Posts from August 2012

Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again

by Dominik Lukeš · 2012-08-26

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240"] Professor Abhijit Banerjee (Photo credit: kalyan3)[/caption] "We have to use cliches," said professor Abhijit Banerjee at the start of his LSE lecture on Poor Economics . "The world is just too complicated." He continued. "Which is why it is all the more important, we choose the right cliches." [I'm paraphrasing here.]…

Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism

by Dominik Lukeš · 2012-08-09

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Teacher in primary school in northern Laos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is "knowledge is power". It is used to refer not just to…