What does this mean?

How do we articulate what we have learned in recent decades from a "cultural constructionism" of subjectivity and literary canons with aesthetic ecstasy (both the "old" and the "new" aestheticism)? Deleuze's and Derrida's notions of a "dissolved cogito" and "non-egological" consciousness in the context of aesthetic ecstasy. More generally, in what might life "after the subject" consist? A reevaluation of both the continuities and apparent standoff between phenomenology — Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Michel Henry — and poststructuralism. I.e., possible revisionary versions of the dominant account of French thought from existentialism to the present. For example, were the French poststructuralists really ever the "constructionists" (still less the "cultural" constructionists) they have been claimed to be? Distinguishing between constructionism's lasting contributions and its simultaneous unwitting complicity with the domination of all life-forms by global capitalism.

Camille Paglia is my heroine.

The professor who wrote this botched abortion of a paragraph, by the way, is Philip Wood, of Rice University.  I'll bet his film classes are a hoot.

I'm skeptical of the motives of many who complain about gender harassment and discrimination law and policies.  If one listens to the Limbaughs of the world, before the Civil Rights Act and before corporations and universities began to follow policies against sexual harassment, women never faced discrimination, embarrassment, or humiliation in the workplace.  A day at the office was like a Georgia ball, and women who worked were treated like Scarlett O'Hara.  Harassment policies weren't just unnecessary but sinister, an excuse for liberal feminazis who want to sue their bosses for gentlemanly behavior, such as opening the door for a lady.

But now and again a case comes along that fully validates the Hannitys and the Becks.  As with the "Duke Lacrosse" scandal, such cases, in which a well-meant but poorly implemented gender harassment policy is abused, end up hurting women far more than any number of victories over real harassers, because they tar legitimate, well-founded complaints with suspicion.  Such a case is unfolding at East Georgia College in Swainsboro Georgia right now.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has the story.

Professor Thomas Thibeault is a prophet.  On August 5, 2009, Thibeault attended a training workshop on the school's sexual harassment policy, given by the school's vice president for legal affairs.  In the course of the workshop, Thibeault asked an uncomfortable question about whether the policy distinguished between subjective harassment (in which some nervous nelly takes offense at innocent or reasonable behavior), and objective harassment (the sort of behavior, like for instance yelling about imaginary pubic hairs on cans of Coke, which any reasonable outsider would consider inappropriate).  He was told it did not.  Then Thibeault asked whether the policy included provisions to protect against obviously false or malicious accusations.  He was told it did not.  All accusations of harassment, no matter how facially implausible, would be treated alike.  Thibeault replied that "the policy is invalid."

Two days later, Thibeault's prophecy came to pass.  He alleges he was called into the office of East Georgia College President John Bryant Black, told he was a divisive force in the college, and ordered to resign at the end of the meeting.  If he resigned, he'd be given a good recommendation for his next job.  If Thibeault chose not to resign, he would be fired and his "long history of sexual harassment" would be made public.  Thibeault chose not to resign, was fired and escorted by police from the campus, and told he'd be arrested for trespassing if he ever returned.

According to Thibeault, it was news that he had a "long history of sexual harassment," but that's what they all say.  What inclines one to give Thibeault the benefit of the doubt is the timing of the action (what a coincidence that Thibeault was fired two days after asking probing and pertinent questions at a sexual harassment workshop!), and the college's own suspicious actions afterward.

For instance, despite three months of requests, by Thibeault, Thibeault's lawyer, and the FIRE, the college has yet to identify an accuser.  East Georgia College is a state school, so Thibeault has a due proces right to this information, unlike what he'd have in a private school star chamber.  The school has yet to inform Thibeault of what he supposedly did, with or without a witness.  Thibeault has been informed by other professors of what appears to be an attempt by EGC to scrounge up evidence after the fact, with faculty being asked if they remember Thibeault reading, in a faculty gathering, from a political humor book with the word "assholes" in the title.

As an aside, if that's the best the college can do Thibeault is going to collect a large damage award at the end of the day.  I socialize with perfessers myself, and they're nothing but old graduate students.  When around people they consider near-equals, or at least not around students, they drink and curse like sailors.  In any case, a college professor at a state school absolutely has a First Amendment right to use language as mild as the almost quaint A-word outside class, and to possess books with salty but non-obscene language.

Also suspicious is Thibeault's classification.  At first, Thibeault was told he was fired.  Then, he was told he was suspended.  Now, he's told he's suspended with pay, pending his hearing, which the college refuses to schedule or discuss despite two months of requests by Thibeault's lawyer.  All of course, with no evidence whatsoever being provided to anyone, not an accusation, not a fact, not a name.

In fact, nothing but the suspicious timing.  From the looks of things, the only person Thibeault ever "harassed" at East Georgia College was its vice president for legal affairs, Mary Smith, and that harassment wasn't sexual.  No, if Thibeault harassed Smith, he did it by asking uncomfortable questions about a potentially illegal and unconstitutional sexual harassment policy.

Questions that the college now is answering, most eloquently, by its silence on the matter.

How would the sort of man who doesn't get responses on OK Cupid reinterpret the classics of romantic poetry and novels?

"if a hotti3 lieks a man & dont ende@vr 2 conceel it OMG he must hit it"

"shl i cmp@r U to a sumrz d@ lol?"

"no i no i shud think wel of myself :-< but that isnt enuff if othrz dont luv me i wud rathr dye then live kthxbye"

"1 day i wr0te hr name up0n tha strand but came tha wavez & washed that sh1t away – wtf"

"yo my l1ps iz 2 b1ush1n p11gr1mz r3@dy st@nd 2 sm00v d@t ruff tuch wit @ t3ndr k1zz"

Of course they're all charming in person, it's not fair to judge a man by his spelling and grammar, and why are you so stuck up anyway, and they'd just love to exchange photos with you.

Hat tip: Flowing Data, through David and Ken.

Several people liked a word I coined. So I submitted a definition to Urban Dictionary.

Such is fame on the internet: meretricious, ostensibly exclusive but actually easily accessible, and doomed to eventually 404-error obscurity. Yet I like it.

In the gossip-driven feeding frenzy that keeps alive the tawdry tale of rising and declining wannabe John Edwards (now with video), the New York Daily News wins quip of the day :

Hunter had been hired by the Edwards campaign to videotape the candidate’s movements, but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform.

The commodification of sexual scandal is nothing new, of course, and in times like these more than ever the media are motivated to regard as "news" whatever will maximize sales.  Thus, there's a regrettable tendency to spew rather than eschew.

What's cheapened in yellowing press, beyond the players' tattered reputations, is a factor arguably worth conserving: the vitality of sexual allusion as a literary device.

For some of their puissance, these worthy tropes depend on indirection– a wink, a nod, a knowing glance.  But in a cultural milieu where everyone seems to say entirely too much altogether, and where even the king is in the altogether, it's hard for prose to play allusively without seeming turgid.

So it goes, too, with visual and spatial art.  Around 1920, that brash jokester Duchamp tagged a mustachioed Mona with a vulgar schoolyard pun.

Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1919 and then on and on.

(For the Gallically disinclined: reading the letters aloud in French makes one say "Elle a chaud au cul" — an observation unsuited to polite company.  French lends itself to this sort of pun, as a legion of Speak-and-Spell-wielding youth will testify.)

On a mission to shock the bourgeoisie, Duchamp kicked off a new wave in the longtime cheapening of time-honored bawd.  Just prior to this, but almost entirely without force in Duchamp's proto-postmodern context, was the sexual allusiveness of Degas:

Degas, Dancers at the Bar, 1900, Phillips Collection

So frequent were his graphical forays into the world of dance that a representation by Degas of some ballerina stretching thus, or adjusting her slipper, or otherwise assuming a complex or lyrical stance seems straightforwardly representational.  Similarly simple seem the shiny statuettes (by the seashore):

Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot, ca. 1900, Metropolitan Museum

We're in territory not far from Duchamp but several steps removed from the schoolyard.  In French, the expression "prendre son pied" (to take one's foot) means "to experience pleasure" and has the specifically sexual connotation of orgasm.  This erotic idiom is often used figuratively nowadays to express with hyperbole any sort of pleasure at all– Q: "Did you like the new Star Trek movie?"  A: "Ah oui, j'ai pris mon pied!".  (This is similar to the cavalier way English speakers toss around the suffix "-gasm", as in "Geekgasm".)

By way of this idiom, Degas invests some, and therefore all, of his graphical and plastic dancers with another layer of allusion to intensify the already erotic connotations of classical dance.  The indirection is not subtle, but it is somewhat less obvious and grating than "LHOOQ" since the foot-touching gesture makes literal sense on its own terms within the theatrical context: sometimes, a touching of the foot is just a touching of the foot.

This brings us, of course, to pirates.  How did it come to pass that "to take one's foot" became an idiom for orgasm?  Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system.  When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole.  The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty.  No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate's pleasure.  Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone's pleasure in anything, and eventually ended up a punchline in Amélie.  And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in our mother tongue suffered under the weight of too popular a press.  We've seen enough; it's time to close your eyes and think of English.

So let's insist that the media fanning the torrid flames of political passion and self-immolation avert their gaze from gossip.  Let's demand actual journalistic attention to news worthy of the name, even if the purveyors of parley have to trim their sales.

Eventually, you have to put your foot down.

On the heels of yesterday's Supreme Court decision holding that a 13 year old girl has the right to attend school without being strip-searched by drug warriors hunting for contraband advil, Matthew Wright, the attorney for Safford Unified School District, had a reaction that, at first blush, blends in with the newspaper boilerplate but when isolated and examined on its own, becomes intensely dishonest:

[S]tunting the discretion of school officials in such circumstances where they need the flexibility to act will inevitably have a chilling effect on their response to threats of drugs on campus.

That's one way to phrase it.  But it isn't the phrase I'd use.

Rather, I'd say that school officials who use their "discretion" to order prepubescent girls to strip almost naked will inevitably be subjected to compensatory or punitive damages.

Or perhaps that school officials who needlessly subject students to abuse of the sort that's normally tolerated only in a jail or prison will inevitably be deterred from doing what your clients did to Savana Redding.

That was the very point of the Redding lawsuit, Mr. Wright.  Although from the lofty peak of the United States Supreme Court it wasn't obvious until yesterday, here on the fringes of decent society where I live it's always been pretty well established that grown men don't order little girls to strip to their training bras and turn their underwear inside out.

Indeed, if your clients hadn't been school administrators, society would have introduced them to an even harsher deterrent or "chilling effect" than money damages:  prison.

Although the language of law has introduced many toxins into everyday English, I can think of few as pervasive as the term "chilling effect," which has evolved from its original and limited meaning (suppression of legitimate political speech by overbroad or arbitrarily enforced laws) to mean, today, "deterring me from doing something that everyone knows is wrong, but that I'd like to do anyway."

Motor vehicle negligence laws exert a "chilling effect" on my discretion to drive after consuming six beers.

The threat of losing my law license, divorce, and alimony laws exert a "chilling effect" on my discretion to clean out my client trust account and fly to Argentina for a weeklong fling with my partner's hot secretary.

And the criminal code exerts a "chilling effect" on my discretion to invest in cocaine futures.

In plain English, we call these "chilling effects" compensation for wrongs, deterrence, and punishment.  And yes Mr. Wright your clients hopefully will be deterred by the prospect of paying damages in a civil suit from molesting little girls like Savana Redding in the future.  Even if their hearts are in the right places.  Even if it's to protect her from advil.

The "chilling effect" euphemism is hardly an American phenomenon.

In England, hardly a bastion of free speech, parliamentarians who've been caught raiding the public treasury for personal expenses complain that a new oversight commission will have a "chilling effect" on their discretion to renovate the family moat on the taxpayers' bill.

In Canada, the head of the federal censorship commission complains that public criticism of her agency's abuses exerts a "reverse chill" on her ability to prosecute even more people for thoughtcrimes.

And back home, insurance companies afraid at the prospect of a federal oversight board in reaction to their role in the economic crisis complain of a "chilling effect" on their discretion to invest policyholders' money in the lucrative North Korean liability insurance market.

None of these cases has anything to do with speech, save that in each someone is mangling the English language, with weasel words.

Perverted drug warriors masquerading as teachers, censors masquerading as the censored, public servants caught with their hands in the till, and corporations squandering shareholders' assets on the equivalent of Dutch tulips, all become victims, by repeating the magic words "chilling effect."

There ought to be a law.

The just-announced international joint venture between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and Russia's GazProm may be a match made in heaven, but the decision to call the venture by an amalgam of the companies' names: NIGAZ

Well let's just say that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton could probably use a few contributions from foreign energy companies anyway.

Where was Nancy Friedman when the Russians needed her?

Thank goodness American tv and movies are making English a unitary language, rather than a series of dialects.

Certain residents of Conisborough, England, United Kingdom, have realized why every man, woman, and child in the entire non-English English-speaking world, most particularly the United States, have been laughing at them for a century.

Via Colin Samuels.

According to the Velazquez Spanish-English Dictionary, La Verga refers to "The organ of generation in male animals, penis."

According to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, Vergatorio refers to "a quality, affordable handheld telephone."  No matter what millions of ignorant people think.

As for penisland, they really do sell high quality pens.

Q: What do Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings films, and Justice Antonin Scalia have in common?

A: A dilemma about how to phrase certain words that are unacceptable in polite society.

Jackson is currently in production on a remake of the classic British war film, The Dam Busters, the story of RAF Wing Commander Guy Gibson's bombing raid on a series of German dams in 1943.  It's a true story, based on a book of the same name, and quite a good movie.  I'm sure Jackson's production, which he intends to keep true to history, will also be worthwhile.

It's just that the language has changed a bit over the past sixty years.  Even if you've not seen The Dam Busters, you may have seen excerpts of it, featuring a black labrador retriever, in Alan Parker's film Pink Floyd: The Wall.  The dog, owned by Gibson, was named, ahem, "N-word".

Except that wasn't his name. And believe it or not, the dog was very important to the story, in life and on film.  In fact, Gibson's operation was code-named for the dog:  "Operation N-Word."

Except that wasn't its code-name.  While Jackson is known as a meticulous film-maker, and says he wants to keep this production true to the facts, he's yet to come to a decision about this troublesome dog.  Some have suggested re-naming it "Niggsy."  Television networks which have shown the original film in recent years have dubbed in the name, "Trigger," leading to cries of censorship, which of course it is, and silliness, which, well …

It's a very offensive word, despite what fans of Chris Rock might tell you.

In some ways and circles, far more offensive than "F-word," which Justice Scalia couldn't bring himself to spell out. Personally I say the F-word all the time, but can't think of many situations in which I would say, or write, the word "Nigger," in other than a context like the present.

Personally I think Jackson, if he intends to remain true to the story, should probably leave it in and attempt to have a serious discussion about history and language before the film's release.

But I suspect that won't happen.

We have a collective Twitter account, though only a couple of us use it.  While I'm not at all sold on Twitter as the replacement for blogging or other online interaction that its evangelists claim it can be, it is a nice way to obtain or share links and news on a rapidfire basis.

The people we follow, and who follow us, on Twitter tend to be of the same general makeup as this blog's readership: lawyers, geeks, and libertarians, some of them all three.  Today being April 15, the libertarians are all atwitter (I slay myself) about this newfangled "Tea Party" movement, in which people take a day off of productive labor to protest against the progressive income tax.  I'm quite skeptical of the "Tea Party" movement, just as I am of people who hold out the philosophies expressed in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a model for, well, anything.

But it has produced much unintentional comedy on Twitter:

More pics of a million tea bags

someone threw #teabags over the WH fence now parts of WH are in tmpry lockdown while Secret Service checks it out

You're going to love my teabags!

Need more teabags not more taxes!

Just stop it.  I'm sorry teabaggers, but that word has been taken from you by the internet, and you cannot take it back.

The Livonian language, which survived conquests of what is now the tiny Livonia province of Latvia by the Danes, the medieval Knights of the Sword, the Teutonic Knights, the Lithuanians, the Poles, the Swedes, the Russians, the Prussians, the Russians again, the Germans, the Russian revolution, the Nazis, and the Soviets, is down to one last native speaker.

In the end, Stalin killed Livonian, deporting the Livonians who hadn't been slaughtered in two world wars to Siberia and forbidding official instruction in the language.  Though Livonian culture survives (barely), with one native speaker left, the language will soon be as dead as Cornish and Etruscan.  It is, unfortunately, only one among many.

H/t: Walter Olson, via Twitter.

I have actually heard a cop say that.  It means, "I walked through the door."  The cop was my client (I defend them in civil suits from time to time).  Fortunately we were just preparing for his deposition, so I was able to prevent him from actually testifying in this pseudo-military Alpha-Bravo-Charliespeak.

I think that the cop tradition of speaking in this fashion, sorry, talking this way, comes from a mix of dealing with lawyers, an envy of the military (where this sort of jargon and four-letter-words seem to vie for supremacy), and Jack Webb.

This was brought to mind by a hilariously entertaining article by Val Van Brocklin, entitled "Cops Talk Funny, And It's Hurting Their Credibility In Court." I agree.  A few samples:

• He indicated… He said
• I have been employed by… I worked for
• I exited the patrol vehicle… I got out of the car
• I observed… I saw
• I ascertained the location of the residence… I found the house
• I proceeded to the vicinity of… I went to
• I approached the entrance… I went to the door
• The subject approached me… She came up to me
• I apprehended the perpetrator… I arrested the man
• I obtained an item that purported to be an envelope from the individual… I got the envelope from her
• I observed the subject fleeing on foot from the location… I saw him running away

I'd add that young lawyers are equally prone to this vice, and some of them never grow out of it.  Read the whole thing.

Thanks to Legal Antics for the tip, and the funny headline, "Silly Cops-big words are for lawyers" Legal Antics earns a spot on the coveted Popehat blogroll.

Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere is promoting a new worldwide common language.  But where past attempts at a linqua franca for business and simple communications, such as Esperanto and Interlingua, failed or never made it beyond hobbyists, Globish may succeed.  In fact, it may not be new to you: It's simplified English.

In a meeting with colleagues from around the world, including an Englishman, a Korean and a Brazilian, he noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed.

He, Jean-Paul Nerriere, could talk to the Korean and the Brazilian in this neo-language, and they could understand each other perfectly.

But the Englishman was left out because his language was too subtle, too full of meaning that could not be grasped by the others.

In other words, Monsieur Nerriere concluded, a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language.

According to Narriere, Globish is just a rules-based system for speaking a form of English that is already spoken the world over.

Globish has only 1,500 words and users must avoid humour, metaphor, abbreviation and anything else that can cause cross-cultural confusion.

They must speak slowly and in short sentences. Funnily enough, he holds up the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as an excellent exponent.

In fact, Globish sounds, in some ways, like a perfect means for communicating over the internet.  Certainly it would be useful to me.  On more occasions than I can count, I have had difficulty communicating with readers who do not understand humor, metaphor, or, most commonly, irony and sarcasm (at least as I practice them).   Oddly, my difficulties in this regard are most noticeable when communicating with fellow native English speakers.  Globish would cut through the knot of sarcasm and irony, by requiring us to avoid them, even, with its tiny, regularized vocabulary, preventing us from using them.

On the other hand, perhaps Globish will never be necessary.  Litigation, hate and harassing speech laws, nannystatism, government bullying, and political correctness will get us the Globish we deserve soon enough.

Via Patrick Joubert Conlon and the Pagan Temple.

The New York Times covers silly and embarrassing place names in England.

He lays it out straight, so there is no room for unpleasant confusion. “I say, ‘It’s spelled “crap,” as in crap,’ ” said Mr. Pearce, 61, who has lived in Crapstone, a one-shop country village in Devon, for decades.

Via Scalzi.