Bossy jerk

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, February 9, 2016

Sheryl Sandberg, Corporate Operations Officer of Facebook, has created a Ban Bossy campaign to encourage girls to be leaders. Many celebrities have expressed support for the campaign and even advertisers have taken up the cause as a means to market to women.

 

Sandberg makes several distinct claims about the use and meaning of “bossy.” Some have merit, others are misleading. All of them are fruitful for understanding cultural roles, inequalities, and how they play into perception, attitude and emotional response. I want to take them separately and look at some data.

 

• “bossy” is used more to describe females than for males

• this disparity shows an inequality in our cultural stereotypes

• cultural stereotypes influence our perception of behavior and our emotional response to behavior

• the cultural role of boss is masculine so males can’t effectively be disparaged by “bossy”

• the cultural feminine roles include nurturing roles, not boss roles, so females playing the boss role are perceived as inappropriate

• the cultural masculine roles include boss, so when men abuse their authority or are pushy or bossy, their behavior is accepted as a norm

Evidence supports some of these claims but not others. A linguistic analysis leads to a more complex relationship between cultural roles/stereotypes/expectations and human attitudes/perceptions/emotional responses that may be independent of the culture. I’m using a beautiful data mine developed by Ben Schmidt. It mines Rate My Professor, an online website that allows students to review their professors. since the professor’s name is identified, the reviews can be sorted by professor’s sex, give or take a few ambiguous names. Professors are quintessential authorities, the reviews are perfectly suited to an understanding of the use and frequency of words like “bossy.”

 

First, the data clearly show that “bossy” is used more often for female profs than for male ones, although it is used substantially for male professors too. Does this imply that female professors are perceived as bossier than males? That is the Ban Bossy claim — women are rejected in positions of authority. A quick look at “jerk” seems to refute that claim.

“Jerk” is used exclusively for males and it appears in the corpus far more frequently than “bossy” — something like 35 times more frequently. That’s not a little. It’s a huge difference. Are there other negative epithets that might be used for women that are more frequent than “bossy”?

“Mean” is also used more frequently for females than for males. Does this support the Ban Bossy view?

The distribution of “jerk” implies that our language has gendered epithets. “Jerk” is for males, “bossy” for females. If that’s so, then the reason “bossy” is used more for females than for males implies nothing about the emotional response to female roles. It’s used more often because “jerk” is the preferred epithet for males.

The data actually show the opposite of the Ban Bossy view of emotional response to female/male role or expectation. Students object to male authority frequently, possibly more frequently than female authorities. The greater frequency of “mean” for females shows the same: why describe a male as “mean” when there are so many more, and more expressive, epithets for men, including not just “jerk” but “dick,” “douche,” “dickhead,” “prick,” “douchebag,” “son-of-a-bitch,” “bastard” and the declining “schmuck.” Rate My Professor no longer allows the most common epithet for males, “asshole,” but the data mine provides partial data — I assume that Rate My Professor closed below-the-belt epithets shortly after they appeared.

Couple of points here. The wealth of epithets for men imply that in our culture we freely object to male abuse of authority. It’s enshrined in the language. The frequency of their use demonstrates that we object to male abuse of authority. So the differential use of “bossy” is purely linguistic fact, not a fact about our perceptions influencing emotional response. We dislike abuse of authority whether the authority is male or female.

The data also show that our language is gendered. There seem to be many more epithets for male abuse of authority than for females, which does very much correlate with the social fact that men are mostly bosses, or that through the development of our language, bosses were mostly men.

Notice that both “bossy” and “mean” are not particularly gendered in themselves and are literally descriptive and not either metaphorical or metonymic. All the vulgar male epithets are metaphorical or metonymic or both: they refer to taboo body parts some of which metaphorically relate to acts of sexual violence, or they relate metaphorically to the social stigma of illegitimacy. In the context of Rate My Professor, “bossy” and “mean” may indicate a second choice after “bitch” which RMP will not accept as a review. Not exactly a euphemism, but a kind of nonce euphemism.

More important, there are many negative words for females, but they do not cover the abuse of authority. Several include “dits,” “airhead,” “twit” (used for both females and males), “bimbo.” I compare these with cultural female/male attire: pockets are the characteristic of male attire; not only are pants and jackets full of pockets and dresses, skirts and blouses largely devoid of them, but taking a minimal pair — men’s jeans and women’s jeans — you’ll find that women’s jeans’ pockets are often shallow and useless, whereas mens’ are deep and many. Pockets are utilitarian in the sense of of managing the outside world through tools. Pockets hold those tools. Womens’ wear is designed for attractiveness (whether for the male gaze or otherwise), not any other utility besides covering and warmth, and often inadequate for both of those.

Putting the attire next to the epithets a pattern emerges. The cultural roles for men are ones of control and manipulation of the world including other people. The response to their aggressive control is a wealth of epithets that object to male power. The cultural roles for women include aesthetic appeal. The negative epithets might be described as “pretty but useless.”

It seems to me important that the responses to authority in RMP shows that our attitudes towards these cultural roles do not numb our emotions. Any expectation that the boss will be male does not incline us to accept the abuse of authority or prevent us from objecting to it in the strongest terms. So we can distinguish between the cultural roles and the perceptions of them. The data implies to me that culture does not determine thought, it just gives us different ways to express our thoughts depending on cultural categories.

The Ban Bossy campaign has given us an important avenue of research to discover

a. the cultural roles embedded in our language

b. the independence of our responses to those roles

The feminist agenda is a fruitful lens with which to investigate not just the facts of our society — inequities of pay and power — but also of culture and attitude in our language and our perceptions.

Part II — Questions for further research

A more disturbing fact in the data is the disparity in use of “brilliant” and “genius.” These are not gendered words, yet they are used to describe males more frequently than for females, and “genius,” the more hyperbolic word is even more biased towards men than “brilliant.” Assuming that females are at least as bright as men if not brighter, how do we account for this disparity in perception?

In this case, I speculate that this is not a linguistic fact but a behavioral and perceptual reflex — exactly the opposite of the “bossy” analysis which is merely about the lack of available gendered words for female abuse of authority. If males are brought up in our culture to be special, competitive and superior, while females are brought up to be servants — the nurturer, the mother who serves her children,m the caretaker — it would be no surprise if the male instructor in class would present himself as special, competitive with his ideas and superior, while the female instructor would be focused on the students.

Saving Grice’s theory of ‘and’ (with Kratzer lumps!)

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 11, 2007

I’ve always considered Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to be one of the most beautiful theories around. But nowhere is beauty so tightly yoked to truth as in the sciences, where beauty, in the form of simplicity, will decide the truth of two otherwise equally powerful theories. (It’s kind of remarkable when you think about it — truth and simplicity seem not only distinct, but unrelated, unlike say, truth and accuracy or consistency. A complex theory will cause more complexity in its relation to other theories, but if it’s still true, why should complexity ever matter? Is preference for simplicity just a bias?) Truth seems to be a necessary condition for the beauty of a theory in science, so if Grice’s theory isn’t true, its beauty all is lost. The application of conversational co-operation gets messy at and, impugning its truth. I’ve got an idea on how to clean up the mess and restore the symmetry of the structure.

Grice’s analysis of “and” goes like this:

Sometimes “and” is interpreted as simple logical conjunction

1. I brought cheese and bread and wine.

The order of conjuncts doesn’t change the meaning: I brought bread and cheese and wine; wine and cheese and bread; bread and wine and cheese; wine and bread and cheese; it’s all the same. This use of and is symmetric, exactly like the logical conjunction &: A&B<=>B&A

But sometimes and carries the sense of temporal order, “and then”

2. I took off my boots and climbed into bed.

(I think I got this example from Ed Bendix some years ago)

This conjunction is not symmetric: taking off your boots and then climbing into bed is not the same as climbing into bed and then taking off your boots, and the proof of the difference, you might say, comes out in the wash.

The difference in meaning, according to Grice, arises from the assumption that the speaker would not withhold relevant information or present it in a confusing form. If the order of events matters, the order of presentation will follow the order events, unless otherwise specifically indicated. So if I said

I climbed into bed and took off my boots

you’d be justified in surmising that I’d come home very late and very drunk.

The theory of conversational implicature avoids the undesirable circumstance that there might actually be two homonymic “and”s in English, one meaning “&” and the other meaning “and then.”

A problem for Grice was observed long ago by Bar-Lev and Palacas (1980, “Semantic command over pragmatic priority,” Lingua 51). They noted this wonderful minimal pair:

3. I stayed home. I got sick.
4. I stayed home and got sick.

If Grice is right, (3) should mean

3′. I stayed home and then got sick.

But it doesn’t. It means

3″. I got sick and therefore stayed home.

Now unless we are willing to say that the sentential boundary is a morpheme with meaning, we are compelled to drop Grice. Worse still, even though (3) means (3″), the sense of “and then” returns immediately we add “and” between the sentences. (4) means

4″. I stayed home and then I got sick.

even though that’s semantically unexpected. So it’s not about semantic bias, this violation of Grice’s principle. It’s a very real problem that Bar-Lev and Palacas pointed out.

So what’s with “and”?

Here’s my suggestion.

a. In order to use “and” you’ve got to be introducing something new. Think of Angelika Kratzer’s lumps of thought: you’d never say “I painted a portrait and my sister” if you’d only painted one portrait and it was of your sister. Information is structured in clumps of truths that the logical connectives don’t respect. Yes, a portrait was painted and a sister was painted, but if these two things were accomplished in the same act of painting a portrait of one’s sister, then they are in some sense the same fact, though two truths. Now notice the difference between :

“I painted a portrait. I painted my sister.”

Could be the same event. Not so easy to get the same-event interpretation from

“I painted a portrait and I painted my sister.”

The and implies a distinct, newly introduced fact not lumpable with the antecedent event.

b. Causal relations are internal to an event.

Put (a) and (b) together and you have an explanation for (3) and (4). I have a good deal more to say about this, but it’s really nice out, and I’ve been in all day.

More about and: a contextual, situational connective?

 

A few examples:

1. Pat washed her sweater and ruined it

2. Pat ruined her sweater and washed it.

3. Pat ruined her sweater. She washed it.

(1) means, I think, that by washing it Pat ruined it. The sentence allows and because washing doesn’t entail ruining; ruining is a consequence, not a cause.

(2) means that Pat ruined the sweater and then washed it presumably in an attempt to fix it, the outcome of which attempt the sentence doesn’t reveal. It can’t be read, as (3) can, to mean: Pat ruined her sweater by washing it.

Now, (3) can be read also as: she ruined her sweater then washed it. That’s not surprising. What’s surprising is that (3) has the grammatical-consequent-as-semantic-antecedent reading as well, while (2) doesn’t. So the explanation above has to be modified a bit:

a’) consequences are external to an event — they are new facts justifying and

a”) causes are internal to an event — they lump with their consequence and don’t justify and

Bar-Lev and Palacas use another example that goes something like this:

Napoleon took thousands of prisoners and defeated the army. (=and then)

Napoleon defeated the army and took thousands of prisoners (=and then)

Napoleon took thousands of prisoners. He defeated the army. (=backwards cause)

So even when the real-world knowledge bias leans in favor of backward cause, and prevents it.

Here’s another strong example against real-world experiential bias. In answer  to the question, “What did you do today?”:

I went to the store and I went out. (two unrelated round-trip forays outside, the latter possibly to a bar or club)

I went out and I went to the store. (two related events: one followed by a consequence: and=and then)
I went out. I went to the store. (One round-trip foray, the consequent explaining the antecedent)

I went to the store. I went out. (Two events: the consequent can’t explain the antecedent, so they are interpreted as two distinct events)

Given a context in which going out explains going to the store, this last sentence pair should reduce to one event, if this analysis of and is right. I think it does: if the question is, “Did you or did you not go out today?” the answer: “I went to the store. I went out,” indicates one event, the antecedent indicating the specific event and the consequent clause explaining how the antecedent is an answer to the question.

This last example also shows that it’s not just cause that is internal to an event, but anything that explains the antecedently described event. Explanation seems the informationally relevant function from utterance to acceptability. Explanations are internal to a fact. The next step in this investigation would be to figure out what kinds of information qualify as explanations / internal to the fact, and what kinds as additional, new information external to the fact.

And or &: ideas for a contextual logic

On one view of this analysis, it looks like Grice was partly right about and. There’s just one and. But he was wrong to equate English and with logical conjunction &. The one and in English carries a conventional implicature just as but does, but where the conventional implicature of but requires the denial of some association of the antecedent clause, the conventional implicature of and requires that the consequent add some information external to the antecedent clause. and always means something like and also, carrying the conventional implicature that what follows and is additional information external to what preceded and.

There’s an alternative to explore for fun. Suppose Grice was completely right that and means the logical connective &. It’s just that the logical connective & is not the familiar one. It’s truth values are dependent on the relationship of consequent with antecedent. I mean, why couldn’t we have a causal relations-based logic? It would be very different from familiar freshman logic, but it might be a lot of fun and useful too. This connective (I’ll use “+” to avoid confusion with traditional conjunction “&”) would not be symmetric:

a+b ≠ b+a

and there could be two ways of dealing with the truth tables:

if a and b are true and a causes b  then a+b =t

if a and b are true and b causes a then a+b=f

if a and b are true, and a and b denote distinct facts that are causally unrelated, then a+b=t,

otherwise a+b=f.

The last two clauses cover the “I painted a painting and painted a portrait” — two conjuncts denoting the same fact. That sentence will be false if denoting one fact/event, true if denoting two causally unrelated distinct facts/events (assuming that there is no causal relation in this sentence in either direction).

(Now, I’ve forgot the second way I was going to do this. Well, it’ll come to me.)

Ah, yes. [Two years later.] How about defining what is included in an event or using the connective to do that work?

a+b entails that b is not included in a

where “included” means either ‘denoting the same event’ or ‘causing’.

It may seem odd to contextualize truth values so that they depend on denotations and situational relations, but truth values are themselves semantic and denotational. We’re just shoving the contextualization deeper in the muddy murk. Why not have logical connectives that reflect the language or reflect thought?

One application would be to lumps of thought. The whole notion of lumps is model-dependent / context-dependent. Here’s a context-dependent (model-dependent) connective that reflects the lumping of reality.

I can think of some obvious objections to a context-dependent logic. It’s not really truth-functional in its syntax. The falsehood, for example, of a+b, does not entail either the falsehood of a or the falsehood of b. a+b could be false simply because b is included in a. But something like this is true of other familiar logical connectives. For example, the falsehood of avb does not entail the falsehood of a or the falsehood of b. It might be that b is true and a false, or a true and b false. The difference between + and v is that the truth value of v depends on the truth values of the statements it joins, while the value of + depends also on event/fact inclusion.

How are the connectives syntactically interdefined? How can deductions be proved syntactically? What would the laws of deduction look like?

Cliff-hanger.

Euphemism and euideism: distinct semantic strategies for French and Latin borrowed words

Originally posted June 11, 2007 on Language and Philosophy

The replacement of one idea for another is a strategy that looks like euphemism but is distinct from it. I’d like to call it euideism: just as euphemisms are acceptable word forms for taboo word forms, euideisms replace taboo ideas with acceptable ones. The difference between these two strategies plays upon the twofold nature of the sign observed so long ago by old Saussure: sound shape (word form) and referent (idea) —

euphemism is motivated by an attempt to replace one sound shape for another

euideism is motivated by an attempt to replace one referent for another.

The distinction also plays into differences in register between Anglo-Saxon, French-derived and Latin/Greek-derived vocabulary in English.

Some of our favorite, most comfortable words are, not surprisingly, taboo. Part of what makes a word comfortable is its restriction to the informal environment, and taboo defines the boundary of informality and personal freedom of expression. In formal company we find strategies to avoid those informal, comfortable words. Replacing a taboo word with a formal, often scientific, word is one strategy. The paradigm case is “feces” for “shit.”

The latter word is frequent: it is often used. It is also common: not only is it often spoken, but it is spoken by many people, it is widely used. And it is frequently used by its wide public — most English speakers seem to use it frequently, not rarely. It is a common expletive to express momentary dismay over one’s errors, whereas expletives like “asshole” are used to express immediate dismay over other’s errors, not one’s own. (Compare “schmuck,” which is commonly used as a descriptor, not an expletive, for agents of non immediate events.) Our degree of comfort with “shit” is evidenced by the wide range of its extended uses: “I gotta pick up some shit at the store,” “Girlfriend, you gotta get your shit together if you wanna graduate,” “What a crock o’shit that is,” “Don’t gimme your shit,” “shitfaced,” “You’re shittin’ me,” “What’s this shit?” none of which refer to the denotation of feces.

Typically, the euphemism is drawn from the formal, stiff and high-register Latin-borrowed vocabulary in English. As a replacement for the taboo word, it is only serviceable for one use: “I gotta pick up some feces at the store,” “Girlfriend, you gotta get your feces together if you’re wanna graduate,” “What a crock o’feces that is,” “Don’t gimme your feces,” “fecesfaced,” “You’re defecatin’ me,” “What’s this fecal matter?” are unrelated in meaning to the “shit” versions. “Feces,” in other words, means just one thing. It’s a scientific, specific word for turds.

No one seems to like the euphemism. And no surprise: it means only one thing and that thing is gross and disgusting. The taboo word, with its many extended uses, arouses much less disgust, if any. There we have the irony of taboo and euphemism: the taboo word is user-friendly, the euphemism is repugnant. That’s what makes the informal environment so much more comfortable.

There is, however, an alternative strategy for avoiding taboo words. It’s not the replacement of a taboo word with an acceptable word carrying the same denotation as “feces” for “shit.” It’s the replacement of the taboo idea with a word that has a slightly different denotation. A good example: “waste” for “shit”/”feces.”

Crucial to this strategy is the shift in focus or prototype. The first association that comes to my mind when I think of waste is paper waste, the waste that most typically finds its way into the office trash basket. It’s a much cleaner prototype than “feces,” which has as its focus human turds, which are at the extreme bottom end of the notion of uncleanness and dirtiness.

Notice that the three strategies, colloquial, formal and scientific correspond to the range of Anglo-Saxon, French-borrowed and Latin-borrowed lexicon mapped out by Hughes in his History of English Words:
A-S words are informal, warm and broad in their denotation and meaning and use
French-borrowed words are more formal and not as broad
Latin-borrowed words are cold, specific, scientific and formal.

The three words under consideration fit neatly. “Waste” is borrowed from French.

The replacement of one idea for another is a strategy that is distinct from euphemism. I’d like to call it euideism: acceptable ideas for bad ideas, just as euphemisms are acceptable words for bad words. The difference between these two strategies plays upon the twofold nature of the sign — sound shape and referent — observed so long ago by old Saussure:
euphemism is motivated by an attempt to replace one sound shape for another
euideism is motivated by an attempt to replace one referent for another.