Language Log

We seem to be entering new lexico-political territory, which is increasingly challenging the publications guidelines of the mainstream media:

Andrew Rosenthal, "Donald Trump defends his hands", NYT 3/3/2016
Gregory King, "Donald Trump defends size of his penis", CNN 3/4/2016
"Mitt Romney Aims at Donald Trump, Hits G.O.P.", NYT Editorial 3/3/2016:

    Holy Mitt, what a meltdown.

James Poniewozik, "A National Descent Into Trump's Pants", NYT 3/4/2016

Or  maybe this is just part of the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres? See e.g. "Taking shit from the president", LLOG 7/19/2006.

After last night's doozy of a Republican debate, Meghan McCain tweeted the following this morning:

Every negative stereotype I have tried to combat for the last 8 years about republicans has been utterly destroyed in the past 9 months.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) March 4, 2016

McCain's dim view of the current crop of presidential candidates doesn't support the notion that they are "utterly destroying" negative stereotypes about Republicans, as several people pointed out. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Towards the end of January, there were three editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine with somewhat overlapping authors and somewhat conflicting messages. The first editorial was D.B. Taichman et al., "Sharing clinical trial data — a proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors", published online 1/20/2016:

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) believes that there is an ethical obligation to responsibly share data generated by interventional clinical trials because participants have put themselves at risk. In a growing consensus, many funders around the world — foundations, government agencies, and industry — now mandate data sharing.

An article by Mimi Lau and Nectar Gan in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) (3/02/16) details a cause célèbre that occurred on the front page of a major newspaper in China on February 20.  The article is titled:

Editor at liberal Chinese newspaper fired over Xi front page
Veteran journalists punished over headline combination seen as veiled criticism of president’s call for state media loyalty to the Communist Party

Here's the offending front page of the Nanfang dushi bao 南方都市报 (Southern Metropolis Daily):

This post brings together current American politics with Victor's recent post on wrestling terminology, by quoting a passage from Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, about a debate staged by Mongke Khan in September of 1254.

Josh Marshall, "Metrical Analysis of Trump Insult Haiku", TPM 2/28/2016:

Trump doesn't just tweet. He's developed a sort of twitter-based, 140 character, insult haiku literary form. […]

The metrical pattern is deceptively simple: Single clause declarative sentence, single clause declarative sentence, primary adjective/term of derision.

Ian Preston has pointed me to Aleksandra Cichocka et al., "On the Grammar of Politics—or Why Conservatives Prefer Nouns", Political Psychology (published online 1/26/2026):

Previous research indicates that political conservatism is associated with epistemic needs for structure and certainty (Jost et al., 2003) and that nouns elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech (Carnaghi et al., 2008). We therefore hypothesized that conservatives would exhibit preferences for nouns (vs. verbs and adjectives), insofar as nouns are better suited to satisfy epistemic needs. In Study 1, we observed that social conservatism was associated with noun preferences in Polish and that personal need for structure accounted for the association between ideology and grammatical preferences. In Study 2, conducted in Arabic, social conservatism was associated with a preference for the use of nominal sentences (composed of nouns only) over verbal sentences (which included verbs and adjectives). In Study 3, we found that more conservative U.S. presidents used greater proportions of nouns in major speeches, and this effect was related to integrative complexity. We discuss the possibility that conservative ideology is linked to grammatical preferences that foster feelings of stability and predictability.

Jim Newell, "Is Donald Trump’s Favorite Term Bigly or Big League? You Make the Call", Slate 9/24/2015:

What is that word—or words—that Donald Trump throws into the middle of basically everything he says?

The consensus around the LLOG water cooler was "big league", but I don't think we ever wrote about it. The Federal News Service transcript of last night's verbal brawl agrees:

I will say this. Mitt Romney looked like a fool when he delayed and delayed and delayed. And Harry Reid baited him so beautifully. And Mitt Romney didn’t file his return until a September 21st of 2012, about a month-and-a-half before the election. And it cost him big league.

But lots of people are convinced it's "bigly":

Update: he said "bigly" https://t.co/LXAllFhejx

— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) February 26, 2016

Even while our debate on whether Cantonese is a language or just a dialect is still burning, the Chinese government adds more fuel to the fire:

"Hong Kong outrage over Chinese subtitle switch" (BBC, 2/24/16)

Hong Kong officials received more than 10,000 complaints in three days after a popular TV programme began subtitling output in the Chinese characters associated with mainland China.

The Bernie Sanders campaign sent out a tweet at 10 a.m., reading: "Greed, fraud, dishonesty, arrogance. These are just some of the adjectives we use to describe Wall Street." That got the attention of Jezebel blogger Joanna Rothkopf, who posted it under the headline, "These Are All Nouns, Bernie." Shortly thereafter, the tweet was deleted, but I was able to grab a screenshot in time.

After Pope Francis suggested that Donald Trump's plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border makes him not-so-Christian, Trump fired back with a written statement that begins with a remarkable pile-up of conditionals:

If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.

All of those would haves! On Twitter, @vykromond asks if Language Loggers have any insights into "the possibly unprecedented 'quadruple conditional' of the first sentence." Here's my tentative analysis.

This World War II American propaganda poster speaks for itself:

A poster of WWII era discouraging the
use of Italian, German, and Japanese.
(Source)

According to the NYT's transcript of last night's Republican presidential debate, the participants used words connected with accusations of untruth at least 25 times. By my (program's) count:

6 lie
5 liar
5 lied
5 lies
2 false
1 lying
1 not true
_______
25

(Also 14 instances of wrong…)

And curiously, none of these accusations were directed against representatives of ISIS or Al Qaeda or drug cartels or Russia or China, or even at Democrats — every one of them, unless I missed something, was directed at one of the other Republican candidates on the debate stage, or at a recent Republican administration. The exchange featured here is all too typical.