[Image: TowedAd,2009, JAVan Devender]
No, I am not receiving any compensation for publishing the ad. It's a towed banner flying over the USNA Sports Stadium and I thought it curious at the time and it kind of fits for today.
But let your “Yes” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No,” (James 5:12)
I have been concerned about the obvious decline in communication skills for years. I am convinced that there is a direct correlation betweeen our language proficiency and our ability to think. In other words, there is a mutual relation between language and thinking such that they feed off each other when improvement is happening. As we become better communicators through language our mind improves concurrently and vice versa.
So.... when there is a conscious effort underway to intentionally blur language, diminish its precision, advocate "dumbing down" levels of teaching/conversation/ exhortation, then what can we expect but to see a corresponding degradation in the ability of people (students for example) to process and understand concepts.
Speaking of "students".... that's what is prompting this particular Grump.
I have it on good authority... in fact a person with excellent credentials on this subject... that in the Anne Arundel County School system, the teachers are given guidelines for communication which prohibit the use of "die" or "dice" when talking about chance or probability or any other subject. They are required instead to substitute... wait for it... are you ready? ..... "numbered cubes!" How does one play the game of monopoly? Well, each player takes a "numbered cube" and rolls it on the board and......!
[see similar blog Here]
Now what is the reported rationale for this incredibly stupid rule? Why, it is that the students might, by word association you see, think in terms of gambling. If we use the word "dice" they might bring up images of rolling craps in the alley.
A couple of things to consider. Given the current status of many of our county school student populations, it would be a dramatic improvement for them to think of rolling craps rather than what they are thinking about. Especially when, in this particular instance, the teacher was engaged in teaching a class with a significant number of students who regularly publicly displayed large rolls of cash, who drove the latest cars and whose single parent was on Social Services payments. You can imagine where the money came from.
But that's not the most ludicrous aspect of this entire silliness. "Wait... there's more."
Maryland only recently enacted a law which legalized gambling and even more recently authorized the casinos to have "board games." You know, like "Black Jack" and Roulette and, of course, "craps." Now, on what basis did the politicians sell the public on the absolute necessity of legalizing gambling? Why it was that it would be good for public education. Our schools need the money, you see, and the taxes from gambling will be used to educate our children. Perhaps they will insist on using "numbered cubes" at the tables... after all, if gambling is bad for our children to think about then we certainly don't want the adults to think about it as they are whispering to their fist prior to rolling the "N-C's" on the felt.
If this was a sit-com it would deserve an award. It sounds like a Marx brothers movie plot.
It's not what the context was mainly directed toward but James' statement above and Jesus' own statement of the same thing can be applied here. We should let our "yes" be "yes" and our "no" be "no." Similarly we should not be using words which add unneccessary complexity to our communication when simple, more precise words are warranted.
To speak plainly does not mean that someone has to "dumb down" their communication. The Gospel of John, for example, is written in the most simple Greek prose in the entire Bible. It's elegance and profundity is not in the least hindered by that simplicity. What lies at the heart of this circumstance? It is that John speaks clearly about things of extraordinary complexity. His mind and his heart bubble up into just the right words to convey just the right idea. To speak plainly and to speak well plainly, requires mastery of the tools of thinking and speaking.
If we want to teach our kids to think we must teach them how to speak and that means calling a "die" a "die." A game of chance is not identical with "gambling." Kids need to know that kind of thing. There are "dice" which have more than four sides - not all are numbered "cubes." Come on people. Teachers, en masse, ought to be telling whoever is coming up with this stuff that they can take their guidelines to the "pot" and flush them. (Now by using the word "pot" I hope that I have not caused anyone to make a mental correlation with a particular green leafy vegetable.)
Good grief...
Oldthinker unbellyfeel.
d4's would actually be "numbered tetrahedrons": http://www.em4miniatures.com/acatalog/JumboD4.gif
And, Christians have been sometime guilty of being equally hysterical about d20 because of its associations with roleplaying games, which is silly in more than one way: http://media.trollandtoad.com/products/pictures/334413.jpg
Posted by: Joel Loukus | April 26, 2013 at 08:53 AM
Hmmm... I think I know what you mean... can you speak a little more "plainly?"... :)
Posted by: John A. Van Devender | April 26, 2013 at 09:00 AM
I laughed out loud. California has linked education to gambling for years. Don't even ask if the profits went to education though.
Completely aside from our culture championing New Speak, or that the television's general script guidelines are to not include vocabulary above the 8th grade...wish I was being sarcastic...I often wonder if our country slips into a vocabulary dumb-down tendency because we are a nation of immigrants. English being an adopted language for a majority of families. When we were in Norway we could view the British news-- which is fantastically socially engineered. But even the talking heads, in their banter back and forth, used more complex and flourished English vocabulary than we do in daily life. Even though English is a hodgepodge, it is their hodgepodge. If all Americans spoke Chinese, might it be a less robust Chinese? Just a thought.
Posted by: PMRMoe | April 26, 2013 at 09:57 AM
What about history...
Alea iacta est
"The [numbered cube] is cast" Julius Caesar
Doesn't have the same impact...
Posted by: Matt C. | April 26, 2013 at 12:54 PM
Matt - Excellent...
PMRMoe - curious how, though, when you read the popular literature of the 19th C. that though there are regional dialects and colloquialisms, I think the average guy had a broader vocabulary than we today (except in technical areas). Yes, American English is an evolving tool but that doesn't mean that any word can mean anything we want it to mean.
Thanks
Posted by: John A. Van Devender | April 26, 2013 at 02:42 PM