Language

"A second way in which milieu control is affects group members is linked to groups' conscious efforts in that regard. That is, the groups maintain milieu control especially by way of labeling recalcitrant members as 'subjective' or 'objective agent.' The former term is used for those who are thought to have harmed the organization by their mistakes or failures in groups' operations."

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists."

"The first is that of total milieu control — control of all information exchange and imagery in an environment that seeks to extend itself to internal controls of every kind."

"This kind of 'milieu control' can be brought about through coercion, but at its most successful it convinces individuals that they are acting autonomously — as is the case for the ex-POW Sergeant Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. The result is that milieu control disrupts the 'balance between self and the outside world', resulting in 'a profound threat to [the individual's] personal autonomy'."

"The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin."

"What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used."

"[to Bishop, after offering her anger management counseling] You would do that for me? I appreciate that. I really do. But I think I'd rather you just WASH THE FUCKING DISHES AND SHUT THE FUCK UP! Fucking psychobabble bullshit asshole!"

"Horatio: [About reporting Eric's lost badge to IAB.] Ok, but you've done nothing wrong. Eric: Then how come I feel like I'm going to slit my own throat? Eric [to IAB Rick Stetler] That's a bunch of psychobabble...crap."

"Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. ... Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring."

"What is shown is that typical ethical argumentation in everyday discourse is saturated with emotionally loaded language, and is highly persuasive in nature. Some insights derived from the emotivist view can be extremely useful in explaining how ethical argumentation works. Ethical arguments arise out of conflicts of values in which there is a pro-attitude viewpoint on both sides. Both sides use emotionally loaded language of a kind that supports one's viewpoint and that expresses opposition to the viewpoint of the other side."

"A reliable system of indoctrination requires nearly total 'milieu control' in which the indoctrinatee has few or no alternate sources of information and values."

"May I show a true model of deconstruction to Derrida by taking off parts that make up my being!"

"The Seventies French fad was a flight from Sixties truths, a reactionary escape into false abstraction and rationalism, masquerading as distrust of reason."

"Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves."

"Professors of the humanities have long been desperate to make their subjects accord with modernity instead of a challenge to it. … The effort to read books as their writers intended them to be read has been made into a crime, ever since “the intentional fallacy” was instituted. There are endless debates about methods—among Freudian criticism, Marxist criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstructionism, and many others, all of which have in common the premise that what Plato or Dante had to say about reality is unimportant. These schools of criticism make the writers plants in a garden planned by a modem scholar, while their own garden-planning vocation is denied them."

"If in one way or another a person is afraid of being unable to maintain an overview of something that is multifarious and prolix, he tries to make or acquire a brief summary of the whole for the sake of a full view. For example, death is the briefest summary of life, or life traced back to its briefest form. This is also why it has always been very important to those who truly think about human life to test again and again, with the help of the briefest summary, what they have understood about life."

"Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstance. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity, and inaction."

"The simple fact is that people do not judge the reliability of community content by its grammatical purity, a shibboleth that is meaningless to them. They judge it by other measures, such as the grasp of the subject matter that the author displays, or the respect that the author has earned from other members of the community."

"Adherence to standard grammar rules is no longer a shibboleth of either the educated or the the professional. People who demonstrate their professionalism and expertise in other ways are given a pass on lax grammar and awkward style"

"These shibboleths are no longer the shibboleths of professionalism, they are the shibboleths only of sticklers."

"If you do not respect and obey the shibboleths of grammar, orthography, and style, people will not regard you as a professional. The function of these shibboleths is specifically to separate the professional from the unprofessional, just as classically their function was to separate the nobility from the peasantry."

"In a sense, knowing that these latinate forms are now considered moribund is itself a kind of super-shibboleth, separating the grammatical elite from the common stickler."

"These particular latinate shibboleths are rarely insisted upon today in “standard” English, but grammatical shibboleths still abound; that is, linguistic conventions and usages that do not exist to convey meaning, but are recommended simply because they are “correct”. “Correct,” that is, not because they are necessary for communication to occur, but because they conform to an established standard."

"After the English crown lost its grip on its French possessions, and France became an enemy, the English nobility began to speak English. But they still needed a shibboleth to separate themselves from the peasantry, and so they created their own English, the English of the privileged and the learned. This English had a grammar based on Latin, which is why it forbade structures natural to English, but foreign to Latin, such as the split infinitive (to boldly go) or the ending of a sentence with a preposition (the sort of arrant pedantry up with which Churchill reputedly refused to put)."

"If you can tell what the author of the offending passage meant, then any lapses from the standard are matters of shibboleth, not essential meaning. If you can “correct” the passage without any doubt as to its meaning, then you are correcting violations of shibboleths."

"She repeated the old shibboleth that time heals all wounds. Hebrew shibbōleth stream; from the use of this word in Judg 12:6 as a test to distinguish Gileadites from Ephraimites. First Known Use is 1638."

"We knew that their claim of giving “the best deal in town” was just a shibboleth."

"A shibboleth is a test which separates friends from enemies, insiders from outsiders, the trustworthy from the suspect."

"Label me as an “Old School” stickler, but I believe the quality of grammer you use when communicating with others says a lot about your character. I suppose there is a time and place for slang or the use of acronyms, emoticons etc., and I can deal with that. I can even understand that there might be mistakes in a translation. But when someone uses “then” when it should be “than”, I want to pull out the rest of my hair. I think this kind of misuse says “I don’t care enough to know which word is the right word to use” or “I wasn’t paying attention in grammer classes”. Either way, I sense a lack of professionalism."

"For most of the well-to-do in the town, dinner was a shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind."

"Class size is another shibboleth: First, small class sizes do not increase learning, and, second, class sizes have become quite small anyway."

"It [“H” dropping in accents] has never been a characteristic of middle-class or upper-class speech: on the contrary, it is perhaps the strongest social shibboleth to exist in the accents of England."

"Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence."

"The fish oil shibboleth is only the latest to be overturned in recent years. Vitamin supplements and fibre have also been found to provide no benefits."

"The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and reality, society. Modernisation is to work towards this."

"Shibboleth is a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning."

"Even socialists, Marxists, and revolutionaries seem to have lost their belief in the future; the old shibboleths come rolling off their lips, but it is as if they cannot keep the scales from dropping from their eyes."

"Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics."

"Dear well meaning poseur, atheist, and other people hostile to Christianity — these are shibboleths of the damned. If you throw these out, it is an immediate signal you are more likely than not destined for hell fire."

"And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand."

"The tribes living on the east of Jordan, separated from their brethren on the west by the deep ravines and the rapid river, gradually came to adopt peculiar customs, and from mixing largely with the Moabites, Ishmaelites, and Ammonites to pronounce certain letters in such a manner as to distinguish them from the other tribes. Thus when the Ephraimites from the west invaded Gilead, and were defeated by the Gileadites under the leadership of Jephthah, and tried to escape by the "passages of the Jordan," the Gileadites seized the fords and would allow none to pass who could not pronounce "shibboleth" with a strong aspirate. This the fugitives were unable to do. They said "sibboleth," as the word was pronounced by the tribes on the west, and thus they were detected (Judg.12:1-6). Forty-two thousand were thus detected, and "Without reprieve,adjudged to death, for want of well-pronouncing shibboleth."

"Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too."

"Shibboleth is a widely held belief."

"Shibboleth is a use of language regarded as distinctive of a particular group."

"It is a custom or usage [Shibboleth] regarded as distinguishing one group from others."

"the errors of Grammarians have arisen from supposing all words to be immediately either the signs of things or the signs of ideas: whereas in fact many words are merely abbreviations employed for despatch, and are the signs of other words. And that these are the artificial wings of Mercury, by means of which the Argus eyes of philosophy have been cheated."

"Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political."

"Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express."

"If all commas were in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning."

"GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction."