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Dr. Solri's Language Clinic: Latest Q&As
Sunday, May 13th, 2007 08:33 pmQ: I have been following the discussion in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
linguaphiles about whether Catholic priests are called the equivalent of "father" in all languages. I was curious as to whether there are cultural contexts where it would be inappropriate to address a priest as "father".
A: As Dave Allen pointed out, his own children have to call him "uncle".
Q: What is the difference between "degrade" and "downgrade"?
A: The word "degrade" became popular in radical circles in the 1970s, when almost anything could be seen as degrading to some group. Penthouse was degrading to women, "pet" was degrading to animal companions, and as for "Penthouse Pet", I shudder to think. Unbeknownst to its users, this is actually a mere homonym of the word that means "to reduce in rank or status" and goes back to 1325 ("Hou sone þat god hem may degrade" - Song of Yesterday).1 This particular usage crept into British English in the 1960s via Jamaican Patois, where "de grade" was the equivalent of the quaint Geordie phrase "the dogs bollocks"; thus it was originally a term of approbation, but was subsequently subject to a process of semantic drift known, coincidentally, as degradation (or sometimes pejoration). Incidentally, the opposite process is known as amelioration, which presumably is what happened to the dog's bollocks.
Another, quite unrelated, use of "degrade" is when a student is given a grade which is later challenged by parents, lawyers or administrators (often all three, in that order). This frequently means that the teacher in question has to de-grade the student. (This should not be confused with its homophone, "D grade").
"Downgrade" is quite different. This is what happens when you install some much-touted (and probably very expensive) software on your computer, find it doesn't work, and go back to using the old version. This happens so often that the term "upgrade" is currently undergoing linguistic degradation.
Q: I have just been passed a report from our school's governing body calling for "standard randomised testing". Shouldn't this be "standardised random testing"?
A: The second would be correct if you were to haul students out of the corridors and say, with an evil laugh, "OK kids, it's pop-quiz time!" and were to say it in exactly the same way every time (you have to make sure the evil laugh is the same as well, as the degree of evil laughter has been shown to affect test scores). Otherwise, in education, standardisation and randomisation are pretty much the same thing. From kindergarten to university, what educational administrators want to see is a Bell Curve, with the majority of students getting somewhere around a B- (except for some American colleges, where the curve peaks at A, and thus cannot reasonably be likened to a bell). If some ornery teachers are giving a lot of A's or D's, then the best way to achieve the Bell Curve is by randomising results between graders (obviously if you randomise them completely, you don't get a curve, you get a straight line, unless you do it by rolling a lot of dice). Thus if one teacher gives a lot of D's and another gives a lot of A's during the semester, but each teacher grades the other's finals, the hope is that both groups of students will end up getting B's and C's. It even works to some extent in cases where a teacher really does have a class full of D students, simply because the colleague will introduce a random element. This is due to what Chomsky calls "poverty of stimulus", resulting from whizzing through exam papers at the same speed that most people read the classified ads in a newspaper. In the absence of adequate information on how good an essay is, teachers fall back on what Chomskyans call "universal scoring", which disregards "performance errors" and relies on "native teacher intuition". Universal scoring is reinforced by norming sessions (also known as "criticism-self-criticism sessions") in which peer pressure ensures that when in doubt, teachers will give a C+ or a B-, so as to avoid being exposed before their peers as eccentric graders. Taken as a whole, this process is called standardisation.
1. This poem really was written in 1325, and bears no resemblance to the song of the same name by Alexa Ray Joel.Neither is it the inspiration for the more concisely named Yesterday, the origin of which is a thirteenth-century fragment: "Yistirday al mine anoy semed agone / Now me ðoght þey abyde."
linguaphiles about whether Catholic priests are called the equivalent of "father" in all languages. I was curious as to whether there are cultural contexts where it would be inappropriate to address a priest as "father".A: As Dave Allen pointed out, his own children have to call him "uncle".
Q: What is the difference between "degrade" and "downgrade"?
A: The word "degrade" became popular in radical circles in the 1970s, when almost anything could be seen as degrading to some group. Penthouse was degrading to women, "pet" was degrading to animal companions, and as for "Penthouse Pet", I shudder to think. Unbeknownst to its users, this is actually a mere homonym of the word that means "to reduce in rank or status" and goes back to 1325 ("Hou sone þat god hem may degrade" - Song of Yesterday).1 This particular usage crept into British English in the 1960s via Jamaican Patois, where "de grade" was the equivalent of the quaint Geordie phrase "the dogs bollocks"; thus it was originally a term of approbation, but was subsequently subject to a process of semantic drift known, coincidentally, as degradation (or sometimes pejoration). Incidentally, the opposite process is known as amelioration, which presumably is what happened to the dog's bollocks.
Another, quite unrelated, use of "degrade" is when a student is given a grade which is later challenged by parents, lawyers or administrators (often all three, in that order). This frequently means that the teacher in question has to de-grade the student. (This should not be confused with its homophone, "D grade").
"Downgrade" is quite different. This is what happens when you install some much-touted (and probably very expensive) software on your computer, find it doesn't work, and go back to using the old version. This happens so often that the term "upgrade" is currently undergoing linguistic degradation.
Q: I have just been passed a report from our school's governing body calling for "standard randomised testing". Shouldn't this be "standardised random testing"?
A: The second would be correct if you were to haul students out of the corridors and say, with an evil laugh, "OK kids, it's pop-quiz time!" and were to say it in exactly the same way every time (you have to make sure the evil laugh is the same as well, as the degree of evil laughter has been shown to affect test scores). Otherwise, in education, standardisation and randomisation are pretty much the same thing. From kindergarten to university, what educational administrators want to see is a Bell Curve, with the majority of students getting somewhere around a B- (except for some American colleges, where the curve peaks at A, and thus cannot reasonably be likened to a bell). If some ornery teachers are giving a lot of A's or D's, then the best way to achieve the Bell Curve is by randomising results between graders (obviously if you randomise them completely, you don't get a curve, you get a straight line, unless you do it by rolling a lot of dice). Thus if one teacher gives a lot of D's and another gives a lot of A's during the semester, but each teacher grades the other's finals, the hope is that both groups of students will end up getting B's and C's. It even works to some extent in cases where a teacher really does have a class full of D students, simply because the colleague will introduce a random element. This is due to what Chomsky calls "poverty of stimulus", resulting from whizzing through exam papers at the same speed that most people read the classified ads in a newspaper. In the absence of adequate information on how good an essay is, teachers fall back on what Chomskyans call "universal scoring", which disregards "performance errors" and relies on "native teacher intuition". Universal scoring is reinforced by norming sessions (also known as "criticism-self-criticism sessions") in which peer pressure ensures that when in doubt, teachers will give a C+ or a B-, so as to avoid being exposed before their peers as eccentric graders. Taken as a whole, this process is called standardisation.
1. This poem really was written in 1325, and bears no resemblance to the song of the same name by Alexa Ray Joel.Neither is it the inspiration for the more concisely named Yesterday, the origin of which is a thirteenth-century fragment: "Yistirday al mine anoy semed agone / Now me ðoght þey abyde."
