If even the Boston Review's subeditors don't know the difference between "diffuse" and "defuse"... well, English is going to change a lot in the next couple of decades. It will get a lot more ambiguous.
Stuff happens, people make mistakes, innocuous stuff like that slips through sometimes. I really don't know that I'd take this long-term view of the English language based on a single typo in the Boston Review, but then again I'm also not sure if that comment is missing a "/s".
I think they do make a point though. Either the immediacy everything has now, or the increased reliance on spell checkers has caused a decline in overall literacy beyond the basic level.
I am far from perfect, and I'm not educated. Let me make that disclaimer first. With that out of the way, I've been online for some time and in the last 10 years, it is common to see a few common errors that I'd say we are in danger of introducing into the lexicon via dictionary-squatting:
- it's and its. If you can't substitute it's for "it is/was/has", then you need its, the possessive form of the word.
- there/their/they're
- your/you're
- are/our
- to/two/too - This is the most common, by far.
- definitely - not definately, just say def or something.
I could go on, but it's starting to feel petty or like my standards are too high for personal correspondence. "Elder shakes fist at terminal"
Sure, I totally get it, and I even agree to some extent. A lot of that eats at me on the regular, too.
But as I get older, the impermanence of, well, everything sits at the front of my mind a lot more often than it used to. Add to that the fact that English has always been in a perpetual state of change, and I just kinda shrug my shoulders at the idea of it changing further.
The “correct” use of a language for any group of people is really just the way they choose to use it. The English language is changing, like all languages always do. But I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. So much of English language doesn’t make sense, or is needlessly complicated. Seeing these stupid rules erode over time is very encouraging.
Does it matter with regards to the above comments? In this context, right now, it's clear. As we start losing track of the precise meaning of words, we'll get an increasing population size that doesn't even know the alternative exists. It's inevitable to then start using them in contexts where both spellings/meanings are valid and using the wrong one results in confusion.
That’s just how languages evolve; there’s nothing particularly dangerous about it. (Besides, I really doubt there are many scenarios where “diffuse” and “defuse” could reasonably be confused.)
Devolves. If meaning is abstracted by multiple words spelt different ways and context specific understanding is required, then there will be a greater cognitive load to reach 'understanding' and the language will move away from it's goal of conveying meaning.
This is a long tail, but it's not like we've only just started down it.
I actually find misspelling and bad phraseology to judge how seriously I should take a person's opinion, though factored in amongst other things (if it's obvious that English is their second language, or if their field of expertise may be one that eschews language skills, for example).
There is no language that isn't effective at conveying meaning, because doing that is fundamental to what language is.
People have been complaining and worrying about this since, literally, the beginning of recorded history. Our language is much "devolved" specifically in the ways many of them were worried about, and yet we are still having this conversation in it. You might not like how it tastes in your mouth but it'll still work fine for the needs we have of it, as all languages always have.
People say this evolution thing about language frequently but not all changes are positive for a languages utility, clearly.
It can get better and it can get worse. When words start meaning their opposite and then consequently nothing, like with "literally", that's evolving away from usefulness.
They're phonetically identical in most dialects so no meaning was confused here, it's a simple transcription error.
The way you say "spelling/meaning" implies you think they're the same thing but they just absolutely are not, as much as that pains pedants sometimes.
If you think otherwise you're mistaken about very basic and long-confirmed foundations of linguistics, like whether meaning derives from the spoken form or the writing system.
Despotism is lucrative for those on the right end of the information asymmetry.
Fundamentally, the phenomena occurs in cycles in areas where communities lack mutual respect, income inequality is high, and regulatory capture of information is monetized/weaponized.
The networks simply made it cheaper to squeeze the vulnerable, and extend the cycle by a few decades.
While unsustainable sociologically or economically, every individual must make a conscious decision at some point... to serve a king... or walk to a better life someplace less foolish.
The US might well not be a "real" democracy by some measure but it's not a despotism by any means - a variety of powerful forces are contending against each other.
I mean, the US has surveillance, had surveillance in the 1960s when income inequality was relatively low and it had surveillance in the 1920s, when income inequality was more similar to today.
This stuff isn't a recipe for some future dictatorship, it's part and parcel of the way power works right now and has worked for a while.
As a foreigner doing business in the US, one needs to understand there is zero protection under the laws for non-citizens. If you have something someone wants, than you must expect professional thieves will show up before any division head.
One can't take it personally, as the price of admission is high for that show.
I find it amusing that you thought I was alluding to the USA, as the work was based on another historical democratic republic.
Apologies for assuming you were talking of the US. You gotta understand that as an American, I'm used to having many of my compatriots worried about a dictatorship to come while blind to the mechanisms of democratic power. Which naturally includes a complete disregard for non-citizen.
That said, the US is still one example of how surveillance doesn't have to lead overt despotism. Really, I think surveillance is essentially the reflex of every modern today, even those which now have a better reputation than the States - Canada or Northern Europe say.
Surveillance generally means a loss of the moral high ground, and an indication a culture has entered a transitional political period.
Generally, as policy it has detrimental consequences to a culture, as corruption is meaningless when honor and respect are already absent from legal due process.
Surveillance generally means a loss of the moral high ground, and an indication a culture has entered a transitional political period.
Sorry to continue the cynicism but what's a modern state that doesn't engage in surveillance? Here in the US, phones have been bugged by the cops at times since phones existed.
And I remember in the Art of War, Sun Tzu advised his reader to essentially surveil the enemy as much as possible. Which is to say states have employed secret agents against the enemy and employed them against their own once the state grew large enough to view the people as yet another potential enemy.
The one way your statement pans out is states whose surveillance becomes obvious tend to be weakened to some degree.
And I'm personally against surveillance, I'm not trying to justify it.
One observation is the lack of personal rights protecting against host-state whims is a cautionary tale repeated throughout history, and may manifest in any number of political systems.
Another theory points out that democratic republics are fundamentally vulnerable to regime changes, and inevitably develops an achilles' heel that manifests as its citizens can no longer distinguish basic facts from their own fictional narratives or media.
I doubt Sun Tzu fully recognized that perpetually testing fate by harassing random people was a poor strategy for survival. =)
I've always thought of all netizens as honorary Americans in spirit, but I see what you mean.
I see a lot of parallels to inner-city life, and the despotism of local tyrants and their co-defendants doing clandestine business under micro-mob rule.
> During World War II military scientists invented the transistor, a semiconductor device that paved the way for miniature recording devices smaller than sugar cubes and thinner than postage stamps to flood espionage markets.
This goes against common knowledge (that the FET was first invented by Lilienfeld in the 1920s, and that the germanium transistor was invented by Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs in the 1940s). Points to anyone that can produce evidence to support this claim that it was invented during WWII.
Friendly reminder that nothing sent over public internet infrastructure without additional security measures is truly private. Also, pardon Snowden.
> The protagonists of state-sanctioned surveillance are cybersecurity experts hacking into smart phones’ operating systems from a suburban office park, Microsoft engineers refining a biometric camera’s algorithm from their home office, and plain-clothes soldiers parsing through geolocation data for someone else to carry out a drone strike.
I think it's more banal than that - Google, M$, Facebook etc probably allow direct access to whatever agencies, no tinkering required. Let's not forget Google was funded by inqtel, and Facebook started the same day Darpa's Lifelog ended.
It seems very likely that surveillance involves both talking to Facebook and hacking on one's own these days. If a local police department (or an obscure agency or a contractor) can successfully hack someone's phone, such action has the advantage that neither the Feds nor Facebook or whoever has to know about it.
It's reasonable to say that surveillance channels are power and by that token, everyone wants a channel that's as much under their sole control as possible. And no one wants another Snowden, even if Snowden probably didn't change things fundamentally, he gave the NSA a big black eye and I'd suspect image is important to these agencies as well.
The stored communications act prohibits companies from sharing email and similar messages without a warrant, and prohibits sharing information from remote computing services without a subpoena. This is not to say that it never happens that information is shared illegally, but the US is one of very few countries where illegally collected evidence is inadmissible, and so is "fruit of the poisonous tree", any other evidence collected based on this illegal evidence.
It is possible there are secret dicta that supercede legislation, and anyway, laws are only as good as their enforcement, so there are many ways for the government to act as if that law doesn't exist and face zero pushback or repercussions.
It is not in your best interest to assume good faith on the part of potentially bad actors.
You are being downvoted, but I will give an example that is not controversial, is ( or at least should be ) openly known and currently in operation. In Canada, which does have much stronger privacy protections than US, RMCP can get information directly from Fintrac under the umbrella of partnership.
While there is no direct evidence that Google et al, allows for the type of access you describe, I find it less and less unlikely these days.
Yeah, I rely on a Chromebook for most of what I do, and I sometimes wonder if US spy agencies have backdoor access to Google servers or even their mobile operating systems.
I was specifically referring to the extent of hidden collusion between US tech companies and US security establishment and military. There's passive collusion which is turning a blind eye, an example of which might be this:
It seems implausible that nobody in these companies, especially in their information security departments, had known or at least suspected that such activities were taking place before the Snowden leaks.
That said, overt collusion with the US government behind the scenes is a different matter. It's been public knowledge for at least a decade that they can access the data of non-US citizens stored on the cloud servers of US tech companies, but in Google's case specifically, I couldn't find any credible claim online that US intelligence has secret backdoors on Android or Chrome OS devices that grant access to locally stored data. Given that Android and Chrome OS are opensource, I don't see this as a likely possibility.
On the other hand, the security of Google software depends on the trustworthiness of Google itself and the integrity of its OTA software updates. It's theoretically possible that companies like Google may have secret backroom deals with the NSA that enable the latter to push malicious code onto the devices of targeted individuals and groups via OTA updates, but I don't think Google is likely to have agreed to such a flagrant violation of consumer trust as to jeopardize their entire business model.
WhatsApp's acquisition by FB (which seemed over-priced at the time, mind you) involved a boutique investment bank called Allen & Company, which acted as an advisor for FB [1]. That bank had as a managing director back in 2008 a certain George Tenet [2], a former director of the CIA. From that same wiki section, and related to the topic at hand:
> Tenet is also on the boards of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a biometric identification software manufacturer.
This is why I despise movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible and love the movie The Lives of Others. James Bond would be the worst spy ever and is unlike any spy I know. Why should we glamourize those who spy on us?
I'm pretty sure intelligence agencies employ some number of adventurers, agent-provocateurs and assassins along with their more staid infiltrators and station chiefs. The most standard way to do things is having the official agents be the "handlers" of the dirtier, hand-on types but there are plenty of stories things being otherwise.
I'd agree we shouldn't glamorize spies, certainly. And actual sociopaths in the cause of order are some of the nastiest people.
If even the Boston Review's subeditors don't know the difference between "diffuse" and "defuse"... well, English is going to change a lot in the next couple of decades. It will get a lot more ambiguous.