Richard Dawkins will stop at nothing. Not content with foisting on the Internet the SARS-like “meme” — which doesn’t mean what you think, look it up sometime — he plumps for “Bright” to describe “a naturalistic worldview…absent any presumption of forces or entities beyond what can be observed/measured.” Few things inspire in me a sympathy for the religious; here is one.

To begin with, there are obviously forces that are far from mystical that cannot be measured, human ends for instance, which are notoriously ordinal, not cardinal. Ends can be observed, but not directly, only in their manifestations. Unfortunately our Bright employs a slash so we cannot be sure if he meant “and” or “or,” which demonstrates the same feeling for language that “Bright” itself does.

As Andrea Harris points out, “bright” is, in ordinary usage, the antonym of “clever.” It describes children who get A’s in Deportment (do they still give grades for Deportment?) and Play Well With Others. It is a word from which any genuinely intelligent child instinctively recoils. This was as true in Dawkins’ time as in my own; he must have forgotten that “bright boy” is a term of abuse, and not the way “geek” and “grind” are either.

He may intend to hijack the word, the way statists hijacked “liberal” and radical homosexuals hijacked “queer.” If he succeeds, it will merely impoverish the language. There are perfectly good English words available to describe a naturalistic worldview. Rationalist, scientific, and non-religious have all performed this homely service adequately for quite some time.

Most offensively, it is a transparent attempt to win an argument by changing the terminology, which is as unscientific a procedure as can be imagined. You may as well adopt the word “right” to describe your worldview. What does that make your opponents? Wrong, of course! Dawkins is quite frank about this, imagining the following bright snatch of dialogue. There is really no other word for it, and if the Brights have their way, there will be no word for it at all.

“Well, some brights are happy to call themselves atheists. Some brights call themselves agnostics. Some call themselves humanists, some free thinkers. But all brights have a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s a bit like ‘gay’. So, what’s the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?”

“What would you suggest?”

Count me dim.

(Update: Andrea Harris comments. Jonathan Wilde comments. Mark Wickens defends Dawkins doggedly but not altogether convincingly.)

Tom Wolfe coined “plutography,” which deserves to be in wider use, to describe television shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and magazines like Architectural Digest. Our new weapons are mind-blowing, to be sure, and I’m happy we have them, but there is something unseemly about the way the TV reporters slobber over them. So what’s a suitable analogous coinage? Paging Dr. Weevil…

Jim Ryan stands up for “he” as the universal antecedent. Cinderella learnedly notes how vastly the status of women in Iran has been improved by the fact that Persian possesses a unisex substitute. Jacques Barzun, in the magisterial From Dawn to Decadence, has the absolutely last word on the subject:

[I]t is unwise to give up a long-established practice, familiar to all, without reviewing the purpose it has served. In Genesis we read: “And God created Man, male and female.” Plainly, in 1611, and long before, man meant human being. For centuries zoologists have spoken of the species Man; “Man inhabits all the climactic zones.” Logicians have said “Man is mortal,” and philosophers have boasted of “Man’s unconquerable mind.” The poet Webster writes: “And man does flourish but his time.” In all these uses man cannot possibly mean male only. The coupling of woman to those statements would add nothing and sound absurd. The word man has, like many others, two related meanings, which context makes clear.

Nor is the inclusive sense of human being an arbitrary convention. The Sanskrit root of man, manu, denotes nothing but the human being and does so par excellence, since it is cognate with the word for “I think.” In the compounds that have been regarded as invidious — spokesman, chairman, and the like — man retains that original sense of human being, as is proved by the word woman, which is etymologically “wife-human being.” The wo (shortened from waef) ought to make woman doubly unacceptable to zealots, but the word as it stands seems irreplaceable. In a like manner, the proper name Carman is made up of car, which meant male, and man, which has its usual human being application…

In English, words denoting human beings of various ages and occupations have changed sex over time or lost it altogether. Thus at first girl referred to small children of either sex, likewise maid, which meant simply “grown-up,” and the ending -ster, as in spinster and webster, designated women. It is no longer so in gangster and roadster. Implications have shifted too. In Latin, homo was the human being and vir the male, so that virtue meant courage in battle; in English it long stood for chastity in women. The message of this mixed-up past is that it is best to let alone what one understands quite well and not insist on a one-sided interpretation of a word in common use.

…To repeat at frequent intervals “man and woman” and follow it with the compulsory “his and her” is clumsy. It destroys sentence rhythm and smoothness, besides creating emphasis where it is not wanted. Where man is most often used, it is the quick neutral word that good prose requires. It is unfortunate that English no longer has a special term for the job like the French on. But on is only the slimmed-down form of hom(me) — man again.

…The truth is that any sex-conscious practice defeats itself by sidetracking the thought from the matter in hand to a social issue — an important one, without question. And on that issue, it is hardly plausible to think that tinkering with words will do anything to enhance respect for women among people who do not feel any, or increase women’s authority and earnings in places where prejudice is entrenched.

Any questions?

(Update: Dean Esmay comments. At length.)

I await this Internet quiz, which is bound to be more instructive than Christian theologian or Euroweenie. Colby Cosh admits to weaknesses for the em-dash and the semicolon. This is small-time. The semicolon is obsolescent, and its users evince a harmless nostalgia for those glorious days when which was which and that was that and shall and will kept to their proper place.

The em-dash denotes an inability to stick to the point, but far less pathologically than the parenthesis, which I favor. Perhaps the most distinguished contemporary exponent of parentheses is Renata Adler, half of whose really rather good book on the Sharon and Westmoreland libel trials, Reckless Disregard, is between them. (It’s hard to decide which half is better, the inside or the outside. Overuse of parentheses often gives rise to this difficulty.)

The colon is favored by poets, and poetasters, who are obsessed with how their deathless prose sounds when read out loud, like that’s going to happen any time soon. Would-be epigrammatists like it too. Few can write something as good as “Man proposes: God disposes”: many can punctuate it. Wallace Stevens was addicted to the colon. So was Nietzsche. I will justify my own addiction to the colon — and I’ve caught myself using as many as three in a single sentence — when I learn to write like Wallace Stevens or Nietzsche.

Question marks, oddly, signify the quarrelsome. Questions in prose are nearly always rhetorical, and writers who employ them are affecting the manner of the high school debater in cross-examination. The truly querulous, like Kierkegaard, rarely use question marks. (Yes, I like question marks too. Yes, I was captain of the debate team in high school.)

The exclamation point used to be for emphasis. But now that teenage girls have hijacked it for use in their diaries — or on their blogs, probably — certain literate devotees, like Mickey Kaus, have begun to use it, half-ironically, to sound less emphatic. A judicious exclamation point gives a sentence some helium, cuts it loose from its moorings. This will be effective until more than three or four people in the world start to do it, when it will grow tiresome.

At least one typographical tic is the exclusive province of the subliterate. Ellipsis Men can often be seen shuffling on the streets, hunched over, muttering to themselves, “Kennedy… radio machines…. Ted Turner Viet Cong… whose job anyway…”