Language Log

According to Ben Zimmer, I'm writing from the front lines. But it's pretty quiet here, sitting at home in Texas, looking at tweets that have come out of Libya in the last couple of weeks. And somehow I don't think I'll be the first twitterologist to suffer from combat fatigue. Maybe that's because my students Joey Frazee and Chris Brown, together with our collaborator Xiong Liu, have been the ones doing computational battle in our little research team. That and the fact that nobody is firing mortars around here.

Yet quiet as it is where I'm sitting, it's a startling fact that today it's easy to hear far off clamor, to listen to the online noise made by thousands of ordinary people. Ordinary people in war zones. What are those people thinking?

From Laine Gates and Dolly Hayde:

One sentence from your recent post on Wernicke's aphasia (" . . . we here at Language Log are committed to taxonomies of nonsense that are as elaborate as possible") made us hopeful that you might be interested in the "salvage ethnography" project we've begun with the Google Reader Lexicon at http://googlereaderlexicon.wikispaces.com/.

See also "Please don't kill our last enlightenment tool", Dust and Trash 2/22/2011.; Sarah Perez, "Iranians Upset Over Google Reader Changes", TechCrunch 2/24/2011:

Last weekend I was on the NPR show "On the Media" to talk about how the word occupy has evolved since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement in mid-September. I reiterated a point I had made in my Word Routes column the previous week, namely that the success of the movement has been helped along by the modular nature of the Occupy slogan, allowing any place name to fill the "Occupy ___" template. That template has shown up in protests around the world, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, with English Occupy generally left intact (perhaps for maximum media impact). In China, meanwhile, Occupy has a translation-equivalent that is being censored online.

FDR had his weekly "Fireside chats", and in 1982 Ronald Reagan began the modern tradition of weekly presidential addresses, which U.S. presidents since then have maintained. I don't think that very many people actually listen to these things — no one that I've asked has ever admitted to regular consumption. But I've been collecting them since 2004, and listening to most of them, and a few days ago I noticed something.

During the Arab Spring earlier this year, we noticed some demonstrators holding signs in Chinese that were not always idiomatic or were written incorrectly ("Maybe Mubarak understands Chinese", 2/10/2011; "Chinese sign in Benghazi", 3/21/2011; "Roll out of here, Mubarak", 4/3/2011). In the recent "Occupy Wall Street" actions, one marcher was likewise seen with a Chinese sign of dubious credentials:

We've had a bumper crop of recent electoral events where I live, and given that I write a good deal about language and persuasion, at regular intervals I get asked to advise on political campaigns. I always decline.

I have no trouble advocating publicly and with feeling for my own political beliefs. I also have no trouble accepting money from commercial entities (well, not usually, anyway) who want to hire me to consult on the technical aspects of their persuasion strategies. But I do get squeamish when it comes to drawing on my knowledge of language and psychology in order to tinker directly with the machinery of political messaging. It basically comes down to the fact that, in order to do so effectively, I would inevitably have to recommend—at least some of the time—the use of techniques that I would ultimately prefer not to play a prominent role in our political discourse. If you read much about political psychology and persuasion, it's hard to miss the growing pile of studies that reveal the various levers and buttons that reside in the less deliberative rooms of our minds and that can set in motion behaviors and choices all while leaving the persuadee convinced that it's his rational, thoughtful self that's been at the control panel all along. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think that the wholesale exploitation of shallow cognitive processes for political ends accomplishes no good thing for the overall health of civic life, and that thoughtful deliberation and evaluation of candidates and their ideas should drive our democratic impulses.

According to John R. Hanson ("'Talking Texan' could mean trouble for Perry", The Houston Chronicle 9/29/2011):

Gov. Rick Perry's performances in the three recently televised debates of the candidates for the Republican nomination for president have prompted much criticism and in some cases alarm from national pundits, not only for their content but also for their lack of verbal fluency.

Prof. Hanson attributes this to a regional difference, which first struck him when he moved to Texas in 1973:

I appreciated the plain-spokeness, but noticed that, typically, utterances were not only simple and straightforward, but also strikingly spare and uncomplex compared with what I had known before. Linguistic flair and embellishment, highly valued elsewhere, were normally and notably absent. […]

Rick Perry [is] talking Texan to pundits who have much different attitudes and abilities with respect to the use of language.

Juanita Jean, writing from Richmond TX at The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., took these as fighting words:

Professor John R. Hanson II can kiss my butt.  I am a fifth generation Texan, totally educated in Texas public schools and universities, and I’ll take on all comers with Shakespeare or Aristophanes.  I know the poetry of Dante and Willie Nelson.   We are not some hick outpost.  Nor have we developed some kind of language that only twins understand.

A couple of days ago, Greta van Susteren interviewed Sarah Palin on Fox ("'Maverick' Palin vs. 'Quasi Reality Show'", 9/27/2011).  Out of the whole 16-minute segment, one word got the lion's share of the coverage.  Thus Sheila Marikar, "Sarah Palin: ‘Is a Title and Campaign Too Shackle-y?’", ABC News 9/27/2011:

A Palin presidency: Too “shackle-y?”

That’s what Sarah Palin suggested on Fox News’ “On The Record with Greta VanSusteren” tonight […] “Is a title worth it?” she asked, rhetorically. “Does a title shackle a person? Are they someone like me who’s maverick? I do go rogue and I call it like I see it and I don’t mind stirring it up in order to get people to think and debate aggressively.”

“Is a title and a campaign too shackle-y?,” she continued.

Andrew Malcolm, "New gaffe: Obama confuses Jews with janitors", LA Times 9/26/2011:

Here is what the president actually said, catching himself almost in time but not quite:

If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a Jew, uh, as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor. I have no problem with that. […]

Maybe in Saturday night's speech Obama was thinking about all those talks on Israel in New York.

This has gotten quite a bit of play in the media as well as in the blogosphere.  The trouble is, I'm not at all sure that Mr. Malcolm's version of the president's speech error is accurate.

There's some interesting socio-politico-linguistic discussion, along with links to a lot more of the same, in Dylan Stableford's post "Was the Associated Press transcription of Obama’s CBC speech ‘racist’?", The Cutline 9/26/2011. I don't have time this morning to add significantly to this discussion, but in any case, I'd largely be recapitulating the material covered in this earlier LL posts:

"The internet pilgrim's guide to g-dropping", 5/10/2004
"Empathetic -in'", 10/18/2008
"Palin's tactical g-lessness", 10/18/2008
"Pickin' up on those features also", 2/29/2008
"Eye dialect in the newspapers", 5/7/2008
"Aksking again", 2/25/2010
"Pawlenty's linguistic 'southern strategy'?", 3/17/2011
"Symbols and signals in g-dropping", 3/23/2011
"Automatic classification of g-dropping", 6/12/2011
"Ask Language Log: Writing 'gonna' or 'going to'", 6/25/2011

That's the title of a recent paper by Caitlin Fausey and Teenie Matlock that appeared in the journal Political Psychology. It's a heartwarming title, one that permits me to dare to dream of that better day when political parties will divert rivers of cash to linguistics departments, when a grad student will be able to defend a thesis on applicative constructions in East Asian languages one day and take up a lucrative job as Washington policy wonk the next, and when volumes by Noam Chomsky and Richard Montague will be pressed into the hands of military personnel charged with the task of winning the hearts and minds of residents in troublesome, volatile nations.

The paper stems from recent interest in the persuasion sciences about the fact that how a message is expressed often has a startling impact on the choices and behaviors of its audience. Most of the attention has been lavished on questions of lexical choice, or on whether a message is framed as involving gains rather than losses. But these are happy days, and persuasion research seems to be taking a more adventurous turn, with investigators beginning to tackle questions involving finer points of semantics and their grammatical correlates.

Professor Cameron Johnston was giving the introductory lecture in a social science course at York University, Toronto, and talking about the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable opinions. You can't say something like "All Jews should be sterilized" and represent that as acceptable just because it's your opinion, he explained. And at that, a 22-year-old senior named Sarah Grunfeld got up and walked straight out of the class to report him to Hasbara, a pro-Israel advocacy group on campus, which rapidly put out a statement calling for the professor to be fired for anti-Semitism. It's a dangerous path one treads when one tries to give examples of obnoxious propositions in a classroom where not all the students have a firm grasp of the fundamental distinction between the use and the mention of a linguistic expression.

Spokespersons for the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) often complain that the words or actions of individuals or groups from other nations "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".  This is true even when those individuals or groups are speaking or acting on behalf of some segment of the Chinese population (e.g., political prisoners, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, people whose houses have been forcibly demolished, farmers, and so forth).  A typical cause for invoking the "hurt(s) the feelings of the Chinese people" circumlocution would be for the head of state of a country to meet with the Dalai Lama or Rebiya Kadeer.  A good example is Mexican President Calderon's recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, which the PRC government denounced in extremely harsh terms.  The vitriolic rebuke led one commentator to refer to the PRC denunciation of the Mexican President as a kind of "bullying".