Language Log

Commenting on the fact that the overall speaking rate in JFK's inaugural address was 96.5 words per minute, the second slowest in the past 60 years ("Inaugural Speed", 9/14/2010), Terry Collmann noted that that Kennedy had the reputation of being a fast talker, with his inaugural address specifically cited by one authority:

Certainly his Inauguration Speech was powerful in content but Kennedy also delivered it with a rapid rate of speech.

What's going on here?

A couple of days ago, and within minutes of each other, David Moser and Brendan O'Kane called my attention to the latest graphemic pun going around the "Nèi liánwǎng 内联网" (what some netizens call the firewalled Chinese Internet, and what we might translate as "Intranet") is to refer to the 目田 and 氏王 enjoyed by Chinese citizens.

Ian Best writes:

Since it was first used by Palin, and then commented upon by the media, I've heard the word [refudiate] used a couple of times in everyday speech. Both times it was used in a playful, ironic way, as if the person knew it was a Palin-invented, non-legitimate word. I.e. "You need to refudiate that comment!"

My question: At what point does a word become a legitimate word, one worth keeping, if it is used often enough in everyday speech, even ironically?

I actually think "refudiate" is a useful invention, whether intended or not by Palin. "Refute" and "repudiate" have distinct meanings, and it is certainly possible to do both simultaneously. Politics and origins aside, what do you think about the word itself, and about the chance that it will catch on?

I ought to be grateful to see any sort of sporadic twitching of anti-racism, since I despise racists so much, but as I have said before, I sometimes find it hard to summon up a great deal of enthusiasm for some UK victories over hate speech. Let me tell you about a story I meant to mention back at the end of June but didn't get around to. It seems to have almost completely slipped away from public notice in the six weeks. The aspect of it that is likely to astonish Americans acquainted with the First Amendment is that a black city councillor, speaking in a council meeting in Bristol, England, in remarks about a race-related issue before the council, was prosecuted for a criminal offense, and fined, because she (allegedly) used the word coconut. The minor point, of linguistic and philosophical rather than legal relevance, is that strictly she didn't use the word at all.

A commenter named bloix here on Language Log recently pointed out yet another case of passive allegations:

First Read, a reliable purveyor of Beltway conventional wisdom, tries out the passive voice: "As for the media, we've allowed this story over race [to] bury one of the more consequential weeks of Obama's presidency thus far (the financial reform legislation becoming law, Senate passage of the jobless benefits, and Kagan clearing the Senate Judiciary Committee). Whether it's Sherrod, Gates, or Jeremiah Wright, the topic of race pushes the media's buttons like no other issue."

The facts: there are seven verbs between the quotation marks, and not a single one of them figures in a passive construction. Yes, zero for 7 (following zero for 4 here and zero for 5 here). If passives were UFOs, the country would be frantic over all the sightings, but the Air Force wouldn't be scrambling any jets.

My piece on Sarah Palin’s refudiate — “Got to celebrate it!” — is on Fresh Air  today (weirdly edited and repunctuated on the NPR site but fixed now). I noodle over why Palin never cottoned to the error before she was caught called out and felt obliged to defend it: probably because repudiate is an item that you're most likely to encounter in books with semicolons in them.  (I wanted to call the piece "Never a Duh! Moment" but NPR likes titles that tip their hands.)  In the end, though, I was more interested in the keening indignation that these things evoke among the logotariat (can’t find any other hits for that one, but a claim of first coining requires more intense Zimmering than I’m capable of). It's a point that has been made before in these pages, particularly by Mark (for example here, here, and here); I defended Palin against the de-haut-en-bushwah (Ben?) condescension of her critics here and here. But it isn't as if it doesn't still need saying:

Take the way the logotariat reacted to Palin's use of "verbage" in place of "verbiage" during the 2008 campaign. It's a very common error, and in its way a logical one. The "i" in "verbiage" doesn't make any sense if you think, as most people do, that the word is related to "verb" and "verbal." (It actually comes from the same root as "warble.") But in The New Yorker, James Wood took "verbage" as Palin's own invention, calling it a perfect example of the Republicans' disdain for words: "so close to garbage, so far from language."

"Where do you begin with that? With the remarkable condescension of "garbage" (so close to "trash")? Or with the insolence of asserting that faulty usage betrays stupidity and turpitude?

If you haven't quite yet gotten your fill after last week's refudiate-fest, I return to the Palinism in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt of interest to all you antedaters:

Some have observed that Palin isn't the first to invent the word refudiate. Patrick Galvin of Politico notes a couple of recent uses, such as Sen. Mike DeWine's statement on "Fox & Friends" in 2006: "I think anyone that is associated with him campaigning needs to refudiate these comments." And on Language Log, Mark Liberman points to a playful usage in John Sladek's 1984 collection of science-fiction short stories, The Lunatics of Terra.

Even earlier is this glaring example that I found in the Atlanta Constitution of June 21, 1925: a headline reading "Scandal Taint Refudiated In Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement."

The headline refers to a court ruling in the Teapot Dome scandal that rejected accusations of fraud against former Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and his cronies in the oil business. A Fall press release interpreted the verdict as "refuting all taint of scandal," and the hurried headline writer must have mashed up refute with repudiate, just as Palin would 85 years later.

That's the first sentence of Andrew Breitbart's explosive recent article, "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism–2010", posted on his web site biggovernment.com.

Breitbart is a sort of new-journalism entrepreneur who developed the Huffington Post for Adriana Huffington, but is better known as the current proprietor of various popular right-wing web sites, and the promoter of last year's controversial ACORN undercover videos. And the "context" that he had in mind was the media furor over the NAACP's call for "Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches".

The explosive part of Breitbart's article was a video clip, a bit less than two minutes long, presented under the title "NAACP: Bigotry in their ranks". The video's content is taken from a speech at the NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet, 3/27/2010, given by Shirley Sherrod, who was then the US Department of Agriculture's Director of Rural Development for the state of Georgia. Graphics in the intro to this video proclaim that "Ms. Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing over a billion dollars, she discriminates against people due to their race". In the video, Ms. Sherrod describes what happened when a white farmer came to her for help in saving his property from foreclosure. She indeed says that that she reacted to him in racial terms, and "didn't give him the full force of what I could do".

Comedians and cartoonists continue to have fun with Sarah Palin's use of refudiate, and her Shakespeare-citing defense — here's Jeff Danziger's editorial cartoon for 7/20/1010:

[Note: Thanks to a link from Andrew Sullivan, our server is maxed out at around 2,000 visitors/hour, and things are a little slow. If you come back in a few hours, response times for browsing or commenting should be better.]

Back on July 14, when Sarah Palin used the blend refudiate in her role as Fox News contributor, I considered posting about it, but decided not to, since I'm not a fan of pouncing on political slips of the tongue.

But today, a week later, she used the same blend in a message on Twitter:

File under "We are all post-racial now"; from a CNN report, "NAACP passes resolution blasting Tea Party 'racism'":

"Tea Party leaders reacted to the NAACP action with swift and angry derision.

"I am disinclined to take lectures on racial sensitivity from a group that insists on calling black people, 'Colored,' " Mark Williams, national spokesman of the Tea Party Express, told CNN. "The Tea Party [movement] is about the constitution of this country…[and] ensuring equality for each and every individual human being."

Charles Krauthammer has joined the chorus of pundits using presidential first-person pronouns to test the theory that a lie told often enough becomes the truth ("The selective modesty of Barack Obama", WaPo, 7/9/2010):

It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I."

I have completed a reanalysis of the verbs in President Obama's speech after the BP oil disaster, and can add a further note to Mark's analysis of Kathleen Parker's unbelievably irresponsible prattle about how the frequency of passive constructions chosen by his speechwriters shows that President Obama talks like a girl (is "suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit").

I can report that I found a way of counting under which one can vindicate Paul JJ Payack's 13 percent figure, which Mark found inexplicable. But a morass of inexplicable stupidity remains nonetheless.