Month: September 2016

Bullies want to fight victims, not adversaries.  –Bruce Tegner

When I was a kid, instructions for dealing with a bully were clear and unambiguous: fight him.  Bullies deal in the currency of fear and intimidation, and what they told us is true: if you come at them, they will typically back down.  My favorite Navy fight stories are not about fights–they’re about fights that didn’t happen, because I didn’t back down from a bully, and then he backed down from me.  (This probably makes me sound like a badass.  I’m not–I’m a total wimp.  But, at some point, the possibility of being beaten shitless is a lot less painful than continuing to be bullied by some asshole.)

At this point in our bizarre election cycle, all of the talk is about confrontation.  Last night was what the French press called the first passe d’armes between Clinton and Trump.  I would guess that most of us turned on the TV to watch the debate with a fair amount of trepidation.  What would Trump do?  Would he literally beat his chest like a fucking gorilla?  Would he lash out from the git-go?  (This expression explained below in the English notes.)  As it turned out, Clinton did what they told us to do when I was a kid: she got right in his face.  She took the fight to him.  Trump did what he’s done in the past when confronted with a woman who wouldn’t back down: he folded.  (I’m thinking here of Carly Fiorina and the Rev. Faith Timmons.)

When I was a kid, everyone advised fighting bullies–parents, teachers, the world.  In American schools today, kids who are involved in anything remotely resembling a fight are suspended from school, whether they initiated it, or they were attacked–see here, or here, or here for news stories about kids being thrown out of school for standing up to a bully.

How kids are supposed to deal with bullies under those conditions, I have no clue. I mean, I can read, so I know what the current advice is:

• Reframe the problem of bullying.  By changing your attitude towards bullying you can help regain a sense of control.  Try to view bullying from a different perspective.  (That’s Tip #2 from this page.)
• Feel good about you. Nobody’s perfect, but what can you do to look and feel your best? Maybe you’d like to be more fit. If so, maybe you’ll decide to get more exercise, watch less TV, and eat healthier snacks. Or maybe you feel you look best when you shower in the morning before school. If so, you could decide to get up a little earlier so you can be clean and refreshed for the school day.  (I think that’s what you call “blaming the victim.”  I found that gem of anti-bullying here.)
• It is incredibly important that you go through the appropriate reporting channels by firstly telling a teacher/parent/guardian/learning mentor or another responsible adult.  (Anyone in the reading audience have success with this as a child?  Found that one at the Ditch The Label site–they describe themselves as “one of the largest anti-bullying charities in the world.”)

…so, yes, I know what kids are told to do.  But, what are kids supposed to do that might actually work?  ‘Cause I’m pretty sure that “reframing the problem of bullying” would not have done much for the girl I was in the Navy with who our bully decided to go after one day by hanging up the sheets that she’d been sleeping on for her 24-hour stretch of ambulance duty so that it would be clear to the world that she was on her period.

Anyone know how kids are taught to deal with bullies in France?  Surely it’s nothing this stupid…

French notes

• un affrontement: confrontation, battle, clash. Premier affrontement musclé entre Hillary Clinton et Donald Trump (headline, RFI, https://goo.gl/2nLOUO)  Affrontement Clinton-Trump: un débat qui devrait fracasser des records (headline, Huffington Post Québec, https://goo.gl/HTZMTX) L’affrontement entre les deux prétendants à la Maison-Blanche a été rude, avec dans le rôle du chœur les internautes et les médias (Le Temps, https://goo.gl/jRveH4)
• une passe d’armes: échange énergique; sparring.  #Trump2016 #Clinton Premières passe d’armes entre les deux candidats (TV5MONDE tweet)  Vive passe d’armes. “Je ferai revenir nos emplois, vous ne pouvez pas le faire” – Trump. “Donald, vous vivez dans un monde à part” – Clinton  (AFP USA, tweet)  Première passe d’armes entre Clinton et Trump sur l’économie (headline, Libération)
• la brute, le tyran: bully.
• la brimade: bullying, baiting, vexation, aggravation.  This is the title of the French Wikipedia page on bullying.

English notes

• from the git-go: from the beginning.  Here‘s a post about the expression from the Grammarphobia blog.

The English word bully can have other meanings besides brute or tyran.  Here are some:

In his book Babel no more: The search for the world’s most extraordinary language learners, Michael Erard talks about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti.  Mezzofanti spoke a lot of languages.  It’s not clear exactly how many–certainly that depends on your definition of what it means to “speak” a language–but, nevertheless, it was a ridiculously large number of languages.  Something that Erard says about him really struck me: What [we] can’t explain is how he could switch from one language to another without confusing them.  Here’s an anecdote from the book:

On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him.  When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him “each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.”  Mezzofanti didn’t flinch but “took them up singly, and replied to eachin his own language.” The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious.  Mezzofanti could not be bested.

Why this struck me: we’ve talked before about the difficulty that many people have with keeping foreign languages “separate.”  Before a recent trip to Guatemala, I prepared by basically purging French from my life completely for the month before I went there.  I didn’t study French vocabulary, I didn’t listen to the news in French, and I didn’t read in French.  Of course, I listened to Spanish podcasts, I read in Spanish (a book about semantics, and The Walking Dead–I’m not picky), and I watched Spanish-language movies.  But, pushing French out of my head was as important to the process as packing Spanish into it.

So, when I got to Guatemala, it was interesting to see where I had trouble keeping the two apart.  I don’t really know what to make of it.  Here are the facts.

For background: I would never claim to speak either French or Spanish.  I’m pretty comfortable in Spanish, which serves very nicely with my siblings if we want to have a private conversation in Shanghai, and when I’m in France, I don’t speak English very often–I live my life in French, both personal and professional.  I would guess that my vocabulary is a thousand times better in French than in Spanish, and that my grammar is a thousand times better in Spanish than in French.  Pronunciation: who knows.

So: as it turns out, I didn’t have trouble keeping the vocabulary apart.  What I had trouble with was the little stuff.  Here are some specific things that struck me:

Possessives

In French, there are three (simplifying by just talking about the second person informal, since that’s what I use the most in the hospital):

• tes for plural nouns.  Sou: tes parents your parents, tes soeurs your sisters.
• ton for masculine nouns and before any noun that begins with a vowel. So: ton chiot, your puppy, because chiot ‘puppy’ is masculine; ton orange, your orange, even though orange ‘orange’ is feminine, because it begins with a vowel.
• ta for feminine nouns that don’t begin with a vowel.  So: ta chaussette your sock.

In contrast, Spanish only has two:

• tus for plural nouns.  So: tus padres your parents, tus hermanas your sisters.
• tu for singular nouns.  So: tu perrito your puppy, tu amigito your little friend.

It’s things like tu amigito that threw me.  I just could not wrap my tongue around the sequence tu + vowel.  It just…stopped.  Eventually I would push it out, while people turned and looked at me like what’s up with the old dude?

The word after

Even after a week incountry, if I did not pay attention, the Spanish word después ‘after’ would not come out of my mouth.  Instead, it was the equivalent French word: après.  Even if I did pay attention, I really had to struggle to dig up después.  I eventually started pausing every time I needed to say after, and thinking to myself: say después, not après.  

Excuse me

If I had a nickel for every time that I said pardon or désolé instead of con permiso or disculpe… 

The “excuse me” problem doesn’t puzzle me that much–that’s right-brain language.  The little function words, though–I’m not sure what to think about that particular phenomenon.  It’s a pretty small sample, so maybe I shouldn’t generalize.

The other funny thing about Cardinal Mezzofanti: apparently, he didn’t actually have much of interest to say.  As Erard puts it:

Despite this…Mezzofanti was…the target of sarcastic barbs.  Irish writer Charles Lever wrote that Mezzofanti “was a most inferior man….An old dictionary would have been to the full as companionable.”  Baron Bunsen, a German philologist, said that in all the countless languages which Mezzofanti spoke he “never said anything.”  He “has not five ideas,” said a Roman priest quoted in a memoir.”

Speaking as someone who was once married to a woman who coined the term of venery a boring of linguists, I fear that there may be a cautionary note for me here…

French notes

From the French Wikipedia article on Mezzofanti:

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, né le 17 septembre 1774 à Bologne en Émilie-Romagne et mort le 15 mars 1849, fut un religieux et un universitaire italien du XIX^e siècle, qui devint cardinal de l’Église catholique, et était un linguiste et un polyglotte renommé.

• le religieux: clergyman, priest.
• renommé: renowned.

English notes

to throw (someone): 5. Informal To cause confusion or perplexity in; disconcert or nonplus.  (From The Free Dictionary.)  How it appeared in the post:

It’s things like tu amigito that threw me.  I just could not wrap my tongue around the sequence tu + vowel.  It just…stopped. 

Even more than soccer, flirting is often said to be France’s national sport.  I like it–it’s fun, and (so far) a harmless way to practice my French.  So, I was chatting with a girl over a cup of coffee in a café by the Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology one day (no, I’m not making that museum up–along with the Pergamon in Berlin and the British National Museum in London, it’s one of my favorites in the entire world, and I can’t even imagine how many hours I’ve spent there) when she said something that made my ears perk up: she mentioned la partie inférieure de la mâchoire.  The “lower part of the jaw:” what you and I probably know as the mandible, and most French speakers as la mandibule.  

On the surface, the jaw doesn’t look that interesting.  One bone, with a pretty simple hinge on each side.  It’s got a lot of subtleties, though, and if you look at how jaws vary across species, a jaw can tell you a lot about an animal.

Let’s look at the “gross anatomy” first–the basic parts.  In many species, the mandible has two main parts: the body, and the ramus.  The body is the part that’s parallel to the ground, and the ramus is the part that goes up vertically.  We’ll go through the French vocabulary now, rather than at the end of the post, because it’s essential to understanding my flirty ways.

• la mâchoire: the jaw; jawbone.
• la partie inférieure de la mâchoire: the lower part of the jaw. The official term for the mandible.
• la partie supérieure de la mâchoire: the maxilla–again, the “official” term.
• la mandibule: mandible.
• le maxillaire: maxilla.
• l’articulation temporomandibulaire: temporo-mandibular joint.
• la branche de la mandibule: the ramus of the mandible.
• le corps de la mandibule: the body of the mandible.

Why it made my ears perk up when she said la partie inférieur de la mâchoire: as far as I know, that’s the technical term for the mandible, versus la mandibule, which I believe to be more general language.  How often do you meet someone whose idea of witty repartee includes throwing around technical terms for bones?  Of course, then a bum walked by.  Blah blah blah blah, you gotta blah blah for me? 

What’s a blah-blah? …I asked my terminologically gifted new friend.  He wants a cigarette, she replied.  And what does blah blah blah blah mean? 

“Kevin Costner”–he called you Kevin Costner.

How the fuck does he know my name’s Kevin?

He doesn’t–you’re an American, and you’re bald, so…

Whatever.

English notes:

to make someone’s ears perk up: to make someone suddenly interested in what you’re saying.  How it was used in the post: She said something that made my ears perk up: she mentioned la partie inférieure de la mâchoire. 

repartee: (Yes, this is an English word.)  Witty conversation that goes back and forth.  From Merriam-Webster: conversation in which clever statements and replies are made quickly.  How it was used in the post: How often do you meet someone whose idea of witty repartee includes throwing around technical terms for bones?

In truth, though: it’s not so clear that it’s a great thing.  One of the problems with Big Data is a special case of a general problem in the ethics of technology: the kinds of things that can go wrong when the public perception of how well/poorly technology performs doesn’t match well with the truth. In particular: when the public thinks that technology performs way better than it does.

You will occasionally hear people talking about how algorithms are going to take our jobs, bring about the zombie apocalypse prematurely, etc. More commonly, technology gee-whizzers will tell you the opposite: that they will remove bias and introduce complete objectivity to sentencing guidelines, for instance.  In fact, an algorithm is nothing more (or less) than a defined set of procedures.  In the case of an algorithm for computing, it’s typically a set of calculations. An algorithm can’t be biased. It can’t be unbiased, either. The data, though: that can be biased. An example from the interview: train an algorithm to evaluate resumes from applicants for jobs at an engineering firm. You could imagine training it with the resume of everyone who has ever been hired in the past, and the following piece of information for each person: whether or not they were a successful employee. If the engineering firm is a typical one, those previous hires are mostly going to have been males. Now the program learns the characteristics of a successful hire, and among other things, the program will conclude that a successful hire is going to be a male, since that’s all that it’s ever seen. Is the algorithm biased?  No. Is the person who programmed it biased?  No. What’s biased?  The data. Not biased in the way that a person is biased–rather, biased in the statistical sense: not every member of the population had an equal likelihood of being included in the training set.

Where people get seduced by things with the Big Data label on them is by the bigness. Most people know that the bigger your data set is, the more reliable the statistical model that comes out of it will be. A lot of people look at Big Data and think: there’s a LOT of data, so it’s GOT to be good. That’s where the trouble comes from.

I like this interview because it’s neither a gee-whiz-this-technology-is-so-great story, nor an ignorant oh-my-God-the-data-miners-are-going-to-kill-us story. The interviewee, Cathy O’Neil, knows what she’s talking about, and she explains it well.  The unbiased sentencing program?  It didn’t work out so great–see a very detailed story about it here.

Link to the interview with Cathy O’Neil:

http://one.npr.org/i/493654950:493654951

French notes:

• le big data: Big Data.
• les mégadonnées: Big Data.
• les données massives: Big Data.

English notes:

• to sentence to (a punishment): to assign a punishment or penalty to someone.  Examples: A 46-year-old man threw feces in a Clark County, Ohio, courtroom Wednesday after learning he was being sentenced to 40 years in prison for armed robbery.  (Story here.)  Alan Turing, the pioneering computer scientist and cryptanalyst who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code, was sentenced to chemical castration as a punishment for his homosexuality.
• sentencing guidelines: instructions for how to determine the length of the jail or prison sentence of someone who has been convicted of a crime.  How it was used in the post: More commonly, technology gee-whizzers will tell you the opposite: that they will remove bias and introduce complete objectivity to sentencing guidelines, for instance.