Countdown Day #2
Noelle Winiecki | Sculpture studio

We’re counting down the days until our 2013 BFA Thesis Exhibition. Watch across social for behind-the-scenes photos of our BFA candidates and their artwork.

by Ger Killeen

This is an excerpt of a talk given by Killeen at the annual Irish Language Day at Marylhurst University, May 18, 2013.

One of the most thumbed-through of the books I own in the Irish language is a dictionary: An Irish-English Dictionary compiled and edited by The Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen in 1904. I have other Irish-English dictionaries which are more useful to me than Dinneen’s, dictionaries that are printed in standard Roman type, unlike Dinneen’s which retains the half-uncial lettering and unreformed spelling in which Irish was written for centuries; dictionaries which have kept up with the times and can tell me the Irish words for “injection mould” and “file transfer protocol”; dictionaries laden with all the serviceable, civil service-concocted words necessary for communicating the intricacies of the bureaucratic machinery running the modern Irish state. These are all valuable dictionaries in their own right, and I depend on them almost daily. But I don’t love them the way I do Dinneen’s; I don’t take as much pleasure in them; and they are not nearly as heartbreaking.

I open Dinneen at random and my eyes are drawn to the word cairríneach which I’m told is the word used in West Kerry for “a frail scythe.” I flip on and come across luch meaning “shreds of extraneous matter in tallow that is being melted down.” And further along there’s tothbhuarach “rushes pounded and prepared for the making of a spancel.”

Personally, I’ve never heard anyone in the present-day Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland which lie mostly along the northwest, west and southwest coasts, use any of these words in ordinary, everyday conversation. They are among many hundreds — perhaps thousands — of words which, though they have a dictionary existence, are passing or have passed from the living speech of native Irish speakers. These particular words come from a world that was pre-industrial, isolated, and conservative in custom and religion. They lived on the tongues of people who farmed smallholdings of fairly poor land, of cattle-raisers and sheep-herders, of fishermen and carpenters, of thatchers and farriers.  And they join whole classes of words that have gone silent in the speech of the Gaeltacht — the names of plants, of weather phenomena, of finely observed character traits. They join, too, the traditional songs, poems and stories that are forgotten or half-forgotten by living people and have gone to their rest in the archives of the heroic collectors of folklore and language data.

“To imagine a language,” says Wittgenstein, “is to imagine a form of life.” And the form of life conjured up from a survey of Dinneen is so remote from the life of the present-day Gaeltacht, never mind the rest of Ireland, that the language itself seems almost as alien as Sanskrit. Long gone from the daily life of the Gaeltacht are the net weavers, the tailors, the cobblers and the blade sharpeners along with their rich hoards of specialized craft terminology.

At this point now the sociologically-minded person might produce a sheaf of woeful statistics about the status of Irish as a spoken language and, depending on her relationship to an Ghaeilge, might prophesy its imminent disappearance with the kind of equanimity historical linguistics reserves for Tocharian or Gaulish, or, might fall romantically into the idiom of pure lament: “Mo mhíle trua, mo bhuairt, mo bhrón…” “Och, ochón!”  (My thousand pities, my grief, my sorrow…Alas, alas!)

I, however, am going to call to my side a different spirit, one canny enough to understand how endangered the Irish language is, and yet one uncannily bold enough to try to turn the wake into a wedding. I’m going to take a look at a few poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, one of the foremost contemporary Irish language poets, and see what they might mean for us as learners and speakers of Irish, see if there’s inspiration and strength we can draw from them.

In her New York Times article, Ní Dhomhnaill talks about the current language situation in Ireland:

At some level, it doesn’t seem too bad. People are warm and not hungry. They are expressing themselves without difficulty in English. They seem happy. I close my notebook with a snap and set off in the grip of that sudden pang of despair that is always lurking in the ever-widening rents of the linguistic fabric of minority languages. Perhaps my mother is right. Writing in Irish is mad. English is a wonderful language and it also has the added advantage of being very useful for putting bread on the table. Change is inevitable, and maybe it is part of the natural order of things that some languages should die while others prevail. And yet, and yet…

And yet, and yet, indeed. On some level, I sometimes think we allow a certain unconscious belief in absolute historical determinism to color our views of future possibilities. The Irish language in a globalized economic system and a global iPod culture, surely it’s all downhill from here?

And yet, and yet… Frank O’Connor claimed that Gaelic culture could be characterized by “the backward look,” an Irish tendency to retrospective anticipation, to looking at the past (not the present) as indicator of the future. Of course it depends on where exactly you look. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill sometimes looks back into the amazing Irish poetic tradition for tropes and hopes of the flowering of the vastly improbable. She has often mentioned, for example, as one of her poetic forebears Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, the 18th-century poet who composed one of the greatest love poems and elegies in Irish ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire,’ (The Lament for Art O Leary).

Composed at a time when Irish was on the verge of being abandoned by large sections of the population, this poem is a miracle of lyrical intensity, a fully realized sumsumption of the entire Gaelic tradition of the caoineadh, the lament and a miracle of survival, living on well into the 19th century in the oral tradition of West Kerry, indeed all of Munster:

Mo chara thú is mo thaithneamh!

            Nuair ghabhais amach an geata

            D’fhillis ar ais go tapaidh,

            Do phógaís do dhís leanbh,

            Do phógaís mise ar bharra baise.

            Duraís, ‘A Eibhlín, éirigh i d’ sheasamh

            Agus cuir do ghnó chun taisce

            Go luaimneach is go tapaidh.

            Táimse ag fágáil an bhaile,

            Is ní móide go deo go gcasfainn.’

My friend and my delight, when you went out the gate you came back quickly and kissed your two infants. You kissed me on the tips of my fingers and said ‘Eibhlín, stand up and put your work aside fast and soon, for I am leaving home and I might never be returning.

Listen to the echos of this (and much more) at the end of a poem called Dún ‘Stronghold’ by Ní Dhomhnaill:

Ach níl in aon ní ach seal

            i gcionn leathuaire

            pogfaidh tú mé i mbarra éadain

            is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom

            is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin

            don leaba dhúbailte

            ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne

            ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

Everything lasts but a moment. In half an hour you’ll kiss the top of my forehead and you’ll turn your back to me, and I’ll be left on my own side of the double bed, remembering in the shade of your shoulders that death will never come to me before my time.

With a poem like this we can be certain that death will never come to the Irish language itself before its time, and there’s an energy and musicality in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem that while full of literary nuance is also full of the vigor of the spoken, everyday language. Anyone who has spent a night in a pub in Ballyferriter or Spiddal knows that spoken Irish has a vital, earthy, fluent existence that really can’t be captured in the “native speaker” statistics such as those piled up in Reg Hindley’s book The Death of the Irish Language.  The numbers game isn’t the whole story.

Ní Dhomhnaill wonderfully and humorously and bitingly catches something of the continued vitality of the spoken language and its importance for literature in a poem called ‘Claoninsint,’  literally, ‘Indirect Speech’:

Tá’s againn, a dúradar,

cár chaithis an samhradh, a dúradar,

            thíos i mBun an Tábhairne, a dúradar,

            cad a dheinis gach lá, a dúradar,

            chuais ar an dtráigh, a dúradar,

            níor chuais ag snámh, a dúradar.

            Canathaobh nár chuais ag snámh?

            Mar bhí sé rófhuar, a dúradar,

            rófhuar do do chnámha, a dúradar,

            do do chnámha ‘tá imithe gan mhaith, a dúradar,

            bodhar age sámhnas nó age teaspach gan dúchas

            gur deachair dhuit é a iompar, a dúradar.

We know, they said, where you spent the summer, they said, down in Crosshaven, they said, what you did every day, they said, you went to the beach, they said, you didn’t go swimming, they said. Why didn’t you go swimming? Because it was too cold they said, too cold for your bones, they said, for your bones that are turned to no good, they said,  not able to cope with hardship, with your unnatural high spirits, it was hard for you to handle, they said.

Here and elsewhere in the work of Ní Dhomhnaill, and indeed in the work of many other Irish writers who choose to be mad enough to continue writing in Irish, the corpse is certainly sitting up and talking back, even singing back. From the margins, from the scarcely acknowledged gaps and discontinuities in the mainstream anglophone culture in Ireland, is coming a whole range of discourses that in refusing to shut up or be shut up opens up a profound questioning of cultural values and to some extent is producing, in literature, at least, a kind of hybrid vigor as English language Irish writers try to take in the insights of such a critique. Issues not only of language, but of gender, of colonization, of genre, of the social position of the writer—all these are informed and deepened by the practice of poets like Ní Dhomhnaill.

As I reach the end of this talk, I realize that whatever questions I’ve raised here, I haven’t so much given answers to them as much as align myself with a series of hopes I find compellingly interlinked in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Among them would be the hope that out of the maelstrom of postmodernity the vivifying differences of languages, cultures, genders and spiritualities can retain their unique virtues without descending into chauvinsim and exclusivity. Is it too much to hope for a reasonably bilingual Ireland a generation from now?

Want to experience the Irish language yourself? Robert Burke and Ger Killeen will co-teach two weekend immersion courses in fall 2013. Dates and times to be posted in the course schedule this summer.

Ger Killeen is a writer and instructor in the Department of Culture & Media at Marylhurst University. His interests include modern poetry, Celtic literature, the poetry of mysticism and critical theory.

Photo: RTÉ Presspack

During the first season of Downton Abbey, there was an amusing bit when the family decided to install a telephone. It being 1914, no one knew how to use one. Several members of the household even questioned whether it was necessary at all.

Of course, this was funny because the phone seems like such a common object in our lives now. It wasn’t long after its invention that nearly every home and business had one. The telephone provided connection with the community. Urgent messages could be delivered quickly; distant loved ones could be reached easily. Dinner could be ordered and delivered.

When I was younger, our household had a “family phone.” We only had one phone line to share. It was in the kitchen. By the time I was in high school, we had several lines, call waiting and phones in each bedroom as well. In fact, even the computer had its own phone line, which it accessed using a top-of-the-line 28.8k modem.

Email experienced a similar transformation. Most households started with a singular email address that was shared by all members of the family. Do you remember getting those free AOL trial discs in the mail? Within just a few years, most people started getting their own email addresses. You probably have multiple. As of this writing, I have 17 different email addresses that I use regularly.

These days, many households use individual cell phones in place of a shared landline. Even so, cell phones are hardly used as telephones anymore – in fact, service providers make their money on data, not minutes. Talking has been replaced by texting, tweets and status updates. Many people spend more time playing Angry Birds than they do on phone calls.

As a society, we’ve become obsessed with having our own phone lines and emails, mostly in order to enjoy privacy. Despite our move towards more privacy in our intimate forms of communication, we’ve become much more public through social media. Many crisis phone lines are being replaced by instant Facebook messages and tweets. We can now broadcast what we are thinking, share photos of what we are eating, show progress on what we’re reading or watching and can send an update worldwide — instantly.

So before you dismiss the role of online communications, think about this: the biggest waste of resources for an organization isn’t investing into new forms of communication. No, it is when they forget how to connect with the very people they’re trying to reach. Perhaps it’s time that the old communications slogan be updated to “Reach out and tweet someone.”

Simon Tam is a musician, author, marketer and social justice activist. He is currently pursuing an MBA at Marylhurst University and can be found at simontam.biz and Twitter @SimonTheTam.

Photo: Tim G. Photography via Flickr, Creative Commons License

by Adam Graves

As I scrape off and revise another area of the painting, I am reminded of the phenomenological dialogue I have engaged in with this image, the subject, the materials, and the place. Revising is an attempt (sometimes desperate) to bring more truth to the dialogue. Sometimes it takes a big move or a risky gesture to release more of the story that is in the impulse to paint a sense of this place. Why risky? We often start out doing something with an idea or a goal, and in the process of moving toward that goal, find that something isn’t working. It is a courageous act to acknowledge the thing that isn’t working and make a change. Scraping off or painting over a whole section of a painting; improvising with marks, gestures, and color – these are the risky acts that allow the full vision to emerge. Sometimes we can’t make this choice and the satisfaction we seek doesn’t seem complete. Sometimes we need someone else’s help to have the courage to make the revision. I paint the way I paint to be in touch with the ever-changing dialogue between maker and object, so I can be that person to help others make the revision they want to make.

Adam Graves is an art therapist, National Certified Counselor and assistant professor in the Department of Art Therapy Counseling at Marylhurst University. You can see Adam’s artwork at the Art Therapy Counseling Faculty Exhibition at Streff Gallery through May 31, 2013.

In March 2013, John Caruso posted a two-part series on digital democracy. Those posts prompted a lively conversation here at the Marylhurst blog about digital citizenship, digital writing, multimedia, co-learning and participatory culture. In response to this ongoing dialogue, Tiffany Timperman offers her perspective on composition and multimodality.

by Tiffany Timperman

“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.” – Oscar Wilde, “The Preface,” The Picture of Dorian Gray

I want to consider the ways that multimodality can enrich composition: process and product. Traditional composition focuses on alphabetic text styled according to a rhetorical mode of writing (narrative, descriptive, argumentative, expository), purpose (to convince, persuade, entertain, inform), audience, and disciplinary guideline (MLA, APA, Chicago Style). Multimodal composition incorporates, as the term suggests, multiple modes to create a whole, and in the sense that we now have new and emerging technologies and materials, composition has increased potential and design elements to draw from.

In 1996, The New London Group called attention to the “increasing complexity and inter-relationship of different modes of meaning.” They also identified six major areas of design and meaning: Linguistic, Visual, Audio, Gestural, Spatial, and Multimodal. Multimodal is unique as a design mode because it interconnects among the other five modes. As a style, then, multimodal composition is not linear, but layered and dimensional. It does not conform to a singular or prescriptive idea of composition; rather, it evolves with the modes of representation and means, medium, of dissemination.

In one sense, all writing is multimodal because life is multimodal, and a close reading of multimodal texts from the 19^th century (consider William Blake’s illuminated books, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s oeuvre, and the illustrated periodical The Yellow Book) shows that the concept is not novel. Rather, it is a movement of growth and addition, of recognition and renaming, as so often happens when critics perceive artistic shifts. Of course, we could trace the origins back further as well, but that is another discussion.

Balance of design is a significant lesson in my introduction of multimodal composition in Writing 323: Academic Writing: Research Paper. Students come to appreciate the practice after a period of recalibration that includes a review of select multimodal composition literature that they respond to, beginning with Tanya Sasser’s article: “Bring Your Own Disruption: Rhizomatic Learning in the Composition Class.” Overwhelmingly, students are engaged and welcome the approach. It does, however, take some rethinking and getting used to after being told how and what to compose for so long, if writing by formula or painting by numbers can even be considered composition.

Unfortunately, many students who enter beginning or advanced composition courses do so reluctantly when it is required. Many report that stale lectures and prescriptive assignments, in which they have no say or freedom of design, still exist. I am not sure if this stems from academic elitism or petrification, but the unwillingness to critically examine our role as educators in a complex social, cultural, and technological system, to reinvent, to test assumptions, and to abdicate authority in order to spark diversity, dialogue, and respect needs to be checked. When I hear faculty complain that students cannot write a decent paper, I wonder if the problem is not the student, but the lack of design and creativity of the assignment magnified by years of conventional and summative rather than experimental and formative teaching and assessment.

So my first call of duty in the composition classroom is to create an open and inclusive environment that fosters narrative imagination and critical depth. One way that I remix authority in the classroom is by asking students to create, design, and publish a blog. Unlike a typical LMS, a blog defers responsibility and accountability to the learner/designer: students are the authors and archivists of their learning objects. Blogging also fosters students’ self-esteem, and when they are comfortable posting, commenting on other blogs and tagging their posts, the magic unfolds and they attract followers, which reifies the sense of ownership and accountability. In this case, the digital sphere is an ideal studio/laboratory to create and test ideas. Blogs are also transferable and adaptable, so the blogger can take his design skills, ideas, following, and artifacts with him into a personal or professional context when he leaves academe. Blogging promotes 21^st-century digital literacy skills that are diversifiable, so for me it is an ideal medium and teaching tool.

However, multimodal composition does not ask the author to forego non-digital in favor of digital representation; rather, as Jody Shipka argues, it “privilege[s] innovative, purposeful choosing and requires that students reflect on the meaning potentials of a wide variety of genres, methodologies, and technologies (both old and new)” (89). Take the opening passage of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.” Here, and there are multiple examples of this throughout the novel, Wilde captures the spatial (environmental), gestural (sensual), and linguistic (visual) effects of the setting in a decadent prose style. Though perhaps more subtle than a text that embeds a physical photograph or drawing of a portrait alongside narrative, Wilde’s stylistic use of ekphrasis is nonetheless multimodal, and one of the oldest forms of “the verbal representation of visual representation” (James Heffernan).

Now, Wilde was a keen observer of nature, artifice, and humanity, and it is not a stretch to propose that he might have embedded more technology in his full-bodied narrative than he already does, had it been more readily existent and prevalent in his surroundings, as it is in ours. When Wilde does narrate his experience with technology, it rises to the occasion of art, such as his quip about the typewriter: “The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.” We can only imagine what he would have made of 21^st-century technology, but if his 19^th-century treatment of tools is any indication, it would have been alive, animate, pulsing with waves and emissions: an aesthetic mix of nature and artifice for a desired (multimodal) effect. Capturing the typewriter’s musical potential in language and metaphor is no less effective than hyperlinking to a staccato audio clip or embedding a still image of a figure playing the machine with emotion. In fact, writing as the medium of expression is arguably preferred in this instance, as it not only mimics (represents) but transforms the sound, when written/played with expression.

Take, as one more example, Wilde’s grotesque animation of Dorian’s portrait: “What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood?” I argue that this is precisely the type of dimension and movement that multimodal composition seeks to capture, and that it can happen with the old and new, and depends only on the author’s skillful composition of elements. Wildean invention and disruption can and should take place in the composition classroom; if not encouraged, we are promoting the circulation of dull, if not dead, ideas.

It is good to remember that pinning a name on an artistic movement does not necessarily make it new, but it indicates the malleability and regenerative nature of art. We owe a debt to our predecessors, and this should reassure the conservative or skeptical traditionalists who are reluctant to embrace “new” ideas and technology in the writing – and more broadly humanities – discipline. We also owe a debt to the future of rhetoric and composition studies, ourselves, and our students: a debt that we can begin to settle now by embracing multimodality, which encourages 21^st-century digital literacy as well as an appreciation of the past. We have nothing to fear, as rhetoric goes.

Tiffany Timperman is an instructor in the Department of English Literature & Writing at Marylhurst University. Her interests include 19^th-century British literature, language and decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, rhetoric and composition.

by Alex Mihm

Humankind’s imprint on our surroundings is everywhere, commingled with the natural. I am typing this on my back deck. The moon, nearly full, casts stark silhouettes of the cedars before me. The wind’s breath sighs through the boughs, and somewhere nearby a fussy crow is doing a poor job of keeping the location of its nest a secret. On a hillside across the Willamette, three towers flash red in a jerky rhythm. Straight overhead a commercial jet just narrowly avoids a collision with the Big Dipper. All of this is my —­­ our —­­ world, and it is important to remember that, no matter what we invent or build, nothing we can own will elevate us above it, for we are still natural beings born of the Earth. We need to understand how connected we are to this place, and then cultivate that relationship with both enthusiasm and respectful deference.

When AnnaLee Collinson and I first met to develop ideas for our new club, Student Organization for Sustainability (SOS), we wanted to introduce ourselves to the Marylhurst community at a time when people would be thinking about sustainability. The result was a screening of the film Tapped on Earth Day, followed by great conversation about taking action on our campus. Some of those ideas were shared at our inaugural meeting this past Thursday, and we hope to hear from other students with ideas of their own.

As someone who thinks of sustainability as a responsibility ­­— a small price to pay to live such comfortable lives —­­ I admit rolling my eyes when I hear some of the fluffy talk about Earth Day. I am not sure it provides us with much more than the opportunity to openly acknowledge the simple fact that we cannot sustain ourselves without first sustaining our planet —­­ a thought that should not need a special day. However, I do admit it gives us all a good chance to talk about the ways we can help. It is worth emphasizing there is a marked difference between talking and actually doing something, though, and in our society, that means honoring what we know to be right above what is most convenient and acting accordingly. That is worth celebrating.

So how can we do that? How can we turn our talk into small changes that add up? A few (rambling) ideas…

Buy less stuff. Plant something edible. Plant something native. Get outdoors a lot more. Support our local farmers. Engage with our elected officials. Stop trying to kill each and every “pest.” Put on a sweater when it’s cold. Put on a fan when it’s hot. Don’t use the AC with the windows open. Don’t drive when we don’t have to. Own a reusable bottle and never, ever, ever buy bottled water. Use dishes we can wash, not ones we can throw away. Know what we can recycle and recycle it every time. Stop thinking of animals as things. Take the time to look up at the trees. Look up even higher at the stars. Look down at the bugs. Connect. Wonder.

Think of Earth Day not just as a whiny plea to make us give up bottled water or to learn once and for all what we can and cannot recycle (though we should do those things!) ­­ Think of it as a reminder of how much we all gain when we allow ourselves to embrace our connection to this wonderful world. These walls of sheetrock and glass that separate us from the elements are not as stout as the ones we have constructed within these boxes of bone and mush atop our necks. It will take far more than one day a year to change that.

Alex Mihm is a student at Marylhurst University and co-chair of the new Student Organization for Sustainability club.

Photos: Luz Adriana Villa A, via Flickr Creative Commons.

by Bob Burke

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) estimates that of the 6,000+ languages spoken today half will disappear by the end of the century if nothing is done. The Irish Language is “definitely endangered,” according to UNESCO. Will this language—spoken for several thousand years, first written around the time of St. Patrick (450 AD), and one of the oldest continuously-spoken vernaculars in Western Europe—be one of the languages to disappear? Or will it survive?

In the 2011 census, 94,000 people in the Republic of Ireland, with a population of 4.5 million, said that they use Irish daily. In Northern Ireland, only 4,100 out of 1.8 million said that Irish is their daily language and the fourth most common language in Northern Ireland behind English, Polish, and Lithuanian.

A language is considered endangered when children are no longer learning it as the mother tongue in the home. This means that in the span of just two generations a language could be lost completely from a state of healthy transmission. There are many political, social and economic reasons for this. To lose a language is to lose a part of a culture.

Officially a bilingual country, the Government of the Republic of Ireland provides support to the language although the means often seem to be at cross-purposes. Last year five non-Irish speaking Garda (members of the national police force) were posted to an area in which families receive a stipend for raising their children through the medium of the Irish language. The current Taoiseach (Prime Minister) has advocated making the Irish language an elective subject in secondary school. Yet schools in which the Irish language is the medium of instruction, which began as a “grass-roots” movement in the 1970s, have seen a growth from 16 schools in 1972 to 214 schools today.  Some Irish language schools have waiting lists of up to three years for kindergarten.

Even in areas where Irish is the daily language of the people, English words keep creeping in. Words like “fridge,”  “computer,” and “bicycle” are mixed in with the Irish.  English has been described as the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid and devouring all rivals as it expands.

The Irish poet Pádraig Ó Broin, in his poem “Disinherited,” laments what has been lost when he stands before a bookshelf laden with 11^th and 12^th century Irish manuscripts and writes: “Here is my heritage and here I stand.  I can not read a word! I do not know the tongue my fathers spoke, I can not sing the songs my fathers sang, I can not read the books my fathers wrote.”

On Saturday, May 18, the Department of Culture and Media at Marylhurst will sponsor its 6^th annual Irish Language Day. Marylhurst’s own Irish language instructors Ger Killeen and Bob Burke, along with invited guest teachers, will be there. It is one way to preserve and share the Irish language—join us!

Learn more: marylhurst.edu/irish

Bob Burke is an instructor at Marylhurst in the Department of Culture and Media and vice president of The North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers. He has a special interest in second language acquisition by adults.

Photo: J. McLendon

by Barry Bennett

In an earlier post I updated George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language for the 21^st century, describing how, by creating a false picture of the political process, the word filibuster masks the undemocratic nature of our political system. In this post I describe how use of other words and phrases creates similarly false images that obscure an equally nefarious phenomenon: the destruction of the social contract and the continuing transfer of the country’s wealth to a small elite.

The longest-serving and least noticed example of this deceptive language is defined-contribution pension. A brief history of pensions will illustrate how this term misleads.

The Bible records history’s earliest known pension. After 37 years of captivity, King Amel-Marduk of Babylon, son of Nebuchadnezzar, freed the conquered King Jehoiachin of Judah, who “lived as a pensioner of the king for the rest of his life. For his maintenance, a regular daily allowance was given to him by the king as long as he lived.” The modern pension, originated by the American Express Company in 1875, is paid upon freedom (or retirement) from a different form of captivity, known as work. Some 2,500 years after Jehoiachin, the pension was embedded in American life; in 1960, over half of workers were covered by pensions.

These pensions were still “a regular daily allowance” (or, more likely, monthly), consistent with Webster’s definition of pension: “a fixed sum paid regularly to a person.” By the 21^st century, however, almost all of these defined-benefit pensions (as they came to be called) had disappeared, replaced by a savings plan deceptively called a defined-contribution pension, under which, instead of being paid a fixed monthly sum on retirement, employees contribute a fixed monthly sum while they are working (employers may also contribute). How much the employee receives when he retires (assuming the savings are converted to an annuity to mimic a fixed pension) depends on how much he has contributed and how his investments have performed. Two workers with the same jobs, length of service, and pay — which would entitle them to the same monthly payments under a defined-benefit system — may receive wildly different amounts depending on what they invested in and, crucially, when they retire. Two identically situated workers who both work for 40 years but happened to start working, and therefore to retire, a few years apart, will receive vastly different sums if one reaches retirement age during a market boom and one during a bust. Hard work may mean nothing. It can all come down to luck.

The decline of the pension system has resulted in a massive transfer of risk from corporations to workers. Just as significantly, it also represents a drastic increase in risk. Corporations that offer defined-benefit pensions are able to spread the risk of having to pay the pensions among all workers and across generations. Only a given number of workers will retire every year. If the money a firm has set aside has generated insufficient income to pay one year’s pensions, the firm can draw on other funds. Money set aside for a later retirement class may exceed promised benefits, thus compensating for the earlier shortfall. The risk is collective—like insurance. Under a defined-contribution plan, on the other hand, the risk is painfully individual.

To create a false picture of retirement security, the defined-contribution plan is also called a “pension.” But it no more guarantees a fixed sum than does any investment. Other new words similarly mask the loss of financial security. As firings became routine even among highly profitable businesses, they became layoffs and then downsizing. And whereas layoff merely ameliorated the harshness of firing, downsizing shifted the focus from the employee to the corporation. The word conjures images not of displaced workers but of increased corporate efficiency.

The loss of job security by the working class coincided with the concentration of wealth in the elite. For the last half century increases in wealth and income have accrued entirely to the top five percent of the population; all groups below that level have seen their shares of national wealth decline. Most of the increase has gone to the top one percent, which now controls at least 35 percent of the nation’s wealth, compared to 13 percent for the bottom 80 percent of the population.

A new language has been created to justify the shift in wealth. When polling showed tepid support for repeal of the estate tax, it was rechristened the death tax and support spiked — how dare the state tax death! In fact it is a tax on the transfer of wealth to the beneficiaries of the estate and has merely been deferred until death; had the assets been transferred during life they would have been subject to a gift tax. Transfers and exchanges of wealth have always been a routine basis of taxation — think sales tax, income tax, and tariffs — and the estate tax has a lineage that dates at least to ancient Egypt.

In any case, because of the generous exemption (the first $5,000,000 of any estate), fewer than one percent of estates pay the tax. And despite its alleged “double taxation,” it is imposed mostly on wealth that has not yet been taxed (because the estates subject to the tax consist largely of appreciated capital assets, which are taxed only when sold).

And taxes on those capital assets must remain low, so it is said, since the holders of capital are the job creators, and higher taxes will reduce the capital that provides employment — this despite the studies showing no correlation between capital gains tax rates and either economic growth or employment.

The language used for the working class has a decidedly different cast. Although the inheritors of wealth need only be born into the right family to attain their fortunes, it is the benefits people pay for all their lives — Social Security and Medicare — that we call entitlements. And, yes, at a certain age workers are legally “entitled” to these benefits; but the word suspiciously crept into general usage just as the social contract, with its ethic of sharing the nation’s wealth between management and labor, was disappearing. No one likes someone who feels entitled.

Hence a pattern appears: the words that apply to the wealthy — death tax, job creators — defend their privilege. Those that apply to average workers — defined-contribution pension, entitlements — justify the denial of benefits. Which makes it fitting that the phrase that links the two sides of the economic divide is class warfare. The usual purpose of warfare is to seize land or resources, and its usual means is invasion. “Class warfare,” however, is applied not to the seizure of the nation’s resources by a small group but to the act of pointing the seizure out — to call for a fairer distribution of resources is to engage in class warfare. It is as if war consists not of invasion and capture but of the cries of the injured and the dead.

But if it’s warfare, be on guard. Be aware of the manipulative uses of language, the better to resist them. They aim to overwhelm consciousness, and through repetition become reality. Resistance is not futile. It just takes some thought.

Barry Bennett is an attorney with the Bonneville Power Administration, an agency within the United States Department of Energy, and an adjunct instructor in the Marylhurst MBA program.

Photo:  Kenteegardin via Flickr, Creative Commons License

by Barry Bennett

The crucial tool of politics—and many other human endeavors—is language. Language is how we relate to each other, how we teach and how we learn. Language informs, it instructs, it describes. And it manipulates.

In his famous essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell condemned the increasing abuse of English, directing particular venom at the “swindles and perversions” that governments use to obfuscate and mislead in the most serious of situations: bombarding defenseless villages in wartime and driving out the inhabitants is pacification; imprisoning people for years without trial or sending them to die in Arctic labor camps is elimination of unreliable elements.

According to Orwell, political speech and writing had become largely “the defence of the indefensible.” Mundane, bureaucratic language allowed governments to name things “without calling up mental pictures of them”: after all, who can envision an “unreliable element”? Few would protest the elimination of such a nefarious abstraction.

Orwell wrote in 1946. Over half a century later, how well our leaders have mastered this dark art. When intelligence agencies torture terror suspects, they engage in “enhanced interrogation techniques.” When they send suspects to other countries to be tortured, they practice “extraordinary rendition.”

As with Orwell’s examples, “torture” elicits an emotional response that the bureaucratic language obscures. “Enhanced interrogation” at least suggests that someone is being questioned (perhaps loudly — but little more than that); “extraordinary rendition” is an unusual . . . well, one simply cannot tell.

But today’s political leaders have taken manipulative language in two new directions. First, they use it not only to disguise state-sanctioned brutality but to mask the more benign aspects of political and economic life. And second, they use it not only to hide true mental pictures but to create false pictures. Hence, to avoid acknowledging the country’s increasingly undemocratic system of government, politicians call Congress’s metaphorical torture of the nation with its continued inaction and paralysis (which has bequeathed us the sequester) a filibuster.

In the 17^th century, pirates known as fleebooters (also called freebooters) raided Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. The Spanish word for the pirates was filibustero, and eventually the English evolved from fleebooter to filibuster. Meanwhile the usage evolved to include not only 17^th-century pirates but 19^th-century adventurers who traveled from the United States to Central America and the West Indies to stir up revolutions. Hence filibuster came to mean a pirate, an adventurer, or, more broadly, an insurrectionist or obstructer. Eventually the word invaded the United States Congress. As Senators took to making long, irrelevant speeches on the floor of the Senate to prevent voting on bills they opposed— as they obstructed Senate business — their tactic came to be called a filibuster.

For almost 200 years the word fairly described the tactic it named. To filibuster, a Senator had to hold the floor; that is, to prevent the Senate from conducting other business he had to obstruct. The longest individual filibuster in Senate history was Strom Thurmond’s 24 hour and 18 minute speech against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which passed the Senate by a vote of 62 – 15 when Thurmond or his voice or his legs finally gave out.

Until near the end of the 20^th century filibusters were not only physically obstructionist: at least partly for that reason, they were rare. From 1789 until 1990 there were 413 filibusters. Then everything changed. From 1990 to 2002 there were almost 600. In 2009 alone there were over 100. Once reserved for matters of great urgency or principle — even if, as in Strom Thurmond’s case, the principle was pernicious — they are now routinely used to block all but the least significant bills. The filibuster explosion was enabled by a 1975 change in Senate rules that eliminated the requirement to hold the floor. Today, all a Senator need do is state an intention to filibuster, and a bill is blocked. The Senator need not even be present; as the New York Times has reported, Senators are not “required to actually talk or even be anywhere near the Capitol when they filibuster a bill.” The filibuster of the unyielding Senatorial presence has become the filibuster in absentia.

The Senate can break a filibuster by invoking “cloture,” getting 60 Senators to vote to proceed with the bill. In a fractured Senate in which one party almost never controls 60 seats, this is no easy task. Hence the paralysis. And hence the routine press reports that a bill received a vote of “58-40 in support, and therefore failed.” The uninitiated will be startled by this pronouncement. How could a bill that obtained a majority vote of 58-40 fail? Is not majority rule the very definition of democracy?

Well, yes. Which is why it has become a stretch to call the Senate — and consequently our system of government — democratic. Yet it would be unseemly for Congress to admit that the world’s oldest continuing democracy is now based on super-majority rule; to admit without pretense that only when the minority decides to let the majority have its way does true democracy prevail. Therefore, even though no one holds the floor to physically prevent voting— that is, even though there is no piratical obstruction — both the Congress and the press still refer to the blockage as a filibuster.

Continued use of this term misleads in two ways. First, it suggests that the blockage of a bill is a singular and exceptional event, worthy of a special name, when in fact it is simply the way things work. Second (at least for voters old enough to remember the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), it conjures an image of Jimmy Stewart nobly holding the Senate floor to exhaustion to expose political corruption; it suggests action when there is none. Thus it misleads by use of a tactic opposite to the one Orwell deplored: it is intended to create a mental picture rather than obscure one.

The Greeks, who coined the word democracy (and severely limited its application), contrasted it to “rule by an elite.” And just as a government would garner less support for destruction of villages than for pacification, it would find little enthusiasm for minority rule — not quite what our system is, but neither is it a system in which the majority can work its will. One can agree that the minority must have rights while still insisting that a democracy should function democratically. If the Senate will not invest “filibuster” with meaning by requiring Senators to hold the floor — if it will not make the picture real — it must abandon the word. Admit that the United States no longer runs by the rules of classical democracy and let the voters respond. Conjure no false images. Tell the people the truth.

Next week: the use of language to disguise the country’s continuing transfer of wealth to a tiny elite.

Barry Bennett is an attorney with the Bonneville Power Administration, an agency within the United States Department of Energy, and an adjunct instructor in the Marylhurst MBA program.

by J.C. Caruso

Last week I wrote a post about some of the challenges we face in a digital age where expertise and authority seem to be under constant attack, but I’d like to follow that up here by exploring this issue from a slightly different angle.

What I see as the crux of our current challenge is this: how can we ensure that the digital democratization of human knowledge does not become mired in the same anti-intellectualism that has for so long been a hallmark of our American democracy?

I know what some of you are thinking. How can I say that America is anti-intellectual?  Isn’t it true that we are home to many of the greatest universities in the world, schools that continue to draw the best and brightest from around the globe for graduate studies?

Yes, that may be true, but looking at our culture as a whole, the anti-intellectualist attitude that pervades our country is undeniable. Consider how casually and caustically our politicians and pundits dismiss “experts” and “authorities” when such learned wisdom (or book-learnin’) disagrees with their own cherished personal opinions. Witness how during last fall’s debates before the elections, senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren’s opponent called her “Professor Warren” as a put-down. True, Professor-cum-Senator Warren still won in Massachusetts but that state prides itself on the prestige surrounding its academic institutions.

By contrast, there are plenty of regions in our country where Warren’s academic credentials would more surely have done her irreparable political damage. Throughout most of the country, American anti-intellecualism is a hard fact. And it’s one I’d guess more than a few of us eggheads had thumped into us in grade school.

This isn’t a new observation. From the 1940’s to the 60’s, historian Richard Hofstadter explored these ideas in his works of social theory and political culture. The most important of Hofstadter’s studies may be Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1964), one of two separate books for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. While Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as part and parcel of our national heritage of utilitarianism rather than a necessary by-product of democracy, he did see anti-intellectualism as stemming at least in part from the democratization of knowledge. Not that he opposed broad access to university education.  Rather, Hofstadter saw universities as the necessary “intellectual and spiritual balance wheel” of civilized society, though he recognized an ongoing tension between the ideals of open access to university education and the highest levels of intellectual excellence.

Of course, important as his work remains, Hofstadter wrote before the dawning of our own digital age. He didn’t grapple with the new challenges presented by an online world where (for better or worse) communication is instantaneous, everything is available all the time, and everyone not only has a voice but has the ability to speak in a polyphony of voices masked in anonymity.

Still, we must be willing to admit that things may not be as dire as all that. As Adam Gopnik has pointed out in the New Yorker (“The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” Feb. 14, 2011), the World Wide Web is sort of like the palantir, the seeing stone used by wizards in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It tends to serve as a magnifying glass for everything we view through it.

As such, it’s no surprise that many have viewed the dawn of the Digital Age as signaling the end of everything that made the modern civilized world great. Indeed, for years now, academics and public intellectuals have lamented the way our digital media has seemed to dumb down our discourse, but there are signs of hope.

In his 2009 article “Public Intellectuals 2.1” (Society 46:49-54), Daniel W. Drezner takes a brighter view of the prospects for a new intellectual renaissance in the Digital Age, predicting that blogging and the various other forms online writing can in fact serve to reverse the cultural trend of seeing academics and intellectuals as remote and unimportant to our public life. Drezner argues that “the growth of the blogosphere breaks down—or at least lowers—the barriers erected by a professional academy” and can “provide a vetting mechanism through which public intellectuals can receive feedback and therefore fulfill their roles more effectively”  (50).

Some views are not so optimistic, but it’s true that are great online resources for serious scholarly work and there are even smart people who are thinking amazing thoughts and writing about them online.

But let’s see what a vigorous online discussion can look like. I anxiously look forward to hearing what others have to say about the issues I’ve raised here.

A 19th-century Americanist and textual scholar, John Caruso teaches at Marylhurst University in both the Department of English Literature & Writing and the Department of Culture & Media.

Photo: N3wjack’s world in pixels via Flickr