Language Log

In case you haven't already seen it, or heard it discussed anywhere, here's the cover of the 21 July New Yorker ("The Politics of Fear" by Barry Blitt):

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong (from Sesame Street). Question: which one?

Dino Capiello, "Gore: Carbon-free electricity in 10 years doable", AP 7/17/2008:

Gore told the AP he hoped the speech would contribute to "a new political environment in this country that will allow the next president to do what I think the next president is going to think is the right thing to do." He said both fellow Democrat Barrack Abeam and Republican rival John moccasin are "way ahead" of most politicians in the fight against global climate change.

At first, the email seemed like the only literate and competently designed phishing lure that I've ever received.  Most of them are obviously written by people who could never pass a TOEFL exam, and have no idea how a bank or an airline or a shipping company addresses its customers. But this message, which arrived under the Subject line "Beat Obama at NO COST to YOU" seemed pretty professional, and even had some competent graphics:

Still, I saw two clues that persuaded me it was a scam, designed to get me to click through to a site that would harvest my personal information for criminal purposes and turn my computer into a zombie tool of international racketeers.

I thought I'd revisit the current presidential-candidate nickname situation, based on a study of headlines in the New York tabloids, well known as the Drosophila melanogaster of onomastic evolution. When I took a look at the nicknames that the French press used for the candidates in their presidential election last year ("Political hypocoristics", 4/18/2007), the consensus among readers was that American papers tend to use first names or initials, like Rudy, Mitt, Hillary, and W, rather than diminutive forms based on last names like  Chichi (for Chirac) or Sarko (for Sarkozy). But my current research results suggest that this consensus was wrong.

Speech researchers at Google have applied speech-to-text to YouTube's Politicians channels, indexed the results, and wrapped the whole thing in a Elections Video Search "gadget" that you can add to your iGoogle page or embed elsewhere. The announcement on the Official Google Blog is here.

In John McCain's interview with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America this morning, he seemed to want to turn any discussion of "Afghanistan" into a discussion of Iraq, as in this exchange:

DS: Does [Obama] deserve the credit for saying that there should be more troops in Afghanistan, and
now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is saying just the same thing?

JM: Actually the chairman of the Joint Chiefs uh said yesterday
that it'd be very dangerous to do what Senator Obama wants to do in Iraq.

A bit later in the interview, he took this one substitution too far:

DS: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent?

JM: Well, I think it's very serious. I mean, it's a serious situation.

DS: Not precarious and urgent?

JM: Oh I- I don't- know wha- exactly whether- we can run through the vocabulary, but it's a very-
it's a ((v-)) serious situation,
and- but there's a lot of things we need to do,
we ha- we have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid-
that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border

Last year I commented on

the tendency of representatives of the U.S. government (GWB especially) and supporters of the government's current policies to refer to timetables for leaving Iraq as artificial timetables or arbitrary timetables, collocations that are presumably to be understood as involving appositive rather than intersective modification.

That is, for these speakers, artificial timetable means 'timetable, which is arbitrary' (all timetables are arbitrary) rather than 'timetable which/that is arbitrary' (only some timetables are arbitrary, and the reference is just to these).

George W. Bush, while continuing to vigorously reject "arbitrary timetables", has now shifted his language a bit to adjust to new realities. As Steven Lee Myers wrote in the lead story in the New York Times yesterday,

HOUSTON — President Bush agreed to "a general time horizon" for withdrawing American troops in Iraq, the White House announced Friday, in a concession that reflected both progress in stabilizing Iraq and and the depth of political opposition to an open-ended military presence in Iraq and at home.

(I would have recast that last bit as "the depth of political opposition, in Iraq and at home, to an open-ended military presence", so as to avoid a parsing in which "in Iraq and at home" modifies "an open-ended military presence", a parsing that is encouraged by how easy it is to take "an open-ended military presence in Iraq" as a constituent.)

… The White House offered no specifics about how far off any "time horizon" would be, with officials saying details remained to be negotiated. Any dates cited in an agreement would be cast as goals for handing responsibility to Iraqis, and not specifically for reducing American troops, said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe.

"Time horizon" wouldn't have fit into the headline, so the head-writer went for the shorter "timeline" instead:

BUSH, IN A SHIFT,
ACCEPTS CONCEPT
OF IRAQ TIMELINE

In any case, "timetable" (unmodified) is to be avoided, especially since Barack Obama has been calling for a strict phased timetable for withdrawal. The Obama camp's response to the "time horizon" announcement:

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, called the announcement "a step in the right direction," but derided what he called the vagueness of the White House commitment.

Of course it's vague. That's the point.

nascardaughter makes an interesting point in the comments section of my Dare to be bilingual post. Taking her lead, I'll divide what were (in my mind) previously two questions into four:

1. Why would making English official be bad?
2. Why would making English official be good?
3. Why is having no official language good?
4. Why is having no official language bad?

Question 1 is what Timothy M asked of me and other Language Loggers, and Question 2 is what I asked readers to ponder in my Language devaluation post. Question 3 is what nascardaughter asks us all to consider, and Question 4 rounds out the logical possibilities.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California appeared on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, and he got some press attention for his stated willingness to serve as an energy and environment czar in a hypothetical Obama adminstration, even though he has endorsed his fellow Republican John McCain. In the recaps of his interview, I was struck by one sentence in particular: "I'd take his call now, and I'd take his call when he's president — any time." This use of when instead of if struck me as unfortunate, and my first thought was that it might be the result of interference from Schwarzenegger's native German, where wenn can serve as the equivalent of English if or when. To check up on my hunch, I emailed the perspicacious polyglot Chris Waigl (who has bailed me out before on German-English translation conundrums), and she replied in her typically thoughtful and nuanced manner. Her response follows below as a guest post.

This is a follow-up on my Language devaluation and Pushing buttons posts from last Monday, and coincidentally also a follow-up on (the first comment on) Bill Poser's Obama's Indonesian post from Friday.

I had promised in the Language devaluation post that I would (when I found the time) collect arguments for why English should not be the official language of the United States. I haven't really found the time yet, but several LL readers were kind enough to take the time to offer their help in the comments section of that post. See the first comment in particular (from Ryan Rosso), chock-full of useful links.

As several commenters point out, a lot depends on what it means to designate an official language — that is, what the practical effects of that designation are. Some think that it would be no more than a symbolic gesture here in the U.S., a formal recognition of an obvious reality: English is by far the dominant language of the nation. Others think (and I agree) that a piece of legislation is a piece of legislation: the original intent may be symbolic, but once it's there it can be used as a tool for less-than-symbolic (shall we say) purposes.

[ Incidentally: recall the calculated shifting around among "official", "national", and "common and unifying" in the House and Senate two years ago, as Ben Zimmer discusses in an LL Classic Post ("English: official, national, common, unifying, or other?"); see also Bill Poser's two posts flanking Ben's ("Senate votes for official English", "What does 'official' mean?"). ]

Today, July 14, is Bastille Day, the 218th anniversary of the Fête de la Fédération, the 219th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and the national day of France. On this day we celebrate the French Revolution, the end of feudalism, the disestablishment of the church, and the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. For some of us it is also a day that reminds us of Jim McCawley.

Yesterday, a reader sent a link to Kevin Krause, "Dallas County officials spar over 'black hole' comment", Dallas Morning News (Dallas City Hall blog), 7/7/2008:

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

This post has accumulated 785 comments, suggesting a significant level of public interest. There are some follow-up quotations from various participants in Steve Blow's column "The hue and cry for holes", 7/11/2008, and of course a chorus of outside comments.

Barack Obama is reported to speak Indonesian as result of the four years, from age six to age ten, that he spent in Indonesia. From what I know of his life since, he has not had much opportunity to improve or even keep up his Indonesian. He doesn't seem to have returned to Indonesia for any significant amount of time or to have had other Indonesian speakers in his life. I would therefore expect him not only to be quite rusty but never to have attained full adult competence. He would not be likely to have the vocabulary expected of an adult, and he might not have acquired some of the syntactic structures. He would also not control some socio-pragmatic aspects of the language, such as the more formal stylistic registers and when to use them. This isn't to dispute his claim to speak Indonesian, but to point out that unless there are factors unknown to me, he may well be able to carry on simple conversation in Indonesian, but he is probably not able to carry out political negotiations with Indonesian leaders in Indonesian, or even to understand discussions of topics like politics and technology in an Indonesian newspaper, for which he likely lacks the necessary vocabulary.

Does anyone know of evidence as to the level of his ability in Indonesian, and if it is higher than I suggest, how he acquired it?