THE NURTURANT PARENT IS THE NANNY.

Berkeley linguist George Lakoff has, for a long time, attempted to help Democrats get elected by suggesting the Democrats change their message.  He recently used his status as a well-regarded linguist to assist a Democrat operative with the latest guidelines for talking points.  Zombie at Pajamas Media has time to read the guidelines, and comment.

Lakoff does something throughout the book which he must think is very clever, but which is completely transparent to the reader, making for a truly cringe-worthy experience. Lakoff has two public personas: First, he is a scientist; and second, he is a partisan political advocate. He understands that when he speaks as a partisan, we the readers necessarily take what he says with a grain of salt; but when he speaks as a scientist, we are expected to accept his statements as objective truth. Throughout the book, he constantly switches back and forth between the two personas: He’ll speak for a paragraph or two as a liberal activist advising Democratic candidates and pundits, then he’ll take off that hat and put on the linguist hat to say something “official”; then switch back to his liberal hat, and so on. I guess the temptation was too great to resist abusing this dual role, because he makes a habit — a career, actually — of putting on his scientist hat and then making partisan statements, which he passes off as impartial facts. I can only imagine that he thinks he’s getting away with it, but the gambit is so glaringly obvious that it makes you almost embarrassed for the guy.

Quite so. More to the point, Zombie suggests, conservative and Republican court intellectuals are quite willing to take the latest frame and mock it.  Or take it seriously.

There’s a new frame in town: The nanny state. In a masterful maneuver of political aikido, conservatives have taken Lakoff’s antediluvian “strict father conservatism” frame and completely reversed it. Conservatism now stands for freedom from authority, while is it progressivism that seeks to implement the new scolding parent metaphor, now known as the “nanny state.” It’s liberals who want to tell you what to do and what is allowed, not conservatives.

And this frame is widely accepted by the general public not simply because of superior conservative messaging, but because there is evidence backing it up. It is mostly liberal politicians, not conservative politicians, who pass laws and regulations telling citizens what they can and cannot do, what they must and must not buy, what they are and are not allowed to say.

Who seeks to impose the “strict parent” paradigm now? Liberals. And everyone knows it. Yet still there’s George Lakoff off by his lonesome still pounding his fists about “strict father conservatives.” All the rhetoric in the world can’t hide the fact that conservatism now stands for unintrusive small government, and that progressivism stands for intrusive big government. The “nanny state” frame is so powerful and self-evidently true that it can’t be ignored away, and can’t be euphemized away.

Nurturant Parents don't let their children buy Big Gulps, q.e.d.

DADDY PARTY, MOMMY PARTY. It's ye olde meme for respectively the Pachs and the Donks (hie thee here or here) but George Lakoff reframes it slightly as "a strict father family and a nurturant parent family." Lakoff's stated objective is to change the nature of political conversation, such that the term "tax relief" loses its force. (I seem to remember President Clinton, early in his term, attempting to substitute "investment" for spending and "contributions" for taxes, but I digress.)

Lakoff makes some other points that contain more substance (I suppose to a linguist, everything looks like a frame. To an economist, everything looks like an opportunity cost. If you want to see the opportunity cost argument posed in a drastic way, hie thee hence and register thyself.)

Methinks Professor Lakoff is being a bit disingenuous to complain about "conservatives and progressives" talking past each other. (I could grouse about the framing bias inherent in equating expansions of the role of the national government with progress, but that's a digression. Today's sermon is about the role of government.) Consider the following:

"Conservatives have worked for decades and spent billions on their think tanks to establish their frames, create the right language, and get the language and the frames they evoke accepted. It has taken them awhile to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an affliction and an unfair punishment -- all of which require 'relief.' They have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.

"Taxes look very different when framed from a progressive point of view. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, taxes are the price of civilization. They are what you pay to live in America -- your dues -- to have democracy, opportunity and access to all the infrastructure that previous taxpayers have built up and made available to you: highways, the Internet, weather reports, parks, the stock market, scientific research, Social Security, rural electrification, communications satellites, and on and on. If you belong to America, you pay a membership fee and you get all that infrastructure plus government services: flood control, air-traffic control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and so on.

Interestingly, the wealthy benefit disproportionately from the American infrastructure. The Securities and Exchange Commission creates honest stock markets. Most of the judicial system is used for corporate law. Drugs developed with National Institutes of Health funding can be patented for private profit. Chemical companies hire scientists trained under National Science Foundation grants. Airlines hire pilots trained by the Air Force. The beef industry grazes its cattle cheaply on public lands. The more wealth you accumulate using what the dues payers have provided, the greater the debt you owe to those who have made your wealth possible. That is the logic of progressive taxation.."

Professor Lakoff takes it for granted that roads, communication hookups, weather forecasts, parks, orderly markets (certainly he is aware that the stock exchanges are not government enterprises,) pensions, and research are properly the function of government. Many of those things are provided by government, but there is nothing in the Welfare Economics Paradigm that requires they be, and there is certainly room for debate on whether the roads, communication networks, parks, pensions, and research ought to be privatized. And Lakoff has bundled the cultural conservatives, whose positions on abortion, public assistance, firearm ownership, and the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq often reflect goals other than economic goals, with the libertarian conservatives (that in itself might be a mixed metaphor, but bear with me) who see some of the services named immediately above as services that could be more efficiently provided by private actors, and who might look at some of the services Professor Lakoff mentions in the third paragraph I quote as corporate welfare. From that perspective, co-mingling all tax funds to provide services that funnel benefits to a few make little sense. (Professor Lakoff's parable of the club with differing levels of benefit to different members reflects a tension within the it-takes-a-village point of view. An old (and cheap) book titled The Screwing of the Average Man (details or see how cheap) devotes some pages to a phenomenon called "transfer screwing" in which politicos will threaten to take away some small benefit to many in order to protect a large benefit to a few. Although the thrust of the book is left-populist, there is much in there to intrigue a libertarian. (Nested parentheses, what is this, a proof? No, the proof is in my portfolio.))

Professor Lakoff is incomplete in his pairing of the complaints of "tax relief" adherents with the accomplishments of the state. He neglects the potential for corruption of the regulators (naw, wouldn't happen, we've all read our Herbert Croly (reissue) and we serve the people.) He also neglects controversial and potentially productivity-sapping regulation of the kind that keeps Walter Olson busy. It is likely that advocates of the various roles for government will continue to talk past each other if one side keeps saying "Corporate Welfare. OSHA. Amtrak." while the other keeps saying "Legal Infrastructure. Accessible Schools. Safe Prescription Drugs."

The conversation over the scope and nature of government matters. Crooked Timber finds an Andrew Tobias column that lays it out:

"Seven programs make up 75 percent of all federal spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, civil service pensions, defense and interest on the debt."

Mr Tobias's point: the Bush Administration expects to spend $1.8 trillion per year on these things, and expects to take in $1.35 trillion per year in taxes -- whether or not these are static or dynamic score forecasts he does not tell us -- which implies that interest payments will increase. The first five items are items where some kind of privatization might work (personal retirement accounts, medical savings accounts) or some tough love might be in order (Medicaid and civil service pensions) and they are also items that are subject to all manner of fiddles (taxing Social Security benefits, changing the retirement age, second-guessing doctors.)

I still have not made up my mind whether the greatest looming saecular crisis is international (Islam versus Christianity) or domestic (the nature of Western culture and the role of the state within it) but these promise to be interesting times ahead.

WHY TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF?

David Brooks suggests that there are two aristocracies:

This year the Democrats will nominate the perfect embodiment of an educated-class professional. John Kerry graduated from law school and plays classical guitar. President Bush, however, went to business school and drives a pickup around his ranch. So we can watch the conflict between these two rival elites play itself out in almost crystalline form.

Soon to be homeowner Apartment 11-D suggests that the division by type is "too cynical." But the notion of two systems of belief -- for simplicity's sake? -- does not go away.

SUSTAINABILITY IS A SESQUIPEDALIAN SYNONYM FOR DEPRIVATION.

A few years ago, Northern Illinois University called on geologist Robert Brinkmann to serve as the ninth dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Although his scholarly interests include caves, it appears as though his primary interest is in sustainability studies, complete with a web log.

A recent post at that site, "A Greenlash in Europe," offers an instructive insight into the way advocates use scholarly language in such a way as to distort debate.  "Before I get into the issue, it is first worth familiarizing ourselves with the term, greenlash. The term is similar to backlash in that it reflects a negative reaction."

NON-ABELIAN TALK. I had some time between trains in Chicago and picked up George Lakoff's The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. (Yes, as if I didn't have enough stuff to read on the train already, that, plus it's all got to be schlepped). I did finish the book, somewhere in western New York, and it gets a quick Book Review N^o. 31. Professor Lakoff continues to peddle his advice to Democrats (he prefers the "progressive" conceit, but we all know who the audience is) to "frame" policy issues in such a way as to appeal to peoples' methods of thinking in ways that can counteract Republican frames. I have never been impressed with the approach, and one reason the book was a quick read was that it revisits familiar ground. The professor is still using his "tax relief" argument (the cleanest "frame", which he doesn't develop well, might be "membership dues", but that, too, is incomplete as it neglects all sorts of principal-agent and public choice problems that might make a voter receptive to limiting the government's tax take, and sympathetic to reducing its power.) His japes at the surge are dated.

The few parts I found much more compelling were the references to the technical work in linguistics and in mathematics. Hence the group theoretic title. Consider one of Professor Lakoff's examples: affection being measured by temperature (cool to the advances of another, warms up over time, whether plied with good conversation or with strong drinks goes beyond the model.) But the reverse mapping (temperatures being described as more or less affectionate) does not exist. I'm looking for an accessible treatment of the intellectual cross-fertilization between linguists and mathematics, as the logical puzzles strike me as fun. The public policy analysis fails to convince and the professor appears to know just enough about game theory to be dangerous.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU SAY D'OH! Today's Homer Simpson moments. (The voice went to Northern Illinois University.) First, there's Andrew Sullivan.

I guess I should say that Condi Rice's race and gender are not the most important things about her career and abilities. But I'm still amazed at how little credit this president gets for promoting a black woman to such a position, and, more importantly, by his obvious respect and admiration for her. His management style is clearly post-racial, and his comfort with female peers is impressive. You know, Bill Clinton was celebrated for his progressiveness, and ease with African-Americans. But it's inconceivable that he would have given so much power and authority to a black female peer. Why does Bush get no respect on this score? I guess it reveals that much of the left's diversity mania is about the upholding of a certain political ideology, rather than ethnic or gender variety itself. Depressing.

Andrew, you had to guess? Even the Most Enlightened (TM) among you can do with a modicum of repetition of this point. What's that old William Buckley line about those who profess to value differing points of view are shocked to discover that there is one?

Next up: James at Outside the Beltway, who discovers that Some People Who Say "Armitazh" are surprised with What's Out There.

At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60's. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus.

I believe the correct response is either Homer's, or "No S#@* Sherlock!" Reading on, meet our old friend George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics (details, compare prices, read Doc Searls), who pushes the party line.

One theory for the scarcity of Republican professors is that conservatives are simply not that interested in academic careers. A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches linguistics and is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views. "Unlike conservatives," he said, "they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about."

Let's deconstruct that. First, you have to pay us. Most of us will not put up with contingent work at niggardly salaries. We have hobbies for that. Second, spare us the preening. It isn't wearing well in Red America, and I've seen how petty and self-interested such Enlightened People (TM) become in committee meetings. A much more clever man than I long ago (details or compare prices) expressed his distrust of those who pretended to traffic for the public good. I have read and understood the passage. Let's look for a simpler explanation.

The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged from 3 to 1 among economists to 30 to 1 among anthropologists. The researchers found a much higher share of Republicans among the nonacademic members of the scholars' associations, which Professor [Daniel] Klein [of Santa Clara] said belied the notion that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly careers.

"Screened out, expelled or self-sorted, they tend to land outside of academia because the crucial decisions - awarding tenure and promotions, choosing which papers get published - are made by colleagues hostile to their political views," said Professor Klein, who classifies himself as a libertarian.

Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley who was chairman of the faculty senate and director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, said that professors tried not to discriminate in hiring based on politics, but that their perspective could be warped because so many colleagues shared their ideology.

"Their view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe," said Dr. Trow, who calls himself a conservative. "Debate is stifled, and conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor judgment."

End result: an echo chamber of people who know nobody who voted for the Speaker of the House.

BYPASSING THE GATEKEEPERS.

I've been reading Senator Ben Sasse's recent The Vanishing American Adult, and yes, there should be a full review of his principal argument to come.  In passing, though, he remarked on Martin Luther's 95 theses in a way that is relevant to Our President's use of social media.

DESPERATELY SEEKING A UNICORN.

In "Taxes Need a Rebrand," Michael Jarvis makes an argument straight out of the early days of the Clinton presidency, when Hillary was actually wearing the pants.  "Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment and discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function."  Just reframe 'em as "contributions."  (Try not to think of George Lakoff.)

Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment. It is discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function. Schools, healthcare systems, transportation networks, courts, emergency services, climate resilience measures, and public safety systems do not emerge on their own. They depend on sustained and predictable collective investment, and taxation remains the primary way societies make that investment possible.

You get your Common Dreams commentator card revoked if you even admit of the possibility that many of the items in that passage emerged through the discovery of trade-tested betterments.

STEREOTYPE THREAT.

You'd think culture-studies types might be clear on the concept, but when it comes to slagging on (checks notes) white guys, they show no understanding.

Why are young men so right-wing? Because they’ve been treated like crap. Imagine yourself as a normal young man. When, throughout your whole life, have you ever been told you were anything besides dirt? When have you ever been in an institution that masculine males ran? It’s almost certain that you never have been. Your whole life has been organized, supervised, and surveilled by scolding feminist harridans and their insipid femboy sidekicks who hold you in contempt.

You went to preschool, kindergarten, elementary, and high school, and who ran it? Primarily leftist women and women–adjacent men. You were told to sit and be still four hours a day when every instinct in your body told you to run and jump. When you were active, they drugged you. They hovered over you, micromanaging your childhood. You were told how you could play. No toy guns, no toy weapons. Oh gosh, no toxic masculinity. Here, have a doll, explore your feminine side. No wonder a portion of boys just gave in and became the (fake) girls they had been told society really wanted them to be.

Men build and men destroy. But you can’t do either in these institutions. What do you build in school? Shop classes are gone. You’re not going to be able to learn to fix a car in auto class. No, you sit there all day and read books about how you’re terrible because your grandfather came from Glasgow. It’s all your fault, you know. All the world‘s problems are on you because of who you are. And if you complain, they tell you to stop trying to center the narrative on yourself by expecting to be treated equally.

That's Kurt Schlichter, doing what he does so well.  In The Washington Stand, though, note one S. A. McCarthy arguing along similar lines.  Democrats' support for abortion and the wackiest alphabet people had something to do with it, but those insipid femboy sidekicks play a role.

But aside from the political fumbles of the Democrats themselves, the very fact that young men are men has likely contributed to their rightward shift. There is a theory that suggests that women and low-testosterone men will tend to follow whatever the socially-accepted, socially-prevalent norm is in almost any given circumstance. Of course, since progressivism has been enforced by schools, corporations, human resource culture, and practically every facet of media for generations, progressivism has been widely accepted as the norm, especially among young adults. Since women and low-testosterone men cannot exactly fend for themselves — and by this I do not mean that they cannot get high-paying jobs or do their own laundry or change a flat tire: I mean that they generally cannot physically defend themselves against a violent mob — they attach themselves to the “herd” for protection, accepting whatever the “herd’s” socially-accepted, socially-prevalent norm is — in the case of American young adults, progressivism.

Men with normal or high testosterone, however, have more freedom to challenge the socially-accepted, socially-prevalent norm, since they have the force to follow through on that challenge. A young woman may be less inclined than a healthy young man to appear in public wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap or to defend Trump’s policies at a party with friends because she faces social ostracization and, at worst, assault, against which she will be far less able to defend herself than the healthy young man. Whereas men, especially those with normal or high testosterone, are more likely to assert what they know or believe to be right and true, despite the consequences.

Some of that might say more about Mr McCarthy than it does about the testosterone levels of nebbishy men; although in his analysis the groupthinky cancel culture of the culture studies types doesn't come off so well, does it?

FRAMING, AGAIN?

George Lakoff uses his stature as a highly-decorated professor at a well-regarded university to collaborate with a political strategist to offer self-styled progressives false choices.

Progressive morality fits a nurturant family: parents are equal, the values are empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and cooperation. That is taught to children. Parents protect and empower their children, and listen to them. Authority comes through an ethic of excellence and living by what you say, rather than by enforcing rules.

He's been beating this drum for probably longer than I've been posting.  It's intriguing how much flak the essay has been taking, from the self-styled progressives on one of their main bulletin boards.  (Scroll through the comments and instruct yourself.)

The false choice comes in equating progressive morality and social cooperation.

Correspondingly in politics, democracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world.  No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public.

Division of labor is also an emergent phenomenon. Sometimes The Public set up institutions that assist The Invisible Hand.  Sometimes those institutions arm-wrestle The Invisible Hand.  Keep that in mind, now work through the passage that follows.

In conservative politics, democracy is seen as providing the maximal liberty to seek one’s self-interest without being responsible for the interests of others. The best people are those who are disciplined enough to be successful. Lack of success implies lack of discipline and character, which means you deserve your poverty. From this perspective, The Public is immoral, taking away incentives for greater discipline and personal success, and even standing in the way of maximizing private success. The truth that The Private depends upon The Public is hidden from this perspective. The Public is to be minimized or eliminated. To conservatives, it’s a moral issue.

No, the self-discipline to be successful is the self-discipline to prosper by respecting the wishes of others.  The Public stands in the way of maximizing private success by agreeing to rules of ownership, contract, and fraud only for grifters and fraudsters.  The moral issue may be the attempt to sharply define boundaries between The Private and The Public, something that observers from diverse political perspectives might agree is not possible.

BURDENED BY BAD IDEAS.

But the self-styled progressives continue to look for the magic words that will persuade the electorate.  In a rambling broadside, laced with solecisms, John Atcheson suggests the magic is available in a book entitled Language Intelligence.

It’s become almost a staple of John Stewart to show clips of talking points working their way around the conservative political circles and into the conservative media, and finally into the broader culture. Talk about repetition: the entire rightwing establishment regularly rings out in unison in a 24 hour chorus leaving indelible echoes reverberating in our collective national ears.

It's also a staple of Rush Limbaugh, with a different set of media establishment and Democratic spinmeisters repeating each other. Two examples are not proof.  And the self-styled progressives already have George Lakoff offering advice on the choice of words.  It's not the words, it's the ideas, or the lack thereof.

If the conservatives have been effective in using language to move people, the progressives have been failures.

Contrary to what Mr. Atcheson asserts, it's not language intelligence that's missing, it may be any new ideas, whether properly framed or not.

Even leaving aside the popularity of fevered figures such as Noam Chomsky, one can point to a number of serious thinkers on the Left such as Michael Walzer, or John Rawls and his acolytes, or Rawls’ thoughtful critics on the Left such as Michael Sandel.  However, the high degree of abstraction of these thinkers—their palpable distance from the real political and cultural debates of our time—is a reflection of the attenuation of contemporary liberalism.  Whereas the left-liberal spectrum once had a vision of the good society based on large ideas accessible to the general public, today liberalism comes to sight more often as pure snobbery, a set of formal values adopted in place of serious political thought, perhaps best expressed in Thomas Franks’ unintentionally hilarious title What’s the Matter with Kansas?  Franks wonders why lower and middle class voters align with Republicans when this is purportedly against their economic interests, without ever perceiving the irony of Upper East Side voters overwhelmingly choosing against the party that wants to reduce their income tax burden substantially purely as a cultural statement.  Duh.

Beverly Gage, who would like to have a set of ideas to frame, offers a plausible list of policy intellectuals.

In my Yale seminar on liberalism and conservatism, I try to assign some plausible candidates: Arthur Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Betty Friedan, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, John Kenneth Galbraith. Undoubtedly many people reading this essay can come up with alternatives, and register strong objections to any of the above. But liberals rarely ever have the conversation. Putting together the conservative side of the syllabus is always vastly easier than putting together the liberal one, in part because conservatives themselves have put so much time and energy into the selection process.

If one sticks to economics, the Welfare Economics Paradigm is much more codified for teaching, whether in the latter chapters of Paul Samuelson's Principles, or in the successors to Musgrave and Musgrave's work on public finance. The foundations of libertarian and conservative political economy are nowhere near as well-packaged.  The obsession with diversity and inclusiveness might militate against putting together such a reading list.

Nobody wants to return to an era in which politics and political ideas were dominated by a handful of white men, however thoughtful. Yet we rarely pause to consider what liberals have lost by neglecting a common intellectual heritage and by attempting to win political success without a political canon. At its best, a canon helps people put the pieces together, offering long-term goals and visions that sustain movements through periods of trial and defeat. Without those visions, liberals have no coherent way of explaining where we’re headed, or of measuring how far we’ve come.

It doesn't have to be that difficult, there are a lot of newer scholars with the requisite genetics who are derivative disciples of Croly or of Marx.

THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION. In November, Extension 720 offered a one hour chat with Leslie Savan, author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. I had some book-club bonus points and ordered it. Here is Book Review No. 49. At the risk of sounding like one of the pop-phrases Ms Savan skewers, Stay. On. Message. Ms Savan at times attempts to bring Edwin Newman up to date, bemoaning jarring neologism that robs language of content. At other times, she's a disciple of George Lakoff (who makes a cameo appearance, although not as a repackager of Democratic talking points) eager to pin abuses of language on a Republican establishment repackaging misguided policies as good medicine through proper choice of words. Ultimately, her book fails either as curmudgeonry or as polemic. (On the stack of things to get to is Sandra Stotsky's Losing Our Language, which appears to be a somewhat more scholarly polemic.)

Pop phrases are at once content-free and precise, enabling a speaker to end a conversation in such a way as to preclude any possible refutation. That's the message of the longest chapter. (Yeah, right.) Ms Savan explores several origins of pop phrases. Many have African roots. That goes beyond the hip-hop inspired "Z" and "X" and "2" constructions; apparently "24/7" is a rap number phrase. (The linked page sheds no further light on the expression's origin.) But it strikes as a bit of a stretch to trace "bad" as "excellent" to a Mandinka phrase translating as "it is good badly," as she contends on p. 53; "I want it badly" might work as a source as well. Some phrases are -- possibly manufactured -- attempts to be the opposite of a snob. That is not to say to be nyekulturniy, an expression for which "boor" is an inadequate substitute. Some emerged from the academy or from high politics. These words and phrases are a different sort of conversation-ender, but Ms Savan treats them as words that "lend a halo effect." Examples: appropriate, agenda, celebrate, issues, offended. Many of these words function as vague space-fillers. Then come the expressions that originated with computer experts or capacity-constrained message systems. (Come to think of it, SOS and 10-4 have those properties. The technological constraints are the same. Have these phrases lost their punch, or did Ms Savan fail to research them?)

When the catalog is done, however, we have ... whatever. No call to address the consequences -- and Ms Savan identifies some -- of a less-precise, more cliched language. No suggestion that people whose vocabulary is limited to pop phrases are boring dinner companions. No rigorous investigation of the adverse consequences of either/or, select an option from the choices offered on the screen or on voice mail thinking. Neither scholarly study nor curmudgeonly complaint, Slam Dunks and No-Brainers may make some people comfortable with their prejudices, but it will not change many minds.