When I first moved to California, I went to a lot of concerts, and one of them was Gil Scott-Heron. That would have been at the Berkeley Greek Theater, an outdoor amphitheater. During one of the breaks I went over to the porta-potties for the usual reason, and there was a line, as is generally the case during the breaks. While waiting in line, I got to talking with a couple of young ladies from Oakland. The young ladies were black.
It was a very pleasant conversation, and afterwards, I tried to analyze why I had felt so comfortable. Their young lady-hood obviously was part of it, but it occurred to me that part of it was their accents and manners.
What has come to be called “Ebonics” is actually a large sub-variant of the southern accent and grammatical quirks. My relationship to the southern way of talking is complicated, of course, given that I grew up in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, then left for what still seem to be very good reasons. Nevertheless, I have the same reflexive it’s-okay-for-me-to-criticize-but-not-for-you-to-do-so that everyone has about their family, town, state, and country. Added to that is something that I’ve mentioned previously: speaking with a southern accent means that people automatically make all sorts of assumptions about you, including that you are dumb and ignorant.
The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written that Ebonics (as well as a number of other features of “Black Culture”) is actually derived from “Cracker Culture,” which in turn was a English/Scots transplant that was pushed on African slaves by their white overseers. One of the features of my mild prejudice in favor of blacks is that I tend to cut black conservatives a little more slack than I do white conservatives, so I lean toward the belief that Sowell believes that American blacks are held back by their culture and would do better if they got rid of it—akin to my own ditching of my southern accent, for example. Nevertheless, Sowell tells only half the story.
The reason why people in the south, both black and white, talk the way they do is partly informed by slaves learning English from Scots overseers, but once that happened, some of the slaves then became the house servants of the southern plantation owners. In particular, they assisted the plantation owners’ wives in household duties, including child care and child rearing. In many cases, they served as wet nurses.
Guess who the children learned to speak from? There have been cases recently of largely absent parents being shocked when their children began to speak Spanish, or Tagalog, or whatever the native language of the main care-giver. In the case of the old south, they learned to speak from the negro slaves, who spoke a creole compounded from Scots grammar and African intonation. In other words, the slave owners began to speak like African-Americans. And when the wealthiest and socially prominent members of a community talk in a certain way, the rest of the community tends to begin talking that way.
The way you speak marks your social class. Every upwardly mobile young person learns this quickly, and the lucky ones are good at dialect. If you are reading a newspaper story, and the word “articulate” is used, chances are that it is being applied to a black person, even if race is not mentioned in the article. It’s one of the standard code phrases, and it means that—surprisingly—the black person doesn’t sound dumb.
Similarly, I would advise any black high school student to work on their accent. The best thing would be to somehow arrange to live in England for a little while and to develop a trace of a British accent. That adds about the same number of assumed I.Q. points that a southern accent subtracts. But any non-Ebonic, non-southern derived accent will do. It’s just part of the tool kit.
A couple of years ago, I was listening to some NOVA special (some PBS thing, at any rate), and one of the speakers sounded familiar. It took a little while for me to place it; he sounded a lot like me. In reaction to a former southern accent, the speaker slightly overemphasized the trailing consonants of words. So while the southern accent says walkin’, thereby dropping the trailing “g”, the reformed southern accent says walking, slightly overemphasizing the trailing “g.”
There are some other features, no doubt. One place to hear them is on Comedy Central, either Dave Chappelle or Stephen Colbert. Chappelle is black and Colbert is from South Carolina. In some ways, it’s the same thing.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Monday, May 26, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Capital vs. Money
I've just put Mark Thoma's Economist's View blog on my blogroll, which is long overdue, as I've linked to discussions there with some frequency. One interesting thing is that someone recently referred to the people there as “left wing”, despite the fact that a goodly number of them, including me, would have been called "conservative" before The Movement took over. I continute to comment on “right wing” folks, as so many of them are lost in libertarian utopianism, or else they feel constrained to follow some sort of party line, presumably because that’s who pays the bills. In matters of this nature, it's important to remember the quote from Upton Sinclair:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it."
There's just been a little comment thread on Economist's View about the opacity of the econojargon use of the word "utility." I've also already quibbled with the economics jargon inherent in the phrase "rent-seeking behavior," and what I'm about to say is another part of the general critique of how words are used, or mis-used in economics.
Generally speaking, I find that economists don’t often distinguish between money and capital. For example, they write about flows of international capital, when they’re actually talking about money flowing from one country to the other. Sometimes this makes it hard to get at the actual real economics of a situation. For example, it is often said that the U.S. is importing a huge amount of capital from China. On the other hand, a financial instrument is also often called “capital.” Since what is actually happening is that the U.S. is importing a lot of consumer goods from China (though China is actually adding only marginally to their value, having itself imported most of the goods, with only the final assembly being done by Chinese labor), and paying for those consumer goods with U.S. Treasury bonds. Now consumer goods are rarely called “capital” while bonds often are, so it looks like the “capital flow” is going the other way. But actually, neither part of the flow looks much like what is often called “capital,” i.e. something used to assist in the production of other goods and services.
Then there is the matter of “transfer payments.” This is a phrase that seems to have been invented to describe certain sorts of governmental payments, ostensibly those without a corresponding exchange of goods and services. Often, Social Security or Veteran’s benefits are named as an example. Huh? Both of those, in fact, require an earlier service (paying Social Security taxes or serving in the military). On the other hand, paying interest on the Federal debt is not considered a transfer payment, despite the fact that on a cash flow basis, it removes money from taxpayers, and transfers it to bond holders. One can argue that there was a previous exchange for the bond, but that argument isn’t used for Social Security, is it?
If you look at the details, there is a pretty clear distinction that can be made between a sort of “capital investment” that pays returns by actually increasing the amount of wealth in the world (a factory, an apartment building, a road, someone’s education), and one that merely gives someone the right to a future transfer of money. Moreover, you’d think that libertarians would be sensitive to the notion that some of those monetary transfers absolutely require governmental power and some do not. A government bond is intrinsically based on the taxing power of government, for example, while a secured personal loan does not. (Obviously some loans require government as an enforcer of contracts, but that’s usually considered kosher in libertarian circles, and besides, something like pawning your watch doesn’t even need that).
Now it so happens that most intellectual property requires a pretty agressive government policy. IP is basically a government-mandated monopoly, and a the enforcement of IP can get pretty obtrusive, such as raiding warehouses, issuing subpoenas to third parties, etc. It’s not something we’d put up with without a pretty hefty social return (the idea is to pay for the effort of creating IP in the first place, yes?), but a lot of people seem to view copyrights especially as some sort of “natural” property, and some of those argue for copyright in perpetuity. This is not the sort of mistake that Ayn Rand would make (and indeed, she did not).
There are some very good reasons for wanting to have a lot of “store of value” items around in an economy. Personal savings are a good thing, and I do not want to be poor in my old age. I also think it’s a decent thing to have a certain amount of personal, family wealth passed down from generation to generation. Still, having such things is an invitation for the “accumulation of great wealth,” and I don’t think that the existence of truly massive multi-generational fortunes has much to recommend it. The history of it doesn’t look that good, frankly, and I’m included the effects on its supposed “beneficiaries.”
In other words, I’d like to see some more attempts by economists to separate “productive” investment from “transfer payments.” Currently, I don’t see much effort being made to even make the distinction. I understand that it’s a hard problem, but that’s no excuse for pretending that it doesn’t exist.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it."
There's just been a little comment thread on Economist's View about the opacity of the econojargon use of the word "utility." I've also already quibbled with the economics jargon inherent in the phrase "rent-seeking behavior," and what I'm about to say is another part of the general critique of how words are used, or mis-used in economics.
Generally speaking, I find that economists don’t often distinguish between money and capital. For example, they write about flows of international capital, when they’re actually talking about money flowing from one country to the other. Sometimes this makes it hard to get at the actual real economics of a situation. For example, it is often said that the U.S. is importing a huge amount of capital from China. On the other hand, a financial instrument is also often called “capital.” Since what is actually happening is that the U.S. is importing a lot of consumer goods from China (though China is actually adding only marginally to their value, having itself imported most of the goods, with only the final assembly being done by Chinese labor), and paying for those consumer goods with U.S. Treasury bonds. Now consumer goods are rarely called “capital” while bonds often are, so it looks like the “capital flow” is going the other way. But actually, neither part of the flow looks much like what is often called “capital,” i.e. something used to assist in the production of other goods and services.
Then there is the matter of “transfer payments.” This is a phrase that seems to have been invented to describe certain sorts of governmental payments, ostensibly those without a corresponding exchange of goods and services. Often, Social Security or Veteran’s benefits are named as an example. Huh? Both of those, in fact, require an earlier service (paying Social Security taxes or serving in the military). On the other hand, paying interest on the Federal debt is not considered a transfer payment, despite the fact that on a cash flow basis, it removes money from taxpayers, and transfers it to bond holders. One can argue that there was a previous exchange for the bond, but that argument isn’t used for Social Security, is it?
If you look at the details, there is a pretty clear distinction that can be made between a sort of “capital investment” that pays returns by actually increasing the amount of wealth in the world (a factory, an apartment building, a road, someone’s education), and one that merely gives someone the right to a future transfer of money. Moreover, you’d think that libertarians would be sensitive to the notion that some of those monetary transfers absolutely require governmental power and some do not. A government bond is intrinsically based on the taxing power of government, for example, while a secured personal loan does not. (Obviously some loans require government as an enforcer of contracts, but that’s usually considered kosher in libertarian circles, and besides, something like pawning your watch doesn’t even need that).
Now it so happens that most intellectual property requires a pretty agressive government policy. IP is basically a government-mandated monopoly, and a the enforcement of IP can get pretty obtrusive, such as raiding warehouses, issuing subpoenas to third parties, etc. It’s not something we’d put up with without a pretty hefty social return (the idea is to pay for the effort of creating IP in the first place, yes?), but a lot of people seem to view copyrights especially as some sort of “natural” property, and some of those argue for copyright in perpetuity. This is not the sort of mistake that Ayn Rand would make (and indeed, she did not).
There are some very good reasons for wanting to have a lot of “store of value” items around in an economy. Personal savings are a good thing, and I do not want to be poor in my old age. I also think it’s a decent thing to have a certain amount of personal, family wealth passed down from generation to generation. Still, having such things is an invitation for the “accumulation of great wealth,” and I don’t think that the existence of truly massive multi-generational fortunes has much to recommend it. The history of it doesn’t look that good, frankly, and I’m included the effects on its supposed “beneficiaries.”
In other words, I’d like to see some more attempts by economists to separate “productive” investment from “transfer payments.” Currently, I don’t see much effort being made to even make the distinction. I understand that it’s a hard problem, but that’s no excuse for pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Object Oriented
One the first page of my Web Site on sff.net, there are a couple of moving images, courtesy of Java applets. I yammer at length about the image manipulation part of the project in “Color Cycling with Java.”
As noted in the write-up, I undertook the color cycling project because of a long standing love for that particular effect in computer graphic art. It’s a simple trick; it can look spectacular; what’s not to like? Well, there is the part about how web browsers won’t do it without some sort of add-on, hence my Java applets.
What I don’t go into much is the Java part. Having the color cycling applets to point to allows me to claim some familiarity with Java, which is a useful thing for a technical writer these days. So there’s that. Moreover, Java is an Object-Oriented programming language. OOPLs used to be the flavor of the month; now they’re more like boilerplate. You have to claim familiarity in order to even interview for many jobs.
So let’s pause for a heavy sigh. (Sigh). I’ve complained many times about how the use of an ordinary word in a technical context can cause problems when the technical meaning differs significantly from ordinary usage. Jeez, does that apply to “object-oriented.”
Programming “objects” have nigh onto nothing to do with ordinary objects. They are programs! They do not have mass, weight, substance, color, physical dimensions, or persistence. Nor, for that matter, do they have anything to do with object code, the venerable term for a program that has been compiled into machine readable form.
What program “objects” have is “properties” and “methods.” For any old computer geezers such as myself, those translate to “data structures,” and “procedures.” But calling things by previously used names is so old-fashioned.
If that was all there was to it, then one might very well ask why bother, since there were already these perfectly reasonable programming structures called “sub-routines” and “modules.” Well sure, but there were a few new(ish) notions added to the mix: “inheritance” and “instantiation.” The former lets you create new “objects” based on old ones, with some modifications to the “encapsulated” data or the procedures that act on that data. The latter lets you fire off a bunch of similar program parts, each doing its own thing in the “multi-threaded environment” of the modern operating system.
See, this is just like taking your white hat and putting it into your matter duplicator, setting the dials to “blue” and “wings” so you have a new blue hat with wings. Then the blue hat can fly around and make fun of the poor wingless white hat.
That’s why they’re called “objects.” Because objects can do that sort of thing (snark).
Anyway, the idea was to use the object-oriented model to create re-usable program components that can be bolted together with minimal effort to create larger programs. This would have worked if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids and their stupid dog, I mean, if they had managed to get a variable typing system that was both consistent and comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the two major object-oriented languages, C++ and Java, based their variable typing conventions (as well as their syntax) on the C language, and that’s pretty much where the blue hat died and fluttered to the ground. C had so many exceptions and so much arcane weirdness in its variable typing that the whole thing was pretty much doomed from the start. It’s a simple fact that communication among “objects” can cause terrible headaches, because the variables they pass to each other get slippery.
Joke from the 1970s: C is Assembly Language in a clown suit.
Update to the 1990s: And C++ carries an Uzi.
Now realize, very little of this has anything to do with what someone is asking about when they ask you if you are “familiar with object-oriented programming principles.” What that translates to is, “Are you experienced with C++ and Java?”
I will say that the Object-Oriented project/marketing campaign succeeded brilliantly at making a lot more work for programmers. It also set the barriers to entry much higher and it resulted in the situation that programming now absolutely requires computerized programming tools. I wrote my Java applets more-or-less by hand, but I was hacking, just modifying previously written programs and sort of jamming them together. To do a similar project from scratch would have absolutely required a full bore Java programming tool set.
And it all would have been a lot easier to do in Pascal or even Fortran. But web browsers don’t support those, more’s the pity.
As noted in the write-up, I undertook the color cycling project because of a long standing love for that particular effect in computer graphic art. It’s a simple trick; it can look spectacular; what’s not to like? Well, there is the part about how web browsers won’t do it without some sort of add-on, hence my Java applets.
What I don’t go into much is the Java part. Having the color cycling applets to point to allows me to claim some familiarity with Java, which is a useful thing for a technical writer these days. So there’s that. Moreover, Java is an Object-Oriented programming language. OOPLs used to be the flavor of the month; now they’re more like boilerplate. You have to claim familiarity in order to even interview for many jobs.
So let’s pause for a heavy sigh. (Sigh). I’ve complained many times about how the use of an ordinary word in a technical context can cause problems when the technical meaning differs significantly from ordinary usage. Jeez, does that apply to “object-oriented.”
Programming “objects” have nigh onto nothing to do with ordinary objects. They are programs! They do not have mass, weight, substance, color, physical dimensions, or persistence. Nor, for that matter, do they have anything to do with object code, the venerable term for a program that has been compiled into machine readable form.
What program “objects” have is “properties” and “methods.” For any old computer geezers such as myself, those translate to “data structures,” and “procedures.” But calling things by previously used names is so old-fashioned.
If that was all there was to it, then one might very well ask why bother, since there were already these perfectly reasonable programming structures called “sub-routines” and “modules.” Well sure, but there were a few new(ish) notions added to the mix: “inheritance” and “instantiation.” The former lets you create new “objects” based on old ones, with some modifications to the “encapsulated” data or the procedures that act on that data. The latter lets you fire off a bunch of similar program parts, each doing its own thing in the “multi-threaded environment” of the modern operating system.
See, this is just like taking your white hat and putting it into your matter duplicator, setting the dials to “blue” and “wings” so you have a new blue hat with wings. Then the blue hat can fly around and make fun of the poor wingless white hat.
That’s why they’re called “objects.” Because objects can do that sort of thing (snark).
Anyway, the idea was to use the object-oriented model to create re-usable program components that can be bolted together with minimal effort to create larger programs. This would have worked if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids and their stupid dog, I mean, if they had managed to get a variable typing system that was both consistent and comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the two major object-oriented languages, C++ and Java, based their variable typing conventions (as well as their syntax) on the C language, and that’s pretty much where the blue hat died and fluttered to the ground. C had so many exceptions and so much arcane weirdness in its variable typing that the whole thing was pretty much doomed from the start. It’s a simple fact that communication among “objects” can cause terrible headaches, because the variables they pass to each other get slippery.
Joke from the 1970s: C is Assembly Language in a clown suit.
Update to the 1990s: And C++ carries an Uzi.
Now realize, very little of this has anything to do with what someone is asking about when they ask you if you are “familiar with object-oriented programming principles.” What that translates to is, “Are you experienced with C++ and Java?”
I will say that the Object-Oriented project/marketing campaign succeeded brilliantly at making a lot more work for programmers. It also set the barriers to entry much higher and it resulted in the situation that programming now absolutely requires computerized programming tools. I wrote my Java applets more-or-less by hand, but I was hacking, just modifying previously written programs and sort of jamming them together. To do a similar project from scratch would have absolutely required a full bore Java programming tool set.
And it all would have been a lot easier to do in Pascal or even Fortran. But web browsers don’t support those, more’s the pity.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Singularly Unique
Unique is not a unique word, at least not in the sense of having no synonyms, since “singular” is a good replacement, and the phrase “one of a kind” will also do nicely.
But unique is one of the “battleground words,” one demarking the realm of prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, one whose use or misuse sets teeth on edge.
My ears hear the phrase “very unique” and I cringe a little, so my ears are pretty well in the prescriptive camp, at least on the “unique” question. That’s not all that surprising, since I use words and grammar professionally and besides, as I think I’ve explained before, I have a long history of intellectual snobbery.
Nevertheless, I’m not committed to my prejudices. The singular “they” offends my ear (“If someone has an illness, they should see a doctor”), but I recognize that it is neither ambiguous, nor is it of recent origin (see Chaucer, for example). So in writing I’ll usually try to finesse it, as any battleground usage can interrupt the flow for some people, and flow control is important. Clarity and communication are the goal; grammar is merely the means to an end.
In the case of “unique” however, there are some other things going on. It’s interesting, for example, that adverbs that are usually intensifiers, such as “very” or “highly” actually weaken the usage of “unique.” “Very unique” becomes equivalent to “very unusual” which is less uncommon than something that is unique.
There is also a deeper philosophical argument here. It is the nature of a singular event that it should not really be comparable to other events, otherwise its singular nature is threatened. But we do not live in the world of Platonic Ideals, nor a Thomist world where each Angel is a separate species.
My own take on the matter originated from the contemplation of Cabbage Patch Dolls. (Hey, you take your insights where they happen). Originally, the Cabbage Patch Dolls were soft sculptures, similar in some ways to my wife Amy’s Bat-a-Brats and Sock-Hoppies. So each head was a “unique” craft creation. But when the Cabbage Patch Dolls went mass market, the design was changed for ease of manufacture, and their heads became stamped plastic. However, each Cabbage Patch Doll has a pattern of freckles on its face, and the freckles are varied for each doll, so No Two Are Alike.
So each Cabbage Patch Doll is unique. They’re just not very unique, are they?
But unique is one of the “battleground words,” one demarking the realm of prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, one whose use or misuse sets teeth on edge.
My ears hear the phrase “very unique” and I cringe a little, so my ears are pretty well in the prescriptive camp, at least on the “unique” question. That’s not all that surprising, since I use words and grammar professionally and besides, as I think I’ve explained before, I have a long history of intellectual snobbery.
Nevertheless, I’m not committed to my prejudices. The singular “they” offends my ear (“If someone has an illness, they should see a doctor”), but I recognize that it is neither ambiguous, nor is it of recent origin (see Chaucer, for example). So in writing I’ll usually try to finesse it, as any battleground usage can interrupt the flow for some people, and flow control is important. Clarity and communication are the goal; grammar is merely the means to an end.
In the case of “unique” however, there are some other things going on. It’s interesting, for example, that adverbs that are usually intensifiers, such as “very” or “highly” actually weaken the usage of “unique.” “Very unique” becomes equivalent to “very unusual” which is less uncommon than something that is unique.
There is also a deeper philosophical argument here. It is the nature of a singular event that it should not really be comparable to other events, otherwise its singular nature is threatened. But we do not live in the world of Platonic Ideals, nor a Thomist world where each Angel is a separate species.
My own take on the matter originated from the contemplation of Cabbage Patch Dolls. (Hey, you take your insights where they happen). Originally, the Cabbage Patch Dolls were soft sculptures, similar in some ways to my wife Amy’s Bat-a-Brats and Sock-Hoppies. So each head was a “unique” craft creation. But when the Cabbage Patch Dolls went mass market, the design was changed for ease of manufacture, and their heads became stamped plastic. However, each Cabbage Patch Doll has a pattern of freckles on its face, and the freckles are varied for each doll, so No Two Are Alike.
So each Cabbage Patch Doll is unique. They’re just not very unique, are they?
Sunday, July 22, 2007
You say nerd; I say knurd
The sharp-eyed reader may observe that I have sometimes used an alternate spelling for the word commonly spelled as "nerd." In fact, before the movie Revenge of the Nerds, the only way I'd seen it spelled was knurd, and nurd.
A little web research says that I am part of a minority opinion that holds that knurd was a coinage at RPI, derived from "drunk" spelled backwards (a trope later used by Terry Pratchett). Certainly "knurd" was the first spelling I saw, in the RPI Bachelor college humor magazine, in 1968. The earliest appearance of the alternate spelling that is noted on the amateur scholarship sites that I can find is "nurd" in a 1965 issue of the Bachelor, which I have seen, and even probably have in some file boxes somewhere. When I was a publications knurd at RPI, I scored back issues of many of the student publications and I was fascinated.
The predominance of the k and u spellings of knurd at RPI is a fact. The question is whether or not the word itself under its current meaning (someone consumed with intellectual activities, often having poor social skills), came from RPI. There is, incidentally, no real argument as to the first appearance of the written word "nerd." That was in a Dr. Seuss book in 1950, and the word was cited in a Newsweek story in 1951 as being someone who was "square," which is close enough to the modern meaning. But the Newsweek reportage was translating oral slang, so the spelling gives no real help. The Dr. Seuss coinage may have been the source of the spelling (the meaning in the Seuss book was ambiguous), while the oral usage could have been inspired by the knurd/drunk origin.
Still, there was an earlier humor magazine at RPI, The Pup (famously banned for having published a fake and very unflattering picture of the dean of students). The issues of that magazine that I read didn't include a usage of knurd, to the best of my recollection. I've spoken to RPI alumni from earlier times, but, unfortunately, people in general do not have the sort of memory segmentation that I have, so they haven't been of much assistance.
The most parsimonious (and therefore most likely) explanation is that the origins of the word are still unknown, but the knurd spelling of it came from a later surmise by some students at RPI. I will hold out one not unreasonable possibility: the postwar GI Bill period of American colleges was a time of massive expansion and flux. It's not at all impossible that the origin of the word was indeed "drunk spelled backwards" and that this origin was first lost, then later rediscovered by the same sorts of students who'd invented the word in the first place. Certainly the Pratchett example is one of parallel formation.
It's not as if knurd isn't a natural category, after all. We self-select, and self-identify. If we don't, others do it for us.
A little web research says that I am part of a minority opinion that holds that knurd was a coinage at RPI, derived from "drunk" spelled backwards (a trope later used by Terry Pratchett). Certainly "knurd" was the first spelling I saw, in the RPI Bachelor college humor magazine, in 1968. The earliest appearance of the alternate spelling that is noted on the amateur scholarship sites that I can find is "nurd" in a 1965 issue of the Bachelor, which I have seen, and even probably have in some file boxes somewhere. When I was a publications knurd at RPI, I scored back issues of many of the student publications and I was fascinated.
The predominance of the k and u spellings of knurd at RPI is a fact. The question is whether or not the word itself under its current meaning (someone consumed with intellectual activities, often having poor social skills), came from RPI. There is, incidentally, no real argument as to the first appearance of the written word "nerd." That was in a Dr. Seuss book in 1950, and the word was cited in a Newsweek story in 1951 as being someone who was "square," which is close enough to the modern meaning. But the Newsweek reportage was translating oral slang, so the spelling gives no real help. The Dr. Seuss coinage may have been the source of the spelling (the meaning in the Seuss book was ambiguous), while the oral usage could have been inspired by the knurd/drunk origin.
Still, there was an earlier humor magazine at RPI, The Pup (famously banned for having published a fake and very unflattering picture of the dean of students). The issues of that magazine that I read didn't include a usage of knurd, to the best of my recollection. I've spoken to RPI alumni from earlier times, but, unfortunately, people in general do not have the sort of memory segmentation that I have, so they haven't been of much assistance.
The most parsimonious (and therefore most likely) explanation is that the origins of the word are still unknown, but the knurd spelling of it came from a later surmise by some students at RPI. I will hold out one not unreasonable possibility: the postwar GI Bill period of American colleges was a time of massive expansion and flux. It's not at all impossible that the origin of the word was indeed "drunk spelled backwards" and that this origin was first lost, then later rediscovered by the same sorts of students who'd invented the word in the first place. Certainly the Pratchett example is one of parallel formation.
It's not as if knurd isn't a natural category, after all. We self-select, and self-identify. If we don't, others do it for us.
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