by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
On a recent thread, the topic of politically correct speech as it relates to free speech came up. As with many of the more interesting threads on this blog, the topic came about from meandering rather than the subject proper of the thread. The subject was brought back to fore in my mind this morning when I read this: How Free Speech Died on Campus by Sohrab Ahmari, published on The Wall Street Journal (online.wsj.com). It seems there are a lot of misconceptions about what constitutes free speech, the limitations thereon and the consequences thereof.
The core of the American free speech right and tradition is codified in the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Congress shall make no law [. . . ] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press[.]”
The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 19, states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
This has implications that apply to public discourse. Let us consider these implications.
What is free speech? I think the Universal Declaration gets to the heart of the idea with the words “freedom of opinion and expression”. You are free to think what you like and express your thoughts. The marketplace of ideas – a consequence of freedom of speech – relies upon this. Everyone says what they like and may the best idea/argument win. However, that being said, there are some limitations on free speech that are universally accepted in domestic and international jurisprudence. Namely the exceptions of defamation (lying about someone for gain and/or profit) and incitement language (encouraging others to violence or panic). Many countries also recognize sedition (calling for the overthrow of government) as unacceptable as well. Consider the difference in these prohibitions and the different ways of addressing the 1st Amendment: the absolutist approach, the categorical approach and the balancing of interests approach.
All three approaches allow for restrictions on free speech. The absolutist approach takes the stance that literally no law prohibiting speech is permissible . . . except when the words are so intimately tied to a specific action like inciting panic or contracting for an illegal purpose as to be inseparable from the otherwise prohibited act itself. The categorical approach attempts to define what speech is or is not protected by assigning categories such as obscenity, fighting words, commercial speech and political speech. The balancing of interests approach in every case courts should weigh the individual’s interest in free expression against a valid governmental interest in restricting the speech in question with a thumb on the scale of justice in favor of free speech. Most modern jurists adopt either the categorical or the balancing approach as the absolutist approach is impractical. Personally, I’m somewhere in between those two analytical schools: circumstances should be considered, but some speech should be categorically protected like political free speech.
Defamation and incitement have sound public policy behind them. In the case of defamation, it arises from the long respected notion in torts that someone should not be able to lie about another to their detriment and/or for the defamer’s benefit. It’s a matter of equity. It has nothing to do with your feelings being hurt. There is a separate tort recognized in some jurisdictions called “Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress”. It is a very specific, very hard to prove tort where someone says things to or about someone with specific foreknowledge and the intent to cause the hearer or subject to suffer extreme emotional distress. It is a wilful tort and you must prove the speaker had mens rea (guilty mind) in causing the extreme emotional distress.
In the case of incitement, everyone knows the old trope about “yelling fire in a crowded theater”. Inciting panic or violence often ends up with innocent bystanders getting harmed either physically or by having their property destroyed and that is a matter of public safety as well as equity. Sedition, on the other hand, is a “political crime”. In the United States, a particularly odd political crime too considering the express language of the Declaration of Independence.
However, with these above noted exceptions, free speech means anything goes basically. You are allowed to think and express your thoughts. This carries some broader implications.
As all people are free to express their thoughts and opinions, you are certainly going to hear things you disagree with or disapprove of or maybe even find insulting or offensive. That is simply a cost of the freedom. If you value free speech then you accept that you will be disagreed with, insulted and offended at some time. If you don’t accept this fact, then you value freedom of speech as long as you approve of what others say first and that, by definition, is not free. If you cannot accept this and try to oppress others simply for having a different, insulting or offensive opinion, then you miss the point of free speech. The antidote for different ideas, just as it is for offense or insult, is more free speech. Make a rebuttal. Offer rejoinder for insult and offense. But everyone gets their say whether you personally like it or not. Respond. Don’t. It’s your choice. However, if you value freedom of speech, you’ll never try to censor. Even if the motive behind your thought is to crush an idea that is deeply offensive and indefensible. Motives don’t matter. Once you cross the line into censorship, you’ve abandoned criticism and counterargument for oppression. You will never beat a bad idea with oppression just like you’ll never stop a good idea with oppression. As the titular character V said in V for Vendetta, “Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea, Mr. Creedy – and ideas are bulletproof.” Ideas and arguments are not idea and argument proof though. That’s the whole notion behind the marketplace of ideas. This illustrates why the antidote to bad ideas and bad arguments is precisely more free speech – better ideas, better arguments.
Your feelings are not generally protected by law with the one exception in tort. They are subjective. They are your own reactions and you own them. They may or may not be rational.
This is part and parcel of what is wrong with the idea of politically correct speech. An idea that has crept on to what was once the bastion of free speech – American college campuses. Rather than interpret or summarize How Free Speech Died on Campus by Sohrab Ahmari, I am simply going to direct your attention to it and suggest that you read it in full for a scathing example of “politically correct” speech regulations on college campuses and how it has gone wrong. It’s a short article, but dense and well worth the read, full of examples like;
At Western Michigan University, it is considered harassment to hold a ‘condescending sex-based attitude.’ That just about sums up the line ‘I think of all Harvard men as sissies” (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel ‘This Side of Paradise’), a quote that was banned at Yale when students put it on a T-shirt.”
and astute observations like;
‘The people who believe that colleges and universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won, Mr. Lukianoff says. ‘If anything, there should be even greater freedom of speech on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to give campus communities the expectation that if someone’s feelings are hurt by something that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and everything can be punished.‘” [emphasis added]
Suffice it to say, in an academic environment, there is nothing more detrimental to learning than shutting down the marketplace of ideas because some pinheaded “risk management” administrator thinks someone’s feelings should get hurt by words they themselves are free to challenge. If this trend continues, our colleges and universities will become a global laughing stock.
Free speech must be protected at all costs. It is how we speak truth to power, to others and to ourselves when we are interested in learning truths. It can make you uncomfortable. It will challenge you. It will piss you off. It will hurt your feelings. Freedom isn’t free. It comes with costs. These are some of the costs that you pay for freedom of speech. If you don’t like getting your feelings hurt? If you don’t like being challenged? Develop thicker skin, learn to counter what you don’t like, or be ready to have yet another important freedom eroded, but this time not in the name of (false) security, but the onus of political correctness and catering to the subjective over the objective. James Madison thought freedom of speech (and the press) was critical and the 1st Amendment the most important item in the Bill of Rights. Maybe you should think about that too.
What do you think?
Think, mind you. Not feel. That being said, have at it.
Source(s): WSJ Online, U.S. Constitution, U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
SwM,
Let’s hope so.
Has everyone arrived or are more still coming?
Gene,
Sh*t! You’re not going to let me get away with saying everybody should think like me.
Of course you are right. Perhaps the hate spewed forth has been self censored and would be worse.
However, I am stuck judging it from the viewpoint of my own sense of right and wrong.
One’s mind can also be too open thus never reaching a decision … history has also proven that to be so.
Blouise,
Again though, self-censorship, like one’s emotional and intellectual responses, is entirely the province and property of the self. Others cannot be responsible for defining or enforcing its expression as that crosses into censorship.
Blouise, You will figure it out. You are an independent thinker. 😉
Gene,
Certainly self censorship is preferred and perhaps … perhaps it is simply this relatively new medium, the internet, that is providing such a megaphone for hate mongers of all types.
That is what I’m referring to when I say I must guard against my own reactionary tendencies to the here and now in order to keep my mind open to the dangers that history has proven censorship creates.
Imagine in some dark future, Fundamentalist Christians gain control of the government. Would you be for hate speech and PC codes at institutions if they meant you can’t talk about abortion? Interracial marriage? Kosher foods? Pre-marital sex? Sex period? That you can’t criticize religion but in particular Fundamentalist Christianity?
Censorship is a tool of oppression. Careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
This country is built on fundamentals Christianity which is real satanism. Had it be real Christianity what people have calling it security we would not have at all. Had we have Christianity a person could walk into a city of millions seeing an ocean of nude bodies all over doing whatever. Even having sex with no one caring at all if they see it. All kinds of sex. Imagine that, no one condemning anyone.
At this point, I’d like to point out you cannot rationally or effectively legislate emotive states of being either.
lotta,
“I have also been on the fence regarding hate speech laws. I have decided that we as a society need them. Thanks for providing a opportunity to crystallize my thinking on the matter.”
I am still on the fence but leaning. I am concerned with the proclivity to characterize responsible free speech as PC. However, hate speech laws still seem a bit too far. I just don’t know!
This thread, including all the irresponsible free speech being passed off as normal, is, however, most instructive. One can almost reach out and touch the hate.
I’m not where you are yet but I know myself well enough to sense a decision is in the offering. I must guard against reactionary thinking within myself and am still in the process of crystallizing.
And who exactly gets to decide what is and what is not “acceptable”?
Censorship no matter how well motivated is still censorship. The silencing of words you don’t approve of the first step in trying to prevent thought you don’t approve of. In the end, the danger of such laws ignore the reality of the political abuse such laws invite. In actual operation these laws where enacted in other Western democracies have a terrible track record of being used by politically powerful factions to suppress speech that criticizes them. Which is exactly what PC speech from the right would look like. “You can’t say that about the Chancellor! The Secret Police will whisk you away in the middle of the night.” The bottom line is such laws here will not pass Constitutional muster here as long as the 1st Amendment stands as worded.
“Congress shall make no law [. . . ] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press[.]“
Nor does it fare well in the subsequent jurisprudence.
Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949) where a “breach of peace” ordinance of the City of Chicago which banned speech which “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance” was unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark SCOTUS case where the Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting, and is likely to incite, imminent lawless action.
National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977), a case rafflaw is intimately familiar with the details, allowed American Nazis to exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of assembly no matter how offensive and unpopular their positions and speech were to the largely Jewish inhabitants of Skokie, Ill.
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) has been widely cited in case against collegiate speech codes as mentioned above. A unanimous United States Supreme Court case involving hate speech and the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. A unanimous Court struck down St. Paul, Minnesota’s Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance, and in doing so overturned the conviction of a teenager, referred to in court documents only as R.A.V., for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family. The basis for the ruling was on the ground that the ordinance was substantially overbroad and (this is realllll important here for the pro-PC faction to realize)impermissibly content based, and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment. Content based. Censorship in other words.
Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343 (2003) revisited the cross burning issue but in Virginia this time. Holding that the Virginia statute was unconstitutional in part because it considered cross burning as prima facie evidence of intent to intimidate and that cross-burning can be a criminal offense only if the intent to intimidate is proven. Prime facie prohibition was censorship. If you wanted to charge with intent to intimidate, a distinct crime, that intent must be proven.
Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. ___, 131 S. Ct. 1207, 179 L. Ed. 2d 172 (2011) held that speech on a public sidewalk, about a public issue, cannot be used as proof to the tort of emotional distress, even if the speech is found to be “outrageous”.
Free speech has its costs, but at every turn through multiple compositions of SCOTUS, those costs have been found to be worth the freedom from censorship.
The costs of censorship are much higher. Ask all those disappeared in Argentina for daring to speak out against Pinochet, or the Germans murdered for speaking out against the Reich, or the member of the Belgian Parliament was convicted in 2009 of distributing leaflets with the slogans: “Stand up against the Islamification of Belgium,” “Stop the sham integration policy” and “Send non-European job-seekers home.” or the Swedish protesters were convicted in 2006 of distributing leaflets to Swedish high school students saying homosexuality was a “deviant sexual proclivity,” had “a morally destructive effect on the substance of society” and was responsible for the development of H.I.V. and AIDS or the French cartoonist was convicted of publishing a drawing of the attack on the World Trade Center in a Basque newspaper with the words: “We have all dreamed about it. . . . Hamas did it.” In these last three examples of hate speech laws gone amok, the European Court of Human Rights affirmed all three convictions, rejecting defenses based on freedom of speech. Consider that in Poland, a Catholic magazine was fined $11,000 for inciting “contempt, hostility and malice” by comparing a woman’s abortion to the medical experiments at Auschwitz.
Censorship is a powerful weapon and cannot be trusted in legal codification and in the hands of politicians who would merely oppress dissent and those with unpopular ideas.
Even in Canada, where their human rights tribunal has harassed magazines for anti-Muslim statements and for republishing the famous Danish Muhammad cartoons? There has been backlash to their actions because they are so hostile to freedom of the press that efforts are under way to repeal that nation’s hate speech laws.
Hate speech laws are the ultimate in PC language policing.
History has shown time and again that such a censorship power is far more dangerous than the annoyances that come as part of the price for freedom of speech.
The Bears are like the Cubs. Even when they have decent teams they fold like a cheap lawnchair when the race gets hot.
Now raff….. I’m going to have to quit reading your posts on here….. They are not PC and offensive…… The way I see it …… You’re taking a defensive posture on being offensive on the PC thread….. Lol….
AY,
The way the Bears are playing, offensive would be an improvement.
The right reinvented the term “PC” as a way to denigrate and marginalize a tool (inclusive language) that worked against stereotyping by attempting to change the language. It’s definition grew to include direct actions like hate crime legislation and anti-bullying legislation. They hang their hat on ‘free speech’ but their use of the term is a tool most useful to them in fending off criticism for the rights social/cultural intransigence and to deflect and defend criticism for obdurately boorish speech of its spokespersons and leaders in the media and politics. Stereotypes are useful to the right to maintain the social structure they desire and a culture that reflects those values.
Herewith are two quotes, the first from ’92 and the second from earlier this year. I would suggest reading the second one in conjunction with a re-read of the Wikipedia article on Political Correctness. Buchanan’s article is a masterpiece of propaganda built around all of the touchstones explained in the Wiki article.
**
“Feminism is one of those issues which has established itself in the political correctness hall of fame. As such, it is not fashionable to take issue with or poke fun at the philosophy which underlies the movement. Those who have the courage to do so are quickly impugned as women-haters, bigots, chauvinists, sexists, and a host of other epithets.” RLimbaugh ’92
**
“RUSH AND THE NEW BLACKLIST
Pat Buchanan describes how offending PC culture ‘gets you hauled before an inquisition'”
A truly fascinating read wherein Pat defends Rush’s comments regarding Sandra Fluke. He starts off praising the HCUA and the destruction of the Hollywood 10 as a political victory and for the right, claims the left has captured the culture, mourns the loss of the Legion of Decency and the mocking of traditional Catholic and Evangelical morality and lists the new sins as “racism, sexism, homophobia and nativism.”. He declares “For who controls the culture defines what is moral and immoral, and what is heroic and villainous. And if you can set limits on what journalists write and broadcasters say, you can shape what people think and believe.”. He then states that Rush was pilloried by the media and people that threatened to boycott his sponsors and claims, in a sentence all by itself set apart as a paragraph “Thus does the left honor the First Amendment.” 03-15-2012
http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/rush-and-the-new-blacklist/
A couple of things. “PC” is used in the article and a few of the comments and used in a manner consistent with the invention and definition constructed by the right. It’s my opinion that those using it have fallen for the propaganda. That means to that the basis for statements made that rely on it as an appropriate description for certain motives are flawed right out of the gate. Free speech being denied as a form of social engineering by the bad old leftists/socialist/collectivist enemies of democracy is the underlying modus operandi of the fictional PC brigades. Drink not so deeply of the Kool-Aid.
The information presented in the Wikipedia article is not new and has been presented here on more than one occasion in some form or another with cites. The Wiki article is not my first encounter with the movement to neutralize certain language- I was a card-carrying feminist in the mid 70’S and beyond. Having the language reflect human values and dispensing with negative connotation in labels and descriptions was an ongoing endeavor in several social movements I was sympathetic to. I also saw the right construct “PC” as a pejorative and turn it into what it is today. I suspect some others of the blawg commenter’s here did also. To continue using “PC” in the manner the right frames it is well known propaganda
and undercuts any argument it is used to advance or characterize.
I suspect what is afoot is that boorish behavior which carries with it an element of bullying and/or a disregard for others self-image is being conflated with free speech in its purest meaning. What I and others here (and on other threads) have shown (some measure of) disdain and revulsion for is boorish, hurtful, bullying with words. Just telling a victim ‘suck it up fag, embrace your reaction and change yourself’ is unsatisfying as a response. It is not an appropriate societal response.
While I hate certain phrases used to manipulate the population such as “Think of the children” even I, childless, am profoundly disturbed that children are committing suicide, or mass murder, in major part because of the boorish behavior of their peers. Boorish to the point of extreme and dangerous. We have previously debated that young people have deficient brain construction and chemistry until their early 20s. “Suck it up b**ch, walk it off” isn’t good enough for teens, the victims or perpetrators. Boorish behavior is socially destructive in small groups and large groups.
This article and thread has actually provided me with great assistance. I’ve been working on a thought-cloud of ideas and considerations since it was published. I have also been on the fence regarding hate speech laws. I have decided that we as a society need them. Thanks for providing a opportunity to crystallize my thinking on the matter.
Actually the history of inclusive language is more textured than what is provided above and has morphed into one of the rights most cherished and effective tools. I too will use Wikipedia (I loves my Wikipedia) and post most of the relevant definition. I have reordered it to make it flow from its linguistic history to the present:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness:
Relevant excerpts not in originally formatted order:
“Linguistics:
In addressing the linguistic problem of naming, Edna Andrews says that using “inclusive” and “neutral” language is based upon the concept that “language represents thought, and may even control thought.”[17] This claim has been derived from the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states that a language’s grammatical categories shape the speaker’s ideas and actions; although Andrews says that moderate conceptions of the relation between language and thought are sufficient to support the “reasonable deduction … [of] cultural change via linguistic change”.[18]
Other cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics works indicate that word-choice has significant “framing effects” on the perceptions, memories, and attitudes of speakers and listeners.[19][20] A relevant empirical question is whether or not sexist language promotes sexism, i.e. sexist thought and action.
Advocates of inclusive language defend it as inoffensive-language usage whose goal is multi-fold:
1.The rights, opportunities, and freedoms of certain people are restricted because they are reduced to stereotypes.
2.Stereotyping is mostly implicit, unconscious, and facilitated by the availability of pejorative labels and terms.
3.Rendering the labels and terms socially unacceptable, people then must consciously think about how they describe someone unlike themselves.
4.When labeling is a conscious activity, the described person’s individual merits become apparent, rather than their stereotype.
Critics of such arguments, and of inclusive language in general, commonly use the terminology of “political correctness”.[21]”
*****
“Political correctness:
Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent. In current usage, the term is primarily pejorative, ….”
*****
“New Left rhetoric:
By 1970, New Left proponents had adopted the term political correctness.[1] In the essay The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara says: “. . . a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist too.” The New Left later re-appropriated the term political correctness as satirical self-criticism; per Debra Shultz: “Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts”.”
*****
“Current usage:
Widespread use of the term politically correct and its derivatives began when it was adopted as a pejorative term by the political right in the 1990s, in the context of the Culture Wars. Writing in the New York Times in 1990,[9] Richard Bernstein noted “The term ‘politically correct,’ with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities.” Bernstein referred to a meeting of the Western Humanities Conference in Berkeley, California, on “‘Political Correctness’ and Cultural Studies,” which examined “what effect the pressure to conform to currently fashionable ideas is having on scholarship”. Bernstein also referred to “p.c.p” for “politically correct people,” a term which did not take root in popular discussion.
Within a few years, this previously obscure term featured regularly in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against curriculum expansion and progressive teaching methods in US high schools and universities.[10] In 1991, addressing a graduating class of the University of Michigan, U.S. President George H. W. Bush spoke against “a movement [that would] declare certain topics ‘off-limits,’ certain expressions ‘off-limits’, even certain gestures ‘off-limits'” in allusion to liberal Political Correctness.[11] The most common usage here is as a pejorative term to refer to excessive deference to particular sensibilities at the expense of other considerations. ….”
Examples of language commonly referred to as “politically correct” include:[14][page needed]
“Intellectually disabled” in place of “Retarded” and other terms
“African American” in place of “Black,” “Negro” and other terms
“Native American” (United States)/”First Nations” (Canada) in place of “Indian”
“Caucasian” in place of “White”, and other terms such as the more scientifically correct “Caucasoid”
“Gender-neutral” terms such as “firefighter” in place of “fireman,” police officer in place of policeman.
Terms relating to lack of various common human abilities, such as “visually impaired” or “hearing impaired” in place of “blind” or “deaf”
“Holiday”, “winter” or “festive” in place of “Christmas” ”
*****
Cultural Marxism – Main article: Cultural Marxism:
University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate connect political correctness to Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They claim that liberal ideas of free speech are repressive, arguing that such “Marcusean logic” is the base of speech codes, which are seen by some as censorship, in US universities. Kors and Silvergate later established the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which campaigns against PC speech codes.[26]
Some conservative critics claim that political correctness is a Marxist undermining of Western values.[27] William S. Lind and Patrick Buchanan have characterized PC as a technique originated by the Frankfurt School, through what Buchanan describes as “Cultural Marxism”.[28][29] In The Death of the West, Buchanan says: “Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.”
*****
End Quotes
Raff,
That’s offensive….. Lol
Speaking of religion . . . 😀
Go Bears!
bettykath and Gene,
“But in the end, both solutions to the problem aren’t less free speech, but more. You can’t educate about a problem you can’t openly talk about.”
Which with I agree, at least the first, but the problem is epistemological when you think you are the educator in the second. It’s the problem of religion and Ideology, they view themselves as the educators. Atheists fall for the same hubris. I pivot on educate.
Or course, it may be just poor listening.
Ariel: religion that has the bible perverting the truth every which way. I can begin to show you but it would be a long complicated post.
I know this is a matter near and dear to your heart, PC Queen, but the generally accepted definition of PC will do. To wit: language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent and used as a pejorative, or more concisely, that some people and institutions feel it is their job as the PC language police to tell others how they should speak as to avoid offense to others (a purely subjective standard) which is essentially censorship and antithetical to free speech which by its very nature guarantees that at some point you will be offended by something.
Everyone so far has understood that.
I hope that clears things up for you.
I’m late to the party, though the best moments are often at the last, and admit I’ve skimmed, but has anyone here given a rigorous definition of “political correctness”? Without it your arguing art and pornography, you know it when you see it. Miller and Cleland have suffered the ambiguity. I didn’t see a definition in Gene’s essay, just an undefined assumption of what it is.
And, Gene, or to be imprecise, Wene (only one consonant off), did you look up Hook or just avoid him?