Geography and politics of "military lingo"

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Charles Lewis wrote to draw my attention to an Op-Ed by Danielle Allen in the Washington Post ("Red-State Army?", 12/19/2008). Allen discusses the social effects of the change to a smaller and all-volunteer military in the U.S. over the past 35 years, from what used to be a larger force mainly made up of draftees. She argues that "the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states"; and she suggests that this is a bad thing, because

Military institutions across nations and throughout time have always been important creators of culture. They strive to develop unbreakable bonds of solidarity among their members based on shared values, experiences and outlooks.

Her conclusion is that there should be "a new structure for national service" — though she avoids the issue of whether it should be mandatory — in order to "weave a fabric of shared citizenship anew".

I agree with her general position about the value of military service in creating a shared culture. But she gives a prominent role to a linguistic argument that I found unconvincing.

Here's the passage that failed to convince me:

In this country, the military's leadership role in racial integration has been understood in just this way.

The issue now is not racial integration but cultural separation. If young people from different regions and social backgrounds either enter or steer clear of the armed forces, military service will become, over time, an experience that doesn't ease but exacerbates preexisting cultural differences. Is the all-volunteer military already having this effect?

I spotted the link between military service and regional partisan divisions when I was researching not military history but Internet political communication. After spending time on political Web sites of the right and left, I noticed that posts on right-leaning sites often employed military lingo — habits of developing monikers and jingles and of using the vocabulary of military tactics and strategy. Left-leaning sites, in contrast, mostly lacked any easily recognizable features of military language.

This is one sign that our public sphere already suffers from a division between military and non-military cultures. The division is not trivial, and without institutional change it is likely to be durable.

The argument about "military lingo" doesn't convince me partly because her generalization doesn't match my remembered experience as a long-time reader of web sites of all political persuasions. It also seems to me that there are general reasons not to expect a big effect of this kind. Some people get military lingo from books or  movies or computer games rather than from real-life military experience; and linguistic influences can in any case linger long after the associated experiences are gone ( e.g. "free rein","unbridled", "saddle up").

But mostly, I don't put much stock in anyone's quantitative impressions about this sort of thing, since I know that such impressions — mine and everyone else's — often turn out to be wrong. We tend to notice and remember things based on how salient they seem to us, which is often not the same as how often they actually occur.

So is there any evidence about this question?

A check via Google Scholar and other web-search options suggests that Prof. Allen hasn't yet published anything to back up her observation. There's a body of quantitative research on vaguely relevant topics, e.g. Kathleen Durant and Michael Smith, "Predicting the Political Sentiment of Web Log Posts Using Supervised Machine Learning Techniques Coupled with Feature Selection", WebKDD 2006. However, I don't know of any work that specifically addresses the geographical distribution of political sentiment on the web, much less its relationship to the linguistic residue of military service. In fact, I don't know of any accessible corpus of political web-site content classified by political position and/or geographical origin.

So I thought I'd try a quick check in the other direction, by searching a general index of weblogs — unclassified as to political position and geography — for a word associated with military tactics and strategy. If Prof. Allen is right, we'd expect to see (among the hits of American origin) a preponderance of red-state locations and right-leaning politics.

I started with outflank. The only locations that I could determine on the first page of hits were Washington (state) and South Dakota — one blue and one red. There were three overtly political pages — one seems to be liberal, one seems to be center-left, and the third is a reprint from the Socialist Workers Party.

So the early returns are not favorable to Prof. Allen's hypothesis, although this is way too little information to license any general conclusion.

Does anyone have access to a database of blog posts categorized by political affiliation (unlikely) or geographical origin (more likely)? If so, we could check the geographical distribution of "military lingo" in comparison to (say) knitting terms, or architectural metaphors, or whatever. I remain skeptical that this would turn up linguistic evidence of a deepening cultural divide, even if Prof. Allen is right about the cultural developments. But I could be wrong, as I often am about such things.



18 Comments

  1. Sniffnoy said,

    December 20, 2008 @ 3:35 pm

    This seems unlikely to me just because military analogies form a lot of our language regarding *any* competition.

  2. The other Mark P said,

    December 20, 2008 @ 5:01 pm

    I think this is a case where the "solution" is worse than the problem.

    If the solution is to remove militaristic talk from the right-wing vocabulary, then it is bound to fail. If it is to imbue the left-wing with more militaristic notions, then it is to remove the non-militaristic aspect of US culture — which I imagine is not her ideal.

    Voluntary service in the military is bound to be linked to ideals of loyalty, patriotism and obeying instructions. It will also tend to attract people who believe that the answer is sometimes military force (!). There is no point having a pacificist army with no patriotic spirit.

  3. Teresa G said,

    December 20, 2008 @ 5:24 pm

    I tried my own quick check just now. In order to abstract away from geography and just concentrate on political leanings, I thought I'd try to compare the lingo at Wikipedia with that at Conservapedia, which is a decidedly more right-leaning website. Each of these websites also rely on a large base of contributors, which should lessen the effect of individual writing styles.

    Conservapedia is, of course, significantly smaller than Wikipedia. As of today, Conservapedia claims to have 28,858 content pages, while Wikipedia has 2,666,331 (limiting ourselves to English). Unfortunately, I couldn't find statistics on total gigabytes of data, which would be a purer comparison. But based on number of articles alone, Wikipedia is approximately 100 times larger than Conservapedia.

    Googling "outflank Conservapedia" generated approx. 65 hits, while "outflank Wikipedia" generated approx. 65,000. (Not all of these would necessarily be hits on the websites themselves, but it was just a quick-and-dirty.) So adjusting for relative size, "outflank" showed up 10 times more often associated with the more moderate website than with the conservative one.

    So again, not so favorable to Prof. Allen's hypothesis. However, the next question is, how much of a marker is the word "outflank" anayway? Are there more insider-y militaristic terms that would more strongly correlate with conservative writing, or not?

  4. Jon Weinberg said,

    December 20, 2008 @ 5:53 pm

    I'm having a hard time identifying words that would constitute the sort of "military lingo" — or "vocabulary of military tactics and strategy" — useful for this test. I'm having an even harder time, though, understanding about "habits of developing monikers and jingles." Is the use of monikers, i.e., nicknames, a peculiarly military thing? And jingles? Does Ms. Allen mean short texts set to catchy melodies? Do those appear on blogs?

  5. Jon Weinberg said,

    December 20, 2008 @ 6:09 pm

    The larger problem, natch, is that if one identified groups of (a) bloggers who tend to view military responses as appropriate solutions to national problems; and (b) bloggers who tend to view military responses as inappropriate solutions to national problems, then, yes, I'd expect the former group to use military imagery more. But I don't think that use of language would tell us anything about the relative proportion of veterans in the two groups. I figure that bloggers who view military responses as an appropriate solution to national problems are more likely to use military imagery without regard to whether they've served.

  6. Chad Nilep said,

    December 20, 2008 @ 9:51 pm

    The other Mark P said,

    "If the solution is to remove militaristic talk from the right-wing vocabulary, then it is bound to fail."

    I don't think Allen's proposed solution has anything to do with vocabulary or talk; "lingo" is merely a purported index of the problem.

    (Of course, Allen's intuitions about the frequency of forms of talk is just a fallible as those of commenters and bloggers on Language Log.)

    The solution Allen suggests is, "[To] think seriously about a structure for national service — both military and non-military — that could successfully integrate young people from different regions of the country so that they will come, at least, to understand each other."

  7. Geoff Nunberg said,

    December 21, 2008 @ 2:45 am

    Teresa G said: "Googling "outflank Conservapedia" generated approx. 65 hits, while "outflank Wikipedia" generated approx. 65,000." Actually, "outflank Wikipedia" gets 663 true hits (when Google's hit-count estimate is bigger than 1000, it's a good idea to check the last page of hits to see how many it really turned up). More relevantly, googling "outflank OR outflanked site:wikipedia.org" gets 697 (true) hits; "outflank OR outflanked site:conservapedia.com" gets 13. But none of this signifies much, given the considerable differences between the two sites in content coverage and article length. Most Conservapedia articles are quite short, for example, except when they deal with politically charged topics: Milwaukee gets 83 words in Conservapedia and 20,500 words in Wikipedia, and the ratios are in roughly the same ballpark for the articles on Billy Joel (113/19,500), Henri Matisse (55/3900), and snail (27/3800).) Not to beat up on Teresa G., but it does tend to get complicated trying to calculate this sort of thing in a meaningful way.

  8. Mark Liberman said,

    December 21, 2008 @ 8:25 am

    Jon Weinberg: I'm having a hard time identifying words that would constitute the sort of "military lingo" — or "vocabulary of military tactics and strategy" — useful for this test.

    After "outflank", the next few possibilities that occurred to me were "drill sergeant", "skirmish", "reconnaissance", "weapon", "squad", "AWOL", "FIGMO", "FNG", "battle rattle", "fobbit". And it would easy to come up with hundreds more. Whether these would be "useful for this test" depends on what you expect the test to accomplish. Words or phrases that start out in military use often come into the general language and stay there. Thus it's easy to find a weblog post that applies the concept of "defeat in detail" to the current financial crisis — and the author doesn't need to have spent time in the military to have acquired the term and the idea.

    There are plenty of pieces of military lingo that don't have much application in civilian life, but the ones that do, don't (in my experience) stay the exclusive property of ex-military people for very long. Consider the history of FUBAR and SNAFU, for example.

  9. The other Mark P said,

    December 22, 2008 @ 4:25 am

    The solution Allen suggests is, "[To] think seriously about a structure for national service — both military and non-military — that could successfully integrate young people from different regions of the country so that they will come, at least, to understand each other."

    This is waffle. It means nothing. (Not getting at you Chad).

    What does a "non-military structure for military service" look like? Assuming it actually means something, why would anyone be crazy enough to have a non-military structure in the military?

    Anyhow, the problems isn't that the young people from different regions don't understand each other. It is that they disagree.

  10. Mark Liberman said,

    December 22, 2008 @ 5:06 am

    The other Mark P: …Anyhow, the problem isn't that the young people from different regions don't understand each other. It is that they disagree.

    In my opinion, it can help if they have to live and work together despite their disagreements.

    And in fairness to Prof. Allen, she seems to be calling for something like the Civilian Conservation Corps.

  11. greg said,

    December 22, 2008 @ 9:00 am

    mark l – And in fairness to Prof. Allen, she seems to be calling for something like the Civilian Conservation Corps.

    or Service Nation

    It seems to me that you'd have to do individual site searches for various words. For example googling "outflank site:volokh.com" gave 7 results. On michellemalkin.com, 38. 77 on nationalreview.com. For liberal blogs, dailykos.com got 515. 65 on thinkprogress.org. 107 on talkingpointsmemo.com. Obviously, this needs to be adjusted for the amount of data that the sites contain, and there is definitely a bit of variety in both writing styles of site authors as well as commenters and the political positions of the authors (as volokh is home to several libertarians as opposed to conservatives), but at first glance, I think that Prof. Allen's supposition is very hard to take seriously.

  12. Chris said,

    December 22, 2008 @ 9:28 am

    If Ms. Allen thinks this phenomenon is undermining our democracy, she should not retreat from her ideas, but rally the rank and file for a frontal assault on the problem.

    IOW, I agree with Sniffnoy – military imagery (including some so old it won't necessarily be recognized as such, like "undermining") is just too widespread to make a statement like this meaningful.

  13. greg said,

    December 22, 2008 @ 9:33 am

    In an interesting turn of coincidence I just happened upon an article on Ars Technica about a presentation in which a group mapped various aspects of the internet. When sorting by languages, there is apparently a wide range in "blogosphere topographies":

    The English-language blogosphere appears as a knotty, fibrous mesh, while Scandinavian and Japanese blogs map as something more closely resembling a blotchy Jackson Pollock painting. Russian blogs, by contrast, seem to be heavily clustered in dispersed and minimally interconnected wedges.

    But more directly on topic, the presentation actually covered the use of certain terminology within different aspects of the blogosphere:

    [A]spiring online advocates may find it useful to track "term valence" within clusters—that is, how disproportionately certain subclusters use specific words or phrases, relative to the network as a whole. Blogs devoted to home schooling, for example, are far more likely to describe what they do as "home education." This sort of semantic monitoring can be used to pinpoint the language that marks one as an insider within a specific community, but also to track the propagation of selected ideas across clusters over time.

    So, for a more in depth look at the use of military jargon, I'd get in touch with the folks over at Morningside Analytics.

  14. Edward Carney said,

    December 22, 2008 @ 12:38 pm

    "Gitmo" is one formerly military usage that has rapidly gained currency, even among journalists, and more surprisingly, among opponents of the prison there. I, for one, do not use the nickname. A small gesture.

  15. Philip (flip) Kromer said,

    December 23, 2008 @ 7:06 am

    Andy Baio (waxy.org) and Josh Schacter did factor analysis on the link graph of memeorandum.com; the principal component was in fact political alignment. I think they'd be glad to share their results, and I know memeorandum was open with their corpus as well.

    You could use this to guide a scrape of blogs at polar ends of the political axis.

    There are massive blog corpora out there but none I know of that would be so targeted.

    flip at infochimps.org

  16. Trevor Stone said,

    December 23, 2008 @ 10:41 pm

    Many LiveJournal users' profiles indicate the location of the author. To make things even easier, you can get a list of all users in a given location who have recently posted to their blog. For instance, Colorado: http://www.livejournal.com/directory.bml?opt_sort=ut&s_loc=1&loc_cn=US&loc_st=Colorado&start_search=1

    There isn't a "what's this blog about" classification, but one might have some luck by looking for tags like "politics," though use of tags could be correlated to some demographic feature.

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  18. Homeschool High School said,

    October 8, 2009 @ 9:49 pm

    Her original premise was unproven “I noticed…” From there she draws a flawed conclusion: “This is one sign that our public sphere already suffers from a division between military and non-military cultures.” She finishes the illogical trifecta by extending and generalizing her flawed conclusion: “The division is not trivial, and without institutional change it is likely to be durable.” No wonder you weren’t convinced. It’s standard journalism practice, but truly sloppy thinking.

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