Language Log

Last September a group of women spent a weekend at Foxwood's Casino to celebrate the 40th birthdays of three of their party. Two casino workers made vulgar comments about them in Spanish, thinking that they would not understand. One did and complained to the casino. One of the casino workers was fired as a result and the women received an apology and free food, drink, and rooms.

What prompted the press accounts of this incident is the fact that the ladies are not satisfied with the compensation that they received and are suing the casino for a total of $3.5 million: it seems to me and evidently a lot of other people that the casino reacted rapidly and appropriately and that the women were reasonably compensated for offensive conduct that nonetheless did little real injury.

What I find so curious about this is the belief of the two offending casino employees that they could speak Spanish without fear of being understood. With 322,000,000 Spanish speakers in the world and 34,000,000 in the United States, the odds of someone at a roulette table in Connecticut understanding the language are not exactly remote, and it doesn't take a linguist to be aware of this. Ironically, the casino is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, who have used part of their income from the casino for efforts to revive the extinct Pequot language.

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.

Roy Peter Clark is composing a new grammar book, to be called "The Glamour of Grammar". For the past couple of months, he's been posting selections on the web site of the Poynter Institute, where he's "director of the writing center, dean of the faculty, senior scholar and vice president". Each post has an email link asking readers to "Help Roy write his next book".

Yesterday, Linda Seebach sent me a link to one of these posts, "Why the Littlest Words Can Mean a Lot" (5/28/2008), drawing attention to a passage where Prof. Clark's call for help was well advised:

Articles are slippery. You might be fooled into thinking that a can only be used in the singular and that the carries the plural until you read "A million dollars will get you the rarest baseball card in the world."

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.)

Over at Supreme Dicta there is an amusing, if disturbing, report by a grader for the Advanced Placement exam in US Government of some of the more comical statements made in response to an essay question about the 15th Amendment. Some of them are just ignorant, such as the statement that: "Strom Thurman [sic] was the first black man in Congress"¹ or weirdly imaginative, such as the report that:

MLK [Martin Luther King -WJP] marched down the streets of a small Alabama town singing songs. When he arrived at a voting booth, a woman was asked to guess how many jelly beans were in a jar. When she guessed wrong the police arrested her.

but there was one that I found truly incomprehensible:

Many blacks were illiterate, or couldn’t even talk, so voting was out of the question.

They couldn't even talk?

Footnotes
¹Senator Strom Thurmond was white and a virulent racist.

Like most people to the left of Genghis Khan, I find much of what appears on Michelle Malkin's blog rather strange, but Mojave Mike left a comment today that is really remarkable:

All the good armies of the world speak English. I’m serious. Think about it. It doesn’t surprise me that the taliban can’t maneuver worth crap, few armies can.

Is there really something about English that makes it uniquely suitable for military communication? The Israeli Army is arguably the best in the world on a per capita basis. Although English is widely known, communication in the Israeli military is in fact in Hebrew. Nazi Germany managed to run a very effective military organization using German. Napoleon got by with French. Genghis Khan used Mongolian. The conquests of Alexander the Great were carried out in Greek. Like most Whorfian claims, this one doesn't seem to do too well under close examination.

Hate speech laws, in my opinion, are in general offensive and counterproductive, but the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act contains a provision that really takes the cake. Section 3(1) provides:

No person shall publish, issue or display or cause to be published, issued or displayed before the public any statement, publication, notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation that

(a) indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate against a person or a class of persons, or

(b) is likely to expose a person or a class of persons to hatred or contempt

because of the race, religious beliefs, colour, gender, physical disability, mental disability, age, ancestry, place of origin, marital status, source of income or family status of that person or class of persons.

You can't "expose a person … to hatred or contempt because of …source of income"‽ I'm sympathetic to the goal of discouraging the idea that, say, toilet cleaners or leather workers are inferior to other people, but aren't there some occupations that are legitimately and more-or-less universally held in contempt? Are there ways to describe a pimp, a torturer, a pirate, or a slave trader that don't expose them to hatred or contempt? I hope not.

Earlier today in a speech about his relationship with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, at the National Press Club, Jeremiah Wright, the controversial pastor of the church that Barack Obama attends, said (transcript) (video):

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he didn't make me this color.

Let me get this straight. Putting someone in chains is bad, right? Putting someone in slavery is bad, right? So "making me this color" is also bad, right? Personally, I don't think that there's anything wrong with being black. I'm dismayed that Rev. Wright does.

Last week, I posted a couple of example sentences that had given me pause:

1. I'll never forget how he must have felt. (overheard)
2. Aren’t you glad you archived instead of deleted? (over-read)

I promised I'd get back to these, so here I am.