Language Log

Todd Akin, nominee of the Republican party for a Senate seat in the fairly conservative state of Missouri, was being asked on TV about his opposition to abortion even in the case of rape, and was trying to clarify why he does not want to make rape grounds for an exception to his no-abortion stance. He said:

It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

It's perfectly clear that by "if it's a legitimate rape" he meant "if it's genuinely a case of rape, legitimately classified as such." But what he said was a telescoping of that: "legitimate rape." And that one little ill-considered nominal — that attributive adjective paired with that noun — has caused a political firestorm. His candidacy may well go up in smoke as a result.

With the international attention given to the trial and conviction of members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot on charges of "hooliganism," many have wondered online whether Pussy Riot is a translation of a Russian name. But no: the band consistently uses Pussy Riot (in Latin characters) on its official LiveJournal blog, even though most of the text is in Russian (in Cyrillic characters). This isn't too surprising among punk/alt-rock bands worldwide. Whether it's the Japanese noise rockers Boredoms or Russian ska-punks Distemper, musicians very often use English in Latin script for the names of their bands (and titles of albums and songs), even when their lyrics are in their native language. But how have Russian sources identified Pussy Riot?

Introducing Paul Ryan as his running mate this morning, Mitt Romney made a gaffe that was remarkably similar to one that Barack Obama made four years ago when he introduced Joe Biden as his running mate.

Today, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on H.R. 997, the "English Language Unity Act of 2011" sponsored by Rep. Steve King [R-IA]. The House bill and its Senate counterpart (S. 503, sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe [R-OK]) have been introduced in the last several sessions of Congress, and there's no indication that this attempt to "declare English as the official language of the United States" will be any more successful than the previous iterations. But at the very least the hearings provide some moments of politico-linguistic theater. At the hearing today, Rep. John Conyers [D-MI] delivered his opening statement in halting Spanish, after which Rep. Trent Franks [R-AZ] requested, "would you repeat that in Yiddish and Vietnamese and French?" Franks and King both argued that Conyers' use of Spanish was itself a compelling argument in favor of the bill (with King making a Tower of Babel reference). Here's the video, from TPM.

The late-night shows on Comedy Central both took a linguistic turn last night. First, on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart managed to give himself a "grammar wedgie" trying to explain how President Obama's now-infamous line "You didn't build that" has been willfully misconstrued by his critics. Then, on "The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert crafted an Old English riff off of the recent comment by one of Mitt Romney's advisors that Romney is somehow more appreciative than Obama of the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" shared by the US and the UK.

"Seriously," said Bruce Springsteen's guitarist Steven Van Zandt, "When did England become a police state?"

I somehow missed this when it was fresh (Joseph Bottum, "Loose Language", The Weekly Standard 10/25/2010:

The plural of syllabus is syllabi. Or is it syllabuses? Focuses and foci, cactuses and cacti, funguses and fungi: English has a good set of these Greek and Latin words—and pseudo-Greek and Latin words—that might take a classical-sounding plural. Or might not. It kind of depends. […]

It’s common, in this context, to deride the pedants who constrict language with sterile rules of grammar. The problem, of course, is that there aren’t very many of those pedants left. The recent campaign against the word syllabi appears to have begun on the “Language Log” blog, a fairly representative hangout for grammarians and linguistics types, where some of the descriptivists still seem to see themselves as embattled radicals struggling against Victorian hypocrisy. I’d more readily believe it if America had enough unrepentant prescriptivists left to fill a Volkswagen. Reading the Edwardian-style attacks on school-marm grammar, one expects to come across brave calls for free love, women’s suffrage, and sentimental socialism.

Glenn Bingham send in a link to this passage in a recent radio address by Paul LePage, the governor of Maine ("Obamacare is on Hold in Maine", 7/7/2012):

Even more disheartening is that reviving the American dream just became nearly impossible to do. We are now a nation in which supports dependency rather than independence. Instead of encouraging self-reliance we are encouraging people to rely on the government.

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Reader GW wrote to ask about a construction in one of Barack Obama's recent speeches:

I was looking at the text of a campaign speech by the President today in Pittsburgh, and noted the following paragraph:

And then I think about Michelle's mom, and the fact that Michelle's mom and dad, they didn't come from a wealthy family. Michelle's dad, he worked a blue-collar job at the sanitary plant in Chicago. And my mother-in-law, she stayed at home until the kids got older. And she ended up becoming a secretary, and that's where she worked at most of her life, was a secretary at a bank.

I don't know if this text is as-delivered or the speechwriters' version, but what stuck out at me was the "NP, pronoun" construction seen here in the first three sentences. I don't think I'd use this construction, at least when speaking in English, but I'm not sure how common it is, or even what it's called. Has LL covered this one before? Does Obama do this a lot? Is it an identifying feature for any particular (sub)dialect?

Yesterday on the public radio program Marketplace, Sarah Gardner interviewed Ben Zimmer about the Obama campaign's "Betting on America" theme ("The president is a 'betting' man", 7/5/2012):

Gardner: Now as you just heard, the president was talking a lot about betting today. He's betting on the American worker, he's betting on Ohio, he's betting on America. What's with all the betting?

Zimmer: Well it reminds me of the whole tradition of gambling metaphors in American politics where you talk about the odds, the whole language of gambling, of bluffing, tipping your hand, raising the stakes. So it draws on that, at the same time is draws on a sense of confidence, the ability to take risks, which is perhaps an image that Obama would like to portray. At the same time, he doesn't want to be seen as a foolish risk taker. He says that he is going to bet on the American worker, and so that is giving you the sense that it's a sure bet, it's a bet that's going to pay off.

I live in Alberta, where the oil and gas industry takes up a good chunk of daily media coverage. Since I sometimes get asked to comment on the persuasive effects of various wording choices by politicians or companies, I was especially interested to come across claims of evidence that public opposition to the method of natural gas extraction known as fracking might be bolstered by its problematic name. (Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, and the process involves injecting a highly pressurized fluid underground to create fractures in rock layers to release gas.) The finding originates from a survey conducted by the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University, which, as stated in the report, was designed to investigate the following:

It was hypothesized by the Public Policy Research Lab that the actual word "Fracking" may have a negative connotation that is separate from the environmental concerns that often accompany discussions of the process. Due to the harsh consonant sounds in the word itself, and an undeniable similarity to a certain other four letter word starting with the letter "F", it seemed plausible that some of the negative public sentiment about "Fracking" may result from how unpleasant the word itself sounds.

The Doonesbury site's "Say What?" feature today reports Mitt Romney as having recently said:

I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love.

I often find I disagree with the views of Republican candidates, and my initial inclination was to mock this remark; but thinking very carefully through what it says, I find to my embarrassment that I have to agree with it.

In the Ukrainian Vekhovna Rada (parliament) Thursday evening, there was a full and frank exchange of views on language policy: