Language Log

The Right Honorable Andrew John Bower Mitchell M.P. was recently appointed Chief Whip for the Conservative Party in the House of Commons (responsible for party discipline with respect to voting). A few days ago he was leaving the area of the Prime Minister's residence in Downing Street on his bike. The police on security duty there open the main gates to Downing Street as seldom as possible for obvious reasons, and on this occasion they declined to open the main gates just to let him ride through. An armed police officer pointed him to a smaller pedestrian gate. Mitchell then proceeded to create the UK's political scandal of the week. He started swearing at the police officer, and got yet more abusive when a second officer advised him to calm down and warned him that he could be arrested. What's more, Mitchell used not just an obscene expletive adjectival modifier but also a blunt monosyllabic noun often employed as a put-down for the non-gentry. Just what the Conservative Party, whose popularity has been plummeting, really didn't need.

Now even innocent mooncakes are enlisted in the campaign against Japan:

From David Moser:

Two days ago, in "'All Japanese must be killed'", I wrote about violently anti-Japanese sloganeering over the Senkakus that has been going on in China. But now, inspired by the government-sponsored "kill all the Japanese" slogans, the same types of slogans are being directed against the government. This is a development that many China-watchers have predicted, since the government has been engaging in various types of agitation to cover up for its own weaknesses, including a sharply factionalized Chinese Communist Party on the eve of its 18th Congress and rising public discontent.

This photograph was sent to me by a colleague:

A new book by Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, is published today. It opens with a prologue telling the story of the Obama inaugural oath flub, first told on Language Log in Ben Zimmer's piece "Adverbial placement in the oath flub" and the follow-up a day later in "Rectifying the oath flub." Toobin reveals two bits of information that I was not aware of. First, a complete script of the oath, showing exactly where the breaks would come so that Obama would know when to do his repetitions, was sent to Obama's staff as a PDF but never reached the president or anyone close to him, so when Chief Justice Roberts stood facing him to administer the oath, there was a script that Obama had not seen, but neither of the two men knew that. Second, although Roberts had worked over that script, he chose to rely on his famously prodigious memory: he waved away the card that was offered to him with the script on it, and the chance to do a rehearsal: "That's OK, I know the oath," he said. And thus it was that when two men met to perform their extraordinarily important ritual, they were both without scripts and had never rehearsed together. The rest is history.

Here are two items of ambiguity in advertising, one intentional and one not. First the apparently unintentional ambiguity: a new commercial from the Romney presidential campaign entitled "Failing American Families."

As the terse voiceover puts it, “Barack Obama. More spending. More debt. Failing American Families.”

Supposing Mitt Romney cancelled all of his appearances and meetings and went missing for a week. Furthermore, neither the Republican National Committee nor the Secret Service would make any statements or answer any questions concerning his whereabouts. Naturally, we would all be alarmed and wondering what had happened to the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. But imagine, if you can, that it would be illegal to search for Romney's name on the internet. All searches for "Romney" and "Mitt Romney" would be decisively blocked by the United States Government, and one might well be arrested for complaining about this. Out of frustration, citizens would search for "Room Knee eh?", "Glove ROM leg joint", and the like.

Kevin Cirilli, "TV pundits split on Obama's convention speech", Politico 9/6/2012, quotes James Carville discussing Obama's speech:

“This was probably not the best speech of the convention,” he said on CNN. “But what I’m struck by is the muscular tone and attitude in both the vice president and president tonight. This is not the mommy party on show here. This is the daddy party.”

"State Department: 'Hold down the fort,' other common phrases could be offensive", Fox News 8/31/2012:

Watch your mouth — everyday phrases like "hold down the fort" and "rule of thumb" are potentially offensive bombshells.

At least according to the State Department.

Chief Diversity Officer John Robinson penned a column in the department's latest edition of "State Magazine" advising readers on some rather obscure Ps and Qs.

Here's Mr. Robinson's column, "Wait, What Did You Just Say?", from the July/August 2012 edition of State Magazine.

Former Republican presidential candidate (and former ambassador to China) Jon Huntsman was on "The Colbert Report" last night, and at the end of the interview Stephen Colbert asked him to say what he really thought about Mitt Romney, in Mandarin. You can see the exchange at the end of this video (skip to about 3 minutes in):

What did Huntsman say?

According to Andrew Rosenthal ("Chris Christie: But Enough About Mitt, Let’s Talk About Me", NYT 8/29/2012):

Gov. Chris Christie is getting rave reviews today for his performance at the National Republican Convention, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he did a huge amount of good for the three most important people in his life – he, himself, and him.

Whether he did any good for Mitt Romney is less certain (and when the cameras cut to Mr. Romney in the audience, the look on his face, at times, suggested that he may have been wondering the same thing.)

The New Jersey governor was, as advertised, energetic, and combative, and played right to the heart of his constituency – err, I mean Mr. Romney’s constituency – on the far right of the Republican Party. But his speech sound more like a stump speech for himself, for re-election or for some federal office, than the keynote speech at the nominating convention for another politician.

By my count, Mr. Christie used the word “Romney” six times in his address. He used the word “I” 30 times, plus a couple of “me’s” and “my’s” tossed in for seasoning.

Several people have written to note the odd phrase used by Paul Ryan in answering questions about Todd Akin's "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" remarks ("In Exclusive Interview, Paul Ryan Distances Self From Todd Akin", KDKA CBS 2, 8/21/2012):

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“His statements were outrageous, over the pail. I don’t know anybody who would agree with that. Rape is rape period, end of story,” Ryan told KDKA Political Editor Jon Delano.

I suspect that Mr. Ryan aimed at the familiar expression "beyond the pale" and missed, maybe due to blending it with "over the line". Perhaps he himself thinks that the expression is a metaphor for trying to put six gallons of milk into a five gallon pail, or perhaps the eggcorn-suggesting spelling was due to the transcriber at KDKA. (I note that the original article has now substituted "pale" for "pail".)