An MemeThat Must Die

Google has released a new tool; they've scanned millions of books in English and other (mostly European) languages, and slotted every word from those books into a data-base. So you can run words you're interested in through their database and, based on their frequency of occurrence within the sample, get an idea of when the concept behind the word was born, when it peaked in its influence in society, and when it died away.

Here's a word/concept I especially dislike:

Deconstruction: a philosophical movement that took The Left out of the game for 20 years during the 1980's and 1990s as trendy Pomo Theorists announced a revolution "at a distance of several centuries"--if I am quoting Derrida correctly--rather than doing anything so soiling as leaving their arm-chairs and organizing at street level (which of course the less hygienically concerned Right was happy to do).

So I'm glad to see its popularity finally beginning to fade. Furthermore, I suspect that it is more prevalent nowadays in the popular rather than the academic literature, where it has been superseded by equally stupid Frenchy concepts rather than the good, Anglo/German, hardcore analytic stuff.

Word up: the French make good wine and great novelists. Their philosophers have sucked since Bergson.

And just to add a bit o' scholarliness here. One of the preliminary results of analysing the database has been the conclusion that (sorry, I can't find the link) Freud is more deeply embedded in world culture than Darwin...

...which is true enough, and interesting in that Darwin's results remain well-established and Freud, while hardly gone away, has gone through all sorts of reputational to-ing and fro-ing.

PS. The graphs look better if you click on them.

Alberta Vs. The Creationists, Part III: In Which Minister Blackett Contradicts Himself And Others

"But Lindsay Blackett, the Tory minister responsible for human rights, said in an interview that the intention of the law is to only allow parents to pull children out when the curriculum specifically covers religions, something that only happens for a few hours each school year."

"It's talking about religion (such as) Hindu, or Muslim, or that type of religion, not ... the curriculum with respect to, for instance, evolution," he said.

[...]

Blackett said if people believe the wording of the bill is unclear and could lead to complaints beyond what the law is intended to cover, the government could tighten up the language before it passes.

"If that's the main worry than we can certainly narrow that down, we're reasonable people."

There are two problems with this.

1) Both Alberta Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett and Premier Stelmach have said explicitly that Bill 44 would allow parents to remove their children from classes in which evolution was taught. So either one of these two guys is lying, or (more likely) they have misread the intention of their own bill, because...

2) the language does not need to be tightened up. In fact, Blackett is correct in the above: the wording of the law states pretty clearly that it applies only where the classroom subject "deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation". The problem is not with the language in the bill, but the language Blackett and Stelmach have used in talking about the bill.

A very confused government, out there in Alberta, I'm afraid...