And in this case, the adjective “dirigible” was nouned into a balloon.

I’m not about to insist, or even suggest, that the etymology of a word like dirigible gives us an authoritative guide to its meaning. It does not. Words grow up and leave home. Some make bad choices, but we love them anyway. So be it.

Still, etymology enriches our experience of our language, dirigible being a case in point. Thus Alban Joseph Zolly, Mr Zolly to us eighth-grade English students at Camp Zama in the early 1960s (I incant his full name in the slim hope that someone might someday search the web for his name can come across this remembrance).

Dirigible/direct is a member of a pattern that includes corrigible/correct, negligible/neglect, intelligible/intellect and eligible/elect, among a few others (when’s the last time you heard “erigible”?). We have legible, but “lect” survives only in works like lector, lectern, lecture Patterns have a mysterious power to explain, though in a sense they only deepen the mystery.

Of the list, “eligible” caught my eye, perhaps because of my side interest in elections and voting. In English, perhaps especially American English, “elect” is highly associated with voting. But the word’s meaning is rooted in the idea of “choose”, and a moment’s thought will tell us that we still use it that way from time to time, and that the voting sense is a fairly obvious outgrowth of “choose”: we choose our leaders, representatives, whatever. But we still elect to do something, take elective courses, and the like. So to be “eligible” is to be capable of being chosen, or elected.

Wealthy Countries May Become Less Crowded and the NYT Wants Us to Be Scared

The NYT reported on new projections from the Population Reference Bureau showing continuing increases in population in the developing world and slow or negative growth in wealthy countries. Low birth rates in the wealthy countries are projected to lead to a rise in the ratio of retirees to workers. The NYT described this prospect as “sobering.”

There is no obvious reason that people in wealthy countries should be concerned about the prospect of a rising ratio of retirees to workers. This ratio has been increasing for a century. The projected increase in the elderly dependency ratio is largely offset by a decline in the number of dependent children. At the worst, the rise in the dependency ratio will offset some of the gains in wage growth associated with rising productivity, as has been the case in prior decades. So, it is not clear what the NYT wants readers to find “sobering” about this news.

The article also implied that a large jump in the share of GDP going to Social Security and Medicare is due to the aging of the population. Much of the cause of the projected increase in spending on these programs is the projected increase in per person health care costs. If per person health care costs in the United States fell to the levels in Germany or Canada, the share of GDP devoted to these programs in 2050 would be little different from what it is at present.

Then what?

Matthew Yglesias on the filibuster

Matthew Yglesias has a fine post on the threat posed by the filibuster to the functioning of our political order. He concludes by suggesting, altogether plausibly, that if the Republicans were in fact to recapture all three branches of government in the 2012 election, then the first thing they would do would be to abolish the filibuster and thus deprive Democrats of the ability to torpedo whatever legislative programs they might have. It would, of course, serve Democratic Party interests to prevent a Republican government from achieving anything, especially with regard to the economy, that might win them votes. It will be typical Democratic blindness if they protect the filibuster while they in fact “control” the Senate only to see it eliminated once disciplined Republicans take over the Senate and can rely on a Republican President of the Senate (i.e., VP), to rule that the Senate is not a continuing body.

Each party has a vested interest in the destruction of a government headed by the other. This is exactly why James Madison hated parties. He wrongly believed that the Constitution would work to mitigate the ravages of “faction,” but he was wrong, not only because of the rise of political parties (by 1796 or, most certainly, by 1800), but also because of the displacement of the elites Madison had such faith in by “the people” who cared only about their own interests. Gordon Wood’s brilliant new Oxford history spells this out. I certainly don’t advocate returning to a Federalist elite politics, nor do I think they were simply devoted servants of “the public interest.” The challenge of our time is figuring out if effective government is possible given the social, political, cultural, and economic realities we live under. The answer may well be no. We simply have to hope for the best, but this may be the equivalent of hunkering down in New Orleans before Katrina and hoping against hope (or praying) that it will veer away at the last minute.

I’m tempted not to quote anything at all, but I’ll include his conclusion:

Most people assume that “bipartisan commissions” are designed to fail: they are given thorny (or even impossible) issues and told to make recommendations which Congress is free to ignore or reject. In many cases — yours is no exception — the goal is to defer recognition of the difficulties for as long as possible.

You are plainly not equipped by disposition or resources to take on the true cause of deficits now and in the future: the financial crisis. Recommendations based on CBO’s unrealistic budget and economic outlooks are destined to collapse in failure. Specifically, if cuts are proposed and enacted in Social Security and Medicare, they will hurt millions, weaken the economy, and the deficits will not decline. It’s a lose-lose proposition, with no gainers except a few predatory funds, insurance companies and such who would profit, for some time, from a chaotic private marketplace.

Thus the interesting twist in your situation is that the Republic would be better served by advancing no proposals at all.

…and beg you to read the whole thing for a wonderfully clear discussion of deficits and government spending.

Asterisks Justin’s dad says

A truly strange piece of euphemism came up in a UK newspaper interview with Justin Halpern, the creator of the hit Twitter page Shit My Dad Says:

One day we took the dog for a walk. My dad said: “Look at the dog’s asshole — you can tell from the dilation that the dog is about to shit” and the dog went to the bathroom. He was incredibly impressed by his prediction.

The dog went to the bathroom? Not exactly a case of like father like son, linguistically.

Keep in mind, Justin is the son of the man (a San Diegan) who said of Los Angeles: “It’s the epicenter of the asshole earthquake. They’d fuck you twice if they had another dick.”

We are talking about the dad who said (on being asked how he lost 20 pounds), “I drank bear piss and took up fencing. How the fuck you think? I exercised.”

The man who claims, “Look, we’re basically on earth to shit and fuck. So unless your job’s to help people shit or fuck, it’s not that important, so relax.”

This is not a man who would describe a doggie as going to the bathroom, is it?

Reading the piece was even stranger in a UK context, where the euphemism “going to the bathroom” is not at all common, since the room in question is not called the bathroom, it’s called the lavatory or the toilet (both of them being euphemisms too, of course). I assume that it was the architectural practice of having the WC in the room with the bathtub gave Americans their euphemism, while the British practice of having it in a separate very small room near the bathroom did not favor it, though I don’t intend to do any scatoarchitectolinguistic research on the matter.

The British publication of the interview gave rise to a few translation challenges. I have deasteriskified things for your reading convenience. In the newspaper (The Metro),

• “Shit My Dad Says” was rendered as “S*** My Dad Says”;
• “the dog is about to shit” was rendered as “the dog is about to s***”; and interestingly,
• “asshole” was rendered as “a***hole”, which (if you count the asterisks) tells us that the British newspaper first translated the “ass” of Justin’s American English to “arse” and then did the asterisking out.

The Los Angeles Times couldn’t even get that close to the real title of the Twitter page; on this L.A. Times blog they called it “Stuff My Dad Says”.

Meanwhile, the book Justin has made from his Twitter site had to be titled Sh*t My Dad Says, which doesn’t match the name of the site, and the TV series made from it is called $#*! My Dad Says, which doesn’t match either the site or the book or the L.A. Times reference; it’s a wonder anyone ever finds any of these things.

The terror of printing the most basic of the earthy Germanic words for human excrement clearly continues unquelled. Except here, of course, because on Language Log we are linguists, and we don’t give a shit. We don’t believe simple Anglo-Saxon monosyllables will either sear your eyeballs or warp the moral fiber of the young.

Maybe Members of Congress Want to Cut Unemployment Benefits to Increase Unemployment

The Post yet again tells us that members of Congress are political philosophers, telling readers that: “Congress’s inaction [in approving an extension of unemployment benefits] has been accompanied by a growing sentiment among lawmakers that long-term unemployment benefits create a disincentive for the jobless to find work.”

How does the Post know what sentiments members of Congress have? Furthermore is there any reason to believe that their sentiments explain their votes on important issues?

Members of Congress get elected and re-elected by getting the support of powerful interest groups, not on their abilities as political philosophers. While the opponents of extending unemployment benefits may believe that they are bad policy, this is likely less relevant to the their votes than the political considerations behind this vote.

At the moment, the Republicans appear to have adopted a strategy of blocking anything that President Obama tries to do, with the idea that a bad economy will be good for them on Election Day. While the Post may not want to assert in a news story that this is the explanation for their opposition to extending unemployment benefits, it is certainly inappropriate to provide an alternative explanation for which it has zero evidence.

A quick note on theodicy | Andrew Brown

… No attempt to construct a rational calculus of suffering can succeed. …

Sunset and evening star,
   And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
   When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
   Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
   Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
   And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
   When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
   The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
   When I have crossed the bar

The talk is intriguing, if arguable in places. The animation is wonderful. Try to watch it full-screen.