to speak a better English

Kevin Drum writes:

This is one of the reasons I don’t blog much about education policy even though it’s an interesting subject. For all the sturm and drang, in the end nothing really seems to matter. After a hundred years of more-or-less rigorous pedagogical research, we still don’t know how to teach kids any better than we used to.

It may be that we’re not teaching kids any better but – especially when you look beyond the introductory levels – it’s clear that there has been quite a bit of progress in most of the subjects we teach kids. Arithmetic is still arithmetic, but mathematics has moved beyond where it was in the late 19th century (though I’d have to do a lot of learning to actually understand those developments). The same could be said of the sciences; there was a great quotation I saw online some time ago (but have never been able to track down since) from someone in the sciences that went something like: “It is sobering to think of how many students we’ve failed for not knowing things that later turned out to be incorrect.” And the social sciences may not, despite some claims to the contrary, be sciences in the way the life and physical sciences are sciences, but they’ve certainly progressed as well.

Even the humanities, where progress is harder to measure or even to define, are generally understood to have made advances. I confess that I’m not familiar enough with fields like English or Philosophy to be able to describe what counts as progress and what progress has been made, but if you look at history, at least, you’ll see that while interpretations have risen and fallen and sometimes risen again, and few have been overturned once and for all, history is also a cumulative endeavor and it’s kept on accumulating over the years with new sources, new types of sources, and new ways of looking at sources. We know more about the past in a lot of ways than we used to, even as we often disagree about what to make of that knowledge.

If there’s an exception to this trend it’s language – not, I should say, the study of language, which falls under the social sciences as linguistics, but language itself: a first language, second language, foreign language, whatever. (Note that the program that prompted Drum’s post was a reading program for kids: that is, a program teaching the English language.) Is the English I’m using right now meaningfully better than the English used in the late 19th century? Better than 18th century English? Is someone fluent in contemporary English more fluent in English than someone who lived in the 19th century and was fluent in the English of that era? (Let’s leave aside the entertaining possibility of being fluent in 19th century English while living in today’s world, something I hear can happen, to an extent, to people who’ve learned a language mostly from reading, or rather certain kinds of reading.)

It would be hard to say yes: English has changed, but those changes can’t really be understood as progress in the sense used above. The same could be said for just about any language, with the possible exception of ones made up from scratch. What one needs to know to be fluent – grammar, vocabulary, syntax – may change, but fluency remains the highest level of expertise (so to speak; “competence” might be a better word) one can acquire in a language.

I don’t really have anything to say about education policy or K-12 pedagogy, where language teaching is certainly not the only subject that hasn’t seen significant progress; I just think the way language differs from other subjects is interesting and Drum’s post happened to remind me of it.

from the sandbox to the ballot box

John Adams saw this coming:

The same reasoning which will induce you to admit all men who have no property to vote with those who have, for those laws which affect the person, will prove that you ought to admit women and children; for, generally speaking, women and children have as good judgments, and as independent minds, as those men who are wholly destitute of property; these last being to all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents.

…

Society can be governed only by general rules. Government cannot accommodate itself to every particular case as it happens, nor to the circumstances of particular persons. It must establish general comprehensive regulations for cases and persons. The only question is, which general rule will accommodate most cases and most persons.

Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions and prostrate all ranks to one common level.

The full (I think) letter is here. It’s excerpted near the beginning of Keyssar, The Right to Vote, which, coincidentally I’m currently reading.

trainover country

I’m a fan of rail service and I was glad to see Obama bring it up recently:

The irony is with the gas prices what they are, we should be expanding rail service … We are going to be having a lot of conversations this summer about gas prices. And it is a perfect time to start talk about why we don’t’ have better rail service. We are the only advanced country in the world that doesn’t have high speed rail. We just don’t’ have it. And it works on the Northeast corridor. They would rather go from New York to Washington by train than they would by plane. It is a lot more reliable and it is a good way for us to start reducing how much gas we are using. It is a good story to tell.

Notice that ellipsis after the first sentence? Both of the places where I initially saw these comments included it, but following the links I found a more detailed report of that Obama appearance. And it turns out those three dots hide quite a bit:

“The irony is with the gas prices what they are, we should be expanding rail service. [Begin ellipsis] One of the things I have been talking about for awhile is high speed rail connecting all of these Midwest cities – Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis. They are not that far away from each other. Because of how big of a hassle airlines are now. There are a lot of people if they had the choice, it takes you just about as much time if you had high speed rail to go the airport, park, take your shoes off.”

He continued to talk up Amtrak.

“This is something that we should be talking about a lot more,” Obama said. [End ellipsis] “We are going to be having a lot of conversations this summer about gas prices.

voting interests

This raises – and by “raises” I mean “led me to think of, off-hand, for no particular reason” – a couple of questions to which I don’t expect any answers, but find interesting nevertheless.

1. In terms of platforms, who was Lincoln closer to: Douglass or Bell? It may be that many Bell voters would have moved to Douglas in a runoff, but is that what they should have done? (Leaving aside the fact that voters don’t always do what others think they “should” do.) Lincoln and Douglas are of course associated with disagreement and debates; Bell is not really known, but both he and Lincoln were former Whigs.

2. In the 1858 Senatorial race, who would have won a direct election: Lincoln or Douglas? (The state legislature still determined Senators back then.)

a new month

It’s still – just barely – May 1st and I realize I haven’t done one of these in a while:

Have you noticed the weather reports on the front page (inserted into what I guess is the masthead)?

To-day, fair and colder.
To-morrow, fair; northwest winds.

I wonder when daily weather – as opposed to general seasonal predictions about climate conditions (drought, heavy rain, harsh winter, etc.) – became a regular feature of newspapers. Surely someone’s researched this.

The top stories:

  1. An accident led to a massive traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge. Elevated lines were stopped for nearly an hour, surface lines “were operated with difficulty and much discomfort to the passengers” and the station platforms nearly overflowed during the evening commute to Brooklyn. Bad weather prevented many from crossing the bridge on foot.
  2. How convenient: a new subway tunnel to Brooklyn is scheduled to open service today.*
  3. Let me just quote the first paragraph:

    Joseph Bermel, who resigned as Borough President of Queens under pressure on Wednesday, sailed yesterday for Italy on the Slavonia, although under subpoena to appear before the Queens County Grand Jury this forenoon at 10 o’clock to answer questions concerning alleged crooked work in the administration of the Borough of Queens.

    His successor was apparently his “right hand man.” Note this bit of detail about his flight:

    The scene at the pier when Bermel sailed with his family was dramatic in the extreme. Bermel’s friends and constituents literally pushed him up the Cunarder’s gangplank. A party of about fifty friends and politicians formed a horseshoe six deep around him, and any one seeking to serve a subpoena could not have forced himself through.

  4. Last night’s storm wreaked havoc around the city, blowing out plate glass windows, knocking ships off course, and causing flooding in some areas.
  5. Train robbers took four bags of currency amounting to $10,000 from a St. Louis bound express last night.
  6. New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes gave a big speech in Schenectady yesterday opposing racetrack gambling and criticizing party bosses for acting against the will of the voters.

*The route goes from Bowling Green to Atlantic Avenue: sounds like what are today the 4 and 5 lines.

s is for scholar

Matthew Yglesias gets a cake upon which various words have been misspelled in his honor. Garance Franke-Ruta speculates:

As blogs move us into a less heavily copy-edited world, I sometimes wonder if we’re moving back into a more 16th and 17th century form of writing, where the idea of correct spelling was less important than the communication of meaning — which, in reality, can be accomplished just as well with incorrectly spelled words and homonyms as with a more perfect language. And also: as we move ever deeper into this new world of speech-like writing, will the perfect, formal language of the page one day seem as antique and elaborate as Victorian silverware?

So far, only one person has commented on her post and it’s none other than Anthony Grafton – no stranger to old pamphlets – who notes (side-stepping the question of spelling for the perhaps more interesting question of editing):

Actually, most printing-houses in the 16th and 17th century had professional copy-editors–the so-called correctors, whose title came from their chief task of proof correction. They also prepared copy, correcting errors of style and fact, and added punctuation. It’s true that pamphlets weren’t always corrected: but most renaissance writers expected that their work would be gone over, corrected and polished before the public saw it.

For my part, I wonder how the state of English spelling at the time compared with that of other European languages. Were they similarly non-standardized?

why 1908? why the New-York Tribune?

A quick explanation. I wanted a Presidential election year. I didn’t want to do McKinley, didn’t want to do a re-election, and couldn’t do 1912 – which would be really interesting – because the collection I’m using doesn’t cover that year. So it was 1908. It’s convenient that it’s exactly a century ago, but that wasn’t a goal.

I thought it would be cool to do a small local paper people don’t see much of, but there was only one choice from an area I know very little about. (The rest of the choices being from areas I know nothing about.) Unfortunately, the Amador Ledger is only a weekly, and not very appealing visually. I thought of doing the San Francisco Call – the only Bay Area paper with a daily selection, and the region of the country with whose history I’m most familiar – but then I figured a New York paper would have more self-consciously “national” news. So I went with the Tribune.

cooler than the Bee

Even Eric admits it. (Whether that means this is the last Bee for a while, I don’t know.) On to today’s paper:

The photo:

JOINT DINNER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AND THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA LAST NIGHT

Top stories:

  1. William Jennings Bryan and Charles F. Murphy have worked out a deal: the New York delegates “selected arbitrarily at the state convention” last week will be recognized as the state’s “regular” delegates at the national convention. In exchange, the New York delegates will vote for Bryan on the first ballot and will apply “the utmost pressure” on other delegations to make Bryan’s nomination unanimous. Update: Murphy was apparently part of the Tammany crowd and Bryan was expected to deny reports of an agreement. A fair amount of intrigue.
  2. The New York state Senate passed a new rapid transit bill.
  3. The city of New York has sent a bill for $78,220.95 to the Brooklyn Rapid Transit company for street work the city says the company should have done.
  4. A member of the New York Historical Society has come across 200 old wills, dated between 1670 and 1730.
  5. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. took a balloon ride from Washington, DC to Delaware yesterday.
  6. A report on the AP and publisher dinner photographed on the front page. In a speech, Bryan “urged the publication of bipartisan newspapers.”

Previous Tribunes: 1, 2*

*Technical note: I have created a category for these, but I noticed that this blog’s theme does not display anything more than the post titles when you click on the category and archive pages. So I’ll probably switch to a new theme. Update: Done.

late edition

I think I’m going to keep this up. I’ll try to do it regularly, but daily is probably too time consuming. Here’s what has now just become yesterday’s 1908 New-York Tribune: 

Across the top of the page, left to right:

  1. William Jennings Bryan gave a speech on “Universal Brotherhood” – and then defended the Democratic southern states afterward when asked a question about the disfranchisement of black voters. Note his reference to northern laws restricting Filipino suffrage.
  2. The British election is heating up, with pronouncements from both Winston Churchhill on Home Rule and David Lloyd-George on pensions.
  3. The Senate steering committee met today and worked out a schedule for the rest of the session.
  4. The NYU Chorus went on strike yesterday.
  5. A Canadian banker’s daughter eloped just long enough to get married.
  6. The State Senate passed “the Page bill placing telephone, telegraph and ferry companies and stage lines under the jurisdiction of the Public Service Commissioners.”

As a bonus, click through and scroll down the front page for what’s likely an unintentionally comical headline about a Lincoln statue (column 5).

this shows potential

Inspired by the above the fold feature at The Edge of the American West, I thought of trying to do the same thing for a historical newspaper. Much to my surprise, thanks to the Library of Congress, this just might be possible.

Here’s the New-York Tribune for April 21st, 1908:

(click on the image to be taken to the full issue)

Some thoughts:

Either the type is smaller than what the Sacramento Bee uses or the paper is wider (or something else is going on). In any case, you really have to click through to be able to read the headlines. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing: if you click through, you’ll be able to read the whole day’s paper. I don’t really have time to read the articles, but I can highligh some of the headlines.

If I do more with this – and there are years of daily issues to choose from (not to mention other papers in the collection) – I’ll experiment with larger image sizes. I don’t have the best in image software, but getting an image of the top of a front page* seems easy enough.

*This raises the question of “the fold”: since the archived image is unfolded to get the full page, there’s no way to be sure where the fold was. But if you look carefully at the quality of the type, it looks like there was a crease part way down. If I keep this up, I’m just going to go with my best guesses.