Language Log

Harry Reid has made a lot people mad, justifiably in my opinion, by saying that a Bain Capital investor told him that Romney didn't pay income tax for ten years. Reid has repeated his claim of being told this, and also said that he doesn't know whether or not to believe it.  To be sure, this is below-the-belt innuendo.  Politifact, however, has given Reid's claim its "pants on fire" rating. In Time Entertainment, James Poniewozik argues that in so doing Politfact is damaging its own reputation for probity, because "pants on fire" in the context of truth and falsity can only serve to evoke "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"  And Politifact has no way in the world of knowing whether or not Reid was lying in reporting that someone had told him something potentially damaging to Mitt Romney.  Furthermore, although in its full article Politifact reports accurately that Reid claims only to have been told the damaging story, in its list of pants-on-fire headlines, Politifact writes, next to a captioned thumbnail of Reid, "Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for 10 years," nine words in a box that accommodates an entry of twenty-five words in the box above with space to spare. Politifact seems to have forgotten to preface this with "said he has been told." Let's say this unfortunate inaccuracy was just an oversight on the part of Politifact and return to the issue of whether "pants on fire" was justified.

Lila Gleitman wrote:

I now happen to be reading "Team of Rivals," basically a history of Lincoln's cabinet.  Anyhow, there is constant mention (and pix of venues) showing Lincoln talking to very large indoor and outdoor audiences (at least once 2000 is the number of listeners mentioned).   They say he had a slightly high clear voice that carried very well, but still I can hardly conceive that he, and others of those times who are mentioned as speaking outdoors to multitudes too, notably Douglas of course., could be heard without amplification.   You must know all about this.  Can you tell me? or tell me how to look this up?   It flummoxes me every time I read of these seemingly prodigious feats of speaking-listening, the authors don't even seem to remark on how astounding it seems (or seems to seem, to me).

I don't think I've ever seen writing with a greater factoid density than these two paragraphs from the start of George Scialabba's essay "How Bad Is It?", The New Inquiry 5/26/2012:

Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.

Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the U.S. government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.

Last Friday, I heard Sarah-Jane Leslie talk about "Generics and Generalization":

Generic sentences express generalizations about kinds, such as "tigers are striped", "ducks lay eggs", and "ticks carry Lyme disease". I present and review emerging evidence from adults and children that suggests that generics articulate cognitively default generalizations — i.e., they express basic, early-developing inductive generalizations concerning kinds. Further evidence suggests that these generalizations don't depend solely on information about prevalence. For example, "ticks carry Lyme disease" is accepted, but "books are paperbacks" is not, despite the fact – well-known and acknowledged by participants – that paperbacks are much more prevalent among books than Lyme-disease-carrying is among ticks. Similarly, both adults and preschoolers understand that, e.g., only female ducks lay eggs, yet they are more likely to accept "ducks lay eggs" than "ducks are female". Rather than depending solely on information about prevalence, these primitive generic generalizations are sensitive to a number of content-based factors, such as whether the property in question is dangerous or otherwise striking (as in "ticks carry Lyme disease"), or is an essential or characteristic property of the kind (as in "ducks lay eggs"). This suggests that our most basic means of forming inductive generalizations about kinds is not guided by prevalence alone, but also reflects our nature as learners.

On a recent commute via Calgary's light rail train, the following recorded announcement caught my ear: "Please stand clear of the doors as this train is trying to depart." Beyond my initial bemusement, I thought little of it. I imagined, perhaps, a harried public transit employee playing a bit fast and loose with selectional restrictions in much the same way that a certain child I know puts together jigsaw puzzles: by pounding together pieces that approximately fit together and hoping for the best. But later in the week my husband fielded a call that made me wonder whether the train announcer's overextension of animacy features wasn't in fact a crafty linguistic maneuver to increase rush-hour compliance.

Sam Dillon, "U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show", NYT 6/14/2011

American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.

Over all, 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrated proficiency on the exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Federal officials said they were encouraged by a slight increase in eighth-grade scores since the last history test, in 2006. But even those gains offered little to celebrate because, for example, fewer than a third of eighth graders could answer even a “seemingly easy question” asking them to identify an important advantage American forces had over the British during the Revolution, the government’s statement on the results said.

Today's Zits:

Yesterday the British government failed to get a chartered Boeing 757 out of Gatwick Airport to go to Libya to pick up stranded British citizens. Naturally the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, was asked how come with all the resources of the government working in concert this once proud nation still proved so disorganized it couldn't get a jet off the ground in ten hours during a first-class emergency when other nations were flying in and out of Tripoli all day. And the ever-unflappable and ever-fluent Mr. Hague made an announcement that appealed to me enormously: "We need to know," he said, "whether today was a coincidental series of unavoidable setbacks, or a systemic flaw."

What utterly delightful phrasing. I plan to borrow this and use it often. No more apologies for total screw-ups from me. I have a much better way to refer to them now.

[Comments on this post are closed because of a coincidental series of unavoidable setbacks.]

Back in 2003, Mark Liberman recounted a line attributed to Roman Jakobson when asked if Harvard should give Vladimir Nabokov a faculty position:

I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?

And in 2006, I mentioned a snippy remark that The New Republic's Martin Peretz made about Garrison Keillor, who had panned Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville in The New York Times Book Review:

So maybe Keillor was actually an inspired choice. Why shouldn't a bird review an ornithologist?

Now the political historian Garry Wills provides another zoological analogy in his new memoir, Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer.

Yet Another Self-Referential Rhetorical Critique: Martin Robbins, "This is a news website article about a scientific paper", The Guardian, 9/27/2010.

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

Mandarin nǎlǐ 哪里 "surely not" or "make no mention of it," "not at all," etc. goes back to at least the Qing period (1644-1912), where we find it in novels. I usually explain it thus: "where?" –> "in what way?" –> "no way, not at all," etc.  Thus, there is a natural progression from informational "where?" to rhetorical "how (in the world)?" and from rhetorical "how (in the world)?" to polite negative.  Furthermore, this progression is not that unusual. For example we see at least the first part of it in the classical Chinese interrogative word ān 安 ("where？"). Compare:

Zi jiāng ān zhī 子將安之  ("Where will you go?")

Zǐ ān zhī zhī 子安知之  ("How [the devil] do you know it?") — expressing disbelief and contrasting with Zi hé zhī zhī 子何知之 ("How do you know it?") — which really asks for information about the listener's source of his knowledge.  This question (Zǐ ān zhī zhī 子安知之  ("How [the devil] do you know it?" i.e., "whence / from what vantage point do you know it?") comes from a famous passage in chapter 17 of the Zhuang Zi (Master Zhuang; Wandering on the Way) about the happiness of fish.

James Somers, on his blog, has a subtle and convincing literary analysis of the mildly dishonest use of a rhetorical device I have often reflected on: the embedding of an assertion in the context "It turns out that _______."

Skilled readers are trained, Somers suggests, to be disarmed by the phrase: over time they learn to trust writers who use it, "in large part because they come to associate it with that feeling of the author’s own dispassionate surprise." So an unscrupulous theorist who tells you his theories by revealing how "it turns out" that they are true is being subtly dishonest, but with very considerable deniability. After all, if P is true, you can hardly deny that "It turns out that P" is also a true assertion, can you?

L. Ron Creepweans, "Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged", Locus 4/1/2010.