Category Archives: Education

An Eggcorn?

Did Harry Reid commit one?

While I defer to no one in my disdain for our mentally challenged Majority Leader, this may be a little unfair. Unless he wrote it, how can one be sure that he said “…another thing coming,” rather than the (correct) “…another think coming”? I haven’t heard the audio, but how does the listener discern between the “k” sound at the end of “think” and the same consonant sound at the beginning of “coming”?

I discussed a similar problem previously, in speculating why aerospace engineers say “detail design” rather than (the more grammatically correct, in my opinion) “detailed design.” The “d” at the beginning of “design” masks the one at the end of detailed, and perhaps many just hear “detail design” and it has become an industry standard phrase (that I hate).

And yes, I was in fact previously unfamiliar with the concept of an eggcorn.

[Friday update]

Wow. I feel like I’m living in an alternate universe.

I have two commenters (one close to my age) who have never (or at least they think that they’ve never) heard the expression “…another think coming” and always heard (or said) “…another thing coming.” I am exactly the opposite. Until yesterday, I had never heard anyone say “…another thing coming,” whereas I’ve heard the expression from childhood with the word “think.” While it’s not grammatical (yes, “think” is a verb, not a noun), it’s colloquial, and it makes sense — “if you think that, you have another think coming.” Another “thing” coming makes no sense at all to me. “Another” implies that there was a first one, but what was the first “thing” being referred to? I’m pretty sure that it’s a confusion caused by the similar consonants that join the two words.

And while we’re on the subject, another one that I see on line all the time (and was very prevalent in Usenet) is “dribble” for drivel. Again, a case of mishearing the word.

Is Our Secretaries Learning?

I guess it’s too much these days to expect a Secretary of Education to know basic English grammar:

I want to thank our mutual friend John Rogers, who’s been a mentor and friend to me since I was 10-years-old. He gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school in the Southside of Chicago, and that has become a model for success in urban education.

I know it’s a nit, but after all the Bush bashing for the past eight years, I can’t resist.

Not In Our University

Mary Graber writes about the academic cocoon and ongoing denial, and the disastrous and unrecognized effects on college students’ knowledge and thinking ability.

Professors use school funds to attend conventions, where they meet at “round tables” and share strategies for surreptitiously introducing “gender” — all nine by famous feminist theorist Judith Butler’s count — into discussions about Russian history or Renaissance literature. Even where core curriculums are still in place, be aware: these teachers are infusing such Marxist-inspired theories. Even schools affiliated with Christian denominations have professors who brag, “Nobody knows. I teach the way I want to” — as one did to me last weekend.

So terms like Obama’s “spreading the wealth” and “redistributing income” clang pleasantly inside a freshman’s skull, echoing such cozy nostrums as “social justice” and “sharing.”

Yet, while asking one of my students why he was voting for Obama, I learned that he was for “change.” (Full disclosure: this was after the student brought up “change” as point of comparison to another “historic” personage whose speeches we were discussing.) But no one in class knew who Bill Ayers was, who the Weathermen were, and what they did. Such evidence of ignorance, however, does not dampen their estimation of their own decision-making abilities.

As anyone who has dealt with the four-year-old who insists “I know how to do it!” understands, arrogance is inversely proportional to age. Professors who themselves are perpetually in the stage of rebellious adolescence are not likely to recognize or report their own biases on surveys. Their students don’t know enough to know what they don’t know, and how much of it their professors are keeping from them.

It’s a bubble waiting to pop. Do parents really realize what a poor value they’re getting for high college expenses?

The Appalling State Of Higher Education

This is a depressing story about the inability to enforce rules against plagiarism, and the comments more so. I don’t think it was this way when I was in school.

And of course, it’s of a piece with a general decline of ethics among the young. And why should they care? The system doesn’t. I’m starting to think that Glenn Reynolds is right — academia is the next overfunded speculative, empty bubble about to burst.

A User-Hostile Service

As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.

I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).

But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.

When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

[message from unnamed service…]

In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).

The response was:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

Hi

Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.

Oh. OK.

They were serious.

They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.

Is it just me, or are they nuts?

Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):

One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:

1) not include my response in your response and

2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?

Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).

WHY DO YOU DO THIS?

Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?

This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.

The response?

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.

Here is my response:

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================

Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…

It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.

===========================================================

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================

Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.

Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.

That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?

The Worst And The Dumbest

Remember that civics test? Well, this should inspire confidence in our political “leadership”:

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

But they did fare better. What does this say about our so-called “elites”? Forget about a literacy test for voters. How about one for candidates?

I Only Missed One

I scored 32 out of 33 on this test (I missed the last one–Doh!). Unfortunately, most people don’t do that well.

I really think that we should bring back literacy tests for voting. They shouldn’t have gotten rid of them because they were being used to racially discriminate–they should have just ended the racial discrimination.

[Friday evening update]

I have to say that readers of my blog, even the non-USians (or at least the ones commenting), are way ahead of the curve. Nice to know.