Language Log

Back in 2005, when George Lakoff's ideas about "framing" in political discourse were a hot media topic, the common journalistic mistake was to see the issue in terms of words rather than concepts.  Now the whole issue seems to have fallen out of fashion — at least, an interesting study, published about a month ago in Psychological Science and featured in the Random Samples section of Science Magazine, hasn't (as far as i can tell) generated a single MSM news story or even blog post.

Jonathan Raban, "Summer with Empson", London Review of Books, 11/5/2009:

For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here – so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase ‘He makes his home in …’). These I’ve learned to recognise, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language over 400 years, reflect as great a difference in experience of the world as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.

Andrew Gelman, justifiably puzzled ("Two countries separated etc etc", 11/11/2009):

I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.

In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.

In two recent posts, Mark Liberman has investigated the religious echoes in expressions from Sarah Palin: "I know that I know that I know" and "If I die, I die." In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take up yet another religiously evocative Palinism: "Only dead fish go with the flow." Turns out that variations of this adage have been circulating in Christian circles for nearly two centuries.

Subtle dog whistle or a typical comment from someone who brags about being covered in fish slime? You be the judge!

Sally Thomason's puzzling comma-spotting reminds me of Louis Aragon's ambiguous invitation to his readers:

Je demande à ce que mes livres soient critiqués avec la dernière rigueur, par des gens qui s'y connaissent, et qui sachant la grammaire et la logique, chercheront sous le pas de mes virgules les poux de ma pensée dans la tête de mon style.

Or as translated in the Columbia dictionary of quotations:

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

From Dinosaur Comics, DIRECTION IS A BUCKET THAT PEOPLE KEEP SNEAKING INTO (with no apologies to George Lakoff):

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

While researching my post on Dr. Jane Orient's theory that Barack Obama is using NLP hypnosis, I listened to Dr. Ron Paul's speech to the 62nd annual convention of the AAPS.  Dr. Orient's explanation of the techniques of trance induction ("… rhythm, tonalities, vagueness, visual imagery, metaphor, and raising of emotion") prepared me well for this experience, and I was especially taken by one particular metaphor that Ron Paul repeated three times, and reinforced in other ways:  true believers as a scriptural remnant.

In addition to everything else that's gone wrong, the McCain campaign is suffering from out-of-control metaphors. According to Adam Nagourney and Elizabeth Bumiller, "Concern in G.O.P. After Rough Week for McCain", NYT, 10/11/2008:

“My sense of where things are: John McCain beat back what was a political climate that would have snuffed out any other candidate in the Republican Party,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser. “He’s beat back every hurdle that was ever placed in front of him.”

The most recent Partially Clips strip:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Everybody seems to be talking about Jesse Jackson's whispered expression of annoyance with Barack Obama.  And I have something to say about it too. I'm not going to comment on the strange choices that editors and broadcasters have made in bowdlerizing Jackson's phrase "I want to cut his nuts off", though that's an interesting topic in itself.  Instead, I want to express puzzlement about the phrase itself.

I've heard men and boys from all sorts of geographical, social and ethnic backgrounds express anger and threaten violence, in thousands of different ways, literal and metaphorical, direct and indirect. But I can't remember every having heard this particular way of expressing anger towards a specific third party who isn't present in the conversation.