Language Log

"Remarks by the President at the National Prayer Breakfast", 1/2/2012:

And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone.  And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.”

From reader AH:

I know I'm a little slow, but during the State of the Union, President Obama said something along the lines of the following (I'm not 100% certain that the noun was "soldier" and I don't remember the verb, but those aren't the relevant parts): "every soldier respects each other."

As soon as he'd said it, my dad and I exchanged a look of disconcertedness — Barack Obama shamelessly putting forth such a blatantly ungrammatical statement? However, when I analyzed it a moment later, I came to the conclusion that the structure "every X Ys each other" is equivalent to the structure "every X Ys each other X," which is correct, and that the more usual structure "all the Xs Y each other" is equivalent to the structure "all the Xs Y each other X," which to me seems at best ambiguous. If my reasoning is incorrect, where did I go wrong? And if my reasoning is correct, what accounts for the little jolt my dad and I (and probably other listeners) experienced as a reaction to Obama's sentence — and what accounts for the fact that we wouldn't even have noticed if he'd said "all the soldiers respect each other"?

The Fox News transcript and the whitehouse.gov transcript agree that there are three uses of each other in the 2012 SOTU, only one of which is connected with a subject noun phrase involving every:

They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to the future of their country, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility.

More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other — because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s somebody behind you, watching your back.

This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.

So what about "every member of that unit trusted each other"? Is it "a blatantly ungrammatical statement", as AH and her dad first thought? Or is it OK, as she later decided?

"Sarah Palin talks Florida GOP battle", Justice with Judge Jeanine, Fox News, 1/29/2012:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You gotta rage against the machine at this point in order to defend our republic and save what is-
what is good and secure and prosperous about our nation – we need somebody
who's engaged in sudden and relentless reform and isn't afraid to shake it up, shake up that establishment. So
if for no other reason, rage against the machine, vote for Newt!
Annoy a liberal! Vote Newt!

The Australian minister of transport and infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, recently plunged himself into an embarrassing situation that will probably stain his reputation permanently (see the Daily Mail's coverage here). He delivered a speech in which one passage, a piece of nicely honed rhetoric about the leader of the opposition (the Liberal party), was lifted with hardly any alteration from a speech that Michael Douglas was seen giving in a 1995 American romantic comedy, The American President (script by Aaron Sorkin). Naturally the two speech segments are now available side by side on YouTube. Albanese's staff, who prepared the speech for him (Albanese claims never to have seen the movie) had apparently forgotten that (1) millions of Australians have in fact personally visited a movie theater, and (2) some of them remember at least parts of movies that they have seen.

We inaugurated "The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding" back in 2005 to honor this inspired effort:

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

While I don't think that we've actually ever gotten around to awarding the prize again, we've nominated other candidates intermittently over the years. The latest to deserve nomination is Mark Steyn, for his channeling of Mitt Romney in "The Man Who Gave Us Newt", National Review 1/22/2012 (emphasis added):

Why is the stump speech so awful? “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.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

A couple of months ago, I pointed out that entertainment industry folks are tracking Justin Bieber's popularity using automated sentiment analysis, and I used that as a leaping-off point for some comments about language technology and social media. Here I am again, but suddenly it's not just Justin's bank account we're talking about, it's the future of the country.

As the Republican primary season marches along, a novel use of technology in politics is evolving even more rapidly, and arguably in a more interesting way, than the race itself: the analysis of social media to take the pulse of public opinion about candidates. In addition to simply tracking mentions about political candidates, people are starting to suggest that volume and sentiment analysis on tweets (and other social media, but Twitter is the poster child here) might produce useful information about people's viewpoints, or even predict the success of political campaigns. Indeed, it's been suggested that numbers derived from Twitter traffic might be better than polls, or at least better than pundits. (Is that much of a bar to set? Never mind.)

This bit of social commentary comes from the Latino Rebels website. Like many brilliant ads, its impact is multiplied by the fact that, even after you've had the Aha! instant of "getting it", your mind continues to unspool a series of relevant inferences.

I bet if you sat down and started listing them, you could easily reel off a good dozen or so.

John McCain has endorsed Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and has been stumping for him in New Hampshire and South Carolina. In the course of those speeches, he's made a couple of name-substitution errors.

Justin Sink, "Santorum denies making a racial comment on welfare", The Hill 1/5/12:

Iowa runner-up Rick Santorum said Thursday that he would be "a much bigger player" than expected in the New Hampshire primary and denied saying that he didn't want "to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Santorum allegedly made the controversial comments when discussing welfare in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News, but he maintained that people misheard the word "black" when he stumbled on a word.

“I looked at that, and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out.  And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn't," Santorum said.

Marin Cogan, "Payroll tax deal: Will House frosh comply?", Politico 12/22/2011, quoting Mo Brooks (R Alabama):

“It is most unfortunate that so many elected officials in Washington have a greater focus on November 2012’s elections than on sound public policy or advancing America’s interests. Both the House and Senate plans are fiscally reckless and should be deposited on the dump heap of history,” he said.

The latest installment of Ruben Bolling's political cartoon "Tom the Dancing Bug" takes the form of a satirical information sheet, "So… You've Been Indefinitely Detained!" Among the "Frequently Asked Questions, Which You'll Have Plenty of Time to Contemplate," is this one:

Q. Have I been disappeared?
A. People aren't "disappeared" in America! Only in lawless dictatorships can intransitive verbs be used to make passive forms.

In the tumultuous run-up to the momentous announcement of the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year (to be proclaimed on January 6, 2012), Language Log's own Ben Zimmer is the main point-man with the media.  See here, here, and here.

The Chinese, of course, are not to be outdone, so they have for the past few years been choosing a "Character of the Year."  This year, 2011, the character selected is kòng 控.  Everybody seems to think that kòng 控 means "control".  In this post, however, I'm going to question that assumption, and I'm also going to cast doubt upon the whole usefulness and validity of choosing a "Character of the Year".

I've been struck for some time by the amazingly loose way the press uses the verb compare. You must have noticed the sort of thing I mean. Politician A reacts to some harsh policy or aggressive act advocated by politician B and says something like "Even Hitler didn't go that far", and the headlines say "A COMPARES B TO HITLER." I've seen dozens of examples of this (if you want to see a concrete example, take a look at this story about Hank Williams Jr. allegedly comparing Barack Obama with Hitler, something he clearly did not do). I thought it might be worth mentioning on Language Log at some point. But I have never seen such an outrageously careless instance as Evan McMorris-Santoro's claim on TPM that:

Obama senior strategist David Axelrod compared the former House Speaker [Newt Gingrich] to the ass end of a monkey.

Axelrod absolutely did no such thing (as Victor Steinbok pointed out in an email to the American Dialect Society's list). Asked about Gingrich's rising prominence (40% of Republicans now support him for president), Axelrod said this:

Just remember the higher a monkey climbs on a pole, the more you can see his butt. So, you know, the Speaker is very high on the pole right now and we’ll see how people like the view.

This isn't comparing Gingrich with a monkey's rear end!