Language Log

In the New York Times Week in Review this weekend, I have a piece looking at the clever linguistic strategies that Egyptian protesters used to tell President Hosni Mubarak that it was time to go. (There's also a nice slideshow accompanying the article.) Language Log readers will already know about the appearance of "Game Over" in the Cairo protests, as well as the use of Chinese to get the message across, but there were many other creative variations on that theme.

About a year ago I wrote a post entitled "Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance."

This construction is still flourishing in China.  Indeed, it is so ubiquitous nowadays as to have lost some of its edge.  While not entirely banal, the frequent usage of the adversative passive has caused much of the raw, critical force that it once possessed to be dissipated through overfamiliarity.  However, when the object of derision or dissatisfaction is one that people are really upset about, the adversative passive can still pack a potent punch.

The U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks offer an unflattering picture of Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, who is now the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and thus the de facto ruler of Egypt. The most widely cited passage, dating from 2008, noted that

__ __ __ described the mid-level officer corps as generally disgruntled, and said that one can hear mid-level officers at MOD clubs around Cairo openly expressing disdain for Tantawi. These officers refer to Tantawi as "Mubarak's poodle," he said, and complain that "this incompetent Defense Minister" who reached his position only because of unwavering loyalty to Mubarak is "running the military into the ground."

This being Language Log rather than International Politics Log, I'm not going to try to evaluate the validity of this perspective, or its implications for the future of Mr. Tantawi or of Egypt. Instead, I'd like to take up some linguistic questions: Did those mid-level officers really call Mr. Tantawi an Arabic version of "Mubarak's poodle", or is this the source's English-language characterization of their attitudes? And where does the whole "X's poodle" business come from, anyhow? When did it start, and who started it? And why "poodle" rather than "yorkie", "beagle", "cocker spaniel", or whatever?

Signs with Chinese on them have begun to appear in the Cairo demonstrations. Here is a protester whose sign combines Chinese and two varieties of Arabic:

Jen Chaney, "Christina Aguilera botches national anthem at Super Bowl", Washington Post 2/6/2011:

Aguilera completely dissed both the ramparts and the fact that they were gallantly streaming by skipping that line entirely, instead singing: "What so proudly we watched at the twilight's last gleaming." That was a pseudo-repeat of the earlier lyric, "What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming." If you missed it, catch the moment via the video below.

Last September, the folks at Bloggingheads.tv brought John McWhorter and me together for a spirited dialog (sorry, diavlog) on a range of language issues. Today they asked us back to do a postmortem of President Obama's State of the Union address, analyzing the president's rhetoric. Here's the video.

I haven't yet thought of any interesting linguistic aspects of last night's State of the Union message, or of the various official and unofficial responses to it. But in preparing for the event, I saw some coverage of a recent speech in Iowa where Rep. Michele Bachmann said something that made me wonder about the meaning and rhetorical use of the word "generations", and about her particular choice of the phrase "21 generations" to describe the historical span of American ideals.

My latest reader response for The New York Times Magazine's On Language column tackles a turn of phrase that has come up on Language Log many times: cannot be underestimated. The occasion is New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's inaugural address earlier this month, in which the governor used the magic phrase twice (and talked about "underestimating" a third time without the cannot). I give the requisite shout-out to Language Log, of course.

Lameen Souag has posted a detailed analysis of "the language being used by the newly significant figures jockeying for power" in Tunisia ("Language Use in Tunisian Politics",  Jabal al-Lughat, 1/17/2011).

According to an email from Youssef Gaigi posted by Gillian York:

Today’s speech shows definitely a major shift in Tunisia’s history.
[Tunisian president Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali talked for the third time in the past month to the people. Something unprecedented, we barely knew this guy. Ben Ali talked in the Tunisian dialect instead of Arabic for the first time ever.

A story in today's New York Times will give you some background on the serious and astonishing situation in Tunisia: David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, "Crisis Deepens in Tunisia as President’s Offer Falls Flat", 1/14/2011. [Update — Since I posted this, Ben Ali has resigned and fled the country, as the linked story indicates.]

There's been quite a bit of discussion about Sarah Palin's commentary on the Tucson shootings, and most of it has been about the segment where she characterizes criticism of her gunsight map as "a blood libel":

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If you don't like their ideas
you're free to propose better ideas
but
especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding
journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel
that serves only to incite
the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.
That is reprehensible.

I have no idea.

Several people have suggested that the ravings of Jared Lee Loughner ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar"; "What's government if words don't have meaning?") may have been influenced by the ravings of David Wynn Miller ("I am the judge in 1988 who wrote the mathematical interface on all 5,000 languages proving that language is a linear equation in algebra certifying that all words have 900 definitions through this mathematical algebraic formula and over the course of the past 21 years have developed an accuracy level in the syntaxing of language sentence structure to prove the correct sentence structure communication syntax language is required in a court system"; "FOR THESE TRUTH-COMMUNICATIONS-CITIZEN'S-KNOWLEDGE OF THESE FACTS ARE WITH THESE CLAIMS OF THESE FACTS-AS-FACTS BY THESE SENTENCE-CONTRACTS."), mentioned about a year ago on LL ("All words have 900 definitions?", 1/29/2010).

I'm skeptical about this — so far I haven't seen any connection more specific than the fact that both relate to language and both are ravings; but I don't have a lot of patience for reading this sort of thing.

On January 4, Cornel West was asked on MSNBC to evaluate the state of the country and President Obama's performance. On January 5 and 6, Rush Limbaugh carried on at some length about a speech error in Prof. West's answer. On January 7, Ann Althouse joined the conversation.

My modest contribution today is to describe the cited error in a bit more detail, and to offer a small bit of evidence about its likely causes.