Interesting Links for 12-08-2024

[andrewducker]

1. The innovations in drone warfare in the Russia/Ukraine war will change warfare forever

(tags:war military technology drone Ukraine Russia viaDanielDWilliam )

2. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Labour's Post-Rwanda Immigration Plans

(tags:UK migration )

3. Why Scotland may have avoided far right unrest

(tags:scotland nationalism riots racism )

Comments

[calimac]

3) It doesn't beg the question, it raises the question.

[wildeabandon]

'Raises the question' is probably the most widely used meaning of the phrase 'begs the question'.

[calimac]

Maybe I should respond to that by saying "I could care less" when what I mean is that I couldn't care less.

[wildeabandon]

I'm really confused by this. If you don't care what it means, why did you respond in the first place?

[andrewducker]

He's saying that he doesn't care that many people use the phrase incorrectly, it's still incorrect.

[wildeabandon]

Oh, I see. Thank you, that makes sense. Or at least clears up my confusion. I remain largely unconvinced that prescriptivism makes sense per se, but it is at least internally consistent.

[calimac]

It clarifies the intent of the speaker and the meaning of words. We already have "raise the question" to mean raise the question; why not leave "beg the question" to mean beg the question? It's only being misused because of uncertainty as to what it does mean; better education would clarify this.

[wildeabandon]

I mean, we also have "assume the premise which it claims to prove". If one wants to be unambiguous, why not use an unambiguous phrase?

But more to the point, I think you're assigning more agency to the process by which language evolves than is actually entailed. People don't make a decision to use a phrase or a word differently and then impose it on everyone else. They hear it, make assumptions about what it means, and use it in the way that seems to make sense to them, and sometimes that leads to new meanings being assigned and old ones falling out of use. And sure, if that happens once or twice in isolation then that's misuse caused by uncertainty about what it means, and can be addressed with education.

But when there are hundreds of millions of people speaking a language it's going to change, and by the time a change has become widespread enough to crop up in non tabloid news articles, then it's a change that's not going to be reversed by trying to educate people. Words mean what people use and understand them to mean, and when a new meaning becomes popular enough that that is how most people are using it, it is by definition, not a misuse.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hopelessly old fashioned and I don't like it, and I will still stubbornly only use "hopefully" to mean "in a hopeful manner" and "momentarily" to mean "fleetingly", but that doesn't make the vast majority of people who use them to mean "If I get what I'm hoping for" or "in a moment" wrong.

[calimac]

Your proposed substitute is long and clumsy, so I can't take it seriously as a suggestion.

You seem to forget that prescriptivists are users of the language too, and there are millions of us, not a tiny squad. If language does not necessarily evolve through agency, it can evolve through agency, and we are highly motivated to make it do so. New usages can disappear, they do so all the time. If a large proportion of the language's users consider a usage to be - let's not say 'inaccurate', let's say untutored and glaringly awkward - that's an important fact of usage and ought to be recorded by descriptivists. And if people who use those usages, out of unawareness of this, learn how hamfooted they look to many of their readers by doing so - why, they might continue out of sheer orneriness, but they might stop. I've received thanks from writers I've informed of this: my particular bugaboo is "crescendo," because it's a technical term whose meaning is not changing.

I don't tolerate such usages in the journal I edit, but it depends on the usage. Someone discovered a split infinitive in the final proofs last year, and I wrote, "It's better not to split an infinitive than to split it, but it's not wrong to split it, and since we have to minimize changes at this stage, let it be."

[mountainkiss]

How do you know that there are millions of prescriptivists and not a tiny squad? (Genuine q not attack)

[wildeabandon]

Sadly I fear that a lot of language choices come down to compromise between grace and precision. You could probably get away with "assume the premise" and leave the reader to infer the rest, in much the same way that you could use 'beg the question', and allow the reader to figure out from context in which sense it was meant, but in either case you have to accept the risk of being misunderstood. Perhaps the solution is to just use 'petitio principii' which is both short and precise, but I'm not sure that would enhance understanding overall.

I entirely agree that part of recording how words are used includes recording differing viewpoints on how they should be used, and Merriam-Webster do just that here. I don't think that there's anything wrong with letting people know that some people would find their use of language glaringly awkward, especially in the context of editing a journal, where your input has been specifically sought. It's the generalisation from "these are the styles that we prefer" to "this is objectively correct and other choices are wrong" that I struggle with, particularly when the other choices are considerably more common.

I would, in all honesty, probably be a bit more open to prescriptivist approaches if I hadn't spent so much time running into it in the form of "specific singular 'they' is incorrect", which unlike nitpicking over novel uses of philosophical and musical technical terms does real harm to real people. And although it wouldn't be fair of me to place all the blame for that harm at the door of prescriptivism generally, it does enable it, which I guess sets the bar for me to be willing to consider it worthwhile as pretty high.

[mountainkiss]

Whenever anyone says to me "I will be with you momentarily", I always reply with gushing enthusiasm "Oh, I do hope so!"

I have not yet been rumbled.

3

[danieldwilliam]

I guess two of the factors in the lack of public disorder in Scotland are firstly, we've got a different a locus for our headbangers - as the article mentions - built around religious sectarianism, football loyalties and concepts of British-Scottish nationalism and identity. Secondly, my guess again, that the protests / disorder in England is being organised through English nationalist networks that don't extend to Scotland or Wales - where I think the locus of right-wing nationalism is Britishness not Englishness so not in the same networks.

Re: 3

[andrewducker]

I remember that the SDL tried to get off the ground but didn't get very far.

Re: 3

[danieldwilliam]

Our indigenous native born thugs have only got so many hours in the day.

[armiphlage]

Drones allow more precise targeting. Thermobaric weapons are extremely lethal to their targets, but do not produce shrapnel that travels far. Could these changes make warfare less lethal to civilians? Or is that being excessively hopeful?

[andrewducker]

Maybe? How much damage do they do to buildings?

[magedragonfire]

I suppose it depends on whether the lethality to civilians - sowing fear and confusion and grief - is part of the point of the attacks.

[bens_dad]

I thought the gases went further (and around corners better) than the shrapnel, making the thermobaric weapons more lethal ?

[armiphlage]

Yes, definitely more lethal in the location of the detonation. Theoretically, you would not get metal shrapnel from the bomb or shell casing flying hundreds of metres away from the lethal blast zone. Glass shards and masonry fragments go less than half as far as metal, and penetrate less deeply into flesh. If civilians weren't being deliberately targeted, they might have a lower risk of being accidentally killed or wounded.

That's a lot of "if"'s and "might"'s, of course.