Language Log

I'm going to venture to disagree with my colleague and friend John McWhorter's diagnosis of "What does Palinspeak mean?" (TNR, 4/6/2010).

Of course, I don't disagree with John's observation that Sarah Palin's speech style is folksy and informal. As for his comment that "Palin […] has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete", we could quibble over details — how much of the difference is in what public figures say, as opposed to what gets transmitted and reported? — but let's grant that John is right about this as well.

Where I think that John may go wrong is in his analysis of that and there.

There's been a lot of discussion of what Joe Biden apparently said to Barack Obama at the HCR signing ceremony:

When he turns to the president, some combination of careful listening and lip-reading suggests that Biden said "((this is)) a big fucking deal".

Language is changing at a torrid pace in China, and it's not just a massive infusion of English words that is to blame.  Nor can we simply ascribe the dramatic changes in language usage to rampant, wild punning for the purpose of confusing the ubiquitous censors.

Creative manipulation of lexical and grammatical constructions is another way to express ideas that are not permitted under the harsh social controls imposed by the government.  This is evident from the fact that the "character of the year" in China for 2009 is bèi 被.

Is there one? Chris asks the question, citing a collection of LL posts.

Though George W. Bush certainly took his share of (in my opinion) unfair criticism on this issue, I should point out that Howie Carr's long-running Wizard of Uhs feature was focused on Ted Kennedy, and there's been a fairly large-scale attempt to transfer this epithet to Barack Obama, which hasn't really caught on, except in a diluted form as the Teleprompter Meme.

[This is to follow up, as promised, on yesterday's brief note, "Racist sociolinguistics from El Rushbo?"] On Feb. 22, President Obama met with a group of state governors at the White House, as described in Peter Baker and Sam Dillon, "Obama Pitches Education Proposal to Governors", NYT 2/22/2010. He opening the discussion with an 11-minute speech. Video of the whole thing is here. About nine minutes into the presentation, he says:

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First, as a condition of receiving access to Title 1 funds, we will ask all states to put in place a plan to adopt and certify standards that are college and career ready in reading and math.

He pronounces the word ask as [æksk].  On Rush Limbaugh's radio program later in the same day, Limbaugh played the cited sentence, and makes a big deal of this pronunciation.  Among other things, he says:

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((See-)) this is- this is what- this is what Harry Reid was talking about —  Obama can turn on that black dialect uh when he wants to and turn it off.

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Who's he trying to reach out here to, the Reverend Jackson?

(An extended audio clip of Limbaugh's remarks is here.)

Politicians' slips of the tongue hit the news from time to time, with observers often trying to read more into them than is really there.  But Hendrik Hertzberg ("Decoding Limbaugh", The New Yorker, 2/23/2010) argues that Rush Limbaugh has recently reached a new low in mean-spirited misinterpretation. [Update: more here.]

On NBC's "Meet the Press" this morning, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty grasped for a baseball metaphor in this exchange with David Gregory (see the end of this video clip), and came up with the proposal that the Republicans "need to be not just the party of saying, 'We hope President Obama continues to kick it in the dugout'." Here's the context:

A couple of days ago, when I posted about Nicholas Kristof's take on the electrophysiology of politics, I limited my discussion to a 2008 Science article about the relationship between physiological reactions to "threatening images" (like a spider on someone's face) and political attitudes towards "protective policies" (like immigration). Thanks to a couple of enterprising readers, I found a readable .pdf of a 2009 manuscript from the same (University of Nebraska) laboratory, which Kristof also discusses, on the relationship between physiological reactions to "disgusting images" and attitudes towards "sex items" like gay marriage. And as promised, I have a bit more to say after reading it.

Taken together, the two papers are more convincing than either one alone, since the combined results call into question the idea that the measured physiological differences might simply be due to the greater uneasiness of (more conservative) townies being hooked up to electrodes in a university laboratory, compared to (more liberal) university faculty, students, and staff. But the second paper confirms some of the concerns that I had about the size of the effects in the first paper. And it also shows that I was off base when I wrote that "This is not a case of egregious journalistic misunderstanding or over-interpretation". In particular, Kristof doesn't just exaggerate, he directly contradicts the 2009 paper's findings when he writes that

Liberals released only slightly more moisture in reaction to disgusting images than to photos of fruit. But conservatives’ glands went into overdrive.

It's a commonplace observation that survey results depend on how questions are worded.  But I don't think I've ever seen a larger effect of synonym-substitution than the one reported by a recent CBS News/New York Times poll about the U.S. military's DADT ("Don't Ask Don't Tell") policy.

Question: Do you favor or oppose ___ serving in the military?

It's no longer just imperial pontificators like George F. Will and Stanley Fish. The Obama-is-a-narcissist-and-his-use-of-I-proves-it meme has spread like kudzu, wrapping itself around the brainstem of every Fox News sub-editor and provincial pundit in the land. You couldn't kill it with a blowtorch.

Fox News, specifically, has decided to count first-person pronouns in every speech Obama gives. Thus "The I's Have It: Obama Hits 34 I's in Washington D.C.", FOXNews.com, 2/7/2010:

Much attention has been given to President Obama's persistent use of "I" when giving speeches to sell his administration's agenda. Is he taking responsibility — or, as his critics say, is he still in campaign mode? FoxNews.com is tracking the president's speeches all this month and will report back after each to see whether The "I's" Have It.

Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Sarah Palin: In some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, "How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?" She said, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"

Maybe the L.A. Times editors could have spared themselves some confusion by paying more attention to the American Dialect Society voting for Word of the Year. For 2008, I included hopey changey in my list of nominations, defining it as follows:

hopey changey: Derisive epithet incorporating Obama’s two main buzzwords (also dopey hopey changey).

In the '08 WOTY voting, hopey changey (hyphenated as hopey-changey) ended up in a special category of election-related terms, finishing a distant third behind maverick and lipstick on a pig (but ahead of hockey mom).

I haven't had a chance to do any analysis of last night SOTU address, but Nate Silver has some interesting observations about the matrix of word-count comparisons to other such addresses over recent decades.

[Update: and more here from Jamie Pennebaker.]

[Update 2: discussion of computational models of standing ovations by Dan Katz, including a link to a NetLogo applet.]

[Update 3: for a discussion of the actual content, see James Fallows in the Atlantic.]

Several readers have written to wonder why no one at Language Log has written about the recent Harry Reid controversy.  In fact, one of us has, but in a different forum — John McWhorter, "Reid's Three Little Words: The Log In Our Own Eye", TNR, 1/9/2010. You should read John's article, if you haven't already.