{"id":37516,"date":"2013-06-15T13:47:16","date_gmt":"2013-06-15T17:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=37516"},"modified":"2013-06-15T14:40:46","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T18:40:46","slug":"wordplay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/06\/15\/wordplay\/","title":{"rendered":"wordplay&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"520\" height=\"146\" border=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/academy.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<table width=\"95%\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"4\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tr>\n<td>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><strong>          <\/p>\n<div>I don&#8217;t really know where it started, this thing I&#8217;ve occasionally gotten into about certain words. I sometimes get hung up on why a word means what it means. When I think I&#8217;ve got the answer, invariably, I can&#8217;t confirm my great discovery in an online dictionary. It always has some old non-english version with no explanation. In that way, it&#8217;s kind of an unsatisfying hobby. <\/div>\n<p>               <\/p>\n<div>One such word was<font color=\"#990000\"> reckless<\/font>. It seemed like it ought to be [w]<font color=\"#200020\">reckfull<\/font>, because <font color=\"#200020\">reckless<\/font> behavior really means behaving unsafely, so it ought to lead to having lots of wrecks. My resolution of this difficult conundrum was that a <font color=\"#200020\">reckless<\/font> person&nbsp; was someone who acted as if they had never had a wreck, so they hadn&#8217;t learned by experience to be careful. I thought that was pretty clever, but the dictionary said:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div>[before 900; Middle English <em>rekles,<\/em> Old English<em> reccel<\/em>e<em>as,<\/em> c. German <em>ruchlos<\/em>].<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div>See what I mean? One time, I got pretty close. I got stuck on the derivation of <font color=\"#990000\">ruthless<\/font>. I decided it meant lacking the qualities of Ruth [in the Bible]. I felt silly, like everyone alive already knew that. When I looked it up, it didn&#8217;t say that. But then I looked up ruth, and it said [right under <font color=\"#200020\">Babe Ruth<\/font>]:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div>Ruth [rooth]: In the Bible, a Moabite widow who left home with her mother-in-law and went to Bethlehem, where she later married Boaz.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div>But then below the proper nouns, it said:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div>ruth [rooth]            <\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Compassion or pity for another.<\/li>\n<li>Sorrow or misery about one&#8217;s own misdeeds or flaws.<\/li>\n<\/ol><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div>So maybe Ruth was named for the qualities and grew into them. Who knows? Whatever the truth, I claim credit for the accuracy of my definition.<\/div>\n<p> <\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p align=\"justify\">I was writing a comment on the Doshi et al article about  <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/cgi\/doi\/10.1136\/bmj.f2865\"><font color=\"#200020\">RIAT<\/font><\/a>, and one of those word things happened for the first time in a long time. It was with the word <strong><font color=\"#990000\">academic<\/font><\/strong>. What I was trying to talk about was our academic journals and why publishing clinical trial reports without access to the full raw data shouldn&#8217;t fly. I had said that the thing that made a journal academic was that the articles were peer reviewed both before being published, and afterwards. I was claiming that without the raw data, there could never be genuine peer review, so such studies shouldn&#8217;t really have been published in academic journals in the first place. It was an <strong><font color=\"#990000\">AllTrials<\/font><\/strong> kind of argument [an argument I&#8217;d already made awkwardly in <a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/06\/13\/a-bold-remedy\/\">&ldquo;a bold remedy&rdquo;&hellip;<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">I&#8217;d never really thought about the word academic before, but all of a sudden, the literal meaning occurred to me. If you look into some set of facts and conclude that you&#8217;ve figured out something about them, it&#8217;s just an opinion. But if you lay out your opinion in an article that you present to the whole <strong><font color=\"#200020\">academy<\/font><\/strong> for scrutiny and debate, it becomes <strong><font color=\"#200020\">academic<\/font><\/strong>. But that&#8217;s only true if the members of the academy can see all of <em>the same facts<\/em> that you saw. What we are calling data transparency is an integral part of the definition of the word. Academic means expanding [and exposing] the vision of individual scholars to that of the academy of scholars as a whole. So a journal with embargoed primary data is not an <strong><font color=\"#200020\">academic journal<\/font><\/strong>. It&#8217;s something else &#8211; something that doesn&#8217;t belong in the library at the academy.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Is this semantics? just some other piece of common knowledge that I&#8217;m catching onto as a late bloomer? After all, scientific papers have always been published without the stacks of data notebooks [and later computer print outs] that sit behind most scholarly articles. But it really was different in the past. If you wanted to see somebody&#8217;s primary data, you could. I did that&nbsp; in the late 1960s in another incarnation, traveling to a distant lab to look at their data and taking my notebooks for review. I was a lowly fellow and they were the established scholars, but they treated me like a peer, seemed glad to see me, and together we figured out why we got different results. I can&#8217;t imagine this business of data-as-private-property in those days. It seems a recent creation of this <em>industry-funded-industry-executed<\/em> clinical trial era.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"180\" hspace=\"4\" height=\"101\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/scholars.gif\" \/>I recalled another one of those word things from the past. I was watching a <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/_0ffzsrDkSQ\">youtube video<\/a> of a BBC Panorama program about Paxil Study 329. They interviewed Dr. Mina Dulcan, the editor of the <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry<\/font><\/strong> who had accepted the study over the objections of the peer reviewers. She first talked about the Journal&#8217;s classy ranking [@13:57]. Then, when asked if she had any regrets about publishing it [@14:58], she said, &quot;<em><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Oh I don&#8217;t have any regrets about publishing at all. It generated all sorts of useful discussion, which is the purpose of a scholarly journal.<\/font><\/strong><\/em>&quot; I really balked at the word &quot;<em><strong><font color=\"#200020\">scholarly<\/font><\/strong><\/em>.&quot; I didn&#8217;t linger then, but it sounded effete at the time. It felt embarrassing. Thinking about it now, the discussion it generated wasn&#8217;t &quot;<em><strong><font color=\"#200020\">scholarly<\/font><\/strong><\/em>&quot; at all &#8211; as in <em><strong><font color=\"#200020\">a debate among scholars<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. It was more like IRS Auditors discussing how to sleuth out hidden off-shore accounts. A scholarly discussion is about interpretation and meaning, not about access to the basic observations.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Having lived among a lot of academic scholars in my life [the kind that wear multicolored robes at graduation], I think I&#8217;ve always glazed over when the talk turns to lofty academic matters like tenure, authorship, plagiarism, academic rank, promotion, scholarship, etc. &#8211; those things that preoccupy the inhabitants of ivory towers. I recant! Having witnessed the corruption and deterioration in academic psychiatry in the last quarter century, I take it all back. I now see that the cumbersome ways of academia proper are there for a solid reason. This would never have happened in a department of philosophy or of comparative literature where the traditions and rules of the academy are debated at almost every faculty meeting. Free access to information is a sacrosanct element of academic freedom and scholarship. Mea Culpa!  <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">I think it adds yet another layer of confirmation to a saying I once heard [or maybe made up], &quot;<em><strong><font color=\"#200020\">There is no freedom without walls.<\/font><\/strong><\/em>&quot; The academy has walls. We&#8217;ve proven why they&#8217;re necessary&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t really know where it started, this thing I&#8217;ve occasionally gotten into about certain words. I sometimes get hung up on why a word means what it means. When I think I&#8217;ve got the answer, invariably, I can&#8217;t confirm my great discovery in an online dictionary. It always has some old non-english version with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37516"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37546,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37516\/revisions\/37546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}