Language Log

For the linguistically sensitive, one of the burning questions stemming from last night's election-night coverage was, "When did vote become a mass noun?" Several observers picked up on the usage: Monica Macaulay on the Mr. Verb blog, Nancy Friedman on the Fritinancy blog, and Josef Fruehwald, Jonah Ostroff, Dane Pritchard, Kate Stafford, and Elizabeth Preston on Twitter. If you missed the mass-nounification of vote, you can hear several examples in this clip documenting the remarkable moment on Fox News when Megyn Kelly confronts her number-crunching Decision Desk colleagues after Karl Rove questioned their call of Ohio for Obama:

Ben Yagoda spotted a nice case of overnegation on NPR's "Morning Edition" earlier today, when Renee Montagne interviewed political science professor Michael McDonald about early voting. After explaining that Obama was leading in early voting in Nevada, McDonald said, "I don't want to discourage people from not voting today."

Ann Althouse, "There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president", 11/2/2012:

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."…

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" … sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

The varsity commentariat seems, for the most part, to have given up on the "Obama is a narcissist because pronouns" meme — we haven't heard this recently from George Will or Peggy Noonan or Charles Krauthammer or Stanley Fish. But it's alive and well among second- and third-string pundits, for example surfacing in Howard Portnoy's analysis of the third presidential debate, "L’état c’est Obama", Hot Air 10/23/2012:

There may be no “I” in team, but there is most definitely an “I” in president and nation. And in Obama’s eyes, if no one else’s, the two are one and the same.

It is the latest flexing of his best-worked muscle, the egotissimus anteriori. It is telling. if unsurprising after four years of non-stop speeches filled with self-reverence. […]

CNN acknowledges that Mitt Romney did what he came to do, and that was to appear knowledgeable and presidential. And he did it without repeatedly using first-person pronouns.

During last night's presidential debate, usage maven Bryan A. Garner opined on Twitter that "President Obama is addicted to 'is is.'" Garner also directed Twitter followers to his treatment of "is is" in Garner's Modern American Usage, where he writes, "Rarely is this form found in writing, even when speech containing it is transcribed. In any event, it isn't an expression for careful speakers." But few would characterize Obama (despite his occasional lapses) as a careless speaker, and we do in fact have accurate transcripts of all three presidential debates to test the claim that Obama has an "is is" addiction. So let's check.

It struck me that there might be an interesting linguistic angle on one of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your view) of the second presidential debate last Monday night: Candy Crowley fact checking Mitt Romney on the fly and telling him "He [Obama] did in fact, sir," refer to the embassy attack in Libya as an act of "terror" in a Rose Garden speech the day after the event. A brief, non-partisan description of the exchange, and the controversy about it, can be found in this video from comparative journalism site Newsy.com. Conservatives were furious, liberals delighted.

Looking around at the lively blogosphere discussion, I've found two potentially interesting linguistic aspects here:

• There is a difference between "terror" and "terrorism" (in the diplomatic/international relations world) and Obama did not say "terrorism".
• Obama used the words "acts of terror" but he was referring to the 9/11 attacks or acts of terror in general, not the Benghazi attack.

On the "terror" vs. "terrorism" distinction, see this 2004 piece by Geoff Nunberg for a fascinating discussion of the shift from the latter to the former in the language of the Bush administration. The Newsy story above also mentions legal implications of the word "terrorism".

The second angle, and the crux of the matter, has to do with what Obama might or might not have been referring to when he used the phrase "acts of terror", and this seems like something about which linguists might have something useful to say. So here's a stab at it.

People — especially Americans — are ignorant. This is something that Everyone Knows, because we read or hear about it from time to time in the mass media. Thus we can listen to Robin Young tell us on NPR's Here and Now that

A new survey conducted by Chicago's McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which has yet to open, finds that only 28 percent of Americans are able to name one of the constitutional freedoms, yet 52 percent are able to name at least two Simpsons family members.

Or we can read in the New York Times that

Diane Ravitch, an education historian […], said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.

Reader PH feels that the meaning of entitlement has changed from "a legitimate claim" to "an illegitimate claim", and wonders when and how and why this happened. As an example of currrent usage, he points to Philip Rucker, “Romney sees choice between ‘entitlement society’ and ‘opportunity society’”, Washington Post 12/20/2011:

Mitt Romney framed the 2012 presidential election in a speech here Tuesday night as a choice between an “entitlement society” dependent on government welfare and an “opportunity society” that enables businesses to flourish.

Some news about the presidential debates from Politico, as reported by Dylan Byers:

Philips pulls presidential debate sponsorship

Philips Electronics has dropped its sponsorship of the 2012 presidential debates, citing a desire not to associate itself with bipartisanship, POLITICO has learned.

That lede might cause many readers to do a double-take. If bipartisanship is conventionally understood to mean "cooperation between the two major political parties," why would Philips be opposed to such cooperation? If they don't favor bipartisanship, doesn't that mean they favor partisanship instead? But no: in this case, bipartisanship is actually the equivalent of partisanship, which are both in opposition to nonpartisanship.

From an interview Mitt Romney did with CBS News last week:

Scott Pelley: You're asking the American people to hire you as president of the United States. They'd like to hear some specifics.

Romney: Well, I can tell them specifically what my policy looks like. I will not raise taxes on middle-income folks. I will not lower the share of taxes paid by high-income individuals. And I will make sure that we bring down rates, we limit deductions and exemptions so we can keep the progressivity in the code, and we encourage growth in jobs.

Pelley: And the devil's in the details, though. What are we talking about, the mortgage deduction, the charitable deduction?

Romney: The devil's in the details. The angel is in the policy, which is creating more jobs.

Pelly: You have heard the criticism, I'm sure, that your campaign can be vague about some things. And I wonder if this isn't precisely one of those things?

Romney: It's very much consistent with my experience as a governor which is, if you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don't hand them a complete document and say, "Here, take this or leave it.".

What is Romney using "the devil's in the details" to mean?

Jake Tapper, "Republicans Jump on President Referring to ‘Bumps in the Road’ in Muslim World", ABC News 9/23/2012:

“I guess when u win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing,” tweeted former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, “an attack that kills an Ambassador is just a ‘bump in the road.’”

Other Republicans and conservatives, including officials from the Romney campaign, similarly criticized the president.

Fleischer was referring to this exchange on CBS’ “60 Minutes” this evening:

STEVE KROFT: “Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?”

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “Well, I’d said even at the time that this is going to be a rocky path. the question presumes that somehow we could have stopped this wave of change. I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights — a notion that — people have — to be able to — participate — in — their own governance. But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because — you know, in a lot of these places — the one organizing principle — has been Islam.

As always, the cover-up is worse than the crime. In the Andrew Mitchell story, the protagonist is still refusing to admit that he said plebs (the fucking stuff seems to have been conceded days ago: foul-mouthedness is not the issue, apparently; plebs and morons are the issue). He asserts, vaguely, that he did not use the words attributed to him. [Added September 25: As Polly Toynbee notes, his refusal to actually claim that he did not say plebs leads us to believe that he did say it: he daren't risk a perjury charge, which is why his apologies and denials are phrased with such extreme generality.] But that means the story is morphing from one about a bad-tempered upper-class put-down into a case of a cabinet member telling lies about a law-enforcement matter, and slandering armed police officers who work for his government and may have to put their lives on the line protecting it from terrorist attack (for that is why the police outside number 10 Downing Street, unusually for Britain, carry firearms).

A commenter on this post, "'All Japanese must be killed'", stated that he thought that the sentiments expressed were "a little extreme".

How seriously should we take what appear to be calls for genocide against the Japanese people?