Language Log

… and is careless with grammatical terminology. Thomas Lifson, "Obama's troop withdrawal speech: when politics trumps victory", 6/23/2011:

Notably absent from the speech was any mention of General Petraeus or any of his other military advisors. The reasonable inference is that his military advice counseled against the withdrawal. Notably present was the personal pronoun, which was used about 3 dozen times. Obama is now openly mocked as "President Me, Myself, and I."

I learned this morning (from Adam Nagourney and Ian Lovett, "Whitey Bulger is arrested in California", NYT 6/23/2011) that

James (Whitey) Bulger, a legendary Boston crime boss indicted in 19 murders and who is on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted list, was arrested by federal authorities Wednesday night in Santa Monica, ending an international manhunt that had gone on since Mr. Bulger disappeared nearly 16 years ago, the F.B.I. announced.

This made me think, not of crime and punishment, but of euphony and usefulness.

Craig Shirley & Bill Pascoe don't like Jon Huntsman Jr., and in particular they didn't like the speech (CSPAN video, transcript) in which he announced his presidential candidacy ("Jon Huntsman is no Ronald Reagan", The Daily Caller 6/21/2011):

Most Americans are on the right side of the spectrum. They are knowledgeable and far more sophisticated about politics and government than the commentariat gives them credit for.

They are awash in personalities, and are sick of them. They don’t want Kim Kardashian as their president. They want someone of substance and depth and content who uses the personal pronouns “we” and “us” more than he uses “I” and “me,” and who understands what it is about America that makes it great — and will do everything in his power to restore that greatness.

The segment that I've put in bold face is yet another replication of the First-Person-Singular Pronoun trope — but unlike most versions of this complaint, which can only be checked by comparing the relative frequency of FPSPs in comparable speeches of different politicians, this one makes a within-politician claim, and thus can easily be checked by taking a quick look at the particular speech these two political experts are complaining about.

Jon Huntsman, formerly the governor of Utah and ambassador to China, announced he was running for the Republican presidential nomination at a campaign kickoff event today at Liberty State Park in fair Jersey City. Before his announcement, the assembled crowd was treated to an introductory video. Among Huntsman's exceptional qualities listed by the folksy voiceover narrator was this: "Speaks Mandarin Chinese, and Hokkien… whatever that is."

(The relevant bit occurs at about 2:15 in the above video. You can catch the audio on C-SPAN as well.)

"The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope: A Report by Tom A. Coburn, M.D., U.S. Senator, Oklahoma", April 2011:

This report is the first comprehensive overview of NSF. It examines the management of the agency, recognizes many of its accomplishments and successes, identifies some areas for improvements, and questions some of its priorities and funding decisions.

The good news for taxpayers is there is no question NSF has contributed significantly to scientific discovery.

The bad news is a significant percentage of your money is going to what most Americans will consider fraud, waste and abuse, and there are many areas where NSF could contribute far more with better management and smarter targeting of resources.

This report identifies over $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF. This includes tens of millions of dollars spent on questionable studies, excessive amounts of expired funds that have not been returned to the Treasury, inadequate contracting practices that unnecessarily increase costs, and a lack of metrics to demonstrate results. Additionally, a significant portion of the agency’s budget is spent on efforts duplicating missions performed by other government agencies and a number of NSF officials and grantees have been caught engaging in inappropriate behaviors, but face little or no consequences.

Over at headsup: the blog, fev recently pondered variation in transcription practice ("Annals of g-droppin'", 6/6/2011).  He starts by noting that the same paper edited the same quote, in the same AP story, to have -in' in some but not all gerund-participles in one version, but -ing throughout in another version.  And his main concern is with the socio-political subtext of the choice to use eye-dialect in some cases and not in others:

It's worth puttin' the question to the AP (and/or your own political writers). What exactly are you trying to show about Palin's speech, and how consistent can you credibly claim to be about it — either within a single sentence of hers or among candidates who may have those or other speech features despite their necktie-wearin' formality?

Today's political buzz is all about the win by Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York's 26th congressional district, encompassing suburbs northeast of Buffalo and west of Rochester. National issues, particularly the debate over Medicare, played a big part in the race, but local factors were key as well, with the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, losing votes to Jack Davis, a third-party spoiler running on the Tea Party line. Hochul was helped by squabbles between the Corwin and Davis campaigns, most notably a confrontation between Davis and Corwin's chief of staff outside a veteran's event a couple of weeks ago. The video of the confrontation memorably featured Jack Davis saying, "You want punched out?"

Yesterday, Marc Cenedella did a sort of  Breakfast Experiment™, and reported the results in "I, Obama: The President and the personal pronoun":

President Obama has taken criticism in some sectors for his use of the personal pronoun in describing, and applauding, the nation’s success in covert operations. So I’ve spent my Saturday morning at the outstanding website of The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara to find out what happens when Presidents speak to the CIA.

I picked twelve notable addresses from Presidential speeches at the CIA’s Langley headquarters over the past 52 years and run [sic] the numbers.

The latest plagiarism scandal involves the now former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned due to allegations that he had plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation. The scandal itself is of no particular interest, but it has inspired some really pretty and informative visualization. The "barcode" shows the fraction of pages on which plagiarism from a single source was found (black), the fraction of pages on which plagiarism from multiple sources was found (red), and the fraction of pages on which no plagiarism was detected (white). The blue pages are things like the table of contents and appendices which were not included in the analysis. There is also a display of the individual marked-up pages here.

We've just had a national election here in Canada, the overall result of which is that the Conservatives, who had formed a minority government, finally secured a majority. Another interesting result was the collapse of the Bloc Québécois, the Québec separatist party, which lost most of its seats to the New Democrats, the social democratic party, which now forms the Official Opposition. Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, who resigned as a result of his party's poor performance, went into the election thinking that language was still an issue. Yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail gave a brief quotation from each party leader on the front page. Duceppe's was: "How can we accept putting our confidence in people who don't even speak our language?".

One can only imagine that he, like many others, was stunned by the result in the Québec riding of Berthier–Maskinongé, where the NDP ran a young woman, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who lives 400km from the riding, went to Las Vegas for a vacation at the peak of the campaign, and for practical purposes does not speak French. She won, with a margin of 10 percentage points over the runner up, the incumbent Bloc candidate. We're not in Kansas anymore…

As everyone knows, the English subordinator that can often be omitted when it introduces a complement clause ("I  think (that) your plan goes too far") and also when it introduces a relative clause ("This is the one (that) I want"). And my intuition tells me that omitting that is a bit more informal than including it.

So I was a bit suprised to find that when President Obama gives speeches, he tends to add that in places where his  text "as prepared for delivery" leaves it out.

Mike Pence (R-IN), interviewed by Greta van Susteren on Fox News:

Jonathan Smith sent me this photograph of a man holding a bilingual sign during the protests in Egypt: