Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Frank Boers, Professor of Applied Linguistics, Western University

Being a linguist — and someone who has tried to learn several languages (including English) in addition to my mother tongue (Flemish Dutch) — I have an annoying habit: instead of paying attention to what people are saying, I often get distracted by how they are saying it. The other day, this happened again in a meeting with colleagues.

I started writing down some of the expressions my colleagues were using to communicate their ideas that may be puzzling for users of English as a second or additional language.

In a span of about five minutes, I heard “it’s a no-brainer,” “to second something,” “being on the same page,” “to bring people up to speed,” “how you see fit,” “to table something” and “to have it out with someone.”

These are all expressions whose meanings do not follow straightforwardly from their lexical makeup — they’re called idioms by lexicologists.

Idioms are part of daily communication. But this anecdote also suggests that we take it for granted that such expressions are readily understood by members of the same community. However, when it comes to people who are new to said community, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Learning a language is hard, but even native speakers get confused by pronunciation, connotations, definitions and etymology. The lexicon is constantly evolving, especially in the social media era, where new memes, catchphrases, slang, jargon and idioms are introduced at a rapid clip.
Slanguage, The Conversation Canada’s new series, dives into how language shapes the way we see the world and what it reveals about culture, power and belonging. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of linguistics.

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Idioms and the limits of language proficiency

Research conducted at the University of Birmingham several years ago revealed that international students for whom English is an additional language often misunderstand lecture content because they misinterpret their lecturers’ metaphorical phrases, including figurative idioms.

More recent research confirms that English idioms can remain elusive to second-language learners even if the expressions are intentionally embedded in transparent contexts.

One of my own recent studies, conducted with international students at Western University in Canada, also found that students incorrectly interpreted idioms and struggled to recall the actual meanings later on after being corrected.

This shows just how persistently confusing these expressions can be.

It’s worth mentioning that we’re talking about students who obtained high enough scores on standardized English proficiency tests to be admitted to English-medium universities. Knowledge of idioms appears to lag behind other facets of language.

When literal meanings get in the way

The challenge posed by idioms is not unique to English. All languages have large stocks of idioms, many of which second-language learners will find puzzling if the expressions do not have obvious counterparts in their mother tongue.

There are various obstacles to comprehending idioms, and recognizing these obstacles can help us empathize with those who are new to a community. For one thing, an idiom will inevitably be hard to understand if it includes a word that the learner does not know at all.

However, even if all the constituent words of an expression look familiar, the first meaning that comes to a learner’s mind can be misleading. For example, as a younger learner of English, I was convinced that the expression “to jump the gun” referred to an act of bravery because, to me, the phrase evoked an image of someone being held at gunpoint and who makes a sudden move to disarm an adversary.

I only realized that this idiom means “to act too soon” when I was told that the gun in this phrase does not allude to a firearm but to the pistol used to signal the start of a race.

I also used to think that to “follow suit” meant taking orders from someone in a position of authority because I thought “suit” alluded to business attire. Its actual meaning — “to do the same thing as someone else” — became clear only when I learned the other meaning of suit in card games such as bridge.

The idea that idioms prompt a literal interpretation may seem counter-intuitive to readers who have not learned a second language because we normally bypass such literal interpretations when we hear idioms in our first language. However, research suggests that second-language learners do tend to use literal meanings as they try to make sense of idioms.

Unfortunately, when language learners use a literal reading of an idiom to guess its figurative meaning, they are very often misled by ambiguous words. For example, they will almost inevitably misunderstand “limb” in the idiom “to go out on a limb” — meaning “to take a serious risk” — as a body part rather than a branch of a tree.

Recognizing the origin of an idiomatic expression can also be difficult because the domains of life from which certain idioms stem are not necessarily shared across cultures. For example, learners may struggle to understand English idioms derived from horse racing (“to win hands down”), golf (“par for the course”), rowing (“pull your weight”) and baseball (“cover your bases”), if these sports are uncommon in the communities in which they grew up.

A language’s stock of idioms provides a window into a community’s culture and history.

Same language, same idioms? Not exactly

Idiom repertoires vary across communities — whether defined regionally, demographically or otherwise — even when those communities share the same general language.

For example, if an Aussie were to criticize an anglophone Canadian for making a fuss by saying “you’re carrying on like a pork chop,” they may be lost in translation, even if there isn’t much of one. At least, linguistically that is.

Although people may have learned a handful of idioms in an English-language course taken in their home country, those particular idioms may not be the ones they will encounter later as international students or immigrants.

The moral is simple: be aware that expressions you consider perfectly transparent because you grew up with them may be puzzling to others. We need to have more empathy for people who are not yet familiar with the many hundreds of potentially confusing phrases that we use so spontaneously.

Frank Boers receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. Slanguage: The trouble with idioms — how they can leave even fluent English speakers behind – https://theconversation.com/slanguage-the-trouble-with-idioms-how-they-can-leave-even-fluent-english-speakers-behind-271681

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Barbara K Seeber, Professor, English Language & Literature, Brock University

Season 2 of Netflix’s A Man on the Inside finds Charles Nieuwendyk, private investigator and retired engineering professor (played by Ted Danson), undercover at Wheeler College.

The mission: recover the college president’s laptop. This might not seem juicy, but said laptop contains sensitive information about a $400 million donation by a tech multibillionaire, Brad Vinick.

As someone who has lived and studied academic life, I find the series created by Michael Schur (also behind The Good Place starring Ted Danson, among other hit series) is both funny and uncomfortable because it hits close to home.

Budgets trimmed to the bone

The P.I. is thrilled by his university case, calling it something “I can really sink my teeth into.”

Wheeler College, founded in 1883, has seen better days. It is struggling financially and its leadership is unpopular. The board of trustees hired a president who trims department budgets to the bone, cuts student aid and embraces corporate sponsorship — as well as the bonus he receives with every major donation.

These measures are not enough. Enter Vinick.

Vinick’s secret plan — “Project Aurora” — is to fire half the professors, exclude faculty from decision-making and close what he considers “non-essential departments,” leaving “three tracks of study — biotechnology, economics and computer science to prepare young adults for life in the modern world.”

President Jack Beringer knows Vinick’s intentions but does not want anyone to know he knows. Faculty uprisings would not help his bid for a higher-paying university job in Dallas, where he ate the best steak ever.

Language of efficiency, innovation

Any campus stroll reveals that Wheeler’s “Pepsi T-Mobile Covered Garage brought to you by Sephora” (Episode 4) is only a slight exaggeration.

Vinick’s language of efficiency and innovation dominates in real life. Universities are run increasingly on a corporate model, as numerous studies have demonstrated, including my collaboration with Maggie Berg in our book The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy.

Budgets and programs are being slashed, and in the guise of economic necessity, principles of higher education are undermined.

Professors also satirized

While Beringer and Vinick are the villains of the piece, there are, of course, some digs at the professors. (I admit we are an easy target).

The musicologist, for example, will abandon any conversation mid-sentence when inspiration hits.

In Episode 4, we see the chair of the English department is a snob about books you can buy at airports.

However, the show resists indulging in nutty, overpaid professor stereotypes because it recognizes, in the words of Dr. Benjamin Cole, head of the English department, “these are not the best of times.” The show focuses on staff and faculty efforts in an era of budget cuts and attacks on what the billionaire investor calls “pointless subjects” like art history and philosophy.

Holly Bodgemark, the provost, is so overworked she swallows nicotine gum (“It works faster if it goes right to the stomach”) and mixes her own “Peptocoffee.”

The musicologist may be flaky, but she buys used instruments out of her own pocket for students who can’t afford them. Money is tight for students. Student Claire Chung works a dozen jobs to pay tuition and housing. “When do you sleep?” Nieuwendyk asks. “In class,” she replies.

Defending higher education

To defend higher education, the show calls in the big guns: Ozymandias, a sonnet by 19th- century Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley. It’s mentioned in one of Cole’s lectures, where he recites some of its lines and comments on its continued relevance: “Money, fame, power do not last. But ideas … can endure.”

Published in 1818, Ozymandias speaks of a “traveller from an antique land.” The traveller comes across the remains of a sculpture with an inscription that reads:

“‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!’”

The rest of the sculpture is a “colossal Wreck,” and the king’s boast has dwindled into unintentional irony.

Given that the show is American, the literary allusion might be a veiled reference to the No Kings protests.

Making sense of the present

The series seems to side with philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, who argues that a liberal arts education can help us make sense of the present and read it critically.

Vinick is a modern Ozymandias. He wants to be immortal, literally (he undergoes longevity treatments) and figuratively (he commissions oil portraits of himself). As the professor of fine arts notes in the first episode of Season 2: “Newsflash: the billionaire is a narcissist.”

Not to give away the mystery, but a crisis is averted. Wheeler is safe … for now. It might go under, but, as the provost says, “better to end on our own terms.”

And those terms are: education is not a business; it cannot be reduced to the delivery of quantifiable outcomes. The book What Are Universities For?, by Stefan Collini, professor emeritus of intellectual history and English literature, makes this case in a particularly compelling (and at times laugh-out-loud) way.

Higher education is a public good because it teaches critical thinking and civil debate and prepares engaged citizens.

Community

Good satire like A Man on the Inside points out the problems as well as possible remedies. Vinick mocks the notion of community, but the show values it above all because, without it, resistance is impossible. Wheeler College’s faculty and staff celebrate each other and band together across disciplinary divides.

In the words of the provost in the last episode of the season, they are committed to protecting “community and knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”

Schur’s comedy offers a timely defence of higher education and is notable for bridging the gap between academics and the general public.

Barbara K Seeber received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant at Brock University.

– ref. A Man on the Inside: Netflix comedy offers a timely defence of higher education – https://theconversation.com/a-man-on-the-inside-netflix-comedy-offers-a-timely-defence-of-higher-education-270934

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Robert Chernomas, Professor Of Economics, University of Manitoba

United States President Donald Trump and his MAGA base are often portrayed as a break from past political norms. While that is certainly true, it overlooks the long and predictable path that led to his rise.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) became the movement’s rallying cry, tapping into a nostalgic vision of a past era of economic prosperity and social dominance and appealing to voters who feel left behind by demographic and economic change.

Trump is the predictable result of the deteriorating economic conditions in the U.S. since the 1980s and the political machinations that brought those economic conditions about. In our recent book Why America Didn’t Become Great Again, we explore how the U.S. has set itself on a path toward self-destruction.

The rise of corporate power

In the 1970s, higher taxes and regulation, a growing “rights-conscious revolution” around the environment, gender and race, demand for rising wages and increasing foreign competition threatened corporate power. In response, American business embarked on what billionaire Warren Buffett described as “class warfare.”

To transfer wealth and power from the many to the few, institutions had to be organized, government policies reoriented and economists, journalists and politicians recruited, funded and promoted.

Corporate lobbying skyrocketed. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C.,; by 1982, 2,445 did. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) rose from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by the mid-1980s.

Business lobbying organizations advocated for policies like corporate tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, anti-worker legislation and more permissive rules on corporate political donations. Between 1998 and 2022, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent US$1.8 billion on lobbying activities, making it the single largest spender in the nation.

The role of wealthy individuals

Individual business owners also chipped in. Figures like Charles and David Koch funded organizations that aligned with their desire to create a U.S. free from government regulation, taxation, redistribution or public services. During the 2016 election cycle, Koch-backed PACs spent just under US$900 million.

Many of these organizations, like the Tea Party, also helped put into the mainstream an evangelical creationism that distrusted science and expert opinion, supported a patriarchal animosity to women’s rights, opposed policies to further racial equality and expressed xenophobic opinions.

The flood of corporate money shifted the political centre, making Democrats more conservative. No progressive economic policy has been passed in the United States since the 1970, with the tepid exception of the Affordable Care Act, which is friendly to the health insurance industry.

The strategy proved remarkably successful. According to political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, when wealthy Americans strongly support a policy, it’s about twice as likely to be adopted. But strong support from the middle class has “essentially no effect.”

How does this happen in a working democracy?

Business leaders cannot win elections on their own — they need allies. One particularly large group was easy to convince. Since the 1960s, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of white voters.

Between the 1960-64 and 1968-72 election cycle, support for Democratic candidates among less-educated white voters fell from 55 to 35 per cent. With the exception of the 1992 and 1996 elections when their votes were more evenly split, this gap has held to the present day.

Although their share of the population is declining, less-educated white voters still made up just under 50 per cent of the electorate nationally in 2018. College-educated white voters have tended to split their votes more evenly or provide a small edge to Republicans.

If Democrats have branded themselves as the party of inclusion — of different races, genders, ethnicities and sexualities — the Republican Party has defended what they euphemistically term “traditional values.”

In a Faustian bargain to advance a pro-business agenda, the Republican Party successfully appealed to less-educated white voters, whose historical economic and social advantages have been diminishing. They earn less and die younger than they used to and their advantages over other groups in society are diminishing.

The Republican Party seized on this group’s discontent and actively channelled it against African Americans and immigrants. As early as the 1960s, the Republican’s Southern strategy promoted racism, successfully shifting white voters to their party and shifting the political spectrum to the right. That strategy continued through Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Tea Party and Trump.

Importantly, this shift in voting preferences occurred well before the advent of the so-called “Rust Belt.” According to Pew Research, manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979.

Faced with declining standards of living, less-educated white voters could have chosen solidarity with all other workers and forced concessions from the elite of the business community to make the lives of all working-class people better. Instead, they voted to maintain the relative advantage of being white.

Rising inequality

The redistribution of income and wealth was detrimental to most Americans. Between 1973 and 2000, the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of U.S. taxpayers fell by seven per cent. Incomes of the top one per cent rose by 148 per cent, the top 0.1 per cent by 343 per cent, and the top 0.01 per cent rose by 599 per cent.

If the income distribution had remained unchanged from the mid-1970s, by 2018, the median income would be 58 per cent higher ($21,000 more a year). The decline in profits was halted, but at the expense of working families. Stagnant wages, massive debt and ever longer working hours became their fate.

Income stagnation is not the only quality of life indicator that suffered. In 1980, life expectancy in the U.S. was about average for an affluent nation. By the 2020s, it dropped to the lowest among wealthy countries, even behind China or Chile, largely due to the stagnation of life expectancy for working-class people.

The paradox of “red state” support

Less-educated white voters have historically supported politicians (mainly Republicans) who support cutting taxes for the rich and cutting social programs that they significantly benefit from.

In 2023, the Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas vowed to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of the federal government “out of your wallets.” Yet the numbers tell a different story.

In 2019, the federal government collected only half as much in taxes as it spent in the state, amounting to about US$5,500 per person in Arkansas. Similar patterns hold in many other regions.

Republican Kentucky is the largest destination of federal transfers, receiving US$14,000 per resident, approximately 30 per cent of its entire gross domestic product.

The electoral preferences of red states don’t result in good outcomes. States won by Trump in the 2016 presidential election had lower average scores (similar to Russia) on the American Human Development Index — which measures income, education and health — than states won by Democrats, which are similar to the Netherlands.

The modern Republican agenda

For decades, the alliance between less-educated white voters and business worked very well for business. Trump’s MAGA still delivers longstanding pro-business policies, from deregulation to antagonism to workers’ rights and massive tax cuts for the rich.

Today, however, the Republican Party now also promotes policies that business has long fostered, if not supported, including a distrust of facts and science, the ethnic cleansing of the labour force, racism, a vengeance for justice and a hodgepodge of crony, incompetent economic priorities and policies.

This combination has created a more unstable and unpredictable political, economic and social environment, leaving a significant majority of CEOs yearning for the stable Republican Party of a bygone era.

Robert Chernomas is a Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba and a member of Elbows Up: A Practical Program for Canadian Sovereignty. I am not affiliated with a political party or industry association but I am politically active.

Ian Hudson receives funding from SSHRC.
Ian Hudson is a Research Associate for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

– ref. Why America hasn’t become great again – https://theconversation.com/why-america-hasnt-become-great-again-272778

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jennifer Saul, Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language, University of Waterloo

By now, many of us have probably seen the video of a Minneapolis woman whose last words were a calm “It’s fine, dude; I’m not mad at you,” before she was shot three times in the head as she turned her car to drive away from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that Renee Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”

Vice-President JD Vance declared “the reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car… You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.”

These statements, and others that doubled down on them, were made even as videos showing they were clearly false were in wide circulation.

It’s puzzling. Why lie in a situation like this? Who can you hope to deceive, when evidence falsifying your statements is freely available?

Seeing is not believing?

Our work on authoritarian public discourse stresses that there are multiple answers to this question, partly because there are many different audiences of mass communication. We need to come to grips with the multiple functions of obvious falsehoods like these to understand why they are made so often and so prominently, and how they serve authoritarian leaders.

First, something that seems obvious to you can be credible to others. How? Because in an era of algorithmic news feeds, we are not all getting the same news. Those with a newsfeed of nothing but MAGA influencers are in a different epistemic bubble from other people.

And they may well be in an echo chamber, in which opposing voices are so discredited that when an alternative narrative reaches them, it’s immediately dismissed.

Millions of people may not have seen the videos of the incident at all, or may have seen versions with instructions on how to interpret the visuals: she’s not turning around, she’s backing up in preparation to ram into the shooter; she’s not calmly indicating that she isn’t a threat, she’s refusing to comply with orders.

Videos of police using force often have this dual nature: they can document and prove wrongdoing; but they can also be used to train citizens to see threats where there are none.

Authoritarian tactics

Some people will find the lies too obvious to be plausible attempts at deception. Yet bald-faced lies are important in strongman politics.

Authoritarians can display their power by asserting obvious falsehoods, showing that they cannot be held to account. They also play to their base by showing contempt for a shared enemy, while demanding displays of loyalty and compliance from underlings.

Officials are forced to engage in the humiliating ritual of repeating what we call compliance lies. Think here of White House press secretary Sean Spicer at the start of Trump’s first term, forced to defend absurd lies about Trump’s and Obama’s inauguration crowds.

At the time, this may have seemed merely buffoonish. What’s happened since illustrates how dangerous this can be as the subject of the lies has changed to matters concerning life and death.

Other people may simply become confused by obvious lies. The competing interpretations of the Minneapolis video are diametrically opposed. Once news sites and social media feeds are sufficiently populated by these opposing views, it can feel like an overwhelming task to discern what’s really true.

And exposing a lie still doesn’t end its influence. It is easier to create an opinion with a lie than to undo that opinion when the lie is debunked, something known to psychologists as the continued influence effect.

Filling social media feeds with falsehoods to create confusion is a crucial part of the strategy that Steve Bannon, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser, called “flooding the zone with shit.” This can leave people unsure of who to trust, what to believe, or even what the issue really is.

‘Both sides’ reporting

Relatively savvy and good-faith entities can be used as instruments of this strategy. In the name of neutrality and balance, centrist news media can fall back on a “both sides” model that frames stories mainly in terms of what each side is saying.

When one side commits to obvious lies, this approach obligingly repeats those lies while outsourcing the fact-checking to the opposing side, as if it were merely a partisan dispute.

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Read more:
Why Donald Trump is such a relentless bullshitter

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These duelling narratives can then become the story. The strategy to lie shifts focus away from the shooting itself, in this incident, and onto the alleged controversy.

In other words, obvious lies aren’t necessarily failed lies. They can confuse, distract, excite and intimidate a range of audiences. They can also be believed, no matter how obviously false they seem.

To treat them as mere indications of shamelessness or incompetence on the part of the liar is to overlook the serious harm they can do and the appeal they have in authoritarian politics.

Jennifer Saul is a member of Democrats Abroad.

Tim Kenyon has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. Why Donald Trump is telling such obvious lies on the ICE Minneapolis killing – https://theconversation.com/why-donald-trump-is-telling-such-obvious-lies-on-the-ice-minneapolis-killing-273200