Language Log

In preparation for Tuesday's State of the Union address, I thought I'd take a look at the language of these addresses over the years. Texts are available at UCSB's American Presidency Project — I downloaded their texts and removed irrelevant mark-up .(Or rather, I wrote scripts to do all of this automatically — I believe that the results are generally correct but there are probably a few uncaught errors.)

There are lots of ways to approach this question. In today's post, I'll set the stage and look at a couple of simple word-frequency features, with more (and maybe more interesting) explorations to come later on.

It is time for Language Log to set things straight about the Right Honourable Andrew John Bower Mitchell MP. The story of what everyone thought had happened in London on 19 September 2012 was reported here (by yours truly) in this post and this follow-up. It involved (we all thought) a snooty and arrogant Conservative government minister and member of the House of Commons snarling words of class prejudice, in front of shocked independent bystanders, at an honest cop who was merely trying to enforce the laws that Parliament had ordained. The linguistic point of interest was that the nastiest of those words was alleged to be the noun pleb. Not the expressive expletive fucking: Mitchell never denied muttering something like I thought you guys were supposed to fucking help us when the police told him to push his bike out of Downing Street through a small pedestrian gate rather than ride it through the big one. No, the scandal was that a minister of the crown had used a contemptuous upper-class snob's term for the common people.

Language Log repeated the story that the British newspapers gloried in; but after 15 months of glacially slow police investigation costing around a quarter of a million dollars, yielding one prosecution, the story now looks very different. It appears the Right Honourable Andrew Mitchell was both right and honorable. He was framed by lying cops, and deserves an apology.

Tristin Hopper, "Rob Ford’s drunken, Jamaican English-laced rant translated", National Post 1/21/2014:

On Monday, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was videotaped in a bizarre exchange at a Toronto fast food restaurant that is notable not only for the mayor’s drunkenness, but for his liberal use of Jamaican English.  

Through careful analysis of the audio — and translation via sources in Jamaica — the National Post presents this approximate transcript of Mr. Ford’s exchange with an unknown citizen, along with explanations.

Peter Hamby, "Crist controversy resurfaces in new Netflix film", CNN 1/21/2014:

These days, Crist is considered persona non grata within the GOP. From top party officials on down to grassroots conservative activists, he is seen as a self-interested flip-flopper who left his party when it suited him politically in 2010.

In Romney-world, the aversion to Crist dates back even earlier, to that January evening in 2008 when campaign officials said he broke his word.

“Dem or Republican, I’ll do whatever I can to bury that iguana,” said Will Ritter, a former Romney aide and GOP consultant. “For as long as I live. For free.”

Most people don't understand statistical ideas like distribution, correlation, and regression. And even if they understand these concepts, they often find them too complicated for everyday thinking, or impractical for everyday communication. So instead they fall back on essentialist beliefs and generic statements.

For example, "The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior". This statement attributes a belief about  one generic  category ("the lower classes") to  another generic category ("the upper classes"). It might be someone's subjective assessment based on personal experience, but in this case it's a journalist's description of the results of a series of psychological experiments, describing the fact there was a significant correlation (and a significant multiple-regression coefficient) between a "social class rank" variable and an "essentialist beliefs about class" variable. And as generic statements often do, it risks leaving readers with misleading ideas about the experiment and about the attitudes that it tested.

Yesterday on the American Dialect Society listserv, JSB wrote:

In his news conference on the GWB (that is, Bridge) scandal, Gov.
Christe used the word "I" or first person singular pronouns 273 times
[Slate]. After some "teasing" about it, in his State of the Union
message yesterday he used "we" or "we've" 97 times [NYTimes, today].

(1) "We['ve] is the new euphemism for "I['ve].

(2) Christie's ego has apparently diminished a bit. The frequency
of the first person (singular) in his 110-minute news conference was
2.48 I's/minute. The frequency of the first person (plural) in his
45-minute State speech was 2.15 We's/minute. (Do we have a term for
a new measure of egotism?) A decrease of about 13% — approximately
equal to the percent of persons recently polled whose opinion of
Christie had decreased (16%).

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "The Narcissistic Drama of Chris Christie’s Apology", NY Magazine 1/9/2014:

"What does it make me ask about me?" the governor of New Jersey said about halfway through his press conference today, paraphrasing a reporter's inquiry, and even though the event continued long afterward, this question seemed to contain its essence, and in some way the essence of Chris Christie too. 

Frank Bruni, "The ‘I’ in Christie’s Storm", NYT 1/12/2014:

POLITICS boils down to three pronouns: I, you, we. The politician who has them in balance goes a long way. […]

In his news conference on Thursday [Chris Christie] found a way to spell apology with a thousand I’s.

Apparently, the South Korean government has decided that kimchi 김치 should no longer be referred to just as pàocài 泡菜 ("pickled vegetables") in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but should have its own name to distinguish it from other types of pickled vegetables.  (There's a November 17 news article about it here.)

The Koreans are very proud of kimchi, and it may be referred to as the Korean national dish.  Kimjang, the tradition of making and sharing kimchi that usually is done in winter, has recently been added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list.

My brother Thomas, who served in the Marines during the Vietnam War and fought alongside Korean soldiers, told me he was amazed that, when the Koreans opened their K-rations, there was kimchee inside.  Thus it is obvious that kimchee is extremely important to the Koreans, and it is indeed different from Chinese fermented vegetables.  But, if it's no longer to be referred to as pàocài 泡菜 ("pickled vegetables") in Chinese, what to call it?

Back on December 17, 2011, I wrote a post entitled "Morpheme(s) of the Year" about kòng 控 ("control", but having lots and lots of other meanings, all covered in detail in my post).  The unusual title and thrust of that post were due to my dissatisfaction with the concept of a "character of the year" as a satisfactory parallel for or clone of Western "word of the year" competitions.  It was probably due to that dissatisfaction that I seem not to have written anything along these lines for the year 2012.

Now, however, we are inundated with Chinese words and characters of the year for 2013, so let's see what they convey and whether there has been any improvement in the grammatical understanding of what words are and how they function.

For those wondering why on earth an official announcement about the solemn business of executing a traitor would use wildly overheated language like "despicable human scum" and "worse than a dog" (especially about the uncle of the reigning monarch), the BBC has published a short article on the language of North Korean posthumous character assassination.

Nicholas Watt, "Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech", The Guardian 11/27/2013:

Boris Johnson has launched a bold bid to claim the mantle of Margaret Thatcher by declaring that inequality is essential to fostering "the spirit of envy" and hailed greed as a "valuable spur to economic activity".

In an attempt to shore up his support on the Tory right, as he positions himself as the natural successor to David Cameron, the London mayor called for the "Gordon Gekkos of London" to display their greed to promote economic growth.

This speech bolsters Mr. Johnson's already-strong claim to be the most Dickensian of modern politicians. I was especially impressed by the following passage:

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… and I'm afraid that violent economic centrifuge
is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal
in raw ability
if not in spiritual worth.
Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests
it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality
that as many as sixteen percent of our species
have an IQ below eighty five
while about two percent –
((about- anyway sixteen percent of you want to put up your hands?))
sixteen percent have an IQ below- uh uh below eighty five
uh two percent have an IQ above a hundred and thirty.
And the harder you shake the pack
the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.

In response to "A fair-use victory for Google in these United States", 8/14/2013, JM writes:

I’ve always wondered when this change took place, so was delighted to see this post.  Here’s a harder one to answer:  how did it happen that “to table a motion” have opposite meanings in British vs. American English?

Rand Paul is  in the throes of a plagiarism scandal. (For details, see e.g. Juliet Lapidos, "Rand Paul's Plagiarism", NYT 11/5/2013.)  But in my opinion, much of the commentary on this imbroglio misses the point so badly as to veer into falsehood, at least by implication. Thus Rebecca Kaplan, "More evidence emerges of plagiarism in Rand Paul's work", CBS News 11/5/2013:

Reports continue to emerge that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has a habit of using other authors' work in his own speeches and writings without giving them credit.

By this standard, essentially every professional politician and high-level executive in the world is a plagiarist.