Language Log

Everybody seems to be talking about Jesse Jackson's whispered expression of annoyance with Barack Obama.  And I have something to say about it too. I'm not going to comment on the strange choices that editors and broadcasters have made in bowdlerizing Jackson's phrase "I want to cut his nuts off", though that's an interesting topic in itself.  Instead, I want to express puzzlement about the phrase itself.

I've heard men and boys from all sorts of geographical, social and ethnic backgrounds express anger and threaten violence, in thousands of different ways, literal and metaphorical, direct and indirect. But I can't remember every having heard this particular way of expressing anger towards a specific third party who isn't present in the conversation.

Those who are following the attempts to give English legal status as the official language of the U.S. may be interested in the analogous debate going on about the role of French in France. One difference: French already has a special official status, guaranteed not only by French law but by the French constitution itself, which asserts in Article 2 that "La langue de la République est le français" ("the language of the Republic is French").

Not long after posting my "Pushing buttons" post, I turned on NPR to listen to some of All Things Considered. There happened to be a somewhat relevant story on ("N.C. Sees Push To Register Young Latino Voters") — relevant because, as some commenters on my post pointed out (and as I also noted late last year), "It is not language per se, but its power to function as a 'proxy' for wider social issues which fans the flames of public disputes over language." (Sally Johnson, "Who's misunderstanding whom? Sociolinguistics, public debate and the media", Journal of Sociolinguistics 5.4 (2001), p. 599).

Here's the most relevant bit of the ATC story:

Dale Folwell was among several Republican state legislators up for re-election who spoke at a small rally in June, declaring illegal immigration a "major crisis."

"I can tell you that there are two things that civilizations never survive," Folwell says in a campaign ad. "That's a devaluation of their currency or a devaluation of their language. And these are two things that Americans are facing."

Putting aside the debatable presumption that English is the language of American civilization, I'm struggling to see how the use of other languages "devalues" English in any way. What exactly does Folwell mean by "language devaluation", anyway? Interestingly, the current top Google hit for {"language devaluation"} is a 1975 Time Magazine article ("CAN'T ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?"), which is all about how English is being corrupted by its own speakers (in the classic but "turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless" Orwellian sense — there's even an Orwell quote toward the end of the article) and makes no particular mention of immigration, languages other than English, and so forth. Thirty-three years later, we appear to be less worried about how language is twisted by our leaders to push people into conformity with certain political ideals (some progressives even think we should follow the lead of conservatives in doing more such "framing") and more concerned with … well, I'm not quite sure what.

While driving somewhere in the North County of San Diego this past holiday weekend, I found myself behind a large Ford Extravaganza (or Excursion, Expedition, Explorer, whatever) with a bumper sticker proclaiming:

BOYCOTT ANY COMPANY

THAT REQUIRES YOU TO

PRESS `1' FOR ENGLISH!!

I couldn't (easily) find an image of this bumper sticker on the Interwebs, but in the brief process of searching for it I found many other images with messages along the same lines. The t-shirt image on the right (from a website selling "John McCain […] Anti-Obama Political Conservative Republican" t-shirts and other such paraphernalia) is by far one of the tamer ones; next in line is this one (WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH?), then this one (Aren't YOU tired of "PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH?"), then this one (Why in the hell should I have to press "1" for English?), and it takes a nose-dive into outright offensiveness here (Press #1 for English, Press #2 for Go Home!; part of the sickening "Save California" collection — personally, I'd like to save California from these kinds of ignorant nutjobs).

Last December I commented on the case of Christine Castillo-Comer, the former director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency who was forced out of her job for allegedly opposing the teaching of creationism. The basis for her removal was that she had forwarded an email announcement of a talk by an opponent of the teaching of "intelligent design". Texas Education Agency officials claimed that

Ms. Comer's e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.

Errors in punctuation sometimes result in misinterpretation, but they usually don't arouse the moral outrage that plagiarism does. Some should.

On June 24, 1826 Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Roger C. Weightman:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

From a reader in China:

This is screamingly funny.

Less funny is that that link seems to be blocked in China. I had to use a proxy server to read it. Why in the world would they block Language Log???

Well, we were once blocked by Websense (one of those "internet filtering" systems used by libraries and schools and such), but it turned out to be a mistake. In this case, I'm tempted to think that one of Bill's posts on Tibetan might be to blame, but maybe it's just another case of bycatch.

According to this BBC Report, the US Ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason, has released an album of songs in Guarani, the indigenous language. The BBC story has a clip if you'd like to hear him. He says that he began to study Guarani in Cuba before taking up his post in Paraguay. When he got off the plane he immediately gave a speech in Guarani, to the surprise not only of the Paraguayans but of the US mission, who were unaware that he had been studying the language. The US does not have a good reputation for diplomats who speak the local language, so this is really unusual. Part of the story here is no doubt the fact that Ambassador Cason is a career foreign service officer with long experience in Latin America, not a political hack. In any case, kudos to Ambassador Cason.

Although most Paraguayans are reported to be pleased with Ambassador Cason's album, Senator Domingo Laino, once a distinguished opponent of the Stroessner dictatorship, is not. In his opinion: "[Cason] sings horribly and his pronunciation of Guarani words is stammering. It is an offense to the Paraguayan people." I'm in no position to judge, but my suggestion to Senator Laino is: don't look a gift horse in the mouth. An ambassador who sings in Guarani is like a talking dog: it isn't how well he does it, it's that he does it at all.

According to reports by the Associated Press and Fox News, at Ellender High School in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, co-valedictorians and cousins Cindy and Hue Vo each briefly addressed their immigrant parents, who are not fluent in English, in Vietnamese during their valedictory speeches. Why is this in the news? Because school board member Ricky Pitre objects. For reasons that are not reported, he thinks that there is something wrong with speaking a little bit of another language and proposes to institute a rule that graduation speeches be entirely in English.

English-only advocates like to claim that immigrants refuse to learn English. Here are two kids of immigrant parents who have learned English well enough to be valedictorians and this jackass wants to rain on their parade? For shame! Why is it that school boards attract idiots like shit attracts flies?

Xin anh hãy nhận những lời chúc mừng của tôi Cindy Vo và Hue Vo!

(I hope I've go this right. Regrettably, my Vietnamese is no doubt much poorer than their English.)

As has already been the subject of much blogospheric mirth, news about sprinter Tyson Gay's record time in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials was reported in peculiar fashion by the American Family Association's OneNewsNow site. Here's a screenshot from BoingBoing:

And here's one from Outsports showing a series of Google News headlines:

Regret The Error picks its favorite quote:

Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued.’

Count me among those who will not be at all sad to see the last of the Bushisms industry.  In the end, it's a bit like making wheelchair jokes about FDR, except that all of us commit infelicities of verbal expression from time to time. I guess that W gets tangled up a bit more often than most politicians do, although I think that even this much is not entirely certain.

The Phils are having their best start since 1993. The picture on the right, by the AP's Tom Gannam, accompanies a stories in today's Philadelphia Inquirer by Jim Salisbury, "Phillies pack lots of punch in rout: They scored 20 runs for the second time this season".

The caption below the picture:

Pat Burrell (left) congratulates Ryan Howard on his first-inning home run, one batter after Chase Utley's solo blast. Burrell followed Howard with a homer of his own. Howard hit another shot later in the game in St. Louis.

Fox News has apparently let their semiotic guard down on this one, because a search of their site turned up no evidence of concern that the "terrorist fist jab" may have infiltrated the national pastime.

A couple of days ago, I posted some audio clips in which bits of political speechifying were reduced to their pitch and amplitude contours alone ("Political melodies", 6/5/2008). Robert Delius Royar asked me to apply the same technique to a passage from a speech that John F. Kennedy gave at Rice University on 9/12/1962. I've done as he asked; and I've also posted the code that I used, so that others can try the same thing at home.

Here's the melodized version of the first two phrases of the passage that Robert recalled, with the Obama clip for comparison: