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Thursday 28 December 2017

What Is English Grammar? More Importantly, What Isn't English Grammar?

The Split Infinitive:  “To really error is human.”

One of my senior colleagues was taken aback when I, a tenured professor of English and Comparative Literature, volunteered to teach a course on Applied Grammar.  Teaching grammar was not at the top of the prestige ladder.  “Are you sure you are ready to start teaching about split infinitives?” he asked me.  I thought he was pulling my leg, but I wasn’t sure, so I photocopied a page from Steve Pinker’s The Language Instinct and slid it under his door.  He never responded.


[. . .] ‘don’t split infinitives,’ ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’ can be traced back to these eighteenth-century fads. Of course, forcing modern speakers of English to not split an infinitive because it isn’t done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. (The Language Instinct 374)




I would like to emphatically reiterate what Pinker is pointing out.  (Did you notice that I just split the infinitive and ended the sentence with a preposition?) The notion that there is something wrong with  putting a word between the “to” and “reiterate” (as I have done) or ending a sentence with a preposition comes from the ludicrous but long-lasting notion that the English language should follow the rules of Latin grammar. (In Latin you cannot split the infinitive because the infinitive is one word, nor can you end a Latin sentence with a preposition.)

According to Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue:  English and How It Got that Way, the source of the notion that we shouldn't end an English sentence with a preposition "was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad." As Bryson points out, Lowth was never adamant about this "rule," but thought it preferable in "solemn and elevated" writing. In later years, literal-minded academics would insist, on the grounds the Latin root of the word "preposition" was "place before," that a preposition must be placed before something.






Definitions of grammar:  theirs, yours and mine

Surfing the internet for definitions of grammar, I was surprised to discover that there are even more definitions than I had anticipated, and most of them are even less helpful than I suspected. I think it would be useful to talk about grammar according to what most people think the word means.  Experts and pseudo-experts talking about grammar almost invariably include areas of language under the category of “grammar” which make grammar a lot more complicated and difficult to grasp.  A helpful starting point (at least for you and me) would be to eliminate much of what gets included with but really isn’t English grammar.


What isn’t English grammar

If you have ever studied English grammar, chances are you used a textbook with a title like “Grammar and Usage” or “Grammar and Composition.”  What you may not have stopped to realize is that “usage” isn’t “grammar”; “composition” isn’t “grammar.”  You may have seen “grammar” defined as “a study of the language.”  “Linguistics” is “the study of language,” though “grammar” might turn out to be the product of that study.  Perhaps the hardest distinction to make is between “semantics” and “grammar”; that is, between meaning and the rules for putting words together.  If a student writes “A dozen is twenty-one” or “The Earth is the largest body in the Universe,” these statements are wrong and may not even be what the student meant to say, but they are not ungrammatical.  There are no errors in grammar in these sentences.





Grammar in the everyday world

When people usually ask about English grammar it is because they want to know “is this right?” or more pointedly “is this a mistake?”  The kind of grammar they are asking about is more precisely known as “prescriptive grammar”; that is, the language as people are supposed to speak and write it. "Prescriptive grammar," how people should use English, is typically contrasted with “descriptive grammar,” how people actually do use English.  Prescriptive grammar has developed a bad reputation and gone out of fashion because, among other things, it has been held responsible for absurdities like the split-infinitive and no-preposition-at-the-end-of-a-sentence rules. However, if we want to talk about grammar in the sense that most people have in mind when they use the word, then we need to focus on prescriptive grammar.



Errors in grammar

With descriptive grammar, since its intention is simply to describe usage, the concept of an error hardly exists.  To point out a mistake is to invoke prescriptive grammar. If we keep to this precise and strict definition of grammar, what grammar is becomes much clearer.  In fact, there are only four different types of errors in grammar:

  1. Errors of word order (syntax)
  2. Errors of word type (adjectives versus adverbs for example)
  3. Errors of agreement (eg, yesterday requires the past tense of the verb)
  4. Errors of word form (morphology, actually a sub-category of “agreement” and  "type”)
There are many other ways that we can make mistakes in English—spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, vague pronoun reference, faulty parallelism, redundancies, dangling modifiers and so on—but they are not, strictly speaking, errors in grammar.  And speaking strictly is exactly what I am trying to do here. If you want to reverse the direction and speak of English grammar in the affirmative: it is the rules for putting words in the right order, using the correct word type in each position, and ensuring that the parts are in agreement or concordance with each other.


Grammar versus discourse

Grammar is a collection of those rules that apply within a complete sentence.  How the sentences and parts of sentences are connected together is called “discourse.” The rules of discourse are generally more difficult to specify, but they are what you are being taught if you are studying writing or composition or rhetoric.


Spoken versus written English

It is an exaggeration to claim that grammar does not apply to spoken English but, in fact, moving outside of complete sentences it becomes increasingly difficult to apply the rules of syntax, word type and agreement.  People do not speak English in complete sentences.  A lot of spoken language is just grunts and nods. 

Steve Pinker observes:
The Watergate tapes are the most famous and extensive transcripts of real-life speech ever published.  When they were released, Americans were shocked. [ . . . .] one thing that surprised everyone was what ordinary conversation looks like when it is written down verbatim.  Conversation out of context is virtually opaque. [. . . .] even when transcribed perfectly, conversation is hard to interpret.  People often speak in fragments, interrupting themselves in midsentence to reformulate the thought or change the subject. (The Language Instinct 224)

People remain generally unaware of the degree to which written and spoken English are different kinds of discourse. The rules of grammar still apply but only in about the same degree as the rules of the NHL (National Hockey League) apply to street hockey or the rules of golf apply to most of the guys I play with.

The Latin origins for the parts of speech in English grammar.

Tuesday 19 December 2017

How Is Money Created?

Money isn't just pixel dust! 

In an earlier post I described money as “pixel dust.” I was being cute—way too cute! Sometimes an analogy can hide much more than it reveals. Money is not created by Tinker Bell, though I did feel a bit smug upon realizing that the writers of the Zeitgeist film series repeated my observation that when you take out a bank loan you create that debt out of nothing.




Banks have the right to create money, but they need your help

The bank does not have the money it is lending you. Stop and think about that for a moment, because it is the answer to the question “how is money created?” As more and more people struggle to understand bitcoin, the fact that money is just a way of recording debt is starting to sink in. When I googled the question “how is money created?” I was surprised by the number of sites covering the question—the number of people who knew the answer. I found myself asking, as I often do, how could I not know this? Shouldn’t every ten-year-old know the answer to this question?  Every time you take out a loan for a house or a car or an education, or buy a cheeseburger with a credit card, you create money--those pixels on a computer screen somewhere that are the reason you work and save and struggle.


The Federal Reserve gives banks the right to create money

In the USA the Treasury prints the money, but the amount of printed money is less than three percent of the total money supply in the system. Actually no-one really knows how much digital debt (i.e. money) there is floating around on the internet and in the intranet systems of all the banks and financial institutions in the world. We know, as I pointed out in my earlier post, there are 1.35 trillion US dollars in circulation (i.e., paper money), but the US debt is 18 trillion dollars. The unregulated derivatives market (the one that caused the crash of 2008) is believed to be worth between 710 trillion and 1.2 quadrillion dollars. To answer the question how much US money exists in the world today (remember money is just a measurement of debt), you need to add up all these numbers: 1.35 trillion plus 18 trillion plus (to be conservative) 710 trillion.  In total, a conservative estimate is that there are  729.35 trillion US dollars in circulation right now. How was all this money created?


The rules for creating money

There is an exchange of paper but, basically, the US Treasury gives it to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve then distributes the money to 12 Reserve Banks across the country which in turn pass the money onto private banks. So how does so much money get produced?  We've been here before: leverage.  It's all about the leverage ratio.  




This graphic (above), which I found online, does a nice job of showing how the money flows in what is known as the "fractal reserve banking" system.  "Fractal" (aka "fractional") means that the banks get a fraction of the amount that they are allowed to lend out, so it really boils down to leverage. Descriptions of the "fractal system" make it sound as if the amount of leverage in the system is quite modest, but as Blinder (who you might remember was a VP in the Federal Reserve) points out, in After the Music Stopped, financial institutions figured out ways to create synthetic leverage ratios of up to 40%.  Let me remind you of what a 40% leverage ratio means.  A 4% leverage ratio means a bank with $1 can lend out $25,  a 40% leverage ratio means that a bank with $1 can lend out $250--250 times more than it actually has.



What is the US Federal Reserve? 

The Federal Reserve is the moolah machine, the institution that creates money and runs the monetary system.  It is the model for and has tentacles into just about every central bank in every country in the world.  The cynical, conspiratorial answer to the question is that the Fed is a bunch of bankers, a cabal of the CEOs from the biggest banks and financial institutions in the world. According to the Zeitgeist movement, all the ways that we might imagine the world is being run--politics, religion, economics--are distractions, cover-ups, window dressing.  The only real power is the monetary system which remains hidden behind the activities of governments, religions, and all movement of goods and services.  If you ask why the USA is constantly at war with someone or something, the Zeitgeist answer is that nothing feeds the monetary system better, profiting and empowering those closest to the system, than warfare. Even conservatives acknowledge that money is the life-blood of the economic system, and nothing pumps more spending, borrowing and debt (i.e., money) into the system than a war.

graphic of Federal Reserve System











Who owns the Federal Reserve?

This may seem like a strange, dumb, childlike question, but as I have attempted to get a handle on how the system works, I understand perfectly how we end up at this question.  The pervasive suspicion that the Fed is owned and run by self-serving financial titans is hard to dismiss.  In her book Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland notes a study on the incomes of Harvard University graduates showing a "split between bankers and everyone else, with financiers earning 195 percent more than their classmates." Harvard grads aspiring to become part of the 1% of the 1% have figured out that being connected to the monetary system is the way to do it. Certainly Jamie Dimon, a card-carrying member of the .1%, CEO of Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the USA, being a member of the board of the New York Federal Reserve has got to have the average wage-earner wondering "what the fuck! how is that possible?"

The official answer is that the Federal Reserve is “a blend of public and private characteristics.” Historically the network of "reserve banks" was created in 1910 at a meeting of private bankers on Jekyll Island (yes, it's a real place; I played golf there once in the 60s).  The idea that the entire monetary system would be run by unsupervised private bankers was unacceptable to Democrats; consequently, it was eventually agreed that the Chair of the Federal Reserve and the seven members of the Board would be chosen by the President of the USA and ratified by Congress. They all inevitably have strong connections to the world of banking and finance. As you work your way through the layers of administration, through the lip service and platitudes, the Federal Reserve does seem to be more and more a system run by banks for banks—despite repeated claims that the objective of the system is “to promote the effective operation of the U.S. economy and, more generally, the public interest.”

There are three kinds of answer to the question "Who owns the Federal Reserve?"

  1. The historical, conspiracy-inclined answer is that the Federal Reserve is owned by eight families: 

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/federal-reserve-cartel-eight-families-max-kofoed

  1. The official answer is “The Federal Reserve System is not 'owned' by anyone. Although parts of the Federal Reserve System share some characteristics with private-sector entities, the Federal Reserve was established to serve the public interest.” 

    https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

  1. The third answer, on the other hand, is “The Fed is privately owned. Its shareholders are private banks.” 

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-owns-the-federal-reserve/10489


Whatever answer you accept, it seems clear that the much mocked concept of "trickle-down economics" is beside the point. We live, without much question, in a trickle-down monetary system.

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