Language Log

Reader IL writes:

A former Prime Minister here (John Major) has just criticised another one (Tony Blair) in the following terms:

"(Major) said: 'I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf War, and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew. I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war.'"

Myself, I've always been sceptical of the popular point of view that Blair "lied" or was dishonest about the case for war (I tend to think he was guilty of bad judgement). I'm interested in Major's criticism because it suggests that he and other MPs were (quite reasonably) supposing that Blair was playing some kind of conventional language game in his public statements that he wasn't, in fact, playing, and that this led to a massive misunderstanding. That is, they were supposing that he was lying by omission (saying "less than he knew"). In fact, he was – you might say – misleading by telling them what he thought was the truth.

Yesterday's Sally Forth:

Yesterday's lecture in Linguistics 001 included some discussion of irony, and afterwards, a student asked a good question:

I just wanted to ask something that has been nagging me since your lecture today on Semantics. I was wondering whether irony and sarcasm are universal across all languages, and if so, could we then suppose that it were a selected trait in language–that is, something that we evolved? I have been trying to think whether there is any evolutionary benefit–or even linguistic benefit–to the development of sarcasm and i cannot think of any. On the other hand, if sarcasm and irony are not universal, then are they considered just a cultural phenomenon? If so, how likely is it that so many different cultures could have developed it? has anyone ever tested this by finding a cultural group that does not use sarcasm or irony, shown that group examples of it, and seen whether the group recognized it?

Although cultures stereotypically differ in their affinity for irony, I've never heard or read that any group completely lacked the capacity to produce and understand it.  And for the past three decades, there's been a special reason for this question to matter, because the alleged universality of irony is part of a well-known argument about theories of how people communicate.

Back in June of 2002, one of William Safire's On Language columns began this way:

'The South Carolina primary between Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in 2000," wrote Eleanor Randolph, the New York Times editorialist, referring to Representative Lindsey Graham's current campaign for the Senate, "left Republicans in his state bitter and divided. That said, both President Bush and Senator McCain have already campaigned for his election to the Senate."

In olden times, those two sentences would have been written as one, with the first clause subordinated: "Although the South Carolina primary . . . left Republicans . . . divided, both Bush and McCain . . . campaigned for his election. . . . " Or they could have remained as two sentences, with the second beginning however instead of with the voguism that said.

My view on the classic prescriptive bugaboo known as dangling modifiers or dangling participles (henceforth, danglers) is, I think, a bit unusual. I don't regard danglers as grammatical mistakes; that is, I think the syntax of English does not block them. Yet I do think they constitute mistakes, in a broader sense, so in a way I am with the prescriptivists on this one. A dangler is an error in a domain that I have compared (for want of a better way to put it) to courtesy or manners. I regard danglers as minor offenses against communicational etiquette, but not against grammar. The argument against danglers being grammar errors is simple: they are too common in even careful published writing, and come too fluently to the keyboards of even excellent writers, and are accepted without remark by too many educated readers. If you ask what evidence there is that, for example, verbs come before objects in English, the answer is that it is overwhelmingly clear from just about all of everybody's usage just about all the time, and from the blank "What's gone wrong with you?" reactions if you try putting the object before the verb. The evidence on danglers goes entirely the other way. Here, for example, is an example in the carefully edited prose of The Economist (October 3rd, 2009, p. 79):

A report to the British House of Commons this year highlighted the case of an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond, who was arrested, at gunpoint, in February 2003 while on holiday in South Africa. After being held for three weeks, it turned out that the American extradition request was based on a fraudster who had stolen Mr Bond's identity.

When phrases are coordinated, readers infer that the the juxtaposed elements are in some way parallel. Careless coordination produces unwanted inferences. Today's Daily Beast serves up an object lesson:

Stunned colleagues Friday described veteran CBS News producer Joe Halderman—who was arrested outside the network’s West 57th Street offices Thursday in the alleged scheme to blackmail David Letterman—as a rogue and a womanizer, a lover of literature, a “smart frat boy,” a swashbuckling journalist, and an occasional barroom brawler who distinguished himself in dangerous war zones and occasionally displayed a certain reckless streak.

Fucking literature lovers.

(Part of) today's Non Sequitur:

"For external use only", it says on many poisonous ointments and other medicinal products that should not be orally consumed. But, the naive patient might ask, external to what? Is it all right to eat the product if I step outside the building? This is another case of nerdview, you know. The person who draws a distinction between internal medicine and external medicine is the doctor, not you or me. If saving the patient from eating menthol crystals or drinking rubbing alcohol is what they have in mind, why on earth don't they simply say "Don't eat this", or "Not for drinking", or "Don't put this in your eyes or your mouth", or whatever they exactly mean? It is because (and I answer my own question here) they have not switched out of the doctor's-eye view and considered what things are like from the patient's perspective. That's nerdview.

A recent "joke of the day" from Comedy Central:

A crowded flight is cancelled, and a frazzled agent must rebook a long line of inconvenienced travelers by herself. Suddenly, an angry passenger pushes to the front and demands to be on the next flight, first class.

The agent replies, "I'm sorry, sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these folks first."

The passenger screams, "Do you have ANY idea who I am?"

A casual inspection of the 59 (true) Google hits on "Oooo, you look", suggests that Dr. Willis Jensen, a recent presenter in the brownbag lunch series at Language Log Plaza, vastly overestimated the correlation between utterance initial "Oooo" and sarcasm: the true rate is less than 50%. However, he is correct to identify "Oooo" as a common marker of sarcasm, e.g. the comment "oooo. you look lovely:)" in the comments here from the above search.

(A video report on Dr. Jensen's groundbreaking work is below the fold.)

According to the first sentence of an AP story dated 5/28/2009:

Craigslist has withdrawn its request to block South Carolina's attorney general from pursuing prostitution-related charges against the company, following the prosecutor's agreement to do just that.

Do just what?

Here's what I heard today on my local National Public Radio station:  "The first American has died of swine flu." And also, for clarification, "The first American has died of H1N1." But who is or was the first American, I mused, heartlessly, while being an asshole in the defenseless Texan evening traffic. Obama? Benjamin Franklin? Some spear-wielding mastodon hunter? At any rate, not the unfortunate woman who just died.

Google reports about 37,000 hits for "shameless plug of/for my" or "shamelessly plugging my," and the total would be a lot bigger if you allowed for variants like "my shameless self-promotion" and so forth. The phrases are much more common now than they were in the old media, mostly because the new media have dramatically increased the opportunities for self-exposure — Google Blogsearch alone turns up more than 4000 hits for the phrases. The vast majority of these are associated with creative works and activities, in a broad sense of the term: people apologize for shamelessly touting their books, TV appearances, t-shirt designs, videos, high-school band performances, blogs, and new CD's. (Others apologize for shamelessly plugging their hairdresser or a PC they have for sale on Ebay, which seems to me a little unclear on the concept — what's to be ashamed of?)

The modifier accomplishes several things at once: it concedes that the self-promotion is an impropriety, but one venial enough to be joked about; and it averts the reader's censure with preemptive self-reproach. It reminds me of the way H. W. Fowler described the use of apologies like "saving the reader's reverence" and "if we may adopt the current slang":  "A refinement on the institution of the whipping boy, by which [writers] not only have the boy, but do the whipping."

My new collection The Years of Talking Dangerously was published today by PublicAffairs.