Language Log

Following up on my post "Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations" (7/1/2010), Linda Seebach sent a link to a column in which Mark Steyn complained about president Obama's "passivity" ("Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl", 5/21/2010):

Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn't always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the "Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act." Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That's how I'd put it. This is what the president of the United States said:

"Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

Now Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it's the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

In her most recent column ("Obama: Our first female president", 7/1/2010), Kathleen Parker argues that Barack Obama writes like a girl:

If Bill Clinton was our first black President, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman President. […]

No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie President. But … he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises […]

What's her evidence for this lack of "rhetorical-testosterone"? Along with a lot of vague stuff about how Obama is "a chatterbox" who shares with "Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton" (!) the ability to "assume feminine communication styles effectively", the column includes exactly one relevant fact:

Obama's [oil spill] speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

If you're not a regular reader, please take a few minutes to scan our last discussion of linguistic "analysis" from Paul Payack's Global Language Monitor ("Language guru runs with the journalistic pack", 6/17/2010). According to Mr. Payack, president Obama's address on the gulf oil spill was excessively "professorial" because its average sentence length was 19.8 words. I checked on president George W. Bush' post-Katrina speech, and found that its average sentence length was 23.5 words, suggesting either that Bush was even more "professorial" than Obama, or that Mr. Payack was full of it.

[Update 6/20/2010 — The linked CNN story has been extensively modified, for the better. The headline is now "Language mavens exchange words over Obama's Oval Office speech," and the article now highlights Ron Yaros along with Payack, and incorporates some information from this post. Fev at headsuptheblog has some before-and-after analysis.]

It's amazing what a grip Received Perceptions have on what passes for journalism these days.  Today, CNN enlisted Paul Payack to lead us through an unusually contentless version of one of the standard categories of Obama  criticism  ("Language guru: Obama speech too 'professorial' for his target audience", 6/17/2010):

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

How can we tell? Well, for a start,

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Wait, what? Text at a ninth-grade reading level is too professorial for the American people to understand? When it's read out loud to them? Color me skeptical. But wait, there's more…

Down in South Carolina, there's a weekly webcast from local bars called Pub Politics (slogan: "Beer … bringing Democrats and Republicans together"). The hosts are Phil Bailey, the Director of the SC Democratic Caucus, and Wesley Donehue, a Republican political consultant. The most recent episode was taped at the Flying Saucer bar in Columbia, and was scheduled to feature State Representative Boyd Brown. But State Senator Jake Knotts showed up and stole the show.

I don't know, and I have no reason to care. But one of the more bizarre political stories of 2010 has been the series of Republican political operatives claiming to have had sexual relations with Nikki Haley, the leading Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina. (Haley denies the claims, and blames her political rivals for concocting the stories.)

I bring this up only because it's necessary background for a discussion of the second sex-related linguistic innovation to come out of South Carolina politics in the past year. The first, of course, was "hiking the Appalachian trail", which was one of the cover stories that the current S.C. governor, Mark Sanford, offered for a trip to Argentina to visit his mistress.

One of the first sites to flag that expression as an idiom-in-the-making was Talking Points Memo.  And in a recent post at TPM on the Nikki Haley story, Josh Marshall implicitly noted a gap in the word-stock of English, and proposed a way to fill it ("Somethin' in the Water Down There", TPM 6/2/2010):

I'm not sure which would make for a more colorful and entertaining story: Haley exposed as an inveterate … what I guess you'd call, man-izer or the idea that a series of different GOP operatives, each of whom is currently married, conspiring to publicly allege phony affairs with Haley. What say you?

It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim (among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", Fox News 5/22/2010, wrote:

After passing the nation's toughest state immigration enforcement law, Arizona's school officials are now cracking down on teachers with heavy accents.

The Arizona Department of Education is sending evaluators to audit teachers and their English speaking skills to make sure districts are complying with state and federal laws.

Teachers who are not fluent in English, who make grammatical errors while speaking or who have heavy accents will be temporarily reassigned.

"As you expect science teachers to know science, math teachers to know math, you expect a teacher who is teaching the kids English to know English," said Tom Home, state superintendent of public instruction.

In our numerous posts on Chinglish here at Language Log, we have shown how unintentional errors of translation from Chinese result in ludicrous or impenetrable English.  In this post, I shall demonstrate how translations from English into Chinese can (and often do) intentionally differ from the original.

On March 15, 2010, Nicholas Wade published a long article entitled "A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets" in the Science section of The New York Times.  Mr. Wade interviewed me extensively during the course of preparing the article, so I am intimately familiar with the issues he raised in it and am, in fact, quoted several times by him.

Shortly thereafter, one of China’s most widely read weeklies, Southern Metropolis Weekly (Nándū zhōukān 南都周刊), published a Chinese "translation" of the NYT article entitled "Invisible Cemetery" (Kànbùjiàn de mùdì 看不见的墓地).  It is now available online here.

A funny thing happened to the abbreviation "PR" overnight. When I went to bed last night "PR" typically meant "public relations". When I woke up it didn't.

Canada's House of Commons has passed bill C-232, which requires that justices of the Supreme Court of Canada understand both English and French without the assistance of an interpreter. This will become law unless vetoed by the Senate or denied royal assent by the Governor General (which is exceedingly unlikely). Amazingly, the bill is a private member's bill introduced by a member of the New Democratic Party, which holds only 36 of 308 seats.

For some reason, the current British election campaign has been mercifully free of empty pontificating about first-person pronouns. But Tom Clark, "Barack Obama's travel rhetoric rubs off on Nick Clegg's general election talk", The Guardian, 5/6/2010, did take a shot at reading aspects of political character from candidates' distributions of sentence lengths:

Like the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are laying emphasis on cutting waste. [The speech-writing consultancy] Bespoke reveals both parties demonstrate a striking economy with words when compared with Labour. The average sentence in a Liberal or Tory speech is just 14 words, which is five shorter than Labour. Among the leaders the gap is even bigger, with Gordon Brown's tally of 22 in the average sentence being positively verbose when compared with David Cameron's 13, never mind Clegg's even pithier 12. [Simon] Lancaster [director of the speech-writing consultancy Bespoke] believes the trappings of office can encourage a taste for "lounging in the luxury of super-size statements" when compared with the breathless demands for change that typically characterise opposition.

In tonight's playoff game with the San Antonio Spurs, the Phoenix Suns will wear jerseys reading "Los Suns", in protest of Arizona's recently-enacted immigration-enforcement law.

The team didn't need to have new uniforms made up for the occasion — they just unpacked the jerseys that they've been using since 2007 for the NBA's Noche Latina.

So far, it's been overshadowed by the big BP oil spill, the Times Square bomber, Greece's financial crisis, and other hot news items. But quietly developing in the background is what seems to be the best euphemistic explanation for a sexual escapade since "hiking the Appalachian Trail".

According to Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, "Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with 'rent boy'", Miami New Times, 5/4/2010, the anti-gay activist Dr. George Rekers recently took a ten-day European vacation with a young man known as "Lucien", whom he met though a web site called rentboy.com:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

In the Miami New Times article, Dr. Rekers is quoted as saying ""I had surgery, and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him."

Christopher Beam, in a Slate magazine last Wednesday (published while I was winging my way back to the UK by a modified air route far south of Iceland), connects the strange business of birtherism (the political perversion of believing, or pretending to believe, that President Obama doesn't have a US birth certificate and thus isn't constitutionally allowed to serve) to lexical semantics:

Birtherism is here to stay. And not because more people are going crazy, but because crazy has been redefined. Birtherism isn't the only example. Consider how conservatives accuse Obama of peddling "socialism." Sure, some of them genuinely think that Obama is going to usher in a new Soviet state in which the government owns all means of production. But most right-wingers use it as shorthand for government overreach. So now that's what "socialism" means.

There is a fairly major difference between birtherism and the socialism charge: Birtherism has been disproved by facts. But they're similar in the way they get tossed around without much connection to their original meaning.

He isn't very clear in the way he puts this: "crazy has been redefined" isn't quite right, because everyone agrees that craziness is irrationality or mental disorder of a sort that gives rise to unpredictably strange behavior. But the idea that the word socialism has actually changed its denotation in modern American English might not be so crazy.