Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Our Terrible Recommendation Academic Culture

Nice job. The bestest. As always! Now Farooq will never ever believe me when I tell him how much I enjoy his work.

An irish friend of mine is now living in france for a few months. he recounted going to the local grocery store and a client there insisted he taste the local pate, which he averred was outstanding. My friend tasted it, and responded, "pas mal," which means, "not bad."

Now in great Britain that response means, quite good. the Frenchman hearing, not bad, go angry and stormed out of the store, leaving my kind friend feeling mortified. And leaving me with this story to give Farooq for his column which was, in my view, not bad, or being American I'd have to say, not bad at all. At all.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday 24 February 2018 at 19:05
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Our Terrible Recommendation Academic Culture

 

Gloria's point about the rampant hyperbole in American English recalls my October 8, 2017 grammar column in the Daily Trust on Sunday where I made essentially the same point:

Semantic Bleaching in English  

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

 

Just like skin bleaching is the chemically induced lessening of the melanin of a dark or brown person's skin, semantic bleaching occurs when a word loses or lessens its original meaning and becomes an intensifier, that is, a word that has no meaning except to lend emphasis to the word it modifies. The most common intensifier in everyday speech is "very." The word does nothing more than add intensity to what we say. If I say, for instance, that "there were very many people at the party," I've merely used "very" for emphasis, and nothing more.

 

So almost all intensifiers are semantically bleached words. Linguists call them semantically bleached because they often represent a diminution of their original meaning in the service of adding emphasis to the words they modify. Let's take the word "very" as an example. The word originally meant "true," and it still does in some contexts. In fact, in the 13^th century, the English word for "true," according to Dictionary.com, was "verai" (which was borrowed from Norman French), from where it evolved to "very." It shares lexical ancestry with "verily," "verisimilitude," "veracity," etc. which all denote truthfulness. Although "very" still signifies "truth" in many uses, we often don't think of "truth" when we say things like, "That's so not very nice of you."

 

Another common semantically bleached intensifier is "really." "Really" originally means "in accordance with truth, fact, or reality," that is, observable realness as opposed to imagination or fantasy. But "really" has now been thoroughly semantically bleached and is now just used for emphasis, such as when someone says, "Although he is not alone, I think he really feels lonely." The fact of someone feeling "lonely" can't be proved in reality by someone who doesn't have a direct experience of the feeling. Although the word's original sense still endures in everyday language, its semantically bleached version is now more popular.

 

Other routinely semantically bleached words are "actually," "definitely," "ultimately," "wonderful," "awesome," "amazing," "insanely" (as in, "insanely busy"), "outrageously" (as in, "outrageously cheap"), "literally," (as in, "he literally stole the country blind"), "awfully" (as in, "an awfully great performance"), "totally," "crazy," "incredibly."

 

Perhaps the newest semantically bleached word in Nigerian English is "fantastically," which came to us after former British Prime Minister David Cameron called Nigeria and Afghanistan "fantastically corrupt," where "fantastically" merely intensifies "corrupt."

 

My reflection on semantic bleaching recalls a May 11, 2011 column I wrote titled, "Superlative Expressions in American English." See it below:

 

Semantic Bleaching in American English

A favorite catchphrase Texans cherish about their state is: "everything is bigger in Texas." Given Americans' extravagant fondness for exaggerations, intensification, and superlative expressions, they should probably have a shamelessly immodest catchphrase for the whole nation that says, "Everything is biggest in America."

 

Americans are the masters of superlatives and intensification. I have never seen a people whose conversational language is so full of intentional and unintentional exaggerations as Americans.

In grammar, a superlative is the form of an adjective or an adverb that indicates its highest level or degree. In the gradation of the levels or degrees of adjectives or adverbs, it's usual to talk of the base, comparative, and superlative degrees. English superlatives are normally created with the suffix "est" (e.g. wealthiest, strongest) or the word "most" (e.g. most recent, most beautiful). But some words are by nature superlative and require no suffix or "most" to indicate their degree. Examples: absolute, favorite, unique, perfect, etc. Therefore, it would be superfluous (or, as grammarians say it, pleonastic) to write or say "most absolute," "most unique," etc.

 

So superlative expressions are boastful, hyperbolic expressions that sometimes have no literal relationship with the reality they purport to describe. In this essay, I identify the most common superlative expressions I've encountered in American English.

 

In contemporary American English, instead of simply saying something like "it's really nice," young Americans say "it totally rocks!" The "best experience" becomes "the absolute best experience ever." Kids no longer just have "best friends"; they now have "Best Friends Forever." There is even an initialism for it: BFF. (An initialism, also called an alphabetism, is an abbreviation made up of first letters of words or syllables, each pronounced separately. E.g. HIV, BFF, CEO). My daughter changes her BFFs every other week! "Forever" now has an expiration date.

 

On American TV it's now common to hear teenagers use "bestest" (a nonstandard word) to heighten the sense that the superlative adjective "best" conveys, as in: "we had the bestest party ever!" "Baddest" is another nonstandard superlative in American youth lingo. The word has been a part of African-American vernacular English (or Ebonics) for a long time. It's now fully integrated into mainstream, mostly youth, conversational English. But "bad" here is not the absence of good. It is, on the contrary, the surfeit of goodness or "kewlness" (kewlness is derived from "kewl," which is the nonstandard slang term for "cool," i.e., fashionable, excellent, or socially adept) or greatness. So "the baddest guy in town" in the language of the American youth subculture means the best or greatest guy.

 

The intensifier "very" is now considered tame and lame in American conversational English. It has effectively been replaced with "super." People are no longer just "very excited"; they are "super excited." It's no longer common to hear people being described as "very smart"; they are "super smart." An alternative intensifier is "uber," which is borrowed from German. It means extreme or outstanding, as in, "uber-hero," "uber-smart professor," etc.

 

 But it appears that "super" has also exhausted its intensifying elasticity. It is now being replaced with "super-duper." It's now typical to hear Americans say they are "super-duper excited" or that they have eaten "super-duper burgers."

 

Perfect. In America, everything is "perfect." During Christmas, New Year, Mother's Day, etc. people get "perfect gifts" for their loved ones. When appointment times work well, it's "perfect timing." Things are not just "acceptable"; they are "perfectly acceptable." President Obama once described high-flying young country singer Taylor Swift as a "perfectly nice girl." She is not just nice; she is perfectly nice. Does that mean she has no blemish of any sort? Of course no. It only means "perfect" has lost touch with its original meaning.

 

When people respond to a question in the affirmative, a simple "yes" is no longer sufficient. They say "absolutely!" The response to a question like "did you have a good time there?" would more likely be "absolutely!" than the hitherto conventional "yes, I did."

 

In America, routine, quotidian events are habitually called "one-of-a-kind." On my daughter's kid TV, programs are almost always described as "one-of-a-kind TV event."

 

And "best ever" has become the default phrase for just about anything. My daughter calls me "the best dad ever" each time I give her a treat. Her "best day ever" is any day she has lots of fun. Now, Americans are graduating from "ever" to "ever ever." An American friend of mine described one of my Facebook pictures as "my most favorite picture of you ever ever"! Well, "favorite" is itself a superlative word that does not admit of any intensifier in standard grammar. To add "most" and "ever ever" to "favorite" seems to me like imposing an unbearably excessive burden on my poor little picture!

 

 If an American hates this article, he would probably call it the "worst article ever written article on American fondness for superlatives." If she is a teenager and likes it, she might call it the "bestest written article on American fondness for superlatives ever ever."

 

The American fascination with exaggeration and superlative language is probably the consequence of the ubiquity of advertising in American life. Advertising traditionally engages in hyperbole, deliberate overstatement, and extravagant exaggeration. Now that advertising has become more omnipresent and more intrusive than ever before (this is no American superlative, I swear!) in American life, it is logical that it would influence their everyday language.

 

 Or it could very well be the linguistic evidence of the over-sized image Americans cherish about themselves. When you're used to being the world's number one in most things, it's inevitable that it will reflect in your language sooner or later.

 

But the effect of all this is that it has blurred the dividing line between fact and fiction in everyday American life. I am now dubious of many claims here. Everything here is the "world's biggest." For instance, Atlanta's international airport is called the "world's biggest and busiest airport." Well, it turns out that the claim is not exactly accurate. In terms of the number of passengers that pass through it annually, it is indeed the world's busiest airport. But in terms of land mass, there are much bigger airports in the world.

 

A modestly sized farmer's market here in Atlanta has also been touted as "the world's biggest farmer's market." If it indeed is, then farmers' markets elsewhere in the world must be really tiny.

 

Superlatives certainly make language colorful, but I worry that their untrammeled profusion in everyday speech has the potential to desensitize us to actually exceptional things around us.

 

Related Articles:

Politics of Grammar Column

 

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperog

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

 

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:08 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:

Well if you look at it the other way, some would consider American recommendations  (of students) to be  effusively couched in  hyperbole.

American speech is known for what some would call an exaggerated use of superlatives.

 

" How was the food?"  "Fantastic", says the American.. Someone else from another culture may say the food was  "good." 

 

" How are you today?"

  "Excellent" shouts the American. Someone from another culture may say " Not bad".

 

I don't think there is an intentional plan to sabotage applicants.

 True, there are cases where the recommenders are unfamiliar with  American expectations or the recommender

 may be downright lackadaisical but  we have a translation problem here, generally. It really is  largely  a cross- cultural translation 

challenge, for want of a better concept.

 

Olayinka will have a better terminology for this.

 

A similar situation  applies to grading, somewhat. As you know a grade of  60 in some non- American institutions may be the equivalent 

of 80  or 90  in the US - and that also affects the overall recommendation. A student once complained to me that

her GPA  was brought down by the low grade she got from a summer abroad class she took in  a  Nigerian  

institution. She was convinced that she would have gotten an A if marked in the US.

 

 

Making  up a list of guidelines is a good idea and will  be instructive - although  you have to see the phenomenon  in  cultural  relativist terms

and not pathologize it in absolutist terms. 

 

 

GE

www.gloriaemeagwali.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2018 2:21 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Our Terrible Recommendation Academic Culture

 

Victor, 

 

The cheapest, easiest pushback against change and against the effort to highlight a problem is to engage in this non sequitur of throwing out the cop out of generalization. For goodness sake, why is this always our go-to canard? Shouldn't it be clear that not every Nigeria-based lecturer writes scanty, non-specific, and weak letters and that some American professors also lazily write similar letters? Oya help me insert the needed qualifiers and caveats so that our colleagues back home can feel better and be reassured that we're not smearing all of them as bad reference writers.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 24, 2018, at 12:58 PM, Victor Okafor <vokafor@emich.edu> wrote:

Does this commentary represent, perhaps unintentionally, a sweeping generalization? Does this pattern of conduct apply across-the-board to all or a majority of the federal, state and private universities that are based in Nigeria? Amongst Nigeria-based academics, is this a common practice or is it a pattern of conduct limited to some frustrated academic practitioners within Nigeria's academic world? What I know, for sure from experience, is that graduates of Nigerian universities tend to experience difficulty with procurement of their transcripts. I feel it necessary to say as well that in my own decades of teaching and performing academic administrative functions here in the USA, I have received and read both ebullient and lukewarm letters of recommendation from both foreign-based and US-based academic practitioners for both students seeking admission and job-seeking academics. In any case, I humbly submit that we ought to exercise some caution and restrain the language that we deploy in our portrayals to the outside world of Nigeria's academic institutions and academic practitioners. In short, let's avoid sweeping generations.

 

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:37 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

 

This, below, is a Facebook post I made yesterday. It has gone viral and sparked discussion and a healthy debate on a pervasive problem.

 

 

Let's discuss how Nigerians unintentionally--or as a compatriot told me recently, intentionally--sabotage other Nigerians' chances of upward socioeconomic and educational mobility.

A talented Nigerian student/graduate is applying to a graduate program in Euro-America and asks her current or former lecturers to write her the required recommendation letters. Some of the lecturers don't even bother to write the letter. The applicant has to chase them down and plead. Sometimes they have to travel from one part of the country to the other to plead in person as phone calls, texts, and emails don't work with the lecturers. 

It's as though the lecturers don't want to support the applicant's foreign educational aspirations. It's part of their job, but lecturers act as if they're doing their current and former students a favor by writing these letters. Many applicants have missed critical application deadlines because of this attitude. 

The ones who agree to write the letter take the most cavalier attitude to it. They write unusably perfunctory nonsense such as "Ms so and so was a student in our department; she was a well behaved student; she worked hard and performed well in her classes; she has a good character and is very respectful; she is humble and God fearing; her academic record is okay."

Far from helping the applicant's chances, this type of letter actually damages and puts her at a disadvantage in relation to her fellow applicants. I should know, since I've served on both graduate admissions and fellowship and grant committees many times.

Where to begin? First of all such a letter says nothing, absolutely nothing, about the applicant's intellectual abilities, unique academic skills, or the specificities of their academic record. It is too general to be useful. It does not offer any insight into the lecturer's academic/intellectual relationship with the applicant, so why should we take the letter writer seriously as someone who can vouch for the applicant?

There is no mention of classes the applicant took with the lecturer, how they did in such classes, how they stood out, what they did to impress the lecturer, why the lecturer believes the applicant would thrive and blossom in the graduate program, etc.

There is no praise, no enthusiasm--only bland, lukewarm, generic comments. It's better not to write a recommendation than to write one that does not endorse the applicant or highlight her intellectual promise and quality. 

Then there is the issue of brevity. Some of these letters that I've seen are one paragraph or at most two--too sketchy to offer any substantive glimpse into the applicant's abilities or give one a sense of the applicant's unique talents and intellectual drive. You can't say anything compelling about an applicant in two or or three sentences.

Finally, there is the annoyingly meaningless deployment of Nigerian idiosyncrasies and cliches. When a Nigerian lecturer writes "hardworking," the North American evaluators of the applicant's materials read it as "mediocre." When the evaluators see a word such as "solid," they don't think it indicates excellence, as it might in Nigeria. In popular and even professional Nigerian usage, "okay" means good. Not so in the North American educational parlance. It does not mean good. Rather, it denotes bad or mediocre. Saying someone is "okay" indicates reservation, that the letter writer is holding back outright praise because the applicant does not deserve it.

And nobody wants to know or cares about the applicant's personal character, so commenting on how well behaved or respectful she is is an unhelpful digression at best and at worst a damaging indication that you have nothing substantive or glowing to say about her academic abilities and intellectual talent. What has the applicant being "kind" got to do with her ability to undertake graduate work, cope with its rigors, and do well? 

The phrase"God fearing" and the word "humble" are staples of Nigerian academic recommendation letters. They are red flags like no others because they simply don't belong in an academic reference letter. Our tendency to religionize every aspect of our lives and explain everything in religious idioms is now infecting our academic enterprise. Religious references presuppose that everyone shares that frame of reference, which is quite presumptuous and thus off-putting. As for being "humble," humility is not, in and of itself, a treasured academic quality or an indicator of academic talent. Unless humility is being advanced to balance out superlatives used to describe an applicant's exceptional intellectual talents, it is a meaningless quality to underline in an academic reference letter.

I don't know whether it is laziness on the part of the lecturers or a lack of awareness about Western higher educational conventions. I suppose it's a mix of the two.

Whatever it is, these lecturers are destroying the chances and prospects of talented Nigerian applicants, who lose out of opportunities because their former or current teachers write non-recommendation recommendation letters on their behalf. 

I've lived and worked in America long enough to know that, in making admission and other decisions, no evaluator will ignore a sketchy, general, and lukewarm endorsement from a person who purportedly knows and has taught and mentored the applicant--the recommender. If the recommending lecturer doesn't sound so enthusiastic about the applicant, why should I? That's the general attitude.

Ignorance of what is expected in the letter is no excuse. I've even seen such a letter which was written by a Nigeria-based lecturer who studied in the US and is thus aware of how critical recommendation letters are and how they should be written. This lends credence to the theory that some of this could be intentional sabotage on the part of some recommending lecturers.

It is sometimes so sad and frustrating for folks like me to read recommendation letters from North American professors saying that such and such applicant is a reincarnation of Albert Einstein and Jacques Derrida in one flesh and then to read a meaningless three-sentence recommendation letter from a Nigerian lecturer about a Nigerian applicant you know is much more talented than the North American applicant whose abilities and talents are being advanced in highfalutin, exaggerated terms.

The interesting thing is that I read recommendation letters written by academics in other countries for other international applicants and they conform for the most part to the North American convention of high praise and substantive commentary on the applicant, her accomplishments, and her ongoing work. 

We're shortchanging ourselves and putting ourselves at a disadvantage in a globalized, hyper-competitive world.

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