Hangunteaux

Watch as freelance comic adventurer extraordinaire, Ryan Estrada, releases new portmanteaux (¿Que?) into Korean.

I think this is one of the most subtly strange and wonderful things I've seen on the net all year.

Seeing the phrase "French president" on a newsticker, I caught myself thinking, for a split-second, "Freedom president." Which was an amusing instance of additional backfiring from the heavy-handed attempt at lingustic engineering long since ridiculed into the ground, "freedom fries."

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Something completely different:

In our world, things don't look like this, don't shift and reform and lose and regain their shape. The only things that do are fire, smoke and water, and none of those things are solid objects. These Transformers, though, they are solid, bewilderingly so. They attract and offend the eye, make you feel like you've missed something, stir a bookmarked desire to see the movie again.

Curse you Mr. Flower, I mean Notley. Now I'll probably have to see that movie and write an unbearably pretentious review linking it to Gonzalo Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.

Speaking of which, I'll be damned.

[Technorati Gonzalo Frasca apophenia deja vu freedom fries heavy-handed linguistic engineering transforming mecha]

Lumping towards futility

This argument between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Dennis Prager, who is some warmongering radio talk show host, is of course unfruitful practically by definition, as it's on wether God exists.

Before you shout "next!", though, the back-and-forth seems to reveal one interesting thing, about categorizing. Somewhere about here, a familiar lumping-together rears its head:

Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters."

The salient thing about this, and the reason I'm even mentioning this discussion, is that Harris also lumps together, but in a different way. Prager, responding to the strategy "we are all atheistic about Zeus":

But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

In the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. What on Earth does that even mean? It means that Prager is indignant at being lumped together with those false believers. Harris operates with a category 'religion' which contains, well, religion, and Prager has a big faceted category labeled 'true religion' ("Judeo-Christianity" and conformity) and a wastebasket of 'false religions and abominations' (everything else).

So Harris is in the same intellectual league as Stalin, because he's one of those, you know, those secularists. Regardless of the fact that Harris does not appear to be a Marxist-Leninist, nor a Stalinist.

The God that must not be named

Velfna is great!

Now, I realize some of you might say that "Velfna doesn't exist." But how can you say that? You just said Velfna yourself! You already acknowledge Velfna's greatness! Do you not long to taste Its pears of eternal clemency?

Such is the power of names: it allows you to paint someone into the same corner as yourself.

[This would appear to be called "The problem of negative singular existence statements" (article apparently by Dr. M. E. Reicher). Looks like I have my work cut out researching it.]

In Steven Poole's Unspeak, he deals with a growing tendency in recent political speech to methodically employ words and phrases that obscure opposing and alternate viewpoints; they unspeak their alternatives. That is, the nouns themselves function as covert capsule arguments, akin to effective marketing slogans.

"Velfna" above is a rather basic example: it uses Velfna as a proper noun and then immediately ascribes greatness to it. The nature of language makes it very hard to back out of the corner that's been thus painted: counterarguments, such as "Velfna isn't great" and "there is no such thing as Velfna" both involve saying "Velfna" a lot.  Asking "but what is Velfna?" is also just as likely to drive the conversation further into the half of the field occupied by Velfna.

Not to mention that just thinking about it makes your mind go Velfna, Velfna, Velfna. Before long, you react to "Velfna" as though it were a word that makes any sort of sense.

The word "God" is functionally not entirely identical to Velfna. It is in fact so unique and deeply entrenched that it's difficult to find anything to compare it to. It appears to presuppose, in itself, that there is only one god, as evident in the Arabic use of the definite article. However, the word also makes itself somehow like a coconut: if you try to crack it, even with a vise, it tends to slip.

It follows that once a religion has discovered a word with this property, it will tend to spread, and strengthen the impact of the religions that adopt it. Confusion then arises when different religions which have all adopted this come together and figure they must be worshipping "basically the same god" or "a heretic god," depending on how magnaminous they're feeling.

Certainly a very high mileage from just one capital letter.

(Pandagon already reviews and critiques Unspeak brilliantly so I don't have to. Cheers!)