Language Log

Sarah Palin's accent has elicited a great deal of curiosity, and now Slate has posted a well-researched analysis by the OED's Jesse Sheidlower. Here's the first paragraph:

Since Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican candidate for vice president, many people have made comments about her unusual speech, comparing it to accents heard in the movie Fargo, in the states of Wisconsin and Idaho, and in Canada. Some have even attributed her manner of speaking to her supposed stupidity. But Palin actually has an Alaskan accent, one from the Matnuska and Susitna Valley region, where Palin's hometown, Wasilla, is located.

A more impressionistic take, with commentary by Rosina Lippi-Green (author of English with an Accent) appeared yesterday on Politico.

"Canada PM faces plagiarism claim", says the BBC. And indeed some copying certainly occurred — in addition to comparing the texts, the story juxtaposes and then overlays video of a speech made by Australian PM John Howard on March 18, 2003, with video of a speech made by Canadian politician (and now PM) Stephen Harper. Here's a bit of the overlaid audio:

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But as the story makes clear, the copying was actually done by Harper's then speechwriter, one Owen Lippert:

A Canadian Conservative Party speech-writer has resigned after Prime Minister Stephen Harper was accused of plagiarism in a speech he made in 2003.

Owen Lippert admitted he had been "overzealous in copying segments" of a speech in support of the invasion of Iraq by then Australian PM John Howard.

Mr Lippert said neither his superiors nor Mr Harper, who was opposition leader at the time, had been aware.

A few days ago, in discussing Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin ("The phonetics of flop sweat", 9/26/2008), I quoted the reaction "Those aren't talking points; they're babbling points". But in Couric's 9/29 interview with Governor Palin and Senator McCain together, things went differently, in a way that deserves notice.

Speaking of the soon-to-be-approved bailout plan: I've frankly gotten pretty tired of the constant references to "Main Street" (generally if not exclusively as opposed to "Wall Street") in discussions of the bailout. It's not that I don't understand the metonym (and why it might have once sounded like the perfect phrase to oppose "Wall Street" with), I just don't find it very effective — that, or the relative novelty of it (for me) wore off very, very quickly and now it just sounds cliché and, quite frankly, devoid of content.

The general reaction to Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric has been a sort of displaced embarrassment.  I thought that Timothy Burke expressed it well ("Trade Secret of Teachers", 9/25/2008):

Bluffing at knowledge is kind of like a bad pick-up line in a bar: it may be amusing, it’s usually off-putting, and most importantly, it’s almost always ineffective.

Watching Palin’s interview with Katie Couric felt like being in a classroom with a bad bluffer. In fact, a bad bluffer at their worst moment, which is about five minutes before a final examination is about to begin. […]

My first reaction to watching the video wasn’t political, it was much more like how I feel seeing this as a teacher: a sympathetic wince.

Clark Hoyt's "Public Editor" column in the NYT on Sunday 14 September ("Getting Past the Formalities") responds to reader queries about Times practices in referring to people by name:

(1) Why "Ms. Palin" but "Mrs. Clinton"?

(2) Why "Barack Hussein Obama" three times on the front page on 28 August?

Some readers saw dark political motives at work.

Hoyt replied that (1) resulted from the application of a consistent policy on the use of courtesy titles (Miss, Mrs., Ms., Mr., and official titles like Gov.) and that (2) resulted from another set of Times newsroom policies on the use of full names, which, however, have sometimes been applied inconsistently. (Hoyt apologized.)

A brief note on the intrusion of the word uppity into the U.S. presidential election. It came a while back, from congressman Lynn Westmoreland. Here's one (of a great many) reports on the event, from The Hill on 4 September:

Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland used the racially-tinged term "uppity" to describe Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama Thursday.

Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Uproar ensued.

There's been a great deal of discussion recently about Senator John McCain's position on Spain. In an interview with Radio Caracol of Miami, he engaged in a puzzling back-and-forth on the question of whether he would be willing to host the leader of the Spanish government at the White House, or perhaps even talk with him. I think that Josh Marshall's analysis is right:

Through some mixture of confusion and inability to understand the interviewer's accent, McCain was confused about who he was talking about and decided to wing it, assuming that the person he was being asked about was some other left-wing strong man from Latin America and answering with the standard boilerplate about standing up to America's enemies.

You can listen and come to your own conclusions — I've put a transcript with an audio link up here.  My contribution to the discussion is to draw your attention to an aspect of Senator McCain's intonation.

It isn't unusual for a political controversy to turn on the interpretation of what someone on one side said. Indeed, I discussed a couple of cases of this type the other day. What is peculiar about the most recent incident in the Presidential election is that the side whose exegesis is superior appears to have won a Pyrrhic victory.

A recent PartiallyClips strip illustrates a technique that we might call "associative dialogue":

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

The tailor's algorithm, obviously, is to use the customer's questions as queries into a database of quotations.

This technique has been used to great advantage by generations of chatbots. The one whose design I know most about is the "extended chat" mode of Cobot, described in C. Isbell, M. Kearns, D. Kormann, S. Singh, P. Stone, "Cobot in LambdaMOO: A Social Statistics Agent", AAAI 2000:

Any utterance directed towards Cobot that is not recognized as a request for social statistics becomes a candidate for the following process. Words in the incoming utterance are matched to words appearing in sentences in the documents, assigning to each sentence a weight based on the number of matching words. […] Cobot randomly chooses a sentence to utter according to the distribution defined by the weights.

The Presidential campaign of the past few days provides us with not one but two examples of false claims about candidates' statements. The first is the now widespread claim that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin believes that the Iraq War is divinely ordained because she said that:

our national leaders are sending them [the troops] out on a task that is from God

Many commentators have observed that John McCain is campaigning as if it were the Democrats, not the Republicans, who had been in office for the last eight years, hoping that voters will forget about George Bush and view the Republicans as the party of reform. If only more people had a classical education, McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate would have provided yet another point for the Democrats: the Ancient Greek word whose transliteration is the same as her family name, πάλιν, means "again" or "back".

Adding to the growing corpus of speech errors connected to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign,  we have Jo Ann Davidson, Co-Chairman of the Republican National Committee, at the Republican convention in St. Paul, 9/2/2008:

We are holding a convention to ((el- )) nominate a Republican woman governor, Sarah Pawlenty, our next vice president!