"Generous" Government Transfers?

Oftentimes one finds implied value judgements in common speech. One such instance is when people talk about "generous" payments received from the government. To me, "generous" means primarily that one is unselfish with respect to that with which one is generous; that one could legitimately keep more for oneself but chooses not to. I cannot see how a word defined in this manner can be applied to the government. Consider:

1. If the government give me a currency unit, it must either have printed it or taxed it from someone (who may or may not be me).
2. In the first case, the government's generosity requires that the money holdings of others be diluted of real value;
3. In the second case, it requires that someone else be made to lose money. In any event, "generosity" requires the violation of the natural rights of others (in the event that there are no natural rights, talking about government generosity implies that value judgement).

What is also required, as per the definition above, is that the government could legitimately have retained the currency unit for its own use. This means that the currency unit, obtained either by use of the printing press or by taxation, is the government's legitimate property. It does not necessarily follow that the government are really the owner of anything and anyone wealth-producing - because it could be that the word "generosity" is applied only when taxation does not exceed a certain point or only when the government do not hoard resources to a sufficient degree - but the way the term "generosity" is applied to government expenditure certainly seems to me to come close.

What would value-neutral language look like? There are a number of rather obvious candidates, such as "large" or "big", optionally qualified with the word "relatively", and a bunch of variations on adjectives such as these. Not that I think language must necessarily be value neutral (I really do not). Still, there are value-loaded terms one could apply to the selfsame transfer labelled "generous", but which take a different view on good value. "Excessive", comes to mind, although it is not the ideal candidate since it has the connotation that the recipient is less deserving than other potential recipients (and they may all be equally undeserving of others' resources).

So what would be the optimal word replacing "generous" with an adjective coated in natural rights rather than statism? Profligate? Wanton? Dissolute? What I am looking for is a word which describes wastefulness with ill-gotten resources though I am not sure I get any closer than these. Suggestions are welcome.

Immigrant Lingo

Of the many interesting things to learn from H. L. Mencken's The American Language, some are to be found in its section, near the end, on foreigners living close together in America and how their language evolves. One famous such group is the Pennsylvania Dutch, who were not actually Dutch but German. They were called Dutch, not because of any confusion but, according to Mencken, because they called themselves Deutch (pronounced in their dialect as Deitch, though the diphthong is pronounced oi in standard German) which, of course, is German for German.

Mencken writes about how Norwegians, Germans and many other groups began to use English terms in their regular speech amongst themselves, providing very many fascinating examples to illustrate what appears to be a gradual trend towards an increasingly Anglicized language.

It occurs to me that I know of no similar examples today. Most immigrant English I have heard is rather high-functioning, but when I hear immigrants talk amongst themselves I never really recognize any words at all, although some book titles (like Econometrics) are obvious exceptions. Society is of course different in many ways today compared to the 1930's when Mencken last amended his great work of linguistics. If my casual observations are right, the question is in which ways society has changed to make immigrants use fewer loan words among themselves.

One possible way is telecommunication. When Mencken wrote, I believe there was no trans-Atlantic telephone line whereas today it is easy to get on Skype with almost anyone else in the world. Even before Skype, telephone communication has of course been feasible and inexpensive for several decades. It strikes me that any possible decline in English influence in immigrant lingo attributable to more contacts with the Mother Country should be discernible provided that immigrant speech has been continuously studied.

Another, more dire, reason, is that regulations have made immigrants harder to hire (think minimum wages and work safety, for instance), and that we are more regulated today than we were in the 1930's. If immigrants as a result associate less with the indigenous population, their language will not be as influenced. I reckon this explanation might fit some refugees or asylum seekers who come to escape in addition to finding work, but persons coming in specifically to seek work are not captured by this explanation, since they simply cease coming when opportunities decline.

Maybe there are other contenders to explain my casual observations. Or maybe my casual observations are wrong. Comments with information on these issues are greatly encouraged.

"I'm a Boy!": Why New Gender-neutral Pronouns Are Moribund

Having recently written about the impotence of words, I find this news, reported by Russia Today, to be very well-timed, indeed. The 2015 edition of the Swedish Dictionary is set to include a gender-neutral pronoun (hen, pronounced, I believe, like the fowl), apparently rather a new word, to be used, if one wants, instead of the Swedish versions of 'he' and 'she'. More specifically, the article reports that:

"In the dictionary, the pronoun will have two uses: for cases when the gender is unknown or irrelevant, or if the information is viewed as irrelevant."

In my aforementioned blog post from earlier this month, I referenced the legendary H. L. Mencken's report in his great book The American Language (a book that is certain to feature again on this blog) of a similar episode in the English (American) language when the word hesh was proposed to mean he-and-she about a hundred years ago. The book contains other such attempts; the word thon (originally meaning yonder in Northern English) and thon's for he-or-she and his-or-her, respectively, for instance. So one may think of the new Swedish pronoun as corresponding to thon.

 

Notice the two uses of the new Swedish pronoun: the first says that the word is to be used when the gender of the person is unknown, the second that it is to be used when the information is irrelevant. Trans-gender people and individuals fitting into the "third legal gender" introduced in Germany last year would therefore be certain thons. Persons viewing themselves as male or female are thus apt to feel offended if referred to by thon. The presence of persons with one clear gender (i.e. most people) would drive down the use of the new Swedish pronoun. Perhaps down into oblivion. After all, thon was in Webster's New International Dictionary as recently as 1934 (Mencken, p. 460 n.), but who uses it now? Who even remembers it now? Dictionary.com does not recognize it.

 

At least I know I would feel offended if referred to by a word used to indicate (even if only by some small probability) third-gender and trans-gender individuals. This is not because there is anything wrong with those people. There is not. But if people think I have uncommon preferences, it will adversely impact my opportunities in the marriage market. I would think most people reason similarly, so my small "model" above should hold: The presence of men and women and the relative fewness of individuals in-between drive out the use of third-gender or gender-neutral pronouns. The prediction which comes out of this model is clear: languages which have ever had established gendered pronouns will remain that way and never see gender-neutral pronouns; languages with gender-neutral pronouns may evolve into gendered-pronoun languages, but will not necessarily do so.

 

This is actually a testable hypothesis. The word son from the French language is a gender-neutral pronoun (third-person singular genitive). I don't know Latin, but French comes from Latin, so if Latin had gendered third-person singular genitives, my hypothesis fails. There are many other languages to consult for yet more evidence. This is something I will keep in mind.

The Impotence of Words

It is intriguing that the noble Daniel Klein is pursuing a quest to reclaim the original, anti- rather than pro-government, use of the word "liberal", but he annoys me when he says, in an interview, that the word is "powerful". What evidence is there for this proposition? It is used in the original sense, or in a sense somewhat close to the original one, in countries like France and Sweden, whereas in the US it has, of course, acquired in many ways the opposite meaning. To define "liberal" as pro-welfare state is profoundly illogical to me and I wish Klein luck in his endeavour, but since France and Sweden are arguably quite a bit less liberal (in the classical sense) than the US, why would Klein claim the word is "powerful"? It has not made its original users more market orientated.

Casual evidence from other contexts suggests to me that words mean very little, indeed. In some countries, such as Finland and Iran, the dominant language does not distinguish between the sexes in its pronouns. H. L. Mencken's wonderful The American Language tells me (in a footnote on p. 175) that the third-person pronoun hesh was suggested in America around a hundred years ago to mean "he or she" in everyday usage. It evidently never took off, but that is how Finnish and Farsi work. So one way of estimating the effect of words on society is to look at how the gender-neutrality of pronouns might result in differences in how men and women behave in these countries compared to comparable ones. If language impacts how one views the world - as claimed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - men and women speaking Farsi and Finnish should behave differently than those speaking, say, English or French.

I strongly doubt the differences are significant here, if they exist at all; for instance, while women make up a high 40 per cent of the members of the Finnish parliament, the corresponding figure for Sweden is almost 45 per cent. Wikigender reports that the share of female members of corporate boards is also lower in Finland than it is in Sweden. Now there are certainly also studies indicating that gendered pronouns do influence how people think. However, to the best of my knowledge, the studies which support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are of the variety that they ask subjects to read a text in which the gendered pronoun is prominent, then ask about career prospects, alternatively ask whether a man or a woman comes to mind.

Frankly, I cannot see why anyone would take these things too seriously. They offer some evidence, but it is very weak. If the image of a man, rather than that of a woman, comes to mind when using the pronoun "he" generically, and this has lasting consequences for one's attitudes or career choices or anything else of actual substance, then I believe one is so deficient in ability to reflect and make important life decisions that one simply does not exist; I cannot believe any human is that stupid. I hasten to add that this is far from my field and readers familiar with more evidence than this are welcome to contribute in the comments.

There are, of course, some studies in economics which look at attitudes and language. Guido Tabellini has claimed that usage of the second-person singular pronoun, rather than the plural, to address others, as well as capitalization of the word "I", are related to levels of respect, and a recent article in the Journal of Law and Economics links gendered pronouns to lower levels of maternity leave, but it seems to be sensitive to the inclusion or absence of just one or two countries, and neither of these articles includes - as far as I can recall - very many countries.

Some words begin to take on a pejorative meaning, such as nigger, cracker, kike and red-skin. Those may be powerful (although whether decent folks should avoid them is another issue - their using them might conceivably destroy their evil power?), but in these cases other words take on the original meaning of the pejoratives, so that what is really meant can still be expressed. I like the word liberal in its original sense and wish Klein and associates every bit of luck as I tend to use liberal to mean "small government". However, I would like to see some good evidence that the word is really as powerful as Klein claimed.

 

HT: Econlog's David R. Henderson