchange of controversies and eye candy. Over cocoa, maybe.

Friday Naming Roundup

Canada’s Canwest Newspaper Group, which was bought by businessman and former Canadian politcian Paul Godfrey earlier this year, is now called Postmedia Network. “Canwest” always sounded to me like a tuna factory, while “Postmedia” sounds like “the party’s over,” which may not be far from the truth. Mr. Godfrey, naturally, tells a more rousing tale in a memo to employees that was reproduced in The Tyee, an independent news blog based in British Columbia:

What we arrived at was a name that looks to both the past and the future. It highlights the journey of our industry and our brands. It showcases the evolution of the technologies that we use to move news and information to our readers and audiences. And it represents our strong value proposition to marketers, advertisers and our partners.  

(Hat tip: Luc LaTulippe.)

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The Pentagon may be changing PSYOP, its acronym for “psychological operations,” to MISO, which stands for Military Information Support and/to [sic] Operations. More savory, or more watered down? As an anonymous commenter on the Small Wars Journal blog pointed out, “So instead of PSYOPers they’ll be MISOgynists?” My own gripe: that ungainly “and/to.” (Sources: Wired and Johnson, which calls the spelled-out new name “tongue-numbing.”)

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The campaign to adopt “hella”—a versatile intensifier that originated in the Bay Area—as the prefix for 10 to the 27th power (1 followed by 27 zeros) continues to gather steam. The Los Angeles Times reports that UC Davis physics student Austin Sendek’s Facebook pro-hella petition has more than 60,000 supporters. Fritinancy first reported on the “hella” campaign back in February (scroll down to the final item). (Hat tip: MJF.)

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Did you know that the ASICS, a brand of athletic footwear that originated in Japan, is an acronym derived from a Latin phrase, “Anima sana in corpore sano” (a healthy soul in a healthy body)? Learn about how eight other sneakers companies got their names over at Mental Floss. My favorite story is the one about PF Flyers.

They Left Their Words in San Francisco

I'm crazy about this map:

It's the cover of the book-review section in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle; it was created by Ian Huebert, "loosely inspired by one of St. Petersburg, Russia, by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter."

Not only are the colors and calligraphy delightful and the quotations well chosen, but you can identify many of the locations from their corresponding quotes: The Golden Gate Park quotation fills a GGP-shaped space; Robert Hass's Tenderloin quotation occupies the Tenderloin portion of the map.

I got a laugh out of this sniffy observation, right about where the bridge's south tower would be: "The new Golden Gate Bridge, that ugly reminder that beauty was going down before utilitarianism." No one reads the author, Gertrude Atherton, these days (although her husband's family estate became the town of Atherton, near Palo Alto); the Golden Gate Bridge, however, seems to have passed the test of history. But Atherton's comment belongs on the map because it's echt San Francisco: The city may appear liberal to outsiders, but in matters architectural it's downright Tory. Every single addition to the skyline, from the Transamerica Pyramid to the recent DeYoung Museum redesign (which I adore), has been met with gnashing of teeth and predictions of doom by the self-appointed guardians of the architectural status quo.

As for the map itself, I was sure the Chronicle would be selling a high-quality poster-size print of it. But no! The accompanying article says only this: "We encourage you to get out some tape or tacks and pretty up that bare wall or window with this map." Seriously? Hang a sheet of newsprint on a wall with tape or tacks? That's just cheesy. And it's dumb of the Chron—which is hemorrhaging money—to pass up a revenue opportunity like this one.

I left a comment to that effect online, and encourage you to do so, too (although site registration is a nuisance). Meanwhile, I checked out the website of artist Ian Huebert. He's not selling posters, either, but maybe (if he's retained copyright) he could be persuaded to. And lookee here! Not only does he live in Oakland, he's practically a neighbor of mine. Yoo-hoo, Mr. Huebert! I'd even stroll  over and pick up a print from you.

UPDATE: Just got an email from the Chronicle's book editor, John McMurtrie: "We hope to offer a high-quality print of the map soon. I recently tried to put something together with the business folks here—while doing a few other things in this one-man department!—and I'll pursue it again soon. When a poster is available, I'll make a note of it in the Books section."

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Typography trivia: Huebert's rendering of the map title reminded me of the logo of Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine, which flourished briefly in the late 1970s. 

Love the diamond-shaped dot over the i.

By the way, the proper shorthand for San Francisco is "The City." Locals never, ever say "San Fran." Or, perish the thought, "Frisco."

June Linkfest

It's been cold and gray for weeks in the Bay Area: bad for Seasonal Affective Disorder, good for hunching over a warm computer and foraging for links. Such as these:

Remember those adverbial puns known as Tom Swifties? ("I'm losing my hair," Tom bawled.) They're (almost) all here, helpfully organized in alphabetical order.

Edmunds Daily picks the top 10 categories of stupid car names, including the oxymoronic Dodge Sprinter and the sounds-like-you're-from Boston Ford Kuga and Ford Ka. (Not on the list: my favorite Bad Car Name.)

Fork in the Road, a Village Voice food blog, lists words "that are so overused in food writing, they make our skin crawl."

Golden Gaytime ice cream bars? Yes, and 11 other Unfortunate Product Names, including Vergina beer, which I wrote about here. (Hat tip: Cooking with Amy on Twitter.) For a daily delivery of bad nomenclature, check out the Unfortunate Names Blog.

A Walk in the WoRds presents a short glossary of Simpsons neologisms, including "craptacular," "pointy kitty" (a rat), and my favorite, "knowitallism."

"It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news." Read about what happened. (Via Snarkmarket.)

I'm fascinated by this glossary of jewelry terms from Ideal Brilliance, a jewelry retailer. A torsade is "any strand of jewelry that can be worn twisted"; a YAG is an yttrium aluminum garnet, a synthetic substitute for a diamond.

One more: Just about everyone has blogged about it already, but in case you missed it, Pride and Twitterverse is a marvelous send-up of both Jane Austen and social media. Best if you've dabbled in Twitter yourself; certainly enhanced by familiarity with Austen's fiction.

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Photo swiped from CHUD, where it accompanies an interesting post about a Tom Swift movie that's in the works. Incredibly, it's the first Tom Swift movie in the character's history, which goes back to 1910, when the first Tom Swift novel was published.